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Janus was doing it again. The teacups on the table had long been empty and now the dregs sat cold and still smelling faintly of Thomas' anglophile phase. Two teacups. One for Janus, one for Patton (and still smudged with his strawberry-flavored lip balm). Remus had pointedly been left out of the equation, having been shooed out of the room with a 'behave' that held all the menace of a teenage girl warning her parents not to ruin her first date.
Now the little meeting was over and Remus had been unleashed and Janus was just staring at the teacups in the least dangerous silence Remus had ever known.
Most of Janus' silences came with a bold warning spelled out in crossed arms and furrowed brows: disturb me and perish. But this. This was something Remus had never seen before, something that would have made Virgil (the old Virgil) cackle with friendly schadenfreude: Janus sat with a flush on his cheek and a small smile on his lips as he stared dreamily at the spot Patton had occupied not five minutes before. Even as Remus observed him, he sighed and tilted his head, more Disney prince than man. (Somewhere on the other side of the subconscious, Roman suffered a shooting chest pain.)
Beads rattling, Remus got a running start and threw himself onto the couch beside Janus, jostling him out of his lovestruck stupor. "You're mooning," said Remus, kicking his feet up on the coffee table. The cups and saucers rattled, wafting up the smell of earl grey and Louis Tomlinson.
"I'm not mooning," Janus argued, more out of habit than anything. A millisecond later, the teasing clicked and he straightened his posture, his face falling into picture-perfect incredulousness. "Over Patton?"
"You're moonier than a college football game." Remus reached for his fly to give a demonstration, but Janus stopped him with an outstretched hand. Remus sat back to allow the mental image to sink in instead.
He'd had a sneaking suspicion something like this might happen, hammered home by how excruciatingly one-note Janus had been lately. Every other sentence was about Patton somehow, whether to complain about his taste in food/movies/philosophical ideologies/friends or to recount some 'utterly stupid' thing Patton had said about food/movies/philosophical ideologies/Remus. It was a textbook crush with all the signs and symptoms of someone too emotionally stunted to tell they had a crush. This starry-eyed, gooey, abhorrent Janus was simply the final nail in the coffin of the dead horse. Crushes like these were the reason Disney had invented the word 'twitterpated.'
"Look," said Janus, lacing into his metaphorical tap shoes, "if this is because I kicked you out, I genuinely don't think you would have enjoyed yourself—"
Remus pulled up his sleeve to check his watch, which he had imagined into existence as soon as it was necessary for the gag. "Uh-huh, uh-huh."
"If it's really that important to you, I'll invite you next time and you can sit right next to me and listen to Patton talk for three hours about his conflicted feelings on pugs."
Remus ran a hand through his hair to hide the manic grin yanking on either corner of his mouth like he'd been caught with fish hooks. "How does Patton feel about pugs?"
"He thinks they're cute, but he hates that they have such severe breathing problems," Janus answered automatically. The flush had crept into his cheek again, a dainty shade of pink that made Remus' toes curl inside his boots. There was a softness in Janus' eyes that Remus had never seen before, not even when Janus was talking to him about Thomas, whom Janus valued above all else.
He was lost.
Something must have shown on Remus' face, because Janus slammed the door shut on everything too early, and his face was a blank mask ready to be molded into an expression he hadn't chosen yet. Remus took the opening, watching Janus decide on an expression as he talked: "I bet he likes you back. He's always coming around to visit and you're always locking me away in the chokey!" He threw himself against the back of the couch, raising his arms as though he'd been chained to a dungeon wall. "Augh! The indignity!" He made a whip-crack sound with his mouth and pretended to flinch. "Harder!"
"Are you done?" Janus asked, having settled on annoyed incredulity.
"Will you admit that you were all moony-eyed for Patton just now?"
"I was thinking—"
"About Daddy Patty's 9-inch c—" With a subtle motion from Janus, Remus' hand came up to cover his own mouth.
"Look," said Janus with a heavy sigh. When Thomas wasn't forcing him to the forefront of conscious thought, when his features belonged wholly to himself, he was the shortest of all of them. He looked especially small now. "Even if I had an interest in Patton, which I don't, pursuing him, which I don't want to even do, would just make things harder and more complicated for him. So even if I wanted anything to do with him, it would be far kinder to just keep it to myself."
