Chapter Text
Jon’s lunch keeps going missing. At first, he thinks it’s Tim or Sasha- maybe it’s some kind of prank. He wouldn’t put that past them. But then one day they happen to both be home sick (or, well, Sasha’s probably home sick, Tim’s probably skipping work) and it still goes missing. And he labels his food, so it can’t be a misunderstanding. He even goes and talks to people that he typically avoids, which means the rest of the Institute staff. It isn’t like he’s antisocial or anything, he just… doesn’t like interacting with people. He spends time with Tim and Sasha mostly because they had forcefully decided to spend time with him. Anyway, it didn’t matter, because Rosie and Ulysses both said they hadn’t touched it, and the people from Archives hadn’t either, and Sasha’s friend Ava from Artifact Storage said no because he ‘had terrible taste’, whatever that was supposed to mean.
After a few weeks of this, Jon decides he’s had enough. He finds a chair in the break room and drags it to face the fridge, sitting down in it and waiting. If there’s someone stealing his lunch, he is going to find them.
Hours later, and still nothing. It’s apparently about when most of the Institute staff have their lunch breaks, which Jon is rudely reminded of when people come pouring into the break room.
Behind him, he hears an overdramatic gasp. “Holy shit, Sasha, am I hallucinating right now? Have we stepped into an alternate dimension? Is this a dream?”
“I think it’s got to be,” Sasha says. Jon still hasn’t turned away from the fridge, but he can imagine them well enough- Tim with his hands pressed to his heart, draped over Sasha for extra dramatic effect, and Sasha laughing and attempting to push him off. “I mean, there’s no way this can be real.”
“Jon taking a lunch break? No, obviously this is some kind of trick of the mind.”
Jon rolls his eyes. He’s loath to look away from the fridge, but he positions himself so he can see both it and his colleagues at once. “Hello, Sasha. Tim.”
“Jon!” Tim stands up properly and offers him a joking half-salute. “Fancy seeing you here! I have to say, it’s a pleasure.”
“Sadly, I can’t say the same,” Jon says dryly.
“That hurts, Jon. I thought we meant something to each other.”
Jon ignores Tim. (He’s learned that there’s no other way to get him to stop.) He turns away from them and refocuses on the fridge.
Sasha opens it and goes fishing around for her sandwich. She gets Tim’s thing for him, too- something atrociously spicy, like usual- and is about to get Jon’s, but Jon grabs her arm before she can.
“Sasha, don’t!”
Sasha cocks her head at him. “I’m just getting your lunch for you?”
“It’s… bait,” Jon explains, feeling a bit embarrassed. “I’m trying to catch the person who’s been taking my food.”
“Oooookay.” Sasha puts it back. “So, did you plan on eating, or…”
“I had some animal crackers,” Jon says defensively. “And breakfast. Kind of.”
“Yeah, no.” Tim pulls Jon out of the chair, like how one would lift a cat. It’s worryingly easy for him to do. “We’re going out to eat, come on.”
Jon looks desperately at Sasha for help, but she’s busy checking her phone and only flashes Tim a thumbs-up. “There’s a really nice coffee shop nearby. Do we want to invite anyone else? Martin?”
Jon wriggles out of Tim’s grip. “Who’s Martin?”
“You know Martin,” Sasha tells him. “He’s your friend. We got drinks together a few weeks ago, remember?”
Jon remembers it now. He rather wishes he doesn’t. “Yes. You made me play Truth or Dare.”
“He can’t come, anyway.” Sasha frowns at her phone. “Says he has to go home and do something.”
“And I can’t come,” Jon says, “because I have to watch for the person who’s been taking my lunch.”
Tim made a face. “You’re obsessed. Just stop keeping it in the break room fridge if you care that much.”
“It’s not that!” Jon protests. “I just want to know who’s doing it. It’s the principle of the thing.”
“You could set up a camera or something,” Sasha suggests. “Not right now, though. Tim’s got a point. C’mon.”
She takes one of his arms and Tim takes the other, and together they drag him out of his chair and through the door.
“I hate you both.” Jon shields his eyes from the bright sunlight outside the Institute. It’s fairly dark inside, and the transition is startling. “Can’t you leave me alone for one day? ”
“Not when it’s the day you decide to obsessively watch the fridge.” Tim slips an arm around Jon’s shoulder, effectively cutting off all his potential avenues of escape. “This will be good for you, Jon. Look at the sun. When’s the last time you were outside?”
Jon tries and fails to extract himself. “I’m fairly certain that looking at the sun causes eye damage.”
“Look a bit to the left of the sun, then,” Tim amends.
They make it to the coffee shop, and Tim lets him go to open the door. He takes the opportunity to try and run back to the Institute, but Tim catches him by the collar before he can get more than a few feet away and pulls him back.
Sasha’s laughing like a maniac. Jon glares at her. “70 percent of people help someone in trouble when they’re the only witness. Do you want to be part of the 30 percent that doesn’t?”
“I’m just making you go outside, that’s not exactly the end of the world,” Tim says, this time opening the door with the hand that’s not holding Jon.
