Chapter Text
The Sides were not born, nor were they made. They came into existence vaguely, growing in power and definition.
If Thomas were to list them in order of oldest to youngest, there was a good chance he’d put Logic and Morality and Deceit first. They seemed like the oldest ones, acted like the parents of the famILY.
They might be the Parental Units™, but they were definitely not the oldest.
Logan was the youngest, coming along around the time Thomas started school. The dark blue Side had come very defined, dressed like the kindergarten teacher and spewing off every ‘fact’ they’d known. A lot of that information was wrong, but that was expected of a child. Logan was still far more put together when he gained a human form than any of the others. He could easily lay his feline ears down and switch his pupils for round ones and retract his claws and his needle-teeth and wrap his tail around his waist and act like “a proper adult”.
They weren’t an adult, but that didn’t matter, because they would be someday.
Janus had come before that, when they were in the area between toddler and school-aged. He had struggled to figure out what they should and shouldn’t take, and how much was too much, and how to pretend like they hadn’t taken when they had, or had taken when they hadn’t. He had hissed a lot, and flicked his tongue, and refrained from blinking on the one side. Then he’d started to learn, and switching between acting like Logan and acting more like a snake was more common than him acting like himself.
Patton was nearly a year before, and had taken some time to figure out if he should have floppy ears and near sclera-less eyes and a tail or put them away. He took a few years to decide, but when Logan came around and started saying what a human is and isn’t, everything was put away the best he could and that was that.
But even before that, perhaps at their first year, the twins were already around. They were indistinct, comparably, but still vaguely around. It took until after Janus before they looked like a human, and it was still a fritzy human, a toddler with mists and fumes around them and a voice that had two tones: the one that shouted out the big parts of the story, and the one that explained everything in between.
Roman and Remus finally separated when school started, realizing that they could be two bodies that were friends instead of sharing one. And it still took until they reached the first grade, and Logan said they might hurt Thomas if they didn’t start adapting, and Patton backed him up, and Janus said nothing, for them to finally put most of the nonsense away and focus on doing more specific duties.
Virgil…
Virgil had always existed.
It was known amongst the Sides that the labels Thomas put on them to make the videos easier were not entirely accurate. The man himself acknowledged that it was mostly for the audience, and a little for the story, and that the Sides were far more complex than he could ever figure out.
One cannot truly know themself, after all.
So it was safe to assume that, while Anxiety didn’t come into existence for quite some time, Virgil was always there.
His job had never been simple. He remembered everything, which kinda sucked when one couldn’t make sense of some things, even when having long since grown up.
He remembered being small, and looking up at a bunch of movement and light and sound and not knowing what it was. He remembered relying on the warmth, of protesting loudly, fearfully, every time it left him. He remembered feeling aches and pains and it hurt but he didn’t know what to do with the strange mass that was him, and therefore didn’t know how to get what he needed. But the warmth would always help him, would take away so much pain, even though it still hurt a lot.
He remembered when things started making sense. That specific shape and noise was his warmth - parents, he learned later - and that he could move a certain way to grab something, and that things made more sense when they were in his mouth.
He remembered when he started to anticipate. He knew that if he made a loud and painful noise, his warmth came and he would be okay. He experienced what his adult self could call phantom sensations, the beginning of the Imagination trying to use what little it had. Touches that weren’t there, movement that never happened, noise that made sense even when it shouldn’t have.
He remembered when he realized he wasn’t Thomas. He wasn’t the one that needed warmth: his person did. He wasn’t the one that needed to grab things: his person did.
He saw a dog start to move around the then-vague Mindscape, and reached out to pet it. He missed the dog when the new thing , the one like him, came and took its place. They weren’t the same, and he couldn’t treat them as such.
And the other thing gave them rules to follow. Sure, it was nice to know what they needed to do to make people happy, so that their person was happy, but he now knew that he could cause people to become upset. That wasn’t good.
There used to be a snake. It slithered up to him, angry and hissing, then calmed down and tried to lick him like the dog used to, but he was too scared at that point. It stayed still until he tried on his own, and it didn’t hiss anymore.
