Work Text:
Logan thought he must have had all of the variables fully memorized by now.
First, was the fact that they all had been a bit in love with the King back then. And what hadn't there been to love? Creativity had been bold, bright, ambitious—brash and unashamed and often dangerous. Unafraid and armed with an explorer's hunger for adventure, and as eager to discover where the boundaries fell as he was to brave the impossibilities of what lay beyond them.
(An immutable fact, not a variable that Logan could or would have been able to change, even if the fire that they all had loved so dearly was what had eventually condemned him to burn...)
Second, was that, out of all of them, Creativity and Curiosity had always been the closest. They had been nearly inseparable back then, always able to bring out the best from within each other. Creativity had never failed to lead Curiosity to new, exciting questions just begging to be explored, and in return Curiosity offered him inspiration that fueled him toward ever loftier pursuits...
(This was a point of data he had attempted to manipulate countless times. It had at least seemed plausible that, without the strength of that bond tying them so tightly together, there might have been room for someone else to fit within their dynamic. That, if need be, it might even have been possible for someone else to fill that role in his place. And yet his efforts, unfortunately, were always fruitless. He had tried keeping his distance. He had tried outright ignoring him, even hurting him to try and force that distance. But the King had been sharp and the King had been loyal, and no matter how many times Logan had tried pushing him away, the King hadn't been willing to let him go without a fight...)
Third, was the fact that the Heart, by his very nature, Loved. He had loved every one of them, of course, and he always would, but the love that he had felt for the King had been different. It was a scarier, bigger, more grown-up kind of love than any other he had ever had to handle. A love big enough and hungry enough that, even smothered beneath his silence, it had threatened to consume him...
(And Logan had never blamed Patton for falling in love with the King. How could he, when he had loved him so deeply himself? How could he when Patton was only following his nature? There hadn't been much that he could affect there, either, no matter how many times he had tried. There was no placing himself between them hoping to stop it from happening—useless, when that was the space he had occupied from the start. There was no pushing them closer together, hoping that this time around the King might choose differently—stubborn, always so stubborn, but also because ultimately, the Heart was too tender a side to withstand the King's sharper edges. And the King had loved the Heart in his way as well, but he couldn't find his match in a partner who loved him for his flame but quailed from the shadows it cast.)
(And no hope in diverting the Heart's attentions toward Instinct instead, when Instinct's shadows ran even deeper.)
And the Fourth, the axis upon which everything else that came afterward was doomed to pivot, was that the King had grown a fondness for the romance of tragedy. He had become enamored of the idea that not all stories had to have a happy ending. That a story that ended in tears could be as moving as one that ended in triumph. That there was a poetic sort of beauty to be found in loves that were fated to fail, that there was a special kind of valor in heroes whose battles were doomed to end in defeat. It had been a new concept, something exciting and novel, and if there was one thing that Creativity had never been able to pass up, it was novelty...
(This was one area in which Logan had hoped he might have some measurable success in attempting to manipulate events. Because surely it was possible to lead Creativity toward safer flights of fancy. It had been so easy, once, all those years ago: Curiosity leading the way so that Creativity could follow... He had been sure he could find something, that he could bring some new, shiny piece of information in front of him, some new gem or tasty tidbit that his hunger for inspiration could sink its rabid teeth into, so that he could let his more dangerous fixations go. It had been easy for Curiosity, once upon a time...)
(But Logan hadn't been Curiosity for a very long time indeed, and Logic was, unfortunately, another animal entirely.)
And the stories he had told back then had amused them all well enough, somber and heartbreaking though they were...
Or, at least they had until the day the Heart had started coughing.
It had raised a few concerns, even in the beginning, because none of them had ever gotten sick before, not like that. Sometimes they were impacted negatively when Thomas was sick—like when the Heart became more thin-skinned and prone to crying, or the King's musings were bent toward incoherence by fever, or when Curiosity was left dulled and sluggish by headache and exhaustion—but none of the sides had ever dealt with so much as a sniffle or a belly ache themselves.
It had raised concern, but it really was just a cough, at the start.
Only Instinct had been truly worried, in the beginning. But then Instinct always worried that everything was a threat, whether it was some weird bug in the garden or the kid who called Thomas mean names on the bus. Instinct was just silly like that, and the King had always discouraged Curiosity from listening to him too closely. Otherwise they would never have any fun.
