I wanted to be seen

summary:

Superheroes AU. Roman, Patton and Virgil are a team of good guys who fight against Evil (Janus and Remus). They get Logan to work for them with like hacking and getting important information from the villains. But Janus tries to convince Logan that he deserves better.

I wrote this in a bit of a hurry because I have schoolwork to do but I also want to procrastinate so I just translated this part of a daydream I’ve had for a while into words. So sorry if it’s not great.

Title from Not What I Meant by dodie.

warnings: Even though he has no dialogues, i made roman (and patton and virgil) kinda mean to Logan again. i’m sorry (not) but i’m not creative and it’s really the easiest way for me to make Logan suffer and want to move to the Dark Side lol

Read on AO3

words:2,529

Logan walked inside the building as silently as he could, following close behind Anxiety. Prince was leading the group, with Morality by his side, Anxiety was just behind them and Logan was last, struggling to keep up with their pace while also staying quiet. He had a habit of bumping into things. 

They made it through the back entrance all the way to the stairs without crossing a single person, Logan had made sure they’d come at an hour when the way would be empty, and he also disabled the cameras with which they could be spotted. At this point, Prince decided it was time to split up. Each of them would search in one of the four floors of the building, Logan got the second one. He followed the instruction and began exploring the labyrinth of hallways on his own. 

He didn’t really want to participate in this. He did his best work from a safe distance, sitting down and staring into a wide computer screen. Alas, Prince said it was urgent that they found and retrieved the stolen relic before anything happened to it, and they needed Logan to cover the most distance in the least amount of time. 

To “look in every room for the small, golden crown” sounded easy enough. However, Logan struggled to move fast while keeping quiet. It was hard to tell if he was making any noise through the pounding of his heart in his ears. He had never done anything like this. All he hoped was to not get caught. He prioritized being quiet over velocity, walking slowly and carefully. 

He picked the lock of the third room in his second hallway and walked inside. The entire building was mostly empty and extremely clean in an uncanny way. The rooms in this floor seemed to be for offices, some bigger, with several desks and file organizers. This one was smaller; it was probably for storage. It had no windows, only illuminated by a yellow light bulb hanging from the ceiling. There was an empty shelf rack on one side and a few plastic containers of cleaning products on the floor. He crouched down to look for anything on the floor between the shelf and the wall. 

As he did so, he heard the door close behind him. He stood up, but before he could turn around he was shoved to the wall and his mouth was covered by a hand in a yellow glove. Logan didn’t have to look up from it to know who had caught him. The yellow gloves were his signature. Logan breathed deeply through his nose, as much as he could, as the pounding in his ears returned. “You had one job,” he heard Prince’s annoyed voice in his head say.

Once he gathered the courage, Logan looked up. 

He had read many descriptions of what Deceit looked like, his job was to research him and get inside his computer systems to allow the team to stop whatever he was planning. He had seen a few cryptic pictures of him, low quality camera footage. He knew he wore a black mask that covered the left half of his face, a bowler hat, a cape, and the famous yellow gloves. Still, all this knowledge wasn’t enough to prepare him to face the man in person so closely. 

He was smiling. His right eye was brown, appearing completely normal, while the left one, behind the mask, was a vibrant saturated green, slitted like a reptile’s. Logan was captivated by both of them, so different and yet both had the same hypnotizing effect. 

“You’re new,” Deceit said, with a low pitch that shook Logan to his core. 

Logan just swallowed. 

“You’re going to stay quiet, right, little mouse?” Deceit asked as he raised an eyebrow. 

He was too frightened to even consider moving a muscle, let  alone speak. He did his best to nod ever so slightly, never moving his stare from the criminal’s eyes. 

“I know who you are,” Deceit said as he pulled his hand away, without stepping backwards, staying too close to Logan for his comfort. “You’re the one that has been meddling in affairs that are not of your business.” His tone was calm, but Logan could feel the threat in his gaze. “I know they got someone else because none of those airheads could even get close to the information you’ve been trying to find. I might need to improve my security.”

