#like Patton *didn't* say X because Y

[erlenmeyertrash]

Oil on Canvas, June 1889

me?? write something??? how dare

words: 1238 | pairings: logicality if you squint | warnings: none, but just lmk if you need something tagged

“It’s chilly out here.”

There’s a shifting of fabric and the slight scrape of clothes on concrete as he settles down beside Logan.

“I suppose it is.”

“Are you cold?”

Logan shrugs. “Not particularly.”

Patton peers through the slats of their balcony railing. The apartment complex’s perimeter fence and the houses beyond don’t make for particularly beautiful scenery, but as he sneaks a glance at Logan and sees that his dark eyes are staring skyward, he supposes it doesn’t matter. Logan opens his mouth ever so slightly and Patton watches his foggy breath drift and dissipate into the air.

“What’cha thinkin’ ‘bout?”

A pause. “Astronomy… and English,” Logan adds, his eyes still transfixed on the twilight sky.

Patton follows his gaze to the heavens. “What specifically?”

Logan takes a breath. Lets out a small puff of trailing white. And then- “...I took an astronomy course freshman year. Observational Astronomy. Every Wednesday night, we would go out with all these telescopes onto one of the fields by of the observatory. We would sit there for hours, just cataloging all the major constellations. We learned how to determine which one was Polaris, the North Star, using other constellations. We learned how the ancient Polynesians used their hands and specific star clusters as guides on the sea. I… I wrote an essay on the constellation Cassiopeia for extra credit. I aced every quiz. I didn’t even have to take the final.”

“That’s really impressive.”

“Is it?” Logan squints, scrutinizing the stars. “I suppose so. I felt very accomplished after that semester. Considered myself a true modern Renaissance man.” His sigh reveals itself in a tiny white cloud.

“...What about English?” Patton prods after a few beats of silence, but Logan doesn’t respond. Patton leans forward until his forehead touches the cold wrought iron railing. It makes his glasses go askew- the starry night blurs into blackness- but he makes no move to change that. If he concentrates, Patton can hear the low roar of car tires on the main roads. The air is still. Undisturbed. He huffs out a long breath and his eyes nearly cross as he tries to watch it disappear.

“...Right now there’s not a cloud in the sky, but I can’t name a single star.”

Logan’s voice is barely above a whisper. Patton whips his head around, one hand straightening his glasses on his nose. Logan’s eyes still haven’t shifted from the starlight, but his gaze is… sharper. Harsh. Instead of another cloud of warm breath, Patton sees his jaw clench.

Patton could comfort him. That’s all right. People forget knowledge they don’t use often to make room for new information. It’s been years since you took that class, and you probably haven’t looked at the stars that much since then. He could change the subject. He could ask about English again. But he doesn’t. He looks back up at the sky, eyes narrowed, tongue sticking out slightly between his teeth.

“...Well, there’s the Big Dipper.” He points up, glancing over at Logan, who is now staring right back at him with owlish eyes.

“See?” He leans over, making their lines of sight as close as possible so his finger is pointing in the right direction. “Those three right there? They make up the handle thing. That bottom one is the top left corner of the four that make up the, uh… the pot thingy. That part.”

“I see it.” Logan’s breath appears in his peripheral vision, and Patton’s gaze slides to it, his outstretched hand wavering. He looks at Logan, whose eyes are suddenly distant, his mouth sliding silent words over his teeth. Patton lowers his arm and waits for the great revelation Logan is uncovering in his head.

“There.” Logan’s hand shoots out, pointing upwards. “That one’s Polaris.”

Patton squints. “That really bright one?”

“No, down and to the right a little.” Logan’s finger mirrors the motion.

“Oh, I see it! How’d you know that?”

Another puff of breath. Patton loses Polaris. “Imagine a line between those two stars of Urs- the Big Dipper. Then take the length of that line, multiply it by five, and add it to that star along the line. Polaris is there.”

“That’s so cool,” Patton whispers, trying to find Polaris again. He thinks he’s found it. “Does that trick always work?”

“....As far as I’m aware, yes.”

“Math and stars.” Patton beams. “That’s awesome. I love that.”

“Do you now?” Something in Logan’s voice tells Patton the question isn’t rhetorical.

“Well- yeah. It’s so interesting. I love it. Just like how I love cool facts about biology. And how Roman loves theatre, and how Virgil loves psychology. And how I love them, and you.”

Patton sits back on his hands, sparing a glance at Logan, who is once again transfixed on the night sky. Patton shivers. He finds the Big Dipper again. Finds the bottom two stars. The distance between them. One, two, three, four,-

“I don’t love people,” Logan blurts out. Patton jumps.

“I- I don’t. I’ve never loved a person. And- even if I did, I wouldn’t know how. I love- I love subjects.” Logan forces a shaky inhale. “And I know how I love them- by studying them, by learning them forwards and backwards and inside out even though facts are intangible and do not have visible figures and therefore cannot be inside out. I know I love them when I learn all this and still think of new questions for which I can or even cannot discover an answer. I can discover new facts, new knowledge, if I can just connect enough dots. And you can’t- do that to people.

