Chapter Text
“Where is he?!”
Gertrude looked up from the statement she was reading. “Hello to you too, Gerard.”
“Don’t fuck with me, you old bat. Where’s Michael?” Perhaps it was in Gerry’s best interest to get on Gertrude’s good side, but he didn’t care. She had done something.
Gertrude pursed her lips. “I told you not to get involved with that boy. There is no room for romantic entanglements in our line of work.”
“What did you do?”
Gertrude looked at Gerry as though he were a child having a tantrum on the Tube, or perhaps dirt stuck to her shoe: irritated with a side of nebulous disappointment. She heaved a sigh and said, “Sacrifices have to be made, Gerard. You know this.”
Gerry’s blood chilled. Sacrifices. “Look, just tell me where he is. I can go get him. What, did you toss him in the Lonely? Tie him to an artefact?”
“I really don’t know how to make it more clear to you.” Gertrude leaned forward, leveling Gerry with her gaze. “There is no longer a him for you to get. Michael Shelley is dead.”
Michael Shelley is dead.
Michael is dead.
Michael ’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead Michael’s dead.
“What?” Surely, he had misheard, or Gertrude had misspoke. Anything made more sense than-
“I’m sorry, Gerard. Michael is gone.”
Gerry swayed and sank into a chair. His ears were ringing. “How?”
“There was a ritual of the Spiral taking place in Russia. He was needed to stop it.” Gertrude reached out and took Gerry’s hand in an uncharacteristic show of compassion. “It was a noble death.”
Gerry staggered to his feet again, jerking his hand away. “Why him, huh? Why’d you take away the one good thing in my life?”
“The decision had nothing to do with you. Michael had a predisposition to the Spiral-”
“Oh, fuck off!” Gerry flipped her off. “It’s always about the world for you, always your fucking hero complex. Who cares about the people in your way, am I right?!”
“Gerard, if one of us has a hero complex, it is certainly not me.”
Gerry threw a stapler at her head. She dodged. You didn’t survive long in the world of Fears without keen reflexes.
“Get out of my Archives before I call security.” Gertrude said. Gerry flipped her off again, wheeled around, and stormed out of her office.
He didn’t make it six steps before the tears began to fall.
—
The next half hour was a blur. He didn’t remember leaving the Institute, didn’t remember charging out into the rain without an umbrella. He only emerged from the fog of grief, sopping wet, when he realized he was standing outside Michael’s flat.
What was Michael’s flat.
The whole world seemed surreal. Gerry had the vague sense that he should be upset, that he had been upset, but right now all he felt was detached from his own body. It was like there was a wall of glass separating him from his emotions. He acknowledged, without emotion, that Michael would need a funeral. Half a thought later, he realized that he had no money to arrange a funeral. Michael’s parents would have to do it. Michael had hated his parents.
It was difficult to put the key in the keyhole. His body felt heavy and unfamiliar.
The door swung open to silence. Gerry couldn’t be bothered to break it. He wondered how long it would be before Marie noticed Michael was gone. He had the vague sense that he should pack up Michael’s belongings before she changed the locks, but that sounded hard, and Gerry was tired. Hadn’t he just woken up an hour ago? It didn’t matter. It was night. Gerry should sleep.
The ugly blanket was still on the bed when Gerry collapsed onto it fully clothed. He was already half-asleep when he noticed something was amiss. A tiny crack appeared in the glass wall in his mind. Just to be sure, he reached for the blanket and lifted it to his nose.
It smelled like nothing.
The glass shattered.
—
Gerry was drunk. Again.
Two weeks had passed since he learned of Michael’s fate. Gerry had spent most of that time under some influence or another. He stumbled out of the pub and fumbled with his lighter. Grey clouds rolled overhead, soon joined by an ashy haze of cigarette smoke. It was there, on the side of the street, smoking a cigarette, that he first noticed the door.
In truth, his eyes slid over it three or four times before he realized it was there. It was sunshine yellow, with a curvy black handle. It was nestled innocuously next to the pub door, and Gerry would have largely ignored it if not for the fact that Gerry was damn sure there wasn’t usually a door there.
