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Upon Roman parking the car at his moms’ house, Virgil got out without a word or a glance in his direction and started to walk towards Roman’s room to get his stuff. He was supposed to be staying the night, but Virgil legitimately did not think he’d be able to look at him after the mall disaster.
“Wait, Virgil,” Roman said, hurrying after him. “What are you doing?”
“I’m grabbing my stuff and having one of my dads pick me up,” Virgil said.
“Oh, come on,” Roman dared to scoff. “You can’t still be upset.”
“Oh, can’t I?” Virgil snapped, rounding on him.
Roman looked legitimately taken aback by the sharpness of his tone. Virgil turned to continue up the stairs, still fuming.
“It wasn’t that big of a deal, Virgil,” Roman said.
“It was to me!” Virgil said. “I can’t do crowds like that, Roman. I just can’t. I had one condition when I agreed to go to that place.”
“It was a shopping mall…” Roman said.
“It was hell with too loud music and too bright lights,” Virgil interrupted. “I said do not leave me alone, or, you know, at least tell me if you’re going to wander away, but no you disappear into thin air on me.”
“It was 5 seconds.”
“It was not 5 seconds.”
“I didn’t think you’d notice.”
“I called my therapist!”
Roman rolled his eyes, and Virgil just about shoved him down the staircase. (It’d be fine. He had superstrength. He’d live. Probably.) Instead, he turned back around and walked into Roman’s room. He grabbed his still packed overnight bag and was met with Roman standing in the door when he turned back around.
“Move,” Virgil said.
“Wait,” Roman said, his tone different now, but that didn’t matter to Virgil. He was still a dick even if he was starting to realize that fact. “No, look. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Don’t be mad.”
“Oh Roman, we are way past that.”
“But…” Roman said. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m wrong. Let me fix it.”
“You can’t just... I’m pissed! I’m going home. Move.”
“But…” Roman said.
“Roman.”
“Look, I get it. I’m in the wrong. I suck. I’m horrible, but please don’t leave.”
Something about how his tone had shifted yet again gave Virgil just a bit of pause even though he was still pissed. “And why shouldn’t I?” he asked, folding his arms over his chest.
Roman seemed at a loss for a moment. “I don’t… You can’t leave when your mad at me. Please. You don’t have to talk to me or anything, but don’t… go.”
“What?” Virgil asked, confused. He sounded… legitimately distressed now. “Why?”
“It,” Roman said. He hesitated for a few long seconds until Virgil raising a skeptical eyebrow seemed to punch words out of him. “You know how my mom’s in a wheelchair right?”
Virgil blinked at him. “…Yeah?”
“And how that happened.”
Literally everyone in the city knew what happened to his mom. “Yeah.”
“Well… she was… mad at me when she left that day,” Roman said, “and I, uh. I have trouble… I can’t…”
Realization slowly dawned. “Oh.” Virgil suddenly felt extremely out of his depth.
“Yeah,” Roman said, shifting uncomfortably. The pinched expression on his face clearly said he didn’t want to explain more, but he did anyway. “Yeah, uh. So, I remember the day of the Onslaught pretty well. I mean, a lot of people do, but I don’t just remember the sirens or the taking cover in school or how I learned exactly what was happening. I remember before. I remember the morning before. We were all in the kitchen and uh,” he squinted as he could see the events from long past if he just looked at the air in front of him closely enough. “I think Remus had put gum in my hair the night before, or maybe I was playing under something and got some stuck in there myself, but I didn’t want to tell my moms for some reason, and I slept with it in. Obviously, it was pretty ground in by the time I was getting ready for school the next day, so Mom had to cut it out. Of course, I was 7 and a little shit, so I threw a tantrum. I screamed at her. I told her I hated her. I said basically all of the worst things a 7-year-old could come up with to her.” He looked at his hands. “I knew she was mad. She didn’t want to deal with this raging glorified toddler at 6:30 in the morning, and it was my fault anyway. But… I was mad at her too even though I was wrong to be, so I climbed under the kitchen table and wouldn’t let her kiss me goodbye.”
He glanced up at Virgil for a moment before letting his eyes drift off to the side.
“So, then… she left for work… on that day.”
“Oh, Roman…” Virgil said, but Roman apparently wasn’t done.
“You know,” he said. “When you’re 7, you don’t quite get that the world is bigger than you. Some part of you is still figuring out that you aren’t the center of the universe. So, when you’re horrible to someone, and then they don’t come back,” his voice shook a bit, “you assume it’s your fault. She didn’t come back. She almost never came back, and the last thing I said to her was that I hated her, and the last thing she probably thought about me was about how awful I was.”
Virgil opened his mouth to say something, but he didn’t know what he could say to that. Roman steamrolled ahead anyway.