Logan knew he was lying. He might have been able to find some information, but nowhere close to what could actually be useful. He had the suspicion, but now he was in this situation it was confirmed that all he could find had already been laid out intentionally by Deceit. It was better than nothing, though, he reminded himself of that. 

”Do they pay you?”

“No, sir,” came out of his mouth before he could think. Perhaps Logan’s brain had translated the intimidating demeanor of this man into an authority figure, and addressed him as such. 

There was a moment of silence. Logan had lowered his gaze but he could still feel Deceit studying him. Suddenly, the villain took Logan’s hands in his. 

“Strong fingers,” he muttered, rubbing his thumb over Logan’s knuckles, “do you play piano?” 

“I code.”

“Right.” Deceit hummed, still staring and Logan’s hands. “What a shame… I could teach you.” 

“What do you want from me?” 

“Oh, nothing at all,” he sounded almost offended by the accusation. “I just wanted to talk and get to know the new team member.” Deceit let go of his hands slowly. Logan pulled them up to cross his arms as soon as they were free. 

“You’re wasting your time.” Logan’s irritation was allowing him to become a little braver. 

“Ah, you mean because of your friends? Don’t worry about them, they won’t find anything.” He said with a smirk. 

Logan bit his lip, ignoring the urge to correct him about the others being his friends. Only Virgil talked to him sometimes. Prince wouldn’t even tell him his real name. Logan wished Virgil was here now, he always knew how to escape difficult situations. He looked towards the door, trying to figure out a way to get out of this. 

“Waiting for them?” Deceit asked with a mocking tone. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Maybe they forgot about you.”

“They didn’t.”

“How are you so sure?”

He wasn’t. He stayed quiet as Deceit grinned. His fangs were visible, and Logan couldn’t help but stare at them. He wondered if Deceit was venomous as some kind of unknown superpower. There were never civilians around to witness when he committed a crime, people only knew of his appearance through rumors. He never needed any supernatural ability to defeat Prince and the others, who all had their own, but maybe he kept it hidden, just like he did with everything else. 

“You know, if you worked with me I wouldn’t leave you behind.” He gently uncrossed Logan’s arms to hold his hand once again. “I would appreciate you for the brilliant gem that you are, unlike those ungrateful, egotistical attention-seekers.” 

“Flattery won’t get you anywhere.” Logan said. He couldn’t deny, however, that he had thought about leaving the team before. They needed him, though. And he needed them, they gave him a place to live and he had nowhere else to go. 

“How about some proof, then? Since you’re such a pragmatic guy.” 

Logan looked into the other’s eyes in confusion. 

“Here’s my proposal,” he said, lifting Logan’s hand from the wrist. Then he pulled out a pair of handcuffs, to which Logan reacted by trying to pull his arm back, but Deceit was too strong. He gave up before getting hurt. “I’ll leave, and give you three minutes to make a choice.” After closing the handcuff over his wrist, he leaned over Logan’s shoulder to cuff both hands behind his back. 

Logan had to make an effort to pay attention to what the man was saying over the panic growing in his chest. 

“I’m going to leave that door unlocked for three minutes. If you leave, then this never happened, but I will keep trying to show you you’re better off on my side of the equation, where your work would actually have an impact, instead of leading those losers to more humiliation.

“After that, though, the door will lock, and you’ll have a chance to prove me wrong. If your friends still look for you and find you here before the day ends, then it’s proved that they care, and I’ll leave you alone. I won’t even interfere with your attempts at breaching my digital storage.” He smirked again, as if reminiscing about having fun with that. “So,” he laid his hands on Logan’s shoulders and whispered in his ear, “do we have a deal?”

Logan wanted to ask what would happen if no one found him, but he felt like doing so would be admitting defeat, which the faint hint of pride he had left wouldn’t allow. He was already too embarrassed from how hot his face felt from Deceit’s touch. He simply closed his eyes and nodded slightly. As if he had any other option. 

“Wonderful!” Deceit’s smile showed his fangs off once more, as Logan tried to control his tachycardia. “I’ll see you later.” He finally said with a wink, before swiftly walking out of the room and closing the door behind him. 

The lock was electronic, Logan observed. 