The coffee shop’s surprisingly crowded. A long line of people is queued up at the counter and almost all the tables are taken up. Oddly enough, Michael’s here, too, sitting at a corner table.
Jon makes a face at the sight of an Archives employee. He doesn’t have anything against Michael specifically, really! He just thought, with three assistants, it could be a bit more orderly than it was. Honestly, anything that didn’t look like a neat person’s personal hell would be a bit more orderly. He hugs his bag with his neat file folders in it closer to his chest. Don’t worry, he thinks to them. I’m not going to let that bad archivist Gertrude Robinson get her poorly organized hands on you.
“Hey, what do you want to get?” Tim asks, leaning on the counter.
Jon glances at the blackboard. “Just a black coffee.”
“Something that’s food,” Tim amends.
“Ugh, fine.” Jon scans the blackboard, picking something at random. “Grilled cheese, then.”
“Finally something normal! I swear to god, you’re incapable of choosing good food. You’ve got such a weird combo of tastes- it’s like some kind of bizarre hybrid between preschooler and eighty-year old man. ”
“This is harassment,” Jon complains.
“Take it up with HR!” Tim says cheerfully.
Sasha waves at them to go find a table while she orders. Jon wants to sit somewhere out of the way, but it turns out the only table open is near the middle of the cafe, so he resigns himself to being near other people.
“The institute doesn’t even have HR.”
“Or a union,” Sasha comments, sitting down. “And we really should. I feel like there’s some kind of clause that says hey, don’t have someone work in a creepy basement. Oh, yeah- they brought in another evil book today.”
Jon jolts. It’s fine, dealing with Leitners is Sasha’s job, she can handle herself- He manages to tamp down the worst of his panic, and asks “Were you careful?”
“Of course I was careful, Jon, I’m not an idiot.” Sasha catches his look of legitimate fear and sighs. “It was fine, alright? I didn’t even get to do anything with the book. Gertrude and some teenager came in and took it before I even had a chance to open it.”
“Some teenager ?” Jon asks incredulously. “And they just… took it? And you let them?”
“If I got in the way of Gertrude Robinson’s path to world domination, I’m 90% sure she’d kill me,” Sasha says matter-of-factly, taking a sip of her coffee. “I’m telling you, she keeps knives under that cardigan.”
“How come you two have the exact same fashion sense?” Tim waves his hand at Jon, a bit of tea splashing out of his mug as he did so. “Keep in mind Gertrude’s the same age as my gran and you’re 23.”
Jon’s thoughts are reduced to indignant sputtering. “I- shut up- how did you know I was 23, anyway? I didn’t
tell
you.”
“I hacked into your computer,” Sasha says matter-of-factly, taking a bite of her croissant.
“You what?” Jon sputters. He keeps getting caught off guard. And insulted. This is why he stays in his office during lunch. Friendship was pointless and he could be getting work done right now. He didn't know why Tim and Sasha had decided to annoy him into spending time with them, anyway. Probably out of pity. He knew he was a nightmare to be around, and Tim and Sasha had plenty of friends that they could be taking to lunch instead of him, who they’d had to quite literally drag outside.
“Relax.” Oh, right, they were still talking about his age. “Even if she hadn’t, it’s obvious that you’re lying. Maybe not to Martin, because he’s your age, but I’m like ten years older than you. I can tell. Acting like a grumpy old man does not an adult make. Speaking of which, can we get back to your fashion sense?”
“My fashion sense is perfectly fine, thank you,” Jon snaps. He’s wearing a cardigan, a collared shirt, and a long buttoned lavender skirt, which… now that he thinks about it, he’s fairly certain that Gertrude was wearing more or less the same thing a week ago. Could you get dress-coded for copying another employee’s fashion sense? God knows the Institute’s dress code was incomprehensible. Jon likes things that make sense, that can be laid out and labeled on spreadsheets and bullet-point lists. He isn’t sure that Elias had ever gone and written out what the dress code actually was. The basic understanding was that you had a far larger chance of being told off if you were someone that he personally disliked. Tim had spent a week coming to work with progressively more and more scandalous outfits until Elias had finally called him out for wearing last year’s Halloween costume.
This is the same person that’s looking at Jon with a critical eye that cannot possibly mean anything good. “What we need to do is give you a makeover.”
“No.”
“Yes! It’ll be great. Makeup, nail polish-” Tim waves his hand in Jon’s face, showing off his sparkly red nails- “clothes shopping, the works. Maybe even dye your hair.”
“This idea is sounding worse and worse by the second.”
“We can go to my flat after work,” Sasha puts in. “I’ve got less stuff than Tim, but he’s lent most of it out to Everett anyway.”
“Why do I not know anyone you talk about?” he asks, instead of arguing. The thing with Tim and Sasha is that, on their own, neither are too bad. The problem is when they both get together. Sasha is smart and takes initiative and plans ahead and has a bit of a creative perspective on things like morals and laws and that means that when she comes on board with one of Tim’s plans, it’s going to happen.
“You do know them, mostly.” Sasha traces a finger around her plate, picking up pieces that had flaked off her croissant. “Eat, Jon. We’re dragging you out here so that you’ll take care of yourself more.”