“She did wake up, though, after over half a year. I tried to apologize for that morning, but she didn’t even know what I was talking about. That’s fair, I guess. A lot more important things happened that day, and she was in a comma for months. I even tried to bring it up with Mama, but she didn’t remember it either. Her wife almost dying overshadowed the fact that her kid was an asshole, I guess. The thing is…” he trailed off before continuing again. “The thing is, I remembered. I remembered and there was no one to accept my apology. So, it just stayed right here.” He put a fist over his chest, “and that honestly kind of fucked me up.”
“What… what do you mean?” asked Virgil.
“I…” Roman said, shifting nervously, “I tried really, really hard not to make that mistake again, to never be bad again. I was quiet and polite, but personable. I got really good at pretending nothing was wrong even when everything was, and everything was wrong a lot for me. I was good at fitting in and fading into the background so much so that I felt like I wasn’t even there sometimes. Remus helped with me looking good a lot, though not a purpose. He dealt with stuff the exact opposite way from me. He’d scream and throw things when he was upset. He’d be mean and not get along with people. So, I looked great next to him, of course that also meant he got a lot more attention. I was perfect. I didn’t have any problems to fix. At least, none that anyone could see.”
He smiled a bit, but it was a bitter smile that Virgil had never seen cross his face before.
“Man was I good at pretending to be okay,” he said. “Until one day when I was 16, I messed up. I hadn’t gotten much sleep that week because I was studying for a big test. Then, I got back a quiz in a different class that day, and the teacher said something snippy about me not doing as well as usual. Even though I tried so hard in that class every day, it wasn’t enough. I was so stressed out about the exam worth 50% of my grade in the other class that I hadn’t studied enough for hers, but she didn’t seem to care, and I just lost it. I put my hand through a wall on accident. It wasn’t even a punch, I just kind of touched it, but I was so keyed up, that my hand went straight through. Of course, then, I got sent to the principal’s office and given a syringe of Oxyproxicolotin to take in case I felt like I was ‘losing control’ which I didn’t take. They called Mama to say I was suspended for a couple of days.”
Virgil grimaced. He knew how school… could sometimes be about things like that. They probably should have sent him to a counselor or something, but instead they just slapped on a punishment without asking why the thing had happened.
“Needless to say, Mama was pissed, especially since she was supposed to be doing something for her company that day. She didn’t yell at me or anything. In fact, I probably would have felt better if she had. At least then I would have known what she was thinking. Instead, she was mostly quiet, but I filled in the details with all sorts of horrible things about myself. I felt terrible. I felt like a failure. I felt like the universe was going to punish me again.”
There was a moment of contemplation before Roman continued his story. “That’s the thing about trying to never mess up. You always fail. You try and try for years to be good, to be perfect, but all it takes is one day where you didn’t get enough sleep and your teacher was an asshole, and it all crumbles down around you. She is mad at you and that’s the worst thing in the world.”
He was sort of hugging himself now. It was a pose that Virgil recognized only from the time when he and Logan had picked Roman up from a party in the middle of the night. It made Virgil as uncomfortable then as it did now.
“We got home,” Roman continued, “and she said we’d talk about it later, because she had to leave to finish whatever she was doing before getting the call. I should have just gone up to my room, but I couldn’t be there alone right then, so I left. I walked out of the house, not really knowing where I was going, but needing to go somewhere. I ended up on a bridge. You know that one above the highway that they renamed after Bluebird after he stopped Telemonger from throwing a train into it in the 80s? Yeah, I ended up there.”
That would have been quite the walk, Virgil knew. That was out of the city limits.
“I felt… I don’t even know how to describe how I felt that day. Like the world was ending. Like a train was hovering over my head about to crush me, but there was no hero around to stop it. I looked down at the ground below me, and then I put my hand in my pocket,” he said. “Which, was when I realized, I still had the syringe the nurse had given me earlier: Oxyproxicolotin.” He drew out the name of the drug in a strange way that unsettled Virgil for a reason he could not name. “It’s funny,” he said, even though Virgil could not see the joke, “that’s the drug my mom used to stop the speedster during the Onslaught. She knew how it worked because she had to give it to Remus and me whenever we got sick, you see. Otherwise, we’d destroy the house on accident with our superstrength. So, I knew how it worked. I’d given it to myself a few times by then and to Remus too, especially during those couple of years where he was power-sick. I had the thought while standing on top of that bridge that I could have easily just…”
“What would the public have thought?” Roman wondered, sounding almost amused. “Can you imagine the news headlines? The mayor, the savior of the city, the hero who almost fell to her death trying to save everyone and her son who chose to fall. Oh,” Roman’s voice dipped down as he chuckled. “Wouldn’t that just be ironic?”
He blinked and to Virgil’s relief the scary amusement on his face faded.