People are…”

Logan looks like he’s on a quest to battle the alphabet. Patton is barely moving. His breath is weak puffs of white.

“...not like physics. Not like math. The laws that define one person don’t apply to the rest,- or even to themselves all the time. Just look at psychology, and sociology, and how… finicky everything is. That’s how people are. All the facts- they’re not constant. They all jumble up and confuse m- each other. There is no right answer. It’s… puzzling.”

Patton’s grasping at straws and his hands are coming up empty. “...And here I thought you liked solving puzzles.” A light tease. A gentle prodding.

But Logan soberly replies, “people are not just puzzles, Patton.”

Patton is silent. There is an image in his head of Logan hovering in a doorway, cradling a pristinely folded shirt Patton had lost in the laundry a week ago like it is made of glass; then there’s Logan standing frozen, hands twitching, before raising one and knocking one, two, three times ever so gently on Virgil’s bedroom door; then there’s Logan, bathed in yellow lamplight, hunched over the coffee table- Roman asleep on the couch beside him- and Logan is copying down Roman’s tilted, jumbled handwriting in his own perfect typewriter script, swapping his pencil for one of many colorful glitter pens Logan would never use for his own notes every so often.

Patton looks up at the sky again.

One, two, three, four, five.

Finds Polaris.

Feels Logan’s stare. He knows Logan is waiting for something but he doesn’t know what.

Patton could search for a poetic, intellectual response; he could dig deeper and try to give Logan some lost key to the universe, to understanding people. Instead, he smiles.

“...No, I guess they’re not, huh?”

[spicycreativity]

Fanfic Appreciation Week Day 7: A Place Where I Can Breathe

Yes, folks, I'm appreciating my own darn fanfic for the final day of Fanfic Appreciation Week because I worked really hard on it and it was a labor of love for/with one of my QPPs, my roommate, the man who got me into Sanders Sides: @\cadeorade-powercade (That's him in the aesthetic board)

Allow me to present the director's commentary for A Place Where I Can Breathe:

Content Warnings: All content warnings mentioned in the fic apply.

Chapter 1: I actually wrote this fairly late in the game. It's meant to serve as a prologue and orient the viewer in the universe, s opposed to staring on Chapter 2, which just throws the viewer in without context. I think it was a good choice, as it also allowed me to introduce the concept of the Sides having power focuses early on.

The Premise: Cade is a Virgil stan and he was getting frustrated looking for Virgil fic. He was finding a lot of stuff written without nuance by young authors, a sort of "by teenagers for teenagers" type deal. We are not teenagers, so we both have a hard time relating to that kind of teen angst fic, as we're not the target audience. So he asked me to write him a Virgil fic and we worked together to identify what plot he wanted, what the Mindscape looked like, and what quirks the Sides have. So a lot of this fic is quite gratuitous and self-indulgent

The Title: Lizzie McAlpine has a song called "Apple Pie" which includes the lyric "I've been running around trying to find a place where I can breathe." Apple Pie SCREAMS Moceit to me, and I had taken notice of the lyric and wanted to use it as the title for a Moceit fic. I didn't really have an idea beyond that, and when Cade asked me to write this fic, I realized it was actually perfect and summed up Virgil's inner struggle quite nicely. So cheers to "A Place Where I Can Breathe," the Moceit Fic That Wasn't

-Cade asked me specifically to include Virgil having a spider and I wrote nearly the whole fic without doing so, then had to go back and sprinkle some references in. I think I managed 2 total.

Chapter 2:

"Uh, how about I hold off on that until I actually see my room?" Virgil stared expectantly at Roman, who bounced on his toes. "Lead on, Macduff."

"That's not the line and you know it," Roman complained, but he turned to lead Virgil to his room. "It's ' lay on, Macduff,' and--"

-This fic was originally supposed to reach a climax with a confrontation between Remus and Roman, and "lay on, Macduff" would come back as a brick joke. Unfortunately, the original ending was a result of me getting tired and lazy, so I had to go back and fix it, and we lost the Roman-Remus confrontation.

It was hard for Virgil to not shudder at the sudden heat and weight on him. With his senses already open and taking in more information than his brain seemed to want to process, touch was an added stressor, more unwanted sensory input.

-Virgil being touch-averse is a direct shoutout to Cade, who is also touch-averse.

Roman had already transformed the living room: metallic streamers of purple and black stretched across the corners of the ceiling, and shiny balloons spelling out A-N-X-E-I-T-Y hovered above the TV.

-Upon first writing, Virgil had already given the upstairs crew his name, so the banner spelled out "VIRIGL" which is way funnier than "ANXEITY." But then his name reveal became a plot point so I had to go back and change it.

-Let! Virgil! Be! Mean!

-Virgil's line about hearing refrigerator noise when Roman talks is another shout-out to Cade, who has leveled that accusation at me

A small, cruel part of him protested at the idea that he would need special treatment and desperately wanted to throw it back in Patton's face. He wasn't a sweetheart, he wasn't a baby. He didn't need to crawl into a blanket fort with Dad just because he was a little stressed.

