It awaited.

Right there in front if him: the blank sheet of paper. It'd been empty since the group started their seemingly endless battle with the emptiness in Riley's mind. After - Flint checked his watch - approximately an hour and four minutes, nothing had been achieved. The paper was still blank, and Flint, Reese, Lev and Beck still hadn't thought of a way to get two of Riley's characters to meet. They knew how the rest of the story would pan out, of course, but they still needed to get passed this unsurmountable predicament. Perhaps, Flint thought to himself, this would be faster if Lev and Reese weren't -

"Okay, Ruby and Sapphire are cute and all, but have you seen Lapis and Peridot? They are objectively the best ship - Flint, tell him!" Reese's voice stung Flint's ears with a volume Flint didn't know if he was physically able to top. (This was why he preferred computers to people: computers had a button to lower the volume).

"Noooooo! Flint! Tell Reese he's wrong - Ruby and Sapphire are soooo much cuter: they're married, they're fused all the time -"

"Exactly! Ruby and Sapphire don't have that irreplaceable cutest-couple drama. They're like a story with no conflict. Boring as Flint with a textbook…"

"The lack of drama is the conflict, Reese, it keeps the audience on their toes, waiting and watching and wondering what'll cause Garnet to fall apart." So now Beckett was in on this as well. Flint was the only one actually working. And although he knew more than the others, much more in fact, he still couldn't figure out whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. It could be good, since Reese, Lev and Beck's contributions may lead them off on another tangent costing the group even more time, but Flint wasn't exactly the best fiction writer of all time - yes, he had an extensive vocabulary and knew all the literary devices, but he couldn't create an intriguing plot line like Reese, or a suspenseful conflict like Beck. He couldn't even spin a satisfying ending like Lev. Flint turned his focus towards his friends' conversation, avoiding a question he didn't dare answer.

"That's not how storytelling works, O dark of my life," Reese crooned, "A lack of conflict is boring and only boring. It doesn't make the audience anxious."

"Well it certainly does for me…" Beck's eyes dropped to the ground, his shoulders caving under nothing short of an unbearable emotional load - he was likely contemplating the mistake of his previous line.

"Everything makes you anxious, buddy, that's not exactly a sign from God," Reese smiled and turned to Lev. "As I was saying, Ruby and Sapphire are boooring! We barely even get to see them. Lapis and Peridot, on the other time… They got so much alone together time at the barn - who knows what could've happened?"

"Well, um… Ruby and Sapphire abandoned their home and all their friends for each other! Lapis and Peridot were forced together by unfortunate circumstance; that's not very romantic!" As Flint watched Lev argue with Reese, he couldn't help but notice the fact that neither of the more emotional sides even lended Beckett a passing glance. They simply carried on in their pointless ship war as Beck sank out, hands in glowing fists at his sides. Flint would've intervened, were it not for the fact that trying to talk to Reese and Lev ran the risk of an even bigger detour from their original task. In addition to that, going out of his way to be "nice" to Beck was something that Reese or Lev would do, and Flint wasn't exactly eager to be associated with them at the present moment. He would simply have to deal with being the only rational side there.

With Beck gone, the others' volume seemed to escalate to an impossible degree. Even Flint couldn't concentrate and the constant screaming was making his throat hurt as if he was the one doing the screaming and every sound penetrated his ears like a battering ram and the room's color spectrum shifted and it was it was red, all Flint could see, the fire surrounding him, and it needed to be put out. He needed to put it out.

"Stop." The word was spoken at Flint's normal volume; he could barely hear himself - but Reese and Lev didn't react and it only made Flint's anger worse. It filled him up, a simmering warmth he didn't know how he'd even lived without.

There was a moment of peace, of comfort in complete agreement with himself. Then the peace erupted around him.

Flint's voice rose far above the others', then crashed back down with more force than he ever meant to hit them with. The emotional sides flinched, Lev's eyes shone with shadows, and -

They left. Gone. Flint was alone. This was…

Perfect?

Silence.

Lev flinched away from the fading echoes of Reese's laughter as Lev rose up in his room. He hated being alone; it felt like everyone else wasn't simply in another room but had melted entirely out of existence, like a snowman of a hot day. Lev slammed his eyes shut, forcing the silence out of his mind. He didn't understand why Flint would kick him out and send him to his room; Lev was part of the team too, wasn't he?

...Wasn't he? Sure, he didn't fill Riley's head with new and colorful ideas and he wasn't a brilliant, wonderful genius like Flint, but that didn't mean he was useless. Lev wasn't useless. He wasn't.

But it sure felt like he was. When was the last time Lev actually fixed one of Riley's problems? When was the last time Flint thanked him for being helpful? When… when was the last time Lev was helpful? He couldn't remember.