"Or," said Remus, his hand finally dropping from his mouth, "convince yourself you don't even have feelings for him in an act of self-delusion and cognitive dissonance to allow yourself to not think about the fact that you, the embodiment of selfishness and self-preservation, are committing an act of pure selflessness that defies your function? Hypothetically?"
Janus sighed so heavily that it sent a shiver down Thomas' spine. "Sure, Remus."
A thousand thoughts raced through Remus' mind until his brain (imaginary, metaphorical, or otherwise) threatened to shut everything down and send him floating into the gentle waters of dissociation. "Interesting," he said as the water began to lap at his ankles.
"In that case," Janus said in a slow, guiding tone, "it would be better for you to just leave it alone. Do you hear me, Remus? Say it with me now: Leave it alone."
But Remus was gone, swept away on the tide.
-
Janus really was a bad liar, when you thought about it. It wasn't his fault, really. In the mind of a guy like Thomas he really was doomed from the start. His real talent lay in obfuscation, namely, in keeping his mouth shut when it really counted. Once you got him talking, the truth practically ran out, but it ran out backwards and usually tripped and fell on its ass. If Janus succeeded in smoothing everything out, it was usually through more obfuscation.
But this time, he had failed to obfuscate the truth. Remus, with his persistence, was uniquely well-suited to weaseling the truth out of Janus. And so it lay hog-tied and naked before him: Janus was head-over-heels for Patton. And it was making him miserable. That couldn't be allowed. Remus had to fix it.
In many ways, Remus served as Janus' opposite; blunt and aggressive, he got his way through the repeated application of verbal force. He was a living wrecking ball with an experienced hand at the controls. Probably some old Italian guy named Vito who smoked cigars on his lunch break and thought OSHA was a small town in Wisconsin.
Anyway.
Remus' impulse had been to swagger on down to Patton and tell him outright just how badly Janus wanted him. But, contrary to prevailing belief, he was sharp enough to know how that would end. As much as Patton insisted that everyone needed to tell the truth, he sure wasn't equipped to handle it, at least not until it had been wrapped up in pleasantries. Like wrapping a pill in lunch meat for a stubborn dog. No, Remus needed a subtler plan, a plan that slithered and crooned like that creepy snake from The Jungle Book. Remus was going to have to act like Janus.
So. WWJD? Probably something old fashioned like— The speeding semitruck of an idea struck Remus full force: Love poetry. Some flowery, hand-written little rhyming missive, scented paper, swirling calligraphy. A piece of paper appeared on the desk before him and a pen jumped into his hand.
Huh, when had he gotten to his room? Maybe Janus had taken him once it became clear that Remus was having a trip.
Eh. Did it matter? Taking up the ballpoint, he scribbled 'Draft 1 Love Poem, Remus de Bergerac.'
No.
'Cyrano Vaginerac.'
He could do better
Ooh. It was coming to him. Cyrano de Berger-cock, the porno parody, and instead of having a big nose, Cyrano was cursed with a 12-inch monster—" Knock.
Knock knock knock.
Remus' paper had turned into a screenplay without his realizing. He flipped it over as he went to answer the door, humming The Police's Roxanne on his way. Deception was the name of the game. No hints.
Janus stood in the doorway tapping his forefinger against his thumb. Remus beamed at him. "How goes it, Romeo?"
Janus made a face like Remus had just inserted a slice of lemon into his mouth. "I was just coming by to ask you to keep it down. You've been awfully noisy since this morning."
Remus spotted the concern buried in the sarcasm and the truth sprang to his lips before it could even occur to him to lie, but he caught it by the tail in the nick of time: "I'm okay. I'm just working on—" He stared at Janus, wide-eyed and smiling in cornered-animal frustration. The silence stretched out before them and his imagination, which he had previously thought boundless, delivered no lie. Well, there went that.
What Remus did not know: The look of feral panic on his face was nigh-indistinguishable from the expression of manic excitement that tended to overtake him when he was immersed in a project. That he had gone silent was of no concern to Janus, who was merely waiting to be polite. He waited a few seconds longer. Remus' left eye began to twitch. "Can I come in?"
