May Flowers - Sanders Sides Fanfiction

❁Blue Hydrangeas - Asking for forgiveness, and expressing regret❁

AU: Canon Divergent

TW: None that I'm aware of

WC: 1025

Date: 5/20/2021

Sweat poured down Janus's back as he shot up in bed, his breath heavy. Memories poured back into his mind like a faucet on full blast, were it not for the practice, he wouldn't know how to turn it off. It took a moment for him to calm his racing thoughts, but eventually, his breath evened out. He had better control over it now, but it hadn't gotten easier. For years and years, he had had this nightmare. He could calm his racing heart, ease his shaking hands, but the self-loathing never stopped. Guilt was a poison.

He stood up, trying to ignore the way his sweat cooled on his skin, trying to ignore how it made him feel chilled to his bones. Dwelling on the past rarely did any good, it was best to learn from mistakes and move on. Janus knew this, implicitly. He tried to teach this to Thomas, regularly.

But Janus was a hypocrite.

His feet slid quietly across the ground towards his closet, doing his best to preserve the quiet of the room. He acted as if the quiet would save him from the memories. It wouldn't. The skeletons in his closet were already awake. They rattled with visions of the past, reminding him of everything he had done wrong. They spoke the truth of his history, the history he didn't want to face. They reminded him of his greatest mistake.

Télesphore.

Janus was more than just deceit. He always had been. They all had always been more than just their primary function, and his primary function wasn't even lying, it was self-preservation. Lies had not become his thing until after Morality started to play a bigger part. Patton had taken it upon himself to purge out the 'bad parts' of Thomas. Self-preservation became selfishness, and selfishness while trying to placate others, became deceit.

That had happened early in their lives, the writing had already been on the walls when they were two before Janus even understood his function fully. By the point Patton built his wall, separating the 'good' and the 'bad', Janus had already spent years with his guilt.

Patton had been doing what he thought was best, he had been following society's rules, a misguided effort but an effort nonetheless.

Janus's sins went deeper than that. He had acted out of selfishness, and his actions could not be undone.

All of them had always had names. They were always more than their function, the world was complicated, even for a kid. The name of their function had changed through the years but there had always been one constant.

Creativity.

He had been the original. He had been the beginning. Télesphore had breathed all of them into being and Janus had split him in half.

He opened up his closet, dragging a box out from the corner. He had pulled Roman and Remus into being, forced them to be separate from one another. He stripped the light from the dark.

The minute Telésphore split, the moment one became two, Janus regretted it. He regretted his needling, regretted his pushing, regretted being given the function of self-preservation. He hadn't understood the nuisance of the world, hadn't understood how you couldn't have light without shadows. He had just wanted to make Thomas's parents proud; it seemed so important back then to have their approval. He thought without the darkness they could be what everyone wanted them to be. It was the same naïve notion that guided Patton to build the wall, but Patton's wall could be un-built.

Janus was left with nothing but the wreckage of his actions.

He had sowed the seeds of shame. His mistake had shaped Thomas. He had opened the floodgates for their host, and Patton as well, to feel as if there was something wrong with having both light and dark within him. No one talked about it. No one said that they blamed him, but Janus knew.

He opened the box, memories, and mementos of Telésphore sitting in the same place they had been since the last time he had had this nightmare. Janus went through the excruciating game of "what-if" asking himself how things would have been different if he hadn't interfered. The pain swallowed him until he was fit to burst.

"I'm sorry." He cried out. "I'm so sorry Teli, we said we would build a world together but I got scared." He clung to an iridescent sweater. Janus had summoned it, it hadn't been the same, but it was the closest he could get. He put on a mask of indifference, a mask of power, but that was only to hide his careful planning, his fear of once again destroying something precious.

Yet, no matter how hard he tried, he stumbled. He had shattered the confidence that Roman needed; he called Remus evil when that had never been his intention. He was supposed to be protecting them. He was supposed to be making up for his mistakes.

"Wow double D, your thoughts are getting almost as bad as mine are."

"Yeah, you realize you don't have to keep doing this alone, right?"

His head shot up, turning to look at the door where Virgil and Remus were standing.

"Boys." Janus was rubbing at his eyes, trying to clear away the look of his shame.

"Don't give us that." Virgil was already flopping down in his bed, motioning for him to come over.

"Truly I-"

"Oh shut it and come over and cuddle."

He hesitated before slowly making his way to the two of them, still clinging to the iridescent sweater.

"What is that thing you are always saying? Forgive yourself but not others."

Virgil snorted, quickly trying to hide it.

"I'm not mad about what you said, and Robro will get over the stick in his ass." Janus relaxed a little bit; it was Remus's last words that broke him. "And I'm glad you split us. I enjoy being me."

He would never know if he had done the right thing, but if Remus and Roman could learn to love themselves, maybe the guilt would fade just a bit.