Maybe Lev really was stupid and immature like Flint used to say - Flint was always right, of course. Come to think of it, Lev could remember a myriad of instances in which Flint had been correct in his negative observations of Lev - reckless, careless, irresponsible, emotional immature ignorant -

Lev covered his eyes as his knees buckled. It wasn't just what Flint said, he was right. Lev wasn't useful or amazing like the others - it was a stretch to even say he was functioning correctly at all. He was supposed to be Morality, the embodiment of kindness and happiness, but he barely even noticed when his son was so insecure that Beck sank out without telling anyone, an event that hadn't occurred in a long while. Even after Flint tried to make him pay attention, Lev continued his side conversation with Reese, who Lev only now realized he neglected to think about when he rose up in his room and the silence crushed him - that same silence could have affected the creative side in the same way, couldn't it? Flint was right: Lev was immature, irresponsible, careless.

Lev molded his hands in shaking fists.

Flint would know what to do.

Flint knew everything.

The echoes of laughter bounced around his room when Reese rose up. As the sound skittered from wall to wall, it changed from friendly giggles to an onslaught of attacks on Reese. They were laughing, not at a joke, but at him. He was the joke.

Echoes fade, he told himself. This one didn't though. Minutes later, he could still hear the obnoxious noise with the same aching clarity. Reese tried to tell himself that the others wouldn't laugh at him, they didn't believe he was nothing but a simple joke, but the sound of his insignificance was right here with him, attacking him from every impossible angle. Whispering in his ear now, now shouting from the other side of the room, back, now, by his side. Reese covered his ears with shaking hands, but the sound slithered inside his head too fast an all he managed to do was trap there.

As the echoes ricocheted off the inner barriers of Reese's mind, causing stands of agony reverberate through his skull with each dull impact, Reese stopped fighting it. Just once, this once, to see what happens when you surrender.

The laughter stopped fighting too. It had already won. Seeping through Reese's memories, the sound found every word, every look and gesture in Reese's past and turned it against him. He couldn't believe he ever really thought Beck cared for him. Of course the many afternoon Disney marathons and nights spent alone counting the stars drifting on the sky's canvas were products of a false hope, no substance or reality. Even if Beck actually cared at some point, how had Reese repaid the sentiment? By laughing at Beck instead of at least trying to understand? Making the anxious side feel insignificant enough to leave without uttering a word? Unacceptable.

Reese felt an excuse rising from the depths of his mind and he shoved it back down with more force than even the echoes because he couldn't go on. Not like this, hurting his favorite person with barely a second thought. As flint would say, this was worse than unsatisfactory - Reese was a figurative train wreck. He needed to sort himself out.

If only he could pull himself together enough to figure out how to start, what to do next.

Beckett was sprawled on the floor of his room, The Count of Monte Cristo nestled in his lap. He barely registered the individual words as he drifted from page to page, completely immersed in the plot weaving itself around him. With his headphones busily murmuring his Spotify playlist in his ears and the book in his hands guiding his through a carefully planned story, Beck was safe in a different world. A silent world. A perfect world.

There was a change. The air shifted, suddenly on edge and attentive to something other than The Count of Monte Cristo. A different kind of silence settled in the new atmosphere, sharp and apprehensious and empty where there once was calm warmth. For a few moments, Beck pondered the likelihood of the change being imaginary. He couldn't have imagined the hand on his shoulder, though, or the voice accompanying it - so bright it seemed impossible among the shadows filling Beckett's room.

"Whatcha reading there, buddy?" Lev's forced grin shattered when he saw his son flinch at his touch.

"A book. What did you think I was reading?" Beck growled, fixing his eyes on Lev in a sudden, uncontrollable burst of anger.

"Oh - I, um… oh." Lev bit his lip, forcing his eyes away from Beckett's. He shouldn't have come; all he ever did was make things worse. Still, he should at least finish what he'd come here to do. Lev let himself hesitate for one more moment before blurting, "I'm sorry I hurt your feelings. I was so focused on Reese, I-"

"What do you mean, Popstar? You didn't do anything… wrong. I'm fine," Beck mumbled, trying to hold Lev's eyes through the lie of his last two words.

"Oh… Okay. Whatever you say, Beck," Lev replied, hoping the faint shiver in the anxious side's eyes as he said he was fine was only Lev's slightly overactive imagination. "But… are you sure I didn't hurt you? What about the others?"

"Flint and Reese? I'm sure they're fine, but if you want we can go check on them, I guess…" Beckett didn't know what to make of Lev's new obsession, but he could at least do his best to help - not that that had a good chance of working; Beck wasn't exactly the best at making things better. Still, he had to at least try to help.