Or…was there? Maybe that door had always been there, clashing with the color and style of the surrounding buildings, and Gerry had just been too drunk to notice it until now. That was probably it. Gerry, inebriated and relieved to have found a rational explanation, allowed himself to sway a little closer. Maybe he’d take a peek at whatever was on the other side, just for shits and giggles. Not like he had anything better to do.
Wait a minute.
Gerry narrowed his eyes. He might be drunk off his ass, but he wasn’t stupid. This thing was fucking with his head somehow. Gerry knew spooky bullshit when he saw it. God, he was way to drunk to deal with this. He should…he should go home. Sober up. Come back tomorrow, see if the door was still there. Yeah. He should do that.
He glared at the door. The door did not glare back. Gerry blew his cigarette smoke in the door’s direction before stumbling off.
The door waited.
—
When Gerry returned the next day, the door was gone. He knew it would be.
—
Honestly, he thought that would be the end of it. Some Entity had a go at him while he was drunk, he lived, life moves on. He didn’t think it would come up again. He certainly didn’t expect the damn thing to come back. But not three days later, as he was walking back home from the corner shop, he saw the door for the second time.
It was just sitting there, bold as you please, embedded in the side of a Sainsbury’s. Gerry was abruptly grateful that he wasn’t wasted. With momentary sobriety on his side, he felt confident enough to properly inspect the door in a way he couldn’t before.
It was a manifestation of the Spiral, if the pounding headache Gerry was getting just by looking at it was anything to go off of. Despite it’s general headachiness, though, the door seemed to give off an aggressive everything-is-normal-and-fine aura. Gerry probably wouldn’t have noticed it, except…it felt like the door was beckoning him. Beckoning Gerry, specifically, not just beckoning in general. Just being near it evoked a desperate curiosity, a need to see what was on the other side.
So the door was definitely targeting him. Great.
The strange thing was, Gerry didn’t think he’d done anything to piss off the Spiral. The Twisting Deceit didn’t have a lot of Leitners to burn or avatars to annoy. Sure, he knew that the Fears were opportunistic bastards, and the Spiral especially didn’t operate on any kind of logic, but something felt off.
Whatever. He just had to ignore it, show this thing that he was more trouble than a meal was worth. It’d get bored eventually.
—
It hadn’t gotten bored.
It had been two fucking weeks, and the door was still following him around. He went to the shops, the door was there. He went to the pub, the door was there. He went Leitner-hunting, the door was there. Gerry could feel his sanity slowly fraying from extended proximity to the thing. Once, he had gotten so irritated that he broke his just ignore it rule and painted the words FUCK YOU over the doors surface in big black letters. The words were gone the next day, but it still felt good.
The door’s latest appearance was in the Archives, which was…not good. The door being powerful enough to manifest within a stronghold of the Eye did not bode well for Gerry’s chances of survival.
He had come to the Archives in search of statements that were similar to what he was experiencing. It was slow going, mostly because the Archives defied all known methods of organization. The only one capable of navigating the labyrinthine stacks was Gertrude, and there was no way in hell Gerry was asking for her help with this. He didn’t want her to know he was being stalked by an Entity.
He had been digging through a box that was labeled “1880-1900” but in fact mostly contained statements from the 1970s when he heard an ominous creak. He looked behind him, and sure enough, the door was there, wedged between two filing cabinets. The thing that made Gerry’s skin crawl, though, was that it was ever-so-slightly open. Not enough to show what was on the other side, but just the right amount to feel like an invitation.
Gerry rose to his feet, walked over to the door, and gently nudged it shut with the toe of his boot. After a brief moment, the door creaked open again. Gerry nudged it shut. It opened. Gerry nudged it shut. It opened. Gerry rolled his eyes and walked away.
—
He wasn’t alone.
The knowledge crept up on him as he lie in bed, wrapped in the ugly blanket he had rescued from Michael’s flat. He shot up immediately, blood turning to ice.
The door was in his room.
Fuck. In all the times he had seen the door, it had never once appeared within Pinhole Books. Gerry had no idea what caused this change in behavior, but he really didn’t like it.
Gerry clutched at Michael’s blanket in an unconscious bid for comfort. This thing must be eating awfully well, he was afraid to even move. Slowly, so slowly, he crawled out of bed, never once taking his eyes off of the door. He padded over to his normal bedroom door, double-checked that it was the right color, and bolted.
