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The moment a little part of Tim Stoker’s world comes to an end, he doesn’t even notice.
It goes like this: Tim gets back from lunch on Tuesday, and finds one of those old tape recorders on the floor in the middle of the bullpen, unassuming as anything.
In the moment, Tim smiles. It’s just that Jon is so damn precious with these things: holds them in his hands like they’re worth their weight in gold — or something a little more precarious. Uranium, maybe — always sure to have one on hand in case he finds one of those statements that make him all clammy and irritated like he gets when he’s pretending not to be spooked by something.
Yeah, there’s no way Tim’s about to just ignore that. He snags it, fiddles with the buttons. “This thing still working?” He asks himself, and hears an affirmative click when he hits record. “Ah, okay. What are you doing on the floor?”
The tape recorder just whirrs at him in response.
Tim grins. Holding the recorder up, he leans in close, puts on his best Serious Jon Impression. “Statement of Joe Spooky, regarding sinister happenings in the downtown ol—”
And then—
A crash. Some kind of awful, wet thud that sounds like nothing he’s ever heard before, but still makes all the hairs on his arms stand on end. Somewhere off to his left, Sasha shouts at him.
(Later he’ll wish he paid more attention to her. He’ll wish he hadn’t let her go, that he’d followed her to Elias’s office, that he’d done literally anything else. Later, he’ll wish a lot of things.)
Tim’s never understood the ‘heart in your throat’ metaphor until he looks up, and sees the fear on Sasha’s face, because something inside him lurches, plants itself firmly behind his Adam’s apple.
“Sasha?”
“Behind you!” She’s shouting at him. Why’s she shouting? “Run!”
It’s instinct. He turns, and immediately wishes he hadn’t.
Somehow, even after everything, there was some small piece of him that had thought Jane Prentiss wasn’t really real. He’s been dealing with her icky, squirming little presents for weeks, has listened to Martin’s statement, listened to Sasha’s. but seeing her alive and in the… flesh is like waking from a dream because someone’s sloshed ice water all over your face.
Sasha’s still yelling something. His name, he realizes dully. She’s shouting his name, but it comes to him from underwater. His ears ring, and he stands, rooted to the spot, paralyzed, until.
She collides with him, and they both go down. Tim sprawls painfully onto his back, hot pain lancing from his shoulderblade down to his wrist where it connects with the hard basement floor.
Lucky for them both, Sasha’s quicker than he is. She’s already pushing herself back up her feet, and the warm jolt of her skin as she grabs his upper arm and hauls him upright finally snap something back into place in Tim’s brain. The next minute they’re both up and running, some base animal instinct pushing them to get as far away from Prentiss as possible.
(In a way, he’ll think, later again, looking back on it from a quarantine tent, she saved him with that one touch. Even in the midst of pain and confusion and a burst of horrible new sensation, the buzz of her fingertips on his bare skin stays with him, lingering.)
—
In the tunnels under the building— because of course, of course the Magnus Institute has spooky secret tunnels sprawling under its foundation, right? Why wouldn’t it?— Tim makes himself a promise.
He’s loopy, lightheaded and dizzy from either fear or oxygen deprivation or both, he’s not really sure, and running for his life from genuine honest-to-god evil worms armed with nothing but a fire extinguisher. He doesn’t know where he is, what he’s doing. Doesn’t even know if anyone else made it, what might be happening to Jon, to Martin, to—
(He pictures Sasha’s face for what he doesn’t know is the last time. He pictures her eyes, wild, panicked. He pictures her making a mad dash for the door.)
He stumbles, throws one of his arms to steady himself, squashes a single stray worm under his shoe. He doesn’t know where Sasha is. He doesn’t even know if she made it, if she’s still alive.
Breathing heavily, he leans against the wall. He holds up the extinguisher, but the worms are fewer and farther between down here, so he gives himself a moment to catch his breath, knuckles white against the canister, breathing hard
“Okay,” he gasps, “okay. Yeah, that’s enough. I get it, universe, loud and clear. If I survive this— if we survive this— I-I’ll tell her, alright?”
In the gloom, no one answers him.
—
Tim doesn’t tell her.
He doesn’t know why, but after he and Jon make it out of the tunnels, after Bouchard and the ECDC drag them out of the archives, after he gets a thorough decontamination and a stern talking to from some blokes in Hazmat suits, all that adrenaline-fueled hopeless romanticism kind of just… slips away from him.