"Awesome! Let's go talk to Flint!" Lev's lofty grin didn't melt all of Beck's anxiety as usual, but it did help a little. It was a start, anyways.

"Wait, but what if he's still mad at you?" Beckett fidgeted with his sleeves, noting the sudden change in his heart's rhythm as he thought of how Flint may react to seeing him and Lev appear out of thin air while he was no doubt trying to work.

"I, uh… didn't think of that." Lev's eyes chased something bouncing around the room as he tried to think of a solution that didn't include getting yelled at. "Hey, what if we hid somewhere out of sight so Flint didn't know we were there, then he wouldn't yell at us?"

Beck considered this option and was about to point out the many holes in this plan, but Lev had already sank out. Now all that was left to do was follow.

Flint groaned and ran a hand through his hair, staring blankly at the paper. This was getting him nowhere; he should have just put up with the others' nonsense. At least that way, there would be less evidence pointing towards him being the least important, least productive, least functional side. Especially since his mind kept running in circles around other topics than the one he should have been working on. If Flint couldn't focus and get the job doe, then Riley may never get to writing the rest of their story. He. Had. To do this. Now.

"Hey there Flintstone!" Flint flinched as Reese's hand dropped between Flint and the still wordless paper. Flint thought he noticed a tremor in the creative side's fingers, but denied the thought as out of character. He looked up, prepared for an extensive verbal battle.

"What do you want? Go play dolls with Lev; there's no reason for you to bother me here," Flint growled, finding it surprisingly difficult to meet Reese's eyes.

"I just wanted to help, see whatcha got done, maybe pitch in a bit? I am, of course, the best side at spinning super suspenseful stories," Reese replied with a smirk.

"Yeah, well I don't need help. Especially not from someone who can't even focus on something for more than a minute without running off on a tangent," protested Flint. Immediately after finishing his statement, however, he realized that he was not actually much better at staying on topic than Reese, but he decided he could go without pointing that out.

"It certainly seems like you need help, Flint," Reese said with an uncharacteristic pleading tone after snatching the paper, "This looks exactly as it did before you kicked me out. Talk about time wasted! Hypocrite… Anyways, I actually have some ideas that I think might help improve the poorly played project, pretty boy, so…"

Flint growled, ready to start a shouting match then and there before realizing Reese was actually trying to help. Genuinely. In addition to that, Reese was also right: he was Riley's creativity. He would be the one to do the best work on any type of fiction-based project, really. Being the embodiment of logic and reason, however, how could Flint sit there and just… yell, like an uncivilized Reese?

"Fine." Flint curled his hands into fists. He would make this work out. Somehow. He blinked, slowly, stalling for one last moment before squaring his shoulders and looking straight into Reese's suddenly shining eyes.

"Eeeeeeee! Okay, so I thought maybe instead of making them friends from the start we would make them rivals at first, slowly becoming closer over time, y'know?"

Flint was on the verge of a reply when he spotted a pair of too-familiar eyes peeking at him from behind his bookshelf. When they realised Flint was looking at them (it took a few seconds), the eyes widened and shrank back, before an entire face followed the eyes out from behind the bookshelf.

"Awwww, it's so cute to see you two working together without even ripping each other's faces off," Lev sighed, casually inching towards his fellow sides in an attempt to call attention away from the fact that he had just been spying on them like a creepy stranger only moments before. Fortunately his plan seemed to work when Flint and Reese gawked at each other and started to mumble incoherently about how it wasn't cute, they certainly weren't working together, and they were still absolutely biting each other's heads off (figuratively of course). Unfortunately, attention was abruptly snapped back to the creepy spying when Beckett stepped out from behind the bookshelf, clapping slowly.

"Yeah. Real smooth guys," Beck drawled, "But seriously, you guys are adorable."

Reese flinched at stared at the ground. His only thought was how alike to Beck he must look, with his shoulders caving in around him and his eyes focused entirely on the floor.

"So, now that we're all here and paying attention, this time would most likely be well spent working on Riley's story," Flint suggested.

"You know Flint's trying to avoid talking about something when he changes the subject abruptly, for no reason, and beings a sentence with the word 'So'," teased Lev, "But, he is right. Let's get to work. Any new ideas, Reese?"

"Actually, yes: as I was explaining to Flint before you two so rudely interrupted…"

After a while, the sides' conversation melted into a steady rhythm, pouring from one subject to the next, with surprisingly little protest from Flint. Eventually, when the flow of words lulled, they all agreed to retreat to their rooms and come back to this conversation at a later date.

Lev sank out with a smile. All's well that ends well, he thought tim himself.

"Wait, Lev, why were you and Beck behind that bookshelf? What were you two doing?"

Yes, all's well that ends well, but that did not end well.