Gerry didn’t return to Pinhole Books for twenty-four hours. He roamed the streets of London, following up on leads and keeping an eye out for a flash of yellow. It never came.
When he finally went back, he noticed two things:
1) The door was gone.
2) It had taken Michael’s blanket with it.
—
Three days later, Gerry moved out.
—
The house was tiny and drab and gray. Gerry couldn’t help but think how much Michael would have hated it.
He got out of the cab. It didn’t matter. The house was suited to his needs; it was far away from the Magnus Institute, and that’s all he cared about.
As Gerry pulled his singular suitcase out of the backseat with him, he noticed the front door. The yellow front door.
For fuck’s sake. Gerry hadn’t exactly expected the thing to leave him alone just because he changed addresses, but posing as his own front door? That was a new low for it.
He walked up the front steps and stared the door down. It really was a lovely color, bright as sunshine. Gerry wasn’t normally one for bright colors, but, well…this had been Michael’s favorite shade.
Fuck it. It wasn’t like Gerry had anything left to live for. Michael was gone, his mother was dead, he had cut his ties with the Institute. The Spiral wanted to eat him so bad? Fine.
He opened the door and gasped.
Inside was a home. The walls were pink and blue and yellow and green, the floor draped with an enormous multicolored rug. The stripy orange-and-turquoise couch was piled with pillows, some sequined and glittering.
Gerry had never seen this place before in his life, but found himself overwhelmed by deja vu all the same. It took him a minute to realize why it seemed so familiar.
Oh. This was his and Michael’s dream house.
This was the house they had spent hours imagining, detailing, building in their minds. And it was here. Now that he was looking, Gerry could see his own contributions to the space: the black throw blanket, the blackout curtains, the music system. What the hell was going on?
He walked over to an improbably-shaped bookcase on the far end of the room. The shelves were jam-packed with Michael’s various trinkets and tchotchkes that he had amassed over the years. (Gerry was sure he had gotten rid of most of these, the sight of them to painful to bear after Michael passed.) One shelf was significantly emptier than the others, only half filled with Gerry’s beat-up collection of classics. He’d decided to leave them behind in the move, how were they here?
Propping up the books was a framed picture of Michael kissing Gerry on the cheek. Gerry stared. He had lost that photo not long after Michael died.
He was distracted from his reverie by the smell of tea. Michael’s tea, the kind he used to drink every day. Gerry followed the smell to the kitchen, where he found a steaming yellow mug on the counter.
Gerry carefully picked the warm mug up. Who made this tea? Was it whatever Spiral-thing lie behind the door? Why?
Someone came up behind him. Gerry froze.
And arm looped affectionately around Gerry’s waist. A hand settled gently in his hair. Gerry couldn’t breathe. The thing behind him was holding him just like Michael used to, but that couldn’t be, Michael was dead-
Gerry whirled around, eager to confront the monster (hoping to see a familiar face).
There was nothing there.
Gerry broke, falling to his knees in tears. He fucking hated this. He knew this was the Spiral’s MO, creating hallucinations and making you doubt yourself, but something was wrong. The Powers fed on fear, and this place made Gerry feel…safe. Lonesome and grief-stricken, sure, but safe.
He sobbed. Michael was gone. Michael was gone, and Gerry was trapped in a bittersweet hellscape full of reminders of him. It wasn’t fair, but honestly, Gerry wasn’t surprised. His life had never been fair. Had he really thought that he’d be allowed to make a home for himself out here? Had he really thought the grief and the horror wouldn’t follow him?
Gerry knelt there for a long while, but eventually, he got to his feet. There was still one room he hadn’t explored. The bedroom.
It was more subdued than the other rooms. Still bright and eclectic, still distinctly Michael, but Gerry’s touches on the room were more overt. There was a large, black bed (still covered with multicolored pillows, of course), band posters on the walls, a ratty old beanbag chair pushed up against Michael’s dream vanity. Gerry barely noticed any of it. His attention was wholly focused on what lie on the bed.
It was the blanket. That ugly fucking blanket that Michael had gotten him so long ago. The blanket he never thought he would see again. Gerry reached for it with shaky hands, bringing it up to his face and breathing in.
The smell of bubblegum shampoo filled his nose.