His immediate impulse was to run out and get away as far as he could. He didn’t even have to go back to the team of heroes, he could find somewhere else to go. 

As he struggled to reach the door and turn around to try to hold the handle with his cuffed hands, anxious thoughts plagued his mind. 

Could he go somewhere else? Would he constantly be haunted by Deceit and other villains he had worked against? He didn’t have any powers, he wasn’t even strong or fast. Who knows what they would do to him if they found him. Would he survive out there on his own, without protection? 

Maybe he should just look for the others. But what if they had left already? From what he could hear, the hallways were dead quiet. Logan didn’t know how long it had been since he split up from the rest. They didn’t bring any electronic devices to avoid being tracked. What if they were still here but Logan got lost searching for them? People said it was best to stay in one place if you wanted someone to find you. But could he stay there doing nothing?

What if Deceit broke his promise and was waiting for him right outside the door? That wasn’t improbable given his name. Would he mock him for being a coward? Did Logan care about being a coward more than his own safety? What if he wanted to hurt Logan, not before playing mind games with him for a while? What would Logan do without help? Would he take Logan hostage and threaten his life to get away with whatever he was planning on doing today? 

He stopped for a moment to think, resting his forehead on the door. This was supposed to be easy. They promised him it would be. 

Maybe Prince, Morality and Anxiety would find him. They did need him. Even if they didn’t always voice their appreciation Logan knew he was a crucial part of the team now. Even if they didn’t care about him as a person they should at least care about what he could do for them. Perhaps they would save him just for appearances, so Prince could have his heroic act of the day, since they probably weren’t able to find the relic they were looking for. Maybe they were looking for him right now. 

Logan breathed deeply. 

Then he heard the click of the lock activating. 

There was nothing left to do now. So Logan waited. 

In a security room somewhere else inside the building, Janus was looking at the cameras’ footage with Remus sitting by his side. On their left side, Logan was now sitting on the floor, with his back rested against the door. On the right, the entrance to the building was empty. Prince and his teammates had left hours ago, showing no sign of planning to come back. 

“How long till we tell him?” Remus asked, propping up his feet on the desk and leaning his head back on the chair’s backrest. 

“I told him that he had until the end of the day, can’t break a promise.” 

“But you do that all the time!” Remus whined. “Last week you told me I could buy some arsenic with our booty and then you took it all!” 

“I simply saved it for later.”

“Yeah, right. And tomorrow there will be another golden snake statue of mysterious origins in your house.” 

“Listen,” Janus said, dismissing Remus with a wave of his hand. “I have to teach him a lesson.” 

Remus looked back into the camera, where Logan still sat in the same position as before. “What are we going to do with him after?”

Janus shrugged. “We’ll find him some use.”

Logan didn’t have any way of telling how much time had passed. There wasn’t even any natural light in the small room, it could have been night for hours already and he wouldn’t be able to see any difference. 

He estimated that an hour had passed when he began trying to escape. He tried everything, breaking the handcuffs, breaking the lock, sliding his hands free, tackling the door, looking for something to deactivate the lock, to dismantle it, or turn it off… Nothing worked. 

Eventually he grew tired, sat back down on the floor, in one of the room’s corners, and waited some more. His head hurted, there was a knot in his throat, his eyes stinged and his muscles were shaking. It wasn’t long before he drifted off, and was fast asleep before he could realize. 

Later, he felt he was being picked up slowly. With one arm on his back and the other below his knees, Logan could faintly see Deceit lifting him from the floor and pulling him close. He let his eyes close again, and rested his head against the other man’s chest, letting himself drift off once more as he was carried out of the storage room. 

He opened his eyes fully as they walked out through the main entrance. It was dark outside. 

Deceit put him down to allow him to sit in the back seat of an old car. Logan couldn’t see anything outside, he didn’t know if it was because of the darkness of the night or if the windows weren’t fully transparent. He counted his breaths as Deceit moved to the front seat. The driver’s seat was occupied by a man in a green suit covered in glitter. 

“Where are we going?” Logan whispered when the car began moving. 

Deceit made eye contact with him through the rearview mirror with a jarringly earnest expression. “Home.”