He doesn’t see Sasha again until he’s out of quarantine, exhausted and half-out of his mind after surviving the unsurvivable. In the movies, this is when it would happen. He’d jump into her arms and he’d tell her everything and it would make all that terror seem small.
But instead, he looks into her eyes, and he smiles, and all his grand plans fall right out of his head, don’t come back till after he’s already gone home. Back in his flat, hair still damp from the most satisfying and most painful shower he’s ever taken in his life, sprawled out alone in the half-dark on his own bed, it hits him. He groans, presses a bandaged hand over his eyes.
“Fuck,” he hisses up at his ceiling fan. “Bloody coward.”
He rationalizes it to himself really well. Maybe it’s for the best. If Tim had popped out of the tunnels, bleeding and dizzy and crazed, and just said Hey, Sasha, by the way, I’m totally, head over heals, over the fucking moon in love with you, she might’ve gotten the wrong idea. It might’ve seemed like he was only saying it because he was bleeding and dizzy and crazed, and not because he meant it.
It would’ve been a lot to put on her shoulders after their ordeal, so maybe his own cowardice works out for them both: now he has time to figure out how to do this right. He can get his shit together, maybe show Sasha that he’s the type of guy worth her time, worth her love.
He can… he can be a goddamned gentleman about the whole thing.
He knows he’s not great at all this. Sure he’s charming. He knows how to flirt. But the real stuff… if he’s honest, since Danny, it’s been… hard. All those soft gooey spaces inside of himself have sealed off and gone sharp; he doesn’t know how to let someone in in any way that matters.
Except.
Sasha’s the first person Tim told about Danny. The truth, not the half-baked lies he’d had to spin so the police wouldn’t think he was some kind of deranged lunatic when he’d reported his brother missing. She’s seen all his weird, sharp corners, and she’s still here.
He thinks, for her, he could make the effort.
Despite everything, he feels a little giddy, when he thinks about it. They didn’t work the first time, he knows, but. But that was different. This wouldn’t be some drunken, impulsive hook up after a pub night.
Safely tucked away from the world, he thinks about what it would mean, to really make a go of it with Sasha James. He could take her out. Somewhere nice, somewhere they could get a proper dinner with those fancy fairy lights and good wine. He could walk with her through the park and buy her those cheesy cards on Valentine’s day that would make her groan and roll her eyes like she does when he’s done something she has to pretend not to be charmed by.
Maybe he spent the day running from actual evil worms, but he can’t even find it in himself to be scared when all he can think about is Sasha’s face.
—
Of course, that’s when things change.
Tim can’t pinpoint the exact moment it happens. Maybe there isn’t one single Moment, maybe things just kind of snowball, straws pile up, whatever, insert metaphor here. All he knows is that Sasha’s treating him differently, these days. That she’s putting distance between them.
Was it Prentiss? Tim’s pretty sure things were okay until then. They’d gone for chips after work just a few days before the attack, and Sasha had laughed so hard at one of his stupid jokes she’d almost choked on her food. And thing’s aren’t… It’s not like she’s avoiding him, or giving him any kind of cold shoulder. She talks to him, she works with him. She’s perfectly amenable and friendly.
But there’s something underneath it, a microscopic shift in the tectonic plates of their relationship.
See, they weren’t friendly and amenable with each other before. They were weird and pushy and unashamed around each other. They were friends.
He starts to wonder what he did wrong. He spends most of his nights raking over every one of their interactions, looking for something he’d said, something he’d done, that might’ve made Sasha realize he’s not really worth her time.
Maybe she’s just finally decided he’s more effort than he’s worth. Maybe she’s just sick of waiting around for him to stop being such a chicken.
Because, because…
Because the thing is, before all this, Tim was starting to think — he was pretty sure, almost positive, even — that this thing wasn’t one sided.
For a minute there, Sasha had loved him back, and Tim…
Well, obviously he’d ruined it, somehow. Been too sacred of losing her friendship that he’d somehow gone and ruined their friendship anyway. Maybe if he could figure out what he did, he could try and mend things. Even if Sasha’s not interested in taking things to the next step, he’d give anything to have his friend back, to have things go back to how they were. He just…
He misses her.
—
It’s only about a handful of weeks later that Tim finally breaks.