(No one had noticed how conflicted Instinct had been, back then, of two minds about everything. No one had thought very much about hearing him shouting his warnings one moment and pretend hopelessly that things were okay the next. But the worse it got, the less anyone wanted to listen, so that eventually he stopped coming around at all, until the end...)
Only Instinct had really worried when the cough had started, even as it had begun, steadily, to worsen...after all, they had all been sure he would get better eventually, right? Thomas always did. He always had. Kids got sick and then they got better, and there had been no reason, no matter what Instinct said, to believe that this would be any different...
(Except for the fact that it was already different. It was different and Instinct had warned them, but they foolishly hadn't listened at all.)
Even when the petals appeared, none of them had known to fear. The King had thought it was funny, the unusualness, the whimsy of it, so much so that even the Heart had found it in him to laugh...the first couple of times at least. And Curiosity had found himself fascinated with the idea, the seeming impossibility, and wondering what sorts of diseases they, as imaginary beings, might be subject to and how they might be caught. It had been something new, something exciting and unusual to explore...
(...none of them had ever imagined how literal the word "heartbreak" might turn out to be in the end.)
(The second time around, the third, the fourth...seventh, tenth. The twentieth—the hundredth and more—and far past even his counting, all that Logan could do was throw everything he had toward finding an answer, a solution, a cure...
Anything but the solution that Logan already knew would save him.
Every single time, he had found himself racing against the clock, and every single time come up empty handed. And with each attempt, each iteration, each permutation, his efforts were driven by less energy, less urgency, and with much less hope behind them.
Eventually he had been forced to accept that, if there was an answer to be found, that perhaps he simply couldn't find it alone. And Logan had hoped to find an ally in Instinct, even trying once or twice to tell him the truth of what he was doing, of what he knew, of what was going to happen if they couldn't stop it... And Instinct had been good, back then, at keeping secrets, but he hadn't been able to offer him any new information or any new way for him to work on the others. At least none that held any promise. The best he could ever manage, with Logan's aid, was to get the issue taken seriously, sooner, by the others with his warnings, and that itself had so little impact on the overall outcome that Logan had been forced to let it go.
To leave Instinct to vanish into the shadows once again...)
(None of them had even noticed, at the time, so focused on what was happening with the Heart and later with the King. None of them had noticed until the dust had finally settled and the shadows with them. They would learn, only once it was far too late, that Instinct too, caught up in the conflict between Dread and Denial, had also been torn apart in the end.)
And in the end, with his intervention or without it, eventually the laughter would cease, first smothered behind soft red petals, and then choked upon flower and thorn. Yet still the Heart had tried to smile, that was the most painful thing: that the Heart could smile at them with blood on his lips as he fought for each breath, his face deathly pale, and still mean it. That he hadn't blamed the King or Curiosity either.
(It was the very core of his nature that the Heart Loved, and nothing could ever make him love an ounce less, even as his love was killing him.)
There was resignation approaching the final act. All of them knew, by then, the end that was coming. Or so most of them had believed. But the King was stubborn, and the King was not afraid of exploring the boundaries and what lay beyond them...
(And whyever would he fear when, in truth, Imagination was boundless? Why should he fear when all of its rules had been written—and thus could be changed, or bent, or shattered—by Creativity himself?)
A hundred times, a thousand times, Logan had failed.
A hundred times, a thousand times, Logan had watched the King make his choice...his sacrifice.
(Another variable Logan knew he could never change. A choice he could never sway or stop. Because once they had finally accepted the inevitable, whatever objections Logan might have raised, it had only ever been the King's choice to make.)
To save the Heart from the fate that tragedy had written him, the King had needed to sever the connection in Thomas's mind that had bound romance to tragedy in the first place.
To save the Heart, he had taken his crown in his hands and, with one last glance at Curiosity, he had broken it clean in two.
(His last memory of the King, and the only memory, in the entirety of their existence together, of seeing him express anything close to regret.)
And what came after was always the same, because he was always far too numb, by then, to try and change it.
The Heart would wake, his breath and his health restored. He would wake, and the first thing his eyes would see would be the softer, brighter half of Creativity standing over him, smiling brightly like some triumphant prince in a fairy tale...
(His breath and his health were returned, though as much as he might try to hide it, certainly not all of his cheer. It was impossible for any of them to have missed how the weight of the King's sacrifice had changed him. And, over the years, it would continue to change him, leaving a more conflicted, more melancholic being in their bright Heart's place...)
The Heart would not see Creativity's other half, not for ages. Nor would Logan, for that matter.
