Work Text:
it's numbing, to keep living.
he's crawled up in a blanket on the floor, cradling an empty wine bottle as if it were his newborn. the taps the bottle makes against his wooden floors are satisfying— a weird silver lining to, well, everything else.
he feels weird. doesn't know how to explain it. he thinks— an airplane. a long flight. that period of flying, sitting patiently in your seat as you wait to arrive at your destination. you're not in the previous time zone nor the next. habitually moving forward, time controlled by schrödinger. when the flight finishes, the box is opened.
but he's still in that box. he almost snickers at himself at how odd that metaphor is, but it's true. a constant hodgepodge of junk smashed together. never molding, never melding. a heterogenous clusterfuck of movement, but no progress.
a birdcage whose door is open, but only for the head to fit.
◭
he doesn't hate them, he doesn't.
actually, he's not really sure what hate entails. emotions look like idioms from another language to him. or maybe idioms in general. he's not adverse to emotions, not particularly. he wouldn't even say he doesn't have them. he does. he's just more inclined to lie if he finds anything susceptible to ruining his reputation.
he feels things. lots of things. when he stares at thomas' diploma, squeaky clean save for a speck of dirt he can't seem to scrub off, he feels proud. happy, cathartic. like things make sense.
and that's the thing— it makes sense. things should make sense. it makes sense to him that he feels happy when thomas graduated. it makes sense to him that he feels frustrated when thomas doesn't listen. he can admit to himself that he feels so, so much.
but it's— it's the confusion of the box, again. trapped in motion. his heart feels like a rubik's cube with an extra color.
he loves the others. that statement is fully true when he was an adolescent. as a thirty-year-old, it—
they say relationships with those you've loved for a long time only grows as time passes. but somehow, when he sees the others, he is riddled with a perplexing tenseness he doesn't understand. he loves them, but the moment roman shifts his position and opens his mouth to reply to logan, he feels his stomach churn automatically, waiting for an insult. anticipating. his brain has subconsciously wired the others with a sense of warning, of apprehension.
it's a habit now, to shut his trap. to pre-plan every conversation in his notebook, even casual ones.
is that love?
he does it because he wants to please the others, but it hurts, and he's so confused because it wasn't like this, and it doesn't make sense, and—
logan doesn't do emotions. let's just go with that.
◭
there's something so cruel about how everyone is born automatically disadvantaged, no matter who you are. to be eaten alive by nonsensical bigotry, or to be conditioned into believing the gospel of bigotry. all everyone's been doing is making do, which, to logan, feels appalling. no one asks to be born this way, to be vessels of "life" in a reality that doesn't cherish it.
logan usually has two of these to monitor. thomas', and his own. he'd argue he's less of a human than, say, thomas, but half of him wants to reason he only believed this so he can make his job easier.
he asked the sides a long time ago what it meant to be human, to be alive, as individuals practically attached to an actual living person. they said they resembled portions of thomas, yes, but what they do with their inherited personalities was entirely up to them.
logan thinks they're not seeing the bigger picture.
to be human is to be a reflection of your community. logan lives with seven-ish people, the seventh he's immensely keen on not meeting. all of them are reflections of an individual— thomas. they are born to be subservient to the man, even if he grows and changes. logan would obviously know a lot about that.
by the transitive property, they should be reflections of the people that thomas meets. but it's not really like that. nico hasn't met the sides. joan and talyn have never met them either. they're even reduced as imaginary creatures thomas talks to in the living room. the sides may grow to adopt some of their interests and personality traits, maybe imprint themselves on thomas' friends through thomas, but they are doomed with the fate of never having actual friends outside of themselves.
the sides aren't a community. they're supposed to be family, but when a baby is brought into the world, they aren't thrusted into the responsibility of keeping someone alive. they aren't tasked to thoroughly memorize someone's personhood, watching them grow like a security guard on long night duties. virgil was given the burden of remembering the pain of every injury. patton analyzes every detail he can about the people thomas meets. roman knows everything thomas doesn't like about himself.
logan carries the weight of knowing thomas was doomed ever since he was born, watching his dad work long nights to feed his family. he's haunted by the fear of losing your privilege to live just because you miss a day of work. that's the kind of society they live in. of course, humanity strives to protest against that, but logan is a coward. sustain the status quo if that makes thomas alive. he wants thomas to live.
he doesn't know why.
he doesn't even understand why he cares so much for thomas. he doesn't understand love. he was just born with it, and now it leeches off him like a compulsive itch he can't scratch.
he's just a kid. a kid tasked to solve the infamous trolley problem over and over and over again. but instead of two tracks, he just gets to decide how fast or slow the train would run over thomas.
if someone gave him a button to cease his existence within a split second, he would. it was thomas who he wants to keep living — or at least, try to — but not himself.
◭
what is a side?
he asks himself that everyday. they're extensions of thomas, but they are also his lifeguard, in some ways. they plant the seeds for thomas' future but, if thomas really wanted to, he could kill a side off. he wouldn't, obviously, but there's this grasp of power thomas has over the sides that no one wants to talk about.
it makes logan question the genuinity of the sides. they're family, they say. they're friends. they're people he could depend on. they're thomas' biggest supporters.
truth is, the sides are colleagues of the same cult. thomas, on the other hand, is their god.
the sides are professional violinists, all of them. these people say they pour their hearts and souls for the beauty of the craft, but that's not true. that's never true. there is no beauty in the twelve hours one violinist would put in repeating the same chord progressions that aren't even their own. there is no beauty in the millions of dollars being put into mere strings and wood.
the beauty, the gratification— it lies within the overstimulating feeling of being the best.
the applause is everything. to be a prodigy is everything. camaraderie between musicians only exists because they're the only ones who understand the depravity of their starvation.
the sides are violinists, and they are hungry for attention.
logan is very familiar with it. it's existed since his birth but he only recognized it after he recorded a video with thomas and remus. the moment thomas left for nico, leaving logan alone in the living room, remus popped up.
"tough luck," remus said, smirking. "ah well, there's always a next time."
next time. logan didn't want there to be a next time. logan didn't want remus to be there next time, to argue with the sides next time, next time, next time.
he almost punched remus then and there, but the realization that he's stuck in a cyclical purgatory punched logan harder in the face.
he doesn't want to keep performing anymore. he is not a puppet in thomas' game.
◭
logan's still on the floor cradling his bottle. he doesn't know how much time has passed, but he's praying, pleading:
dear schrödinger, the cat is dead, and mangled, and rotting. please let me out.