Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

Thud.

A soft swear sounds at the door, then the metallic jangle of keys, before the lock clicks open and the door swings out. The light from the hallway spills into the dark room and reveals a man standing in the doorway, casting a long dark shadow. The man is tall and lanky but slouched heavily, clad in a worn, black hoodie with purple patches sewn on that was slightly too big for him. He looks young, skin pale to an anlmost unhealthy extent, and with dark eye bags framing his purple eyes, their vibrancy dimmed by exhaustion. Sighing, he walks into the house without turning on the light, dropping his backpack onto a chair before walking away. The name “Virgil Sanders” can be seen on a faded name tag.

The man — Virgil — practically falls onto the sofa, grabbing the remote and turning the television on, volume low. He closes his eyes against the sudden brief glare of light in the dark room, well-practiced at this point. He stretches out leisurely like a cat, listening to the news, before he freezes.

“...and here we are at the scene of the standoff between Psyche and the latest villain group they are facing, Void,” the news reporter was saying, visibly excited. “The villain group is on the right, while on the other sid-oh! Oh, there’s the Prince!! Logic and Deceit too!” When the camera focuses in the distance, three figures appear, two wearing black, one with navy blue highlights and the other yellow, while the figure at the head was wearing white with a bright red sash across his chest.

Virgil lets the news reporter’s voice tune out, seeing that it’s a standard battle, standing up and heading to the kitchen. “Flashy as ever, Roman,” he grumbles, searching the drawers for some instant coffee, and not finding any. “Ugh, just my luck.”

You’d think, as a barista, he’d have coffee in his own house, but noo…

He quickly puts on his boots and heads out to the convenience store down the road. Pulling his hood over his head, he kept his eyes on the ground and his head down.

It seems the others were doing well with their hero business as usual. He could still remember the time he could go on missions, even the times before their powers had manifested, when they were happy, before that horrible incident, before just by existing he could hurt his brothers, before he had become worthless, useless, a liability—

A loud horn jolts him out of his thoughts, and he looks up to see a large truck plowing down the road. Strange, it rings at the back of his mind, but he automatically moves closer to the buildings to avoid being near the probably-drunk driver. His body begins to relax again after the near scare, but far too soon. Something hard collides with the back of his head with a loud crack, his world flashes with painpainpainpainpain, before everything goes dark.

Thomas looks up from his stack of paperwork at a loud crash from the other room. Sounds of a scuffle come from the doorway, before Roman burst in, distraught. “JANUS BROKE THE CROFTERS AGAIN.”

“Well, you and Logan were being so quiet over that particular jar, I just couldn’t help myself,” a smooth voice said, as Janus strolled into the room, smirking.

“But-but it’s Crofters! You can’t just do that!” Roman cried.

“And what are you going to do about it?” Janus retorts pettily, now checking his fingernails.

“Ugh—!“

“Guys!” The two brothers stopped and looked at Thomas. “We are in a situation here, and I would appreciate it if you guys could either help me sort through this,” he brandishes the thick stack of papers at them, “or just be quiet.”

“Aren’t those the different idea we suggested for future videos?” Roman asked, dropping into a seat next to Thomas.

“Yep, Storm mentioned yesterday that the fans have been calling for another collab, so I was thinking—”

The computer screen in front of Thomas glitched for a moment, and then a few more times with a staticky sound before settling to show a man wearing a white mask.

“Psyche, we want to negotiate.”

Thomas met Janus’s eyes over the screen, suddenly serious, and he nodded and went to fetch his other brothers. Turning back, Thomas raised an eyebrow. “And why would you think we would agree to any terms of yours?”

The man—or could be a woman, they were using a voice modifier—chuckled. “Because we have your brother.”

Thomas’s brows knitted in confusion, as he saw the rest of his brothers file into the room after Janus, and did a mental headcount. Remus, check. Logan, check. Patton, check. Roman was already with him. There was no one missing.

Roman laughed. “All our brothers are here, did you get a little conk on the noggin’?”

The masked person hummed, before the camera switched and showed someone lying on the floor. “Ooo look, I think he’s waking up!” The distorted voice came through the computer’s speakers (a different person?), and as if on cue the man in the tiny metal room groaned quietly. He lay there dazed for a moment, before attempting to move and, with a hiss of pain, lay still once more. He started visibly take deeper breaths, and Thomas could recognise the incoming signs of a panic attack even blindfolded by now. It was painful to watch.

The man took some more time to recover, before gingerly raising his head to peer about the room. As he did so, his hood fell off.