He had already been run off by the time the Heart awoke, for the lighter Creativity had seen in his twin, in his brother, only the parts of the King that had nearly cost the Heart his life. But Anxiety and Deceit—newly formed, and still confused and reeling from their own unbecoming—had known only one thing for certain: it wasn't anywhere that black and white. And they hadn't had much to offer in those days save the refuge of the shadows, but they had given him what little welcome they could.
And thus those hundreds upon thousands of times had all ended the same: with misery and heartbreak.
They had ended with Curiosity kneeling before the stone they kept for remembering the King. Kneeling and tearing his own bouquet of bleeding roses from his chest to lay upon the stone beside his shattered crown. He had lost his faith in the sort of fantasy that promised him happy endings.
For Curi-
For Logan—for Logic—had been forced to accept that reality held only tragedies.
Logan blinked, blinded by white light as the door to the chamber opened. He sat there for several moments, shaking as he came back to himself. His memories were in a chaotic state: shuffled around and misfiled, and plagued with contradictions and redundancies that would need to be compared against the existing record, analyzed and collated or discarded. At the present moment, however, he had neither the energy nor the focus to properly realign himself...
Logan had strained every ounce of his analytical capability in seeking after futility. He was spent.
With painstaking slowness, Logan picked himself up off of the cold stone floor. He was sore from lying there for...however long his endless search had ultimately translated for his body. Smudges of filth which was probably better not named or contemplated streaked his bare arms, and he realized in the same breath that his face was aching and wet with tears. Taking just a moment he drew up the effort to remove those traces—to refresh his clothes and banish the dirt, to force his hair into a more acceptable state. He adjusted his glasses and straightened his tie, and only then made his way through the door.
Remus awaited him in the hallway of his dungeon—a surprise to Logan, though it probably should not have been. He had simply forgotten that Remus had been there when he had first entered the chamber, and while he hadn't expected him to find him waiting when he stepped out again, he supposed it wasn't unusual to find him there.
After all, as far as the natural timescale of the mindscape was concerned, he couldn't have been in there for much longer than a day, if it had even been that long...
(Logan would not have begun to know where to begin trying to guess how long had passed outside the room any more than he could have guessed how much had passed inside of it. He had lost track so long ago of how many times he had relived the events from all those years ago—the weeks leading up to the day when all their lives had come apart. He didn't know how many times he had watched Patton wither, and the King destroy himself, how many times he had tried to pretend not to see his own part in the neglect that had brought Virgil and Janus into the world...)
To him it had felt like ages, and yet strangely like no time at all. With repetition after repetition, time itself had ceased to hold any true meaning. But objectively it couldn't have been for very long, if Remus was still here. Even if he had gone and come back, his being here meant that Logan's request had yet to slip his mind...
And Logan knew that he was...curious. Logan couldn't even blame him. It wasn't everyday that Logic came asking the seat of Thomas's cruelest and his most inane imaginings for an honest favor.
And it certainly wasn't every day that Logan would have allowed anyone to witness him entertain so outlandish and impossible a desire as rewinding time...
A fruitless endeavor, or so he would have told anyone else were they to propose such a thing. But then it hadn't been anyone else whose focus on their duties had begun to slip, drawn back inexorably to the nagging question that had begun poisoning Logan's thoughts...
(What if...?)
So impossibly foolish, to dwell on the past. To dwell on things that couldn't be changed. And yet, no matter how often he scolded himself with those very words, it hadn't managed to banish the question from his mind. He was older now, smarter, and possessed of greater clarity—no longer at the mercy of the feelings that had so blinded him back then. Knowing now the things he hadn't when he was younger, was there some way he might have stopped it?
Could there ever have been a way?
Plagued incessantly by such unpleasant musings, and thwarted in his every effort to ignore them, there had only ever been one side he might have approached to lay those thoughts to rest. Though, given the subject of those thoughts, for obvious reasons Remus was also one of the most problematic Logan could have tried to approach. He had therefore done his best to keep his intent obscured while outlining the needs of the exercise he needed help with in as exacting detail as possible:
He needed to be able to enact a scenario multiple times in order to seek after the most ideal possible solution. He needed the opportunity to run through all of these variations on a base scenario in as expedient a manner as possible, which would require stretching the flexibility of time within the mindscape to the fullest possible extent. The scenario needed to repeat itself faithfully each time, save where his own actions changed them, whether it was for the better or for the worse. And it needed to be able to draw upon both his own present knowledge, as well as variables that might remain unknown to him, but the memory of which would still exist somewhere within Thomas's subconscious. He needed to be assured of his privacy, that once he entered the room not even Remus could open it, nor would he know what events were taking place within...