He catches up with Sasha as they’re leaving the Institute for lunch. Well, as Sasha’s leaving for lunch. Truth be told Tim doesn’t have anywhere to go, has half of a leftover sandwich waiting for him in the breakroom fridge, but he’d seen Sasha getting ready to leave, seen her pulling on a scarf that he’d given her, months ago, and something in him had finally snapped.
“Sasha!” He calls, following her outside and jogging over to her.
She stops on the sidewalk a few yards away, turns, waits with her hands in her pockets until Tim catches up. “What’s up, Tim?”
“I…” He what? Now that he’s really here, he’s got nothing. He hasn’t done this in so long, doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. “Look, I just wanted to. To talk. To check in, I guess?”
“Oh.” Sasha raises her eyebrows, a look of mildest surprise. “Alright.”
Ouch. So it’s gonna be like that? Okay, maybe that’s fair. But he still has to try. He promised the bloody universe, didn’t he? “Have I…” He shakes his head, runs his hand through his hair. “Have I done something, Sasha?”
She blinks, but her expression doesn’t change. “Done something? What do you mean?”
He laughs, a little hysterical. “You’re gonna make me say it, huh?”
All she says is, “Tim.”
It’s not even a question. Not an accusation, nothing. Just his name. He swallows, shrugs one shoulder limply. “I mean… Y’know… I guess I just feel like. Like things are different, now? Between us, I mean.”
Sasha hums thoughtfully. “Are they? I hadn’t noticed anything.”
Tim purses his lips into a thin, tight line. Okay, fine. He set out to fix this. He can grovel, he can beg a little, if it means he gets Sasha back. He swallows. He’s gonna have to really say it, now. All this time, all the psyching himself up, and it still makes his palms sweat, makes his heartbeat spike.
“Well… I suppose I figured. I mean, I’d hoped, you and I, might— I-I guess I just thought—”
“Thought what, Tim?”
Tim’s jaw snaps shut. When he meets Sasha’s eyes, there’s ice in her gaze, piercing him to his core. He inhales sharply, lets it out slowly. “Ah. Right. N-nothing, I guess.”
They stand there, facing each other on the sidewalk outside the Institute, neither of them saying anything for almost a full, agonizing minute.
Finally, Sasha sighs, adjusts her purse on her shoulder, shifts from foot to foot. “Did you want anything else, Tim?”
Tim bites his tongue, stuffs his hands in his pockets, suddenly feeling very small. “Guess not.”
“Okay, right. Well, I’m a bit late to meet my boyfriend, so—” She gestures over her shoulder. Boyfriend. That’s new. But, what, had Tim expected her to just… sit there twiddling her thumbs and wait for him to get his shit together? He doesn’t get to feel wounded, Sasha is her own person with her own life and her own heart. “I’ll see you after lunch, Tim.”
Tim nods, robotic and jerky, like his body’s on autopilot. He puts on his best approximation of his usual, cheeky smile. It falls, if the sinking feeling in his gut is anything to go by, horribly flat. “Sure. Yeah. See you later, Sash.”
She smiles faintly at him. For some reason, that’s what hurts the worst; that he doesn’t seem to matter to her anymore. She gives an awkward wave, turns, and then she goes, taking Tim’s heart with her.
Okay. So Tim missed his chance. Fine, he’ll learn to cope with that, too. He hopes, as he watches Sasha vanish into the crowd of London commuters ducking into a Tube station, that whoever this new boyfriend is, he’ll make her happy where Tim couldn’t manage it.
—
And then…
And then:
“If I showed you a picture of the real Sasha now,” Elias says, in that cold, measured tone of his, “you’d have no idea who it was.”
Funny how calm he sounds, as he tears the foundation out from under Tim’s feet, shakes his word down to his hot, terrified core.
Something that used to be bright and golden inside of Tim shifts, sinks, and dies.
—
Click.
“I went back over to the calliope, there was—”
“I thought it was pronounced ‘kal-ee-oh-pee’?”
Tim’s breath catches.
He clicks the recording off again, chest tight and heaving like he’s just run a marathon.
It’s late, and Tim is alone in the archives. He didn’t even bother to make his excuses to the others; none of them try and bother him much anymore. All he’d had to do was look angry and keep his head down and hang back until everyone else had gone. (Even Jon’s not here, which is some small blessing. Tim doesn’t know or care where he gets off to these days, so long as he’s far away from Tim.)