Jon begrudgingly nibbles at his grilled cheese as Sasha continues. “The problem is that you’ve got a terrible memory for people.”
“But not for other things,” Tim puts in. “You’ve got basically the complete works of Shakespeare memorized and can recite off statements at the drop of a hat.” He puts on a rather bad impression of Jon’s voice. “Ah yes, in statement 42069, Mr. McGee encountered a… spooky thing.”
“I do not sound like that,” Jon mutters.
“I’ll have you know my acting is top-notch.” Tim hands him another piece of grilled cheese and he eats it mechanically while listening to Tim and Sasha talk.
They move on from the topic of Jon’s faulty memory to Tim going off about architecture (“It should be functional and not some grand fucking work of art with shitty giant atriums that no one goes into- I don’t care how picturesque your million-dollar dream house up in a tree is, it’s got a leaky roof and that ladder’ll be a nightmare for anyone with any kind of mobility disability to navigate- or, hell, even just someone with groceries!”) to discussing some sort of party they had a week ago (they’d invited Jon, but he’d turned it down. A voice in the back of his head suggests that he’d probably have liked it, if he’d gone. He shuts that voice down. He wasn’t here to get to know people.) Jon interjects or adds to the conversation occasionally, but mostly his thoughts are caught up with the book and the teenager Sasha mentioned. What the hell was a kid doing with a Leitner?
An alarm goes off on Sasha’s phone. “Ten minutes until our lunch break’s over. We should probably get back.”
“It’s been almost an hour already?” Jon asks, startled. It hadn’t felt like it.
Tim nudges him with an elbow. “They say time flies when you’re having fun.”
“I think I just had to zone out so that this would be over quicker,” Jon counters on reflex.
“Yeah, yeah. You coming?” He gathers up all their plates and glasses in a stack. Jon realizes with a bit of surprise that he’d actually finished all his lunch, probably because of all the prodding from Tim and Sasha. Huh.
“You and Sasha can go. I want to ask Michael something.”
Interacting with the archival staff was always a process. The Archives were supposed to be a proper part of the Institute, somewhere people could easily go for sources or more information. Instead of that, they were a giant mess that most people avoided at all costs. When someone actually needed something from them, they tended to go to Sarah Carpenter. She was friendly and young and approachable and generally not insane. (Though Jon was inclined to take that last one with a grain of salt, owing to Sarah pacing about muttering about coffins of all things in the hall last week.)
Michael’d do, though- Sasha and him were friends, and while he wasn’t Jon’s favorite person by any means, he wasn’t as bad as Gertrude. Really, he was almost normal, by Institute standards.
Jon flags him down when he’s getting up to leave, just a minute or so after Tim and Sasha had left. “Ah, Michael- I was wondering if I could have a moment of your time?”
Michael nearly drops his phone in surprise. “Yeah- I mean, okay, yes, sure- sorry, I was just checking- Sarah was supposed to meet me here, but, uh, apparently Emma just needed her for something, so that’s alright- sorry! What did you want to ask about?”
Jon sighs. “It’s alright. I just wanted to know if you knew anything about the teenager hanging around Gertrude lately?”
“Oh! His name’s Gerard- or maybe it’s Gerry? He goes by both, I think, but Miss Robinson always calls him Gerard. Obviously Gerry’s a nickname for Gerard- but I don’t know which one would be better, yknow?”
“...are you asking me?”
“I- no. Maybe? I don’t know.”
Jon sighs. “Where can I find him?”
“Well, I mean, he’s not gonna constantly be in one place- I don’t even know where he lives, I think he sleeps in the Archives, maybe?” Michael flaps one of his hands vaguely, tipping his plate and sending crumbs falling off of it and a glass sliding around precariously. Jon tactfully doesn’t comment.
“The Archives, then. Alright. Thank you for your help.” Jon walks quickly out of the door before he has to do any more human interaction. He’d had quite enough for the day, thank you very much.
When he gets back, his lunch is gone. Of course. Of course it was. Goddamnit. He skipped work to figure this out and he still had nothing.
With nothing better to do, he decides to head down to the Archives. A sign posted close to the stairs reads ‘ BEWARE HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE (it’s super cursed)’ in large bubble letters . Jon finds that a bit overkill. (He did remember a dispute between the Archives and Archival Storage over which one was the more cursed department, however. That was presumably why there was a similar sign in Michael’s scrawling cursive tacked up near Archival Storage.)
The steps are creaky, and Jon finds himself reverting to how he used to act as a younger child up far later than he should be, sticking to edges and wincing every time one creaked. It’s unwarranted, of course- he’s allowed in the Archives. Nevermind they were sketchy as all hell.
He emerges into a surprisingly nice basement, with filing cabinets arrayed across the wall. Just at a glance, Jon can tell what a mess they are. There’s papers everywhere and unfiled statements in crates piled up in one corner. Not only that, but there’s some obscure color coding system with no less than 14 different colors scattered about. Basically, it’s not visibly neat and orderly, and that makes it Jon’s hell world.
He doesn’t see anyone immediately, so he raps hesitantly on the side of a filing cabinet. “Er… Gerard?”
There’s a second, then he hears a response.