And, finally, the scenario would need to repeat itself without cease until Logan had exhausted every available avenue, because under no circumstances was Remus to allow him to enact the experiment a second time.
(Because he could only ever do this once. He could only allow himself this foolishness just once. The temptation to fall back onto these sorts of doubts would too easily consume him otherwise...)
Remus was not often called upon by others to flex his powers of creation on the other sides' behalf. He was not asked for favors or gifts. Remus was not often handed a challenge, and he had set about his task with absolutely terrifying energy...
(And while satisfaction was, perhaps, the opposite of what Logan was feeling at that exact moment, he certainly couldn't argue that Remus hadn't delivered him exactly what he had asked for...)
As Logan stepped out into the corridor, the door swung shut noisily behind him, reverberating with a deep, metallic clang. He turned, just briefly, and watched the door begin to twist and warp, crumpling in on itself like paper until it finally swallowed itself whole, leaving no trace of its vanishing on the bare stone wall once it was gone. And the noise, of course, drew Remus's attention right to him. He immediately abandoned whatever business he had been distracting himself with amid a pile of assorted bones in the corner, rubbing his hands as he closed in on Logan with excited glee.
"So..." Remus needled, drawing the word out expectantly. "You look like you got run over by a dump truck full of dead babies, but other than that, how'd it go?"
Though he had no doubts at all that Remus was...curious, he would prefer not to divulge any further information about his activities. Still, it wouldn't have been fair to leave Remus without honest feedback on the endeavor he had undertaken on Logan's behalf.
"It was...exactly to specifications," Logan managed carefully. "Thank you, Remus."
"But did you find an answer for whatever it was that had your jimmies in a knot?"
"No," Logan said, though he was quick to move forward at Remus's sudden show of disappointment, "However, that was always a possibility. Some problems...simply don't have a satisfactory solution."
"Maybe," Remus allowed. "You sure it's nothing you need help with, though? You know I'm game for anything."
He favored Logan with a manic grin, a whip and a paddle appearing in either hand. Ignoring the crude display, Logan answered what he was sure was the sincere offer underneath it.
"Perhaps another time."
Remus tossed both items behind him, shot Logan a pair of smoking finger-guns, and blinked unevenly before he turned around to leave.
"But-"
The momentum of Remus's turn continued until he had spun all the way back around to face him once more, eyebrows raised with intrigue.
"If you're not otherwise engaged," Logan offered. "I would not mind some other form of company."
For a moment, Remus simply blinked at him in empty surprise before his mouth stretched into a painful looking grin.
"Yeah?" Remus sounded almost hopeful. "Well, if you're not up for anything athletic we could throw on a fun flick. Maybe watch Grave of the Fireflies and laugh 'til we cry ourselves blind?"
On any other night, Logan thought that the offer would have sounded abhorrent. And yet, tonight...
If there was one thing his recent efforts had afforded him, it was perspective on some of the smaller details that had escaped his notice all those years ago. Even after all their wounds had been given time to heal, neither of the twins had fully managed to lay claim to the King's former fearlessness. Which wasn't to say that Roman wasn't brave, he simply lacked the easy faith in his own ideas that the King had always enjoyed, too easily swayed by the weight of others' opinions upon them. But, for the longest time, Logan had held the mistaken belief that Remus had grabbed the lion's share of the King's bulletproof confidence. But what Logan now realized was how much Remus actually did keep hidden. For there was no mistaking that Remus had inherited the King's love of tragedy, and yet so very rarely did he ever bring it out in full force. Remus didn't exactly pull his punches, but even when he drew from his darkest wells there was always a veneer of twisted humor stretched desperately over top of it. Like a mask he was hiding it behind. Like an armor meant to shield them from the very sharpest edges...
Of course Remus had known why his brother had driven him away, all those years ago. He knew what it was he was being blamed for. And it wasn't in his nature to hold back, and yet he had, in his way, and Logan had somehow never seen before how pained he was to do it.
(It made him wonder what else he might have missed.)
"That would be...acceptable."
Remus cocked his head, surprised, Logan thought, as much as he was obviously intrigued. And Logan was more than a little surprised in himself for taking his offer. But perhaps, tonight, indulging one more tragedy might be exactly what was needed.