Tears ran down Gerry’s face. Carefully, he toed off his shoes and curled up on the bed, cradling the blanket to his chest. How was it here?
Gerry heard someone else enter the room. His breath hitched. He didn’t dare turn around as the other person slowly sank down on the bed and settled against his back. An arm reached around to hug Gerry’s chest , and a nose nuzzled gently at the crook of his neck.
Gerry didn’t dare to breathe. It was impossible. Michael was dead. But the way this person fit against him was so familiar it ached. It was impossible. But all the same…
“Michael? Is that you?”
There was no response. Gerry’s heart sank. Of course it wasn’t Michael. He was just hallucinating. The Spiral was just messing with him.
A hand (too large, fingers too sharp, but still with the same scar on the index from when Michael almost cut his finger off with a kitchen knife) cradled Gerry’s cheek and guided him to look behind him.
There, he saw Michael.
He looked…wrong. His curls were too curly and his eyes were full of fractals and his body had been stretched and twisted and distorted beyond reason. But it was still undeniably Michael, and Gerry was having a hard time caring about anything else.
“Hello, Gerbear,” he (it?) said.
Michael was smiling, a crooked smile that curled in on itself at the edges and showed too many teeth, and even though every bone in Gerry’s monster-hunting body was screaming danger! predator! he still reached up to hold Michael’s face in his hands.
“Jesus, sunshine, what happened to you?”
Michael laughed, his laugh ricocheting off the walls and giving Gerry a headache. “I happened to me, little bookburner. The events that brought me here cannot be separated from myself.”
Gerry wasn’t stupid. They were in a domain of the Spiral, and given that Michael had been going to stop a Spiral ritual last time he saw him, it wasn’t hard to piece together what happened.
Christ, his boyfriend was an avatar of eldritch madness.
Gerry hesitated. Was this still his boyfriend? Or was the Spiral simply parading Michael’s corpse around? He drew back, second-guessing. The Spiral was the embodiment of lies. You couldn’t trust the reality it presented.
But Gerry knew this was Michael with the same certainty that he knew his own name. It was simply the only possibility.
He collapsed into Michael’s twisted arms, giving up on caution completely. Michael curled around Gerry, threading his needle-sharp hands through the other’s hair.
They stayed like that for a long time. Gerry couldn’t even entertain the thought of leaving Michael’s embrace. Here, against all reason, was where he felt safest. In the arms of a monster. In the arms of his sunshine.
Eventually, a realization materialized in the haze of warmth and love and closeness. “You want me to join the Spiral.”
Michael hummed. “I would like you to stay here, with me.”
“Yeah, and that means joining the Spiral.” Gerry felt like he should be mad. He had spent his whole life crusading against the Fears, and now Michael wanted him to serve one. Besides, his mind was his greatest (only) asset. He couldn’t give that up, could he?
But the truth was…Gerry was tired. He was tired of fighting, tired of Beholding trying to sink its claws into him, tired of chasing after the promise of answers that perpetually dangled out of reach. And now, Michael was offering an out. Was presenting him with an opportunity to stop chasing, to embrace confusion. And it sounded so fucking tempting.
“You would be mine,” Michael cooed, “and I yours. You need never worry about the Watcher stealing you away.”
Gerry nodded. “Fine. I’ll do it.”
Michael’s eyebrows rose. He clearly hadn’t expected it to be that easy. “It will hurt.”
“I’m aware.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
“Good. That is the first step.”
Gerry simply leaned forward and kissed Michael. He tasted like sunshine.
—
Gerard Keay was never seen again.
Eventually, Gertrude Robinson grew tired of being sent to voicemail and tracked down her assistant’s new address. When she arrived at the grey house with the white door, she wasted no time with knocking. She picked the lock.
Inside, she found only a cramped, sparsely-decorated space with grey-blue walls and a bare wooden floor. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust. No one had been here in a very long time, that much was clear.
No one really found out what happened to Gerard Keay. No one really cared. He simply…faded into obscurity.
But sometimes, if you are alone, and afraid, you might see a man leaning against a sunshine-yellow door. You might notice how his black trench coat shimmers like an oil spill in the light. You might hear him say “You wanna come in?”
Or you might not.
But if you do, it’s best to ignore him. Best to ignore the yellow door.
Those who go in don’t come out.