None of them really keep normal hours anymore, but for once, Tim has a purpose here. Something that doesn’t make him feel ill just to think about. He has something to do, and it had felt easier to deal with here than it would at his own flat. For some reason, he can’t stomach bringing this home with him.
See, a few days ago, Jon gave him the tapes. The tapes with—
The tapes you can still hear her voice on.
Her real voice, a voice that Tim— he can’t remember it, but he— it’s like there’s a fishhook behind his ribcage, tugging his chest open, pulling his heart upward.
He can still remember that heart-in-his-throat feeling he got when Sasha looked at him, months ago, when she saved him from Prentiss. Only now, when he pictures her face, he can’t make the voice on this tape line up with what he remembers Sasha sounding like. And the face he pictures…
He can remember the heart-in-his-throat feeling, but the face he pictures isn’t a face that makes him feel it. When he pictures h— that, it, the thing he thought was the woman he loved— loves. Loves, present tense; he still loves her, somewhere, he knows it, doesn’t know how to shut the feelings off and put them aside even though Sasha’s not here anymore.
Tim looks at the recorder he’s holding.
His hands shake.
Click.
“Sasha? You’re back early. I thou—”
Tim hits fast forward, skips past Jon’s voice. Can’t quite stand to hear that right now.
“Tried and succeeded,” Sasha (it’s Sasha, Tim tells himself. This is Sasha, this is her, not the voice his head produces when he thinks of Sasha) says on the tape.
She sounds so… god, she sounds radiant. She sounds proud of herself, and smug, in a playful way. Tim can… he can almost, almost imagine a smile to go along with it. It makes him feel like he’s wearing the wrong skin, but that’s better, hurts less, than trying to imagine the monster smiling along to these words.
“They were actually quite helpful.”
“Oh… well. Good work.”
“So,” Sasha chirps, “do we know if it’s pronounced kal-ee-oh-pee or kuh-lie-uh-pee?”
Click.
Tim chokes, not on his heart, but around a sob he hadn’t even noticed building up in his throat.
Something inside him burns.
He rewinds the tape.
Click.
“I thought it was pronounced ‘kal-ee-oh-pee’?”
Click.
Tim drops the recorder, slaps a hand over his mouth. He can’t breathe, can barely even think around the ice in his lungs, stabbing into his chest as sharply as a dagger.
At least when he lost Danny he knew. One moment he had a brother, and then the next he didn’t. Simple as that. He lost him, and he grieved — is still grieving, probably. But this is…
This is a kind of grief Tim is entirely unacquainted with. He lost Sasha a year ago and didn’t even know it. Sasha died, and he wasn’t even allowed to mourn, just had to go on loving something that walked in her shadow with no warning, no idea he was even doing it.
And now. Now he can’t even properly picture her face, can’t even remember who he fucking lost!
He wants to take the tape recorder and smash it into bits, but he can’t seem to manage it. These tapes… These few fragments of her voice… This is all there is left of her.
Tim pulls his legs up close to his chest, buries his face in his arms, and doesn’t stop crying for a long time.
—
The thing is, Tim still has all these memories.
He doesn’t know exactly when Sasha became Not Sasha, but when he thinks about it, he’s pretty sure he can pick out which memories are her and which aren’t.
According to Elias, Sasha was— taken during the Prentiss attack.
When Tim tries to think of all the moments they had together from before that day, things feel… wrong. There’s something not quite right in the back of his brain; something buzzing uncomfortably like bugs under his skin. It’s like the Not Them had to superimpose an image of itself over the real Sasha in his mind, and when he thinks about it too hard, her face feels… static, flat, where it’s been replaced.
He thinks of Sasha, before, and how she made him feel.
He thinks about sitting with Sasha a few years back, spending an hour scrolling through website after website searching for the ugliest possible sweaters to wear to the Institute’s annual holiday party.
He remembers, distinctly, the look of pure disdain on Elias’s face when he and Sasha had turned up wearing them, how they’d both fought to keep a straight face in front of him and then dissolved into a fit of silent giggles and hissed teasing the second his back was turned.
(He still has the sweater, buried somewhere in the back of his closet. He’s not sure what Sasha did with hers.)
He thinks of the time they’d gone out for drinks together, their first week as Jon’s assistants. They’d gotten completely pissed, and done drunken karaoke together until they were both laughing too hard to keep singing. He remembers looking at her face, and he remembers feeling something big and bright expand in his chest, right under his ribcage.