Gasps sounded behind Thomas, but he barely heard them as the blood drained from his face, as he set his eyes on the face of his brother that he hadn’t seen for years, that he had thought missing, that he had thought dead, and he was unable to tear his eyes away when they met the man’s purple ones through the screen.

“Psyche, say hello to Virgil Sanders.”

Chapter Text

As the rest of his brothers stare, stunned, at the screen of the monitor, Logan quietly slides into his practiced (forced) calm, batting down the rising tide of his hysteria. Now is absolutely not the time. He slips to the side, his fingers moving by muscle memory as he attempts to track the video transmission signal. He vaguely registers Janus gently pushing Thomas aside, speechless as he is, and taking over the “negotiation”, his voice maintaining his usual smooth and steady smugness.

Nevermind that they can all see his fingers picking at the seam of his gloves. His tell since youth that he’d trained himself out of once their careers had properly taken off (once Virgil had gone). He hasn’t seen Janus do that in years.

The first time, he and Patton had just been introduced to their new siblings. “Logan, Patton, meet Virgil and Janus,” Father had told them, a hand on Logan’s shoulder and the other on Patton’s head.

He remembered they had been standing in the living room of his house, his soon-to-be stepmother and step-siblings looking very much out of place and uncomfortable. While Patton, ever the social butterfly, had bounded forward to greet them, he had silently observed. The other boys had inherited the narrow jaw and soft brown hair of their mother, the latter somehow—he decided it was amusing—curling over all three of their foreheads in the exact same way.

(Janus, in recent years, gelled it back fiercely, or else it was pressed flat under his usual bowler hat. Neither the twins nor Thomas shared the same trait.)

Virgil had been heavily slouched, hands curled tightly around the hem of his large hoodie, dark eyes on the ground. Whenever they darted up to look at them, Logan saw how heavily shadowed they were, eyebags ringing the lower lids thickly. He looked even more exhausted than his mother.

His subtle vigilance was so greatly-honed (Logan only realised just how Virgil showed his protectiveness years down the line) that he didn’t even notice Janus was there until he peeked out from behind Virgil. Even then, Logan couldn’t see much else of him except for his hands, which had crept out to hang onto Virgil’s sleeve, and the scar crawling up one half of his face, too large for such a small boy. Too large for anyone, really. For some reason, his eyes immediately focused on the picked nails of his fingers, the skin around them ragged, red and irritated. Bleeding slightly too.

Without a word, he had slipped off to find the first-aid kit in the bathroom. As he had turned the corner, he remembered his father had given a sigh.

“My apologies,” he heard, “he’s rather prickly towards others…”

There had been a twinge of…something…in his chest. Something painful. But he ignored it as he picked out some ointment and a few band-aids with Spyro the Dragon on it.

When he made it back to the living room, his new family had migrated to sitting on the couch. When walked up to the two boys huddled together on the soft cushions, he didn’t remember what exactly he had said after presenting his items, but he did remember the warm swelling of pride when Virgil finally looked him in the eye to thank him quietly. Especially so, since he was long-used to being the socially and emotionally stunted one of the family, but it seemed they hadn’t even opened up to Patton yet.

This? This was a first, and it remained a warm memory, even until today.

Even still, after that first meeting it took a while before the others warmed up to him and Patton, to even begin to ease around them. It took many viewings of Disney, a number of sessions of Cluedo and poker, before he started to see Virgil’s habits of climbing onto the kitchen counter to sit, or Janus’s penchant for napping in the sun on the porch like a grandma.

Janus first smiled so, so widely, when he ate Patton’s cookies for the first time, before immediately schooling it into smoothness again. But it had been there, and Patton’s baking experiments increased by tenfold over the next week. Janus and Virgil both tried to help and learn, but their attempts were disasters, and they were soon banned from the kitchen. It was especially funny, since their mother was a fantastic cook, and when they got more comfortable it was a common point of teasing amongst them.

Virgil, he took over a year to crack. Logan could recall, clear as day, during the wedding, when he turned his head towards his siblings and almost dropped his clipboard of tasks (the day had to be perfect!!!) when he saw the upward curve of Virgil’s lips, looking at how happy his mother was.

His smile appeared more and more, as the years passed and the twins, then Thomas were born, and he fussed over them more than even their mother did.

Which is why, now, when Virgil is before his eyes again for the first time in three years, he is sure (as well as his family) that he’s willing to do just about anything to see him smile again.

He can see and feel Remus’s hand land on the head of the chair behind him, leaning forward with the characteristic focus of his (it’s usually seen when he’s planning chaos. Which is all the time, really). His hands are still flying over the keys, unwilling to let himself slip into emotion at this critical junction. There will be time later, when Virgil is back with them.