-Remus calls Janus "Janus Geminus" because I was tired and couldn't come up with a pun. "Geminus" is one of the Roman god Janus' epithets; another is "Pater" meaning "Father." That led to a conversation about Remus deliberately confusing Patton by calling Janus "Daddy," but I couldn't think of a clean way to fit the explanation into the narrative, so I stuck with "Geminus."

Chapter 3:

"There's nothing normal about that! " Roman stared in horror at the coffee massacre Virgil had orchestrated. What had once been a respectable (if not very tasty) cup of black coffee was now part of a 1:1 coffee to milk suspension, the liquid a tasteful shade of tan suitable for business casual trousers or a show-ready chihuahua.

-Cade is a certified Nightmare Man and came up with Virgil's horrifying coffee order after I asked him about it. Keep an eye out for Janus' equally horrifying coffee order later in the fic.

1) Shouts out the fact that Janus is canonically a Dostoevsky fan

Chapter 4:

Janus smiled at him. "Where reason fails, the Devil helps." He fussed with his gloves and straightened his capelet. "It's showtime."

-I fucking love Crime and Punishment. Look at me. Look at me. I fucking love Crime and Punishment. Janus' quoting Raskolnikov serves multiple purposes:

2) Lampshades the fact that Roman just conveniently happened to be alone in the living room, because I didn't want to waste time getting him there. That makes me, the author, the Devil

3) Foreshadows the impending disaster. When Raskolnikov says this line it is because he had planned to commit axe murder. The axe he was planning to steal had been moved, but he finds another, different axe to use. Raskolnikov messes up the murder and ends up killing an innocent witness in addition to his intended target. Janus messes up his manipulation attempt and ends up murdering Roman's self esteem

-I was going to include a reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Remus' line "debauchery and vomit" was originally going to be "blood, love, and rhetoric") but I didn't because... Uh... Hm. Why didn't I do that. Maybe I just forgot about it???

-Roman is too stubborn to manipulate for long and that is a fact.

"I was pretty much done anyway," Remus said. "There's only so much debauchery and vomit you can fit into one story."

-Cade specifically ask me that nobody cry in this fic, but after I had Janus eviscerate Roman I knew he couldn't not cry a little. I kept it to a minimum because there's already a billion fucking fics about [literally any Side] crying on the shoulder of [literally any other Side] and it's really just not interesting to either of us.

-It didn't come up because it doesn't matter, but Thomas dreamed he was participating in the exact Dionysian orgy that took place in The Secret History because it's my fic and I said so.

Chapter 5:

He just sat back and watched and tugged at his hair while Janus spooned mound after mound of crisp white sugar into his mug and Virgil poured his customary eight fluid ounces of milk into his own mug.

-Cade strikes again. Virgil's coffee order is equal amounts milk to coffee; Janus' is equal parts sugar to coffee. He had asked me to include a scene where Roman catches Janus massacring his coffee and is appropriately horrified, but I uhh... Didn't write it. I still might include it as an omake someday.

-I imagine that Roman feels really strongly about dragons vs wyverns, and Remus just pretends to give a shit because he thinks it's funny to wind Roman up. Fortunately for me but unfortunately for my sense of realism in writing, I can't relate because I adore my sister and we get along perfectly almost 100% of the time.

"You shut us down every chance you get!" Remus said, baring his teeth. "How would you like it if your pens never wrote, hm? What would you do with all those thoughts in your head?"

-I do wish I had developed the concept of power focuses a bit more, established rules and such. Basically, Patton is always on the prowl for wrongthink and actively represses it, which in turn breaks or sabotages the Dark Sides' power focus.

Chapter 6: This chapter really should have been Janus and Roman but I was really tired and didn't want to bother with it. Plus, you know, Moceit. This chapter was meant to demonstrate how the characters would get along without Virgil nannying them. There's friction, but everyone is making a conscious, deliberate effort to get along because they love Virgil, and love is a series of choices you make.

I chose "Leo" as the answer for the answer to the crossword clue instead of "Virgo," because my other QPP is a Leo. She'll never read this fic, but I did it anyway because I love her. (Trivia: My sign is Virgo, so it was really a choice between shouting her out and shouting me out, and the last chapter is self-indulgent enough, thank you).

Chapter 7: I was gonna write a fic where all the Sides watched Cats the Musical because I was going through a phase. Then Cade requested this so I combined the two ideas. By this point I was fucking exhausted, and that's the only thing that saved you and the rest of the world from me writing the Sides riffing on the movie scene-by-scene. I could come up with snarky commentary for almost every, if not every single song from the movie.

Most notably, I cut a Patton-Remus interaction where Remus declares his love for Grizabella and Patton gets all staryy-eyed about Remus connecting with the idea of rising above rejection and being loved and accepted only for Remus to shoot him down and explain that he just likes that she got to die in a tire fire.

Other cut scenes include Janus quietly pretending not to go feral over Mister Mistoffelees, Patton full-on fucking sobbing over Grizabella and the kittens, and Logan experiencing a deep, soulful kinship with Munkustrap during Of The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollices (and henceforth introducing the phrase "like herding cats" into his regular vocabulary