He remembers collapsing back into their booth together, loud and giggling and jostling each other. He remembers looking at her, realizing they were much closer than he’d anticipated.
He remembers how soft Sasha’s face was when he’d reached out, tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, his fingertips grazing her cheek.
He remembers how awkward the next morning had been; he remembers debating if he should call her, later that day, after she’d gone home. He remembers deciding not to, and almost wishing he had when she’d pretended like nothing was any different come Monday morning.
He thinks of investigating cases with her and Martin, from the weird to the gross to the terrifying to the obviously fake. He remembers getting some kind of virus on his hard drive that had all but locked him out of his files. It was his personal computer, he used it for everything, so it’d seemed so earth-shattering back then.
He remembers Sasha staying back at the institute with him ‘till nearly midnight to try and fix it, crammed in front of his desk while Tim paced, irritated and anxious, behind her.
He remembers her shooing him away every time he poked his nose over her shoulder, even going so far as to whack him with a rolled up statement file. That had… that had eased his nerves, a bit, he remembers. If she was calm enough that she was teasing him, it must not be the end of the world, it must be salvageable.
He remembers the relief he’d felt when she’d stood up and declared the issue solved, and herself a total genius. He remembers the gratitude he’d felt for her, grinning at her like mad pulling her into a fierce hug.
He remembers saying, Oh, shit, Sash, I owe you one, seriously, and kissing her quickly on the cheek before he could think better of it.
He thinks about the day Martin had disappeared— not that he’d known it was a disappearance, at the time— and the day he’d come into work to find out Martin was apparently living in document storage. Sasha and Tim had sat with him in the breakroom while he told them his story, sharing concerned looks with each other over his shoulders.
He remembers not entirely wanting to leave Martin alone that night, with only Jon and the statements for company, but Martin had insisted, so he’d left to grab a pint with Sasha, because neither of them quite wanted to be alone themselves.
He remembers being a little bit of a dick about it, honestly, and maybe if it weren’t for everything he’d feel guilty for that. He hadn’t really taken Martin seriously at first, he knows, but when he and Sasha left the pub that night he remembers the way she’d thrown her hands up with a dramatic “Boo!” in her most menacing voice, and how he’d actually jumped away from her, yelping in surprise.
She’d laughed so hard they had to stop in the middle of the sidewalk outside the pub while she doubled over her knees, tears gathering in her eyes.
Most of all, he remembers splitting a taxi with her, just to make sure she got home safe. He remembers the way she’d lingered, the cab idling outside her flat.
He remembers, even through the alcohol and the nerves, the way she’d said, “see ya, Stoker,” and kissed him goodnight, right on the lips, before popping out of the cab and dashing up to her door. He remembers waking up feeling hopeful for the first time in ages. He had called her, later, and they hadn’t actually talked about it, but they had talked, and it had been nice.
He thinks of countless late nights and inside jokes, talking her ear off about Smirke back in the early days. He thinks of the night he told her about Danny, thinks of sitting with her after the Michael incident, how she’d let him put his arm around her shoulders with only a minimum of eye rolling. He remembers the way she would pull at the ends of her hair when she got really stressed.
And when he thinks of all this, Not Sasha stares back at him out of all these memories, with her blank, monotonous smile.
—
Tim’s holding a polaroid.
Melanie gave it to him, a few days ago, after finding it swept under the sofa in the breakroom by the kitchenette when she’d bent to retrieve a dropped sugar pack for her coffee.
Tim remembers this photo. It was taken on New Years, 2015. Not New Year’s Eve, when Tim had gone out to a party with some of his friends from uni — god, remember when he had friends? When he knew people outside the Institute? When he had a life? — but January 1st, 2015.
Sasha’d been blown off by some guy she’d been talking to the night before, so she’d rang him up, pulled him out of bed, demanded he take her out for pastries and coffee to start the year off right.
And Tim had, because it was Sasha. Even with a pounding hangover, he’d showered, put on some half-decent clothes, and taken the Tube across town to meet Sasha at that pretentious coffee shop she always liked.
(Later, she’d meet Michael there, and stop liking it so much, but. This was before.)
Sasha’d gotten an old polaroid camera from one of her aunts for Christmas that year, and she was on some