The computer pings, and his breath catches.

It found something.

Chapter Text

Virgil forces himself to take slow, heaving breaths, as steady as he can make them. It’s made much harder with the pain in his ribs, the slight shifting of bone that he can feel under the skin and muscle. Just thinking about it almost sends him back into a panic attack, but no. It was absolutely not the time.

Seven in…hold for eight…out for four… He’s been doing so well too, with his new medication. But he’ll admit, it's still comforting to fall back on old habits. Patton taught him that one, if he recalls correctly. God, he misses them.

His eyes open, slightly alarmed, and his head twitches from where it's been lolling on the wall he’s propped himself up against.

A weird thing that happens when you’re a solo runaway, saddled with a brain that often rolls a die to decide on when it's going to be helpful or not, is that you end up knowing how your brain processes work really well. Y’know, so you don’t end up having a breakdown in the middle of grocery shopping where your talented hacker brother could take notice and find you from the CCTV cameras, things like that. So you put on your headphones, wear your giant hoodie that's large enough to cover your palms, and voila! 45% less chance of being overwhelmed!

So, yeah. Him getting sappy about his brothers? Not a great sign. Him joking around after coughing up blood? Honestly, par for the course, but he does have some self-awareness to know that’s a dubious sign too.

Also, this cell he’s been placed in? Horrible room and service, 0 out of 5 stars on Yelp. He has no clue how much time has passed already, and there’s no one even here to check if he’s dying after a truck hit him. Why does he assume these people need him alive? The fact they took the effort to bring him here is answer enough, it would have been laughably easy to leave him for dead on the side of the road. A normal hit-and-run, something that wouldn’t even make it to the papers for his brothers to see…

Hold on a fucking minute!

He began to struggle against the zip-ties binding his wrists together, though they didn’t budge an inch. God, was he stupid, the only reason he’d be valuable as a kidnappee was to blackmail Psyche, why didn’t he think of that earlier?!

Virgil feels the familiar curls of panic twisting its tendrils into a hard knot in his chest. Or maybe that was his punctured lung. But that didn’t matter, nothing else mattered except getting away, getting out—! After so many years of heartache, of effort, of sleeping in the cold and empty bellies, all so that he wouldn’t be the weak link that brought his brothers down, he would not let himself be used against them now—!

In desperation, in a spark of flaring instincts and muscle memory, he attempts to reach out to his power. His muscles strain, his throat tightens until a pathetic cry spills from his lips, but all he feels is an empty, aching hollow. One that was left behind four years ago, and has accompanied him ever since.

Despairing, he can’t hold back the few tears that spill from his closed eyelids, and he groans as the zip ties finally bite into the skin of his wrists, fresh blood wetly rolling down his hands. “Please, just…” he croaks, to no one. His panic is such that he does not notice the distant booming sounds from outside the soundproofed room, coughing up blood as he is.

The pain in his chest is getting worse. That’s just what he needs right now, fucking fantastic.

That’s when the door to the room busts open with a harsh screech of metal-on-metal. Top 5 worst sounds on Earth, he thinks, blinking dizzily at…Patton. Sky-blue frog legs and all.

They…came for him?

They’re…here.

Oh shit they’re here—!

“Virgil!” Patton almost-screams, already crying his eyes out, and Virgil can’t make a single move (except a flinch from the loudness of it all) before his brother is knelt next to him with once-again-human legs, warm hands rolling him into a more comfortable position.

Virgil looks dazedly at Patton, as his brother, even while crying, rattles off something into his earpiece. God, he’s grown up, hasn’t he? Well, of course, they’ve all grown, but Virgil can still remember goofing off during assignments, parkouring off rooftops during patrol, and getting chewed out by the higher-ups for lack of communication. Look at that, his brother’s a professional now.

For the first time in four years, there’s a warmth in his chest that manages to drive off the cold emptiness, somehow. It’s so relieving that he notices too late that darkness is encroaching on the edges of his vision. Ugh, passing out is the worst.

Something hits the ground hard on his other side, and a hand, contrastingly, lays gently on his shoulder. His eyes drift, and land on Janus. The warmth vanishes.

Oh, he looks awful.

His eyes are red yet sunken with stress, his scarred cheek has a new wound, his bowler hat is gone and has left his hair messy and somewhat…burnt?

Something in the core of him aches, even after all these years, seeing his little brother in distress, hurt. But his body is on the way to shutting down, and try as he might, he doesn’t have the strength left to stop it any longer.

“Janus…” he wheezes with the last of his energy, before his eyes fall shut and his body goes limp.