"But of course!" Remus said, snapping back into himself. Acting against his function was hard and it kind of hurt in the same way it hurt to focus on something he didn't find interesting. Janus suppressed him a little as he came in, a small exertion of denial to keep the effects of Remus' room at bay. "Business or pleasure?"
"This place is filthy," Janus said like that was any sort of revelation. Remus threw himself backwards onto his bed to wait. Janus would get to his point in time. "Look, you'd tell me if you were upset, wouldn't you?"
"Upset?" Remus sat up, but Janus was busy pretending to care about Remus' DVD collection, his gazed fixed on Anal Blast-o-rama 3: Pumped Up.
"About certain conversations we might have had this morning?" Janus prompted.
"Do you like Patton better than you like me?"
The answer was not immediate, which was how Remus knew to trust it. "...Of course not."
"So why would I be upset?"
"Oh, you know, I've heard tell that some people can get jealous when, uh…" Janus broke off, having lost himself. "If I had any interest in Patton, I might expect you to be slightly…" He gave up with a sigh and looked plaintively at Remus. "So you're not jealous?"
"Please!" Remus spread his arms out wide. "I may be green, but not with envy! You can get back to your mooning guilt-free."
"I'm not—" Janus gave up with a huff. "I think I'd better go. I'm going to be very busy with important work, so try not to disturb me." He swept out, leaving the invitation floating in the air like fine cologne.
Remus waved it away. Unlike Janus, he did have work to do.
A new stack of paper was waiting for him at his desk. He sat, one leg folded with the ankle resting on his opposite knee. If it were up to him, he would write something to the point like 'Roses are red, violets are blue, rhyming is hard, let's bone.' But Janus would never say something like that in a million years and the point was to sound like him.
The subtle feeling of discomfort was back. It just wasn't in his nature to imitate and skirt around things like this. But if it was for Janus, he would endure it.
Such a declaration was easy to make, but much harder to stick to. Remus wrote two stanzas of a sestina before the fraying high-wire of his attention span snapped and the unicycle-riding clown driving his thought process plummeted to a gory death in front of a crowd of sickened onlookers. Well, that was fine. It wasn't like Janus was some master poet. Poetry didn't suit him, anyway. These two stanzas would have to be enough, plus an envoi tacked on for a feeling of completion. Writing in iambic pentameter was hard enough on its own, it's not like Janus would really put in the extra effort to make it all rhyme, right?
Janus' pen of choice was the Monteverde Invincia in brass, a suitably pretentious pen that matched his aesthetic. Thomas had seen one once in a boutique stationery shop and Janus had seized the memory in all six of his yellow-clad hands. But Remus didn't know that, only that Janus had some sort of a fetish for fancy pens, and what was fancier than a quill pen?
After a few failed attempts at cursive, he came to realize that writing neatly with a quill pen was about as intuitive as performing a kickflip in stilettos. Ah, well. Rollerball, then.
Once done, he surveyed his work and felt oddly proud of the result. His looping cursive looked good on the cardstock he'd chosen, shiny gold against matte black. Remus had, against all odds, done a good job impersonating Janus. (Or so he thought).
Remus' poem read thusly:
With one deft thrust, you opened up my chest
And there exposed my bleeding, beating heart
Will you gasp when you find it burning up
Or hold it in a one-handed embrace?
Just one touch has left me open for you
Panting, trembling, waiting for your next move
Oh, oh, oh! how I long to make you move
And meet you face-to-face and chest-to-chest
With no one in our way, just me and you
And in the silence you would hear my heart
You would feel the pounding as we embrace
In this sweet moment, you would take me up
Know the rabbit-fast movement of my heart
Eat me up within our tangled embrace
Eyes, chest, feet, mouth: yours. I belong to you.
Discerning readers will spot anywhere from 7 to 10 sexual innuendoes in the above. Luckily for Remus (and maybe Janus too), Patton had an endearingly obnoxious (or obnoxiously endearing) habit of taking everything at face value.
Remus signed the bottom of the paper with a shiny, swooping 'J' and set off for Patton's room.