Then it was replaced, too, by another thing that hissed a lot more than the snake, and told him that the world was more dangerous than they thought for their person. Some people might take from them, or get upset if they didn’t take just the right amount. Sure, the thing also figured out the limits and how to get what they needed safely. But it still wasn’t good.
There was a strange creature, with tendrils and tentacles and wings and tails and everything in between. It was noisy and fast, but it also brought their person so much joy. It would come over to him and wrap around him and have all its sharp things pointed away from him and would be warm and drown out the noises he didn’t like.
Yet another thing took its place.
This one was hard to look at, and spoke with two voices that he had to learn how to distinguish, and would go on wild adventures that put them in danger and made far too much noise. More often than not, they got wet, and cold, and he never liked the cold. It wasn’t good.
There was a cat, simple and small. It curled in his lap like cats did for his person, and it was warm and purred and let him hold its tail gently for comfort.
The thing that made the cat disappear was like an adult, and calmed things down, and knew stuff. But that stuff meant more rules that could be broken, more dangers he had to look out for, more things he had to worry about. They dressed like an adult, and they made the thing that took them on adventures into two things - which meant they could split up and do things separately and surround him - and they didn’t think he thought enough for their person to do well, and they got loud sometimes.
It wasn’t good.
And he knew they kinda acted like those they replaced, the creatures that used to be there. But they didn’t act like the ones he remembered, and change had come to clearly mean danger.
It made it worse when he noticed his form.
It was after the two that were once one listened to the one that called himself Logan. Logan was the thing that dressed like an adult. He said that they were ‘made-up’ and that they should all have names, and that they were meant to help Thomas - their person.
He didn’t know what to call himself, then, but he finally realized he’d never looked at his form. He saw the other things, and their forms, but he was always flitting around the shadows, focusing on helping Thomas stay safe.
He made a reflection in the shadowy area that would later be his room. He was covered in shadows, so he dusted them off, and he knew that they all were like the thing that had scales, and so he did his best to relax, to try and let the stuff he had out.
He hated it.
Oh, he knew it was bad to hate things. He knew it was bad to say bad things about one’s self - when Thomas said his art was bad, the teacher said that he did a good job, and people had to be nice to themselves.
But he hated this.
He remembered the dog, the snake, the cat, the creature that wasn’t anything in particular. He remembered being something skittering around, briefly, trying to pull on everything at once and figure out how to work the patterns to help Thomas.
But he didn’t want what he saw.
It was ugly, to him. Too much happening on him, too much that wasn’t human trying to fit on a form that was meant to resemble a human .
He had too many ears.
One set was what he was meant to have, two very human ears roughly center on either side of his head. But near his temples and up and back a bit was a set of ears that was always swiveling and moving and picking up noise when he let them. And only an inch or such back was a set that was floppier and couldn’t move as much and didn’t respond the same way. He didn’t like it.
He had too many arms.
One set was right, with five fingers and wrists and elbows. But then there were eight that were wrong because they were covered in little circles that liked to stick and didn’t seem to have bones and liked to touch everything. There were eight that were wrong because they were covered in fur and bent strangely and stuck to things sometimes, and didn’t seem like arms that much, especially when they lifted him up because they wanted to touch the ground and extend.
He had weird eyes.
He had the two he was supposed to have, but one changed from blue to purple to yellow to red and so on, and it always had a slit in it. It wasn’t supposed to have a slit. The other was dark, either black or brown in near solid color, unless he looked too far to one side, then there was white with those weird red stripes.
He pulled it all back in and cloaked himself in shadows and stayed hidden.
It didn’t help.
Even when they had rooms, and he knew he would have privacy, he didn’t let it out. Anyone could just barge in.
But he had to let it out when his hands hurt, and claws grew out, and they were sometimes long and hard like bird talons, and they were sometimes small and needle-ish like a cat’s. He waited until he could put them back in.
And he had to let it out again when his skin started to itch, and he wrapped his hands in blankets and held on tight because he knew his claws were sharp, and it really really itched. He waited for fur to grow across his shoulders in mottled brown, and on his lower back in dark grey, and then they connected and mixed the colors along his spine.
He thought it was over.
It was over for all of three days.
Small gold scales mottled under his chin, going all the way until it reached the fur. It snaked down his arms, like they were dripped by someone holding them in their hands, and covered the tops of his hands like one-sided gloves.
Larger red scales came down, overlapping the gold easily. It edged the fur on his torso, partially hidden under the thicker parts. Some smaller ones, though still much bigger than the golden ones, trailed over his cheekbones and jaw, and he growled the first time he had them reflect light into his eyes.
He sighed when the week mark passed and he was able to breathe easily about it being done.
Then they lost all their teeth.
Well, they’d been losing their teeth as much as Thomas had, waking up to find the little things missing. And it was painful when the new teeth were growing back, and it was barely less scary when Logan told them all about losing “baby” teeth and growing “adult” teeth.
He thought it was incredibly annoying and an unnecessary change.
But then they’d lost their last tooth, and it was a happy moment when Thomas’s mom told him so he would know that the Tooth Fairy - another frightening concept - was coming for the last time.
A happy moment that faded swiftly when the next morning came.
He woke up. He found that he had somehow lost control and let everything out as he slept.
His mouth really hurt.
Usually it took a day or two before the new tooth started coming through and hurting.
He looked in his mirror, now a permanent addition to his room.
No.
He saw his strange eyes widen enough for the sclera to show in the right one.
No no no-
Both hands immediately started reaching into his mouth, feeling around and trying to map the new- the new-
He had his first panic attack.
Thomas felt it, the first time Anxiety could be said to exist properly. He struggled to breathe, couldn’t figure out why it was so hard to get things out. Thomas had his parents there, guiding him through motions and calming him and ready to make an appointment with his doctor.
But Anxiety had no one.
He felt Thomas panic, and reached out like he’d used to, had pulled the strings to help his person, had cut his person off from whatever was going on.
He woke up to find people yelling in the Mindscape, the other things like him unable to figure out what had caused the panic attack.
Slightly more prepared, he looked again into his mouth.
Three rows. Three entirely different sets.
Two pairs on their own.
The front one, the one that felt the weirdest in his mouth and was probably the biggest, looked a lot like a dog’s set. It fit with his back ears and the right eye - sometimes, at least.
The middle one was what he needed. The human set, the one he was supposed to have.
The back one was smaller, and looked like the front set, but different. A cat’s? Maybe.
Two fangs slid from just under his upper lip to just over where his bottom and top teeth met when he put them together. They looked weird, like they were flat from afar, but any inspection showed them as thick and strong.
Two different fangs came from the roof of his mouth, hanging behind his teeth. Experimenting with them showed that he could put them flat against his gums, or push them past everything and have them pop out of his mouth nearly entirely.
His breath picked up slightly - he was cut off from Thomas, it was okay for now - as he thought about how to handle this. Did the others get new sets, too? Was this just him, yet again?
He still had the missing tooth- uh, teeth. A line back from the front set to the back set, all three missing the same tooth.
A shine in the mirror caught his attention. His front fangs were dripping something. Something… golden. It looked like liquid sunlight, swirling colors even in its thin consistency.
He licked at it, running his tongue over the fangs to investigate. Things made more sense when he could put them in his mouth. Right?
The substance tasted… sweet, but not a lot. Not particularly bitter or strong in any way, pleasant enough to not spit it out immediately…
What was it? Venom? Was it okay for the venom to drip into his own mouth? Did having venom mean he was immune to the substance?
There was a knock on his door. He pulled everything in faster than a heartbeat, all his extra bits and weirdness carefully tucked away and out of sight.
“Hello? Are you in there?”
Which thing was that? He didn’t know their differences well enough to tell the voices apart yet.
Cautiously, he moved to his door, standing right at the edge. He unlocked it slowly, and peeped through as he opened it just barely.
It was the thing that liked yellow, with scales and hissing and the tendency to manipulate because that was supposed to help them avoid getting hurt. He didn’t trust the thing. They might help Thomas, but that could easily mean they hated him.
“I came to inform you that my name is now Janus.” They held out their hand, to shake his.
He said nothing. Was this thing also a boy? Would they tell him? What if he assumed on accident and offended them? Logan had just said it in his little announcement, that he was Logan and a boy. That was what adults did.
Did the others figure out names yet? Was he expected to have his own? He could barely think about it with all he had to do. What if the others got upset that he couldn’t handle it on top of everything else?
What if he offended the thi- Janus and then Janus told everyone lies and got them to hate him?
What if they already did? What if they were going to lure him into a false sense of security and they knew he caused the panic attack and they were going to get rid of him to make sure Thomas was okay?
Janus had four hands out, and was leaning forward slightly, and was trying to make eye contact with him.
His eyes widened, realizing that there had been a conversation going on and he’d completely ignored it for his own thoughts.
He pulled back and slammed the door shut. If it hurt Janus’s feelings, he could apologize later and it would have to work out, because he had to learn how to calm down.
He tasted something in his mouth. It wasn’t the sweetness of the new sunshine-venom. It was tangy and woke him up a little. He looked in the mirror and opened his mouth and popped his back fangs out.
They dripped liquid shadows, swirling blacks and purples. He put them back in and ran his tongue over them.
So he had sunshine-venom and shadow-venom. He wondered what they did.
He had different growth spurts after that, and he hated each one.
He could only count himself grateful that some of them coincided with ones the others had.
Like learning about the human body and suddenly they all had to grow digestive tracts and the ability to eat and drink things. And then they had to keep drinking and eating so they didn’t get weak.
Just more to take away from his time. He already had to sleep! What more did the Mind want?
He was glad that his tails came in around that time, when they were all curled into balls in their rooms, and trying to make food appear for them when they were done so they could stop feeling hungry .
He had the dog one, which was fluffy and big and he could use it as a pillow. He had the cat one, which was slim and soft and was good for calming him down. He had the… he didn’t what it was from, but it was scaly and covered in spines that would lay flat or pull into it, and it was rough, but not in the Bad way. In fact, it gave his hands something to do when he was jittery, and he’d probably love it if it wasn’t wrong for a human.
He got the spines when Thomas was in fourth grade and they learned about pufferfish and dragons in the same day, and then Thomas had the fleeting thought that if he had spines, no one would dare bully him.
They laid flat on his back, straight down the spine. Sometimes they were inside , like pulling his claws in. Other times, they simply blended in with the fur, and he couldn’t even tell that there was one more thing to make him weird and strange and ugly.
He found the tongue when Janus tried to pound on his door one day, demanding to be let in. He didn’t know why, and he didn’t want to, and then Janus hissed at him, and all he could think about was how the snake used to hiss, but it had changed from angry to acknowledging, and now all he had was angry -
He hissed back. He saw something move under his nose, felt something flick his lower lip.
Janus stopped pounding on the door, stood for a little while longer, and then left.
He didn’t think he needed two tongues, but at least the forked one - the snake one - hid neatly under his human one, so it looked like he only had the one he needed.
He grew fins when Thomas considered joining a swim team.
“Just in case, huh?” He laughed grimly at his reflection, eyeing the green-grey things that flexed as he moved. They would help if he ever swam, but for now, they just had to be put away, held in like everything else.
He got gills a few days later.
Three lines on either side of his throat, near his collarbone. Three lines on either side of his torso, just under his ribcage.
“Just in case,” he muttered quietly, no longer laughing. He didn’t know if laughing made things worse, but it would be better to just avoid it entirely.
The worst thing was when they we- when Thomas was sixteen. They’d just realized… but they couldn’t be- they had to be normal. Normal meant safe because normal was accepted and being accepted was safe!
There were many panic attacks in the coming days.
But there were the thoughts, the ones that Roman and Remus - the two things that had shared a body once - came up with. Imaginings of flying away, literally, figuratively, of rushing through the sky, wind in their hair, of Thomas being able to escape the pain, the fear, the Anxiety…
He woke up on his stomach. He didn’t like that, because humans shouldn’t sleep on their stoma-
He felt a large weight, one that spread over his entire back and spilled over. He tried to shift and maybe figure out how to get from under it. Who knew what it was?
It moved with him, and he had the horrifying memories of his growth spurts rush back to him.
He flung himself off the bed, towards his mirror, the weight dragging him down, dragging him to the floor and yanking him to the sides-
Staggering, hands on the frame of what would always hold his ugly reflection, he watched in horror. Two wings, red and strong and scaled, raised and fluttered, righting themselves naturally as he came to a halt and woke up. With no hesitation, they were folded tightly to his back, and he suddenly found that they were so thin that they - like the spines, like his spider legs - disappeared into the hideously colored fur of his spine.
He let a moment of relief fill him, then turned his attention to the secondary weight.
It hadn’t been nearly as bad as the wings, hadn’t drawn his focus so quickly, but it was there all the same. He would need to check his bed, make sure nothing was ruined by their growth.
The first set of horns resembled a ram’s, settled between his top-ears and curling downwards. They were a dark red, like a dried bloodstain.
The next set was on his crown, centered amidst everything. They rose an inch or so, then started to gently curve back. They looked like the dragon plushie Thomas had wanted to get the other day. Deep red, like fresh blood, filled with swirling and spattering marks of gold and white.
The smallest set was at his hairline, between his front-top-ears. They looked like a goat’s, simple and barely curved. They were the same red as his scales.
He looked at himself, stared at the horns until he couldn’t stand it anymore. Then he found himself staring at his scales, his fur, his tails and his arms and his stupid claws and his ears and his gills and his fins and-
-and his stupid eyes.
His stupid, no good, hideous eyes.
His wet eyes.
He cried.
Thomas needed a good cry, and so there wasn’t too much worry afterwards about how much had bled through his connection to his person.
He wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and sat down on the ground.
He hated his bed. It taunted him, now that he could wake up with wings pushing up on his back.
He hated chairs. They screamed normal , mocked him with the way he had to contort to fit into them.
He didn’t leave his room for a few days, letting himself feel hungry and thirsty and all the bad things. Anything that made him miserable in a normal way was better than the way he felt in any other way.
Then he stood up, pulled everything in, and steeled himself.
He paused as he went past the mirror again.
Roman and Remus shifted a lot. They turned into animals and heroes and villains and all sorts of things. Janus liked to turn into other people, to pretend he was them. Patton - the thing that made people feel things - and Logan didn’t shift that much, but they could .
He let his eyes slide shut, waiting a moment to pour his concentration on the one thing he wanted. Because-
He opened his eyes.
Two little horns, purple with silvery shimmers, poked out just above his temples.
Because if he could have a little choice in his weirdness, then he could handle being a freak.
He left his room.
The others were all sitting in the living room, positioned on the different couches. None of them looked well.
Janus was muttering under his breath about various things. Trying to figure out how to make sure people didn’t find out about Thomas bei- trying to find ways to keep Thomas safe.
Roman and Remus were being sporadic, fidgeting and conversing quietly, then jumping in volume at the sudden thoughts that buoyed them for a moment.
Patton was rocking back and forth with his knees against his chest.
Logan was reading a book, one that distinctly had no cover to figure out what the subject was.
“If y’all don’t figure out how to come out as gay, I’m going to get Thomas to paint himself as a rainbow, cover himself head-to-toe in rainbow stuff, and have him sing ‘YMCA’ in the middle of the hallways on Monday.”
The attention turned to him, and he held himself in. Everything was just right, his hood was up, and they had to recognize him from his vague and sudden appearances throughout the years.
This was just the first time he’d spoken first.
“You are not letting him sing ‘YMCA’ when ‘I’m Coming Out’ exists.”
“Well, we shouldn’t buy a plethora of new items simply for this. It is logical that he sho-”
“Thrift stores, nerd.”
“What if he drops obvious hints to see what his parents and friends do?”
He sunk out before they could actually include him. He’d given them a push, and that was what was needed because he wasn’t going to let Thomas hurt any longer.
Thomas came out to his close friends that Friday, so they could make plans for the coming week if he was rejected. He was not rejected.
For the first time in forever, his ugly reflection smiled back at him.