“And here’s the thing,” he said. “You probably weren’t going to jump, but you stare at the ground below you and all of the cars, and you realize that when trying to figure out a reason why not to, the first thing on your mind wasn’t that you didn’t want to die, or that you thought people would miss you. It wasn’t even that you thought your body would get in the way of traffic. No, the thing that kept your feet on that bridge was one thought: how embarrassing. And, you know, it might be silly considering you had a mental breakdown because your mother frowned at you and you were now standing on a bridge with a drug that could let you fall to your death, but that… that is when you realize that there is something wrong with you.”
“You…” Virgil did not know what he wanted to say.
“So,” Roman said, “then, I went home, and I never told anyone about that either. I did remember it though, and I tried my best to change.”
“What do you mean?”
“I made a conscious effort to try to do things for me,” he said. “I tried to make myself an identity separate from what I thought everyone wanted from me. I got into theater and started writing again which is something I’d done when I was about 8-11, but I’d stopped when school got harder. I started… doing other things. I’m… better now, I think, but I still have trouble with certain things.”
“You…” Virgil said, his head still spinning from that large amount of information, “Roman that is a lot. Have talked to someone, someone other than me, about it?”
Roman shrugged. “It’s in the past. The main issue happened when I was seven and it was silly. Obviously, I know now that what happened to Mom wasn’t my fault at all. I was just a kid and didn’t understand.”
“It’s not silly,” Virgil said. “It’s obviously a lot more than silly to you.”
Roman sighed. “It’s not like I can even bring it up to them.”
“Yes,” Virgil said. “You can. You should. Or maybe to a therapist. I, uh, know a good one. He specializes in childhood trauma, actually.”
Roman’s face screwed up. “That doesn’t count as childhood trauma.”
“Yeah…I think it does.”
Roman shrugged, and then there was silence. “Sorry,” he finally said after a few moments. “I, uh, I don’t actually know why I said all of that. I didn’t mean to. I just panicked and it all came spilling out and…”
“Don’t be sorry,” Virgil said awkwardly.
There was a very long time where they both just stared at the ground. Virgil did not know what to say to any of that. What did someone say? It was… it was a lot. He bit his lip. “You know,” he hedged. “I think 7-year-old you got one big thing very wrong, and I’m not talking about the part where you blamed yourself. You obviously know that was wrong already, but even if it somehow had been your fault, I still think you got it wrong. You said the last thought your mom would have had of you was about how awful you were, but I really don’t think that could possibly be true.”
“But…” Roman said.
“No,” Virgil cut him off. “Do you really think she spent her whole day angry at you? Or even if she did, do you think when she realized what was happening, when the city was in danger, when you were in danger, when she was falling off that building thinking she would die, do you really think she cared about the tantrum you threw one morning? You were her kid. She loved you. No matter what stupid childish thing you’d done that morning, that would never have been her last thought of you.”
“I…” Roman said. He seemed to think about it and as he did, his eyes grew watery.
Virgil gave him a half smile. “Did I ever tell you about the day Logan and Patton, well,” his lips twitched into a full smile, “more Logan asked if I wanted them to adopt me?”
“No,” Roman said with a curious head tilt despite his still wet eyes.
“Well,” Virgil said. “I was being a little shit, and I didn’t have the excuse of being 7. I was screaming at him over something really dumb. They wanted to get me a new suit, and I thought they were going to make me go to your mothers’ party, which you know me, ick. Anyway, Logan was getting pissed off, like really pissed off at me because I was being an absolute trash child. I said something to the extent of they shouldn’t care because I wasn’t actually their kid and Logan snapped. I legit thought he was going to explode like a firework, but do you know what he did instead?”
“Well, this somehow leads to you getting adopted, so…”
“That’s right,” Virgil said. “He pulled out adoption papers and slammed them down on the table in front of me. He was so mad. He was furious at me, but he still… he still wanted me. He was angry, but that didn’t mean he didn’t love me. He could do both at the same time. He did do both at the same time. Patton too. That silly argument didn’t matter in the long run, but something that did matter was that they wanted me to be their kid. I promise, even if your mom was mad when she left that morning, she had hundreds of thoughts about how much she loved you before she fell.”
“I…” Roman said. “Thanks. I don’t… thanks.”
Virgil shrugged. He knew he hadn’t nearly touched on all of that, but he also was pretty sure he didn’t have the capability to do so. It would have to do for now. “Yeah, uh, no problem.”
Roman bit his lip after a few seconds. “So… are you still mad at me, then?”
Virgil snorted out a laugh. “Oh, yeah, no, I’m pissed. You’re a dick.” Roman let out a startled chuckle and Virgil reached forward to sock him in the shoulder. “We’ll figure it out though, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Roman agreed after a bit of hesitation. “Yeah, okay.”