The following hour was an ecstasy of agony, all trembling limbs and giddy anticipation. Remus paced and bounced on the balls of his feet, even going so far as to make a few passes by Janus in the living room but never quite daring to show his face. He was too nervous right now; his honest face would give away the game faster than Virgil could jump to a bad conclusion. So he paced until his thudding heel strikes summoned Janus, who was doing a passable job of pretending to be annoyed, anyway. He had his arms crossed over his chest and his hip cocked just so, but the furrow of his brow hinted more at concern than he would have preferred. But that was alright. Good lies weren't necessary with Remus. "If you're trying to wear a hole in the floor, you're going to get bored before you get anywhere with it."
"Not if I wear really heavy shoes," Remus said, but he was too distracted to summon up a pair of cinderblocks to demonstrate his point. Instead, he leapt forward and turned, slinging one arm easily over Janus' shoulder. "Let's go play Pokémon Stadium."
-
Remus sat in the discomfort of lying for the next few days, shimmying and stamping his feet when the unfamiliar sensation got to be too much. Janus remained none the wiser, too caught up in a pink-tinged and distinctly 1950s-inspired love fantasy. He kept having dreams about sharing strawberry sodas with Patton and waking up with a craving for strawberry-flavored kisses. Beyond that, nothing happened. So much nothing, in fact, that it was starting to get unusual.
"Where's the Foxy Froggie?" Remus asked on the third morning after his illicit delivery, inadvertently startling Janus out of a daydream wherein Patton asked him to go steady at the roller rink.
Janus stiffened and said, slightly too casually, "Am I Morality's keeper?"
Well, damn. He hadn't snuck into Janus' bedroom in the night and, in the immortal words of Conway Twitty, laid him down and whispered pretty love-words in his ear. Remus tucked his feet under him on the couch and began to work. "You killed him with a rock?"
"Don't be uncivilized, Remus, obviously I used poison."
"The coward's weapon." Remus waved a hand, grinning behind it.
"'Coward' in one dialect is 'pragmatist' in another," Janus said lightly, glad of the distraction. Patton's absence was unusual and it weighed on him.
"Sorry," said a voice that was neither Remus' nor Janus', "is this a bad time?"
Remus sprang to his feet in delight, unable and unwilling to keep the deranged grin off his face. "Not at all!" he said. Then, regrettably, he threw his head back and cackled like an asthmatic hyena.
Patton (the voice belonged to Patton, if you hadn't already figured that out) took this in stride. Sort of. "Uh, great!" he said with an expression like an underpaid worker who'd just found out he was getting a pizza party instead of a raise. "Thanks."
He was holding, Remus noticed with delight, a small, white envelope. "Shall I leave you two alone together?" he crooned, leering at Patton. This was it! His master plan, deviously woven, was all coming to a toe-curling climax. Move over Janus, there's a new Lord of the Lies in town. And his name? Remus de Bergerac. No, wait. Berger-cock.
"Ah, Remus?" Janus gave a restrained little wave that the untrained observer might have mistaken for polite.
"Oh, don't mind me!" said Remus, laying it on thick. Like, 'artificially-flavored maple syrup that's been congealing on the back table at IHOP for 6 years' thick.
Sticky, too.
"Pay no attention to the rat behind the curtain." Raising his hands in surrender, he backed away, hit the coffee table, did a fantastic Gene-Wilder-as-Willy-Wonka-style pratfall that went unappreciated, and finally left the room.
He stayed close enough to eavesdrop, of course.
"That was…" Janus hesitated, base instinct to lie getting tangled up with his inability to choose a word to describe Remus' unusual behavior. "Well."
"Yeah." Janus and Patton met eyes, each of them blushing and breathless and starry-eyed. In the hall, Remus stuck out his tongue and gagged. Patton gave a shy smile. "Hey, Janus."
"Hey," said Janus, smelling strawberries. Then he remembered himself. "By all means, let's just stand here and stare at each other."
He motioned at the couch, but Patton shook his head. "This is okay. I just, um. I wanted to apologize for how long it took me to get back to you."
"That's alright," Janus said slowly, feeling the first subtle pinch of wrongness, that he might be missing something.
"I guess I was just panicking, because it was something I didn't even know I wanted until I had it. And I wanted to do something equally as special for you."
"Uh... huh…" said Janus, Lord of the Lies, Subterfuge Specialist, Master of Mendacity, Baron of— Well, you get it.
"So," said Patton, holding up the envelope and taking a deep breath, "I wrote you this:
Self-Care is yellow
Morality is blue
Poetry is hard
But I like you, too."
Around the corner, Remus stamped his foot. He'd really put way too much effort into this little scheme, hadn't he?
Janus blinked, excavating bits of the truth from the situation. The emerging fossil was starting to look distinctly Remus-shaped, but it was no good to jump to conclusions quite yet. "You like me?" he repeated. His lips tingled.
"I'm sorry I couldn't put it as well as you did." Patton looked down at his feet, blushing like an anime schoolgirl. "But all that stuff you said… I want to be yours, too. And I want you to be mine."
"This is a love confession," Janus said out loud. He'd been caught on the back foot before, but never quite like this. Unsure of what else to do, he borrowed a trick from Roxy Hart and swooned.
"Whoa!" said Patton, catching him in the least-romantic way possible, which is to say he grabbed Janus under the armpits and set him back on his feet like a toddler.
Annoyed, Janus grabbed him by the collar and kissed him. Patton was wearing strawberry lip balm, and a surge of vindication made Janus' heart hammer in his chest. The third-act twist could wait; everything could wait. Reality gave a thrilling shudder and turn as Patton bent at the waist and picked Janus up under the knees. Janus wrapped his arms around Patton's shoulders to keep from toppling backwards but broke the kiss, instead touching their foreheads together.
And face-to-face, chest-to-chest, Patton felt the rabbit-fast pounding of Janus' heart.
In the hall, Remus punched the air.
"I have to tell you something," Janus murmured, unable to keep from imagining his gloves away so he could run his fingers through Patton's hair.
"Oh, yeah?" Patton's grin was distinctly boyish, so unlike the fathering persona he wore around his shoulders like his cardigan.
"No— Really, I have to tell you something. But. I need you to know that this isn't going away."
"This?"
"Us."
"Why would we?" Patton asked, tilting his head. "Is it bad news?"
"I'm afraid you'll have to decide that for yourself." Janus wiggled out of Patton's grip and snapped twice. "Remus!"
Remus slunk in like a guilty dog, pouting up at Janus and Patton and flinching like they might hit him. "Yyyeeees, Janus?" he said in a whine.
"Is there something you'd like to tell us?"
Remus dropped the act. "You know it!" He sauntered over to Patton, displacing Janus, and leaned hard on Patton's shoulder. "Janny-Bananny is really in love with you, y'know. He's been pining like a tree ever since you stood up for him way back when."
"That's totally what I meant," Janus huffed, crossing his arms over his chest and drawing into himself.
"But…" Patton looked at Remus, then at Janus. "I know. You told me so in that poem."
"Oh, that!" Remus smacked his forehead so hard his head snapped back, feigning forgetfulness. "I wrote that."
"You wrote that?"
"He wrote that," Janus confirmed. "Without my knowledge or permission, I might add."
"But…" Horror dawned on Patton's face. "So I just…"
"Well for Christian's sake, it wasn't like he was going to tell you," Remus snapped.
"Christian?" Janus' eyes widened almost imperceptibly. "Oh my God, Remus, you do know that Christian and Cyrano both die, don't you?"
"Really?" Remus shrugged and bounced on his toes. "Maybe I should actually read Cyrano de Bergerac."
"Oh!" said Patton suddenly, reaching behind Remus so he could hold Janus' hand. "This isn't going away."
"No," said Janus with a sigh of relief. "Yes. Whatever."
"I get it." Patton beamed and then, dropping Janus' hand, wrapped both arms around Remus and bear-hugged him so hard his feet left the floor. "Thank you, Remus."
"Oh my God," said Remus, wriggling fruitlessly like a worm freshly removed from an apple (get it?). "Approval. Ew, ew, ew, get it off, get it off! It burns!"
Patton winked at Janus over Remus' shoulder. Janus smiled back and joined the hug, squeezing Remus from behind. "Yes, thank you, Remus. We owe everything to you." Ignoring Remus' protests, he stood on his toes and kissed Patton again.
Revenge was sweet, but Patton's strawberry lip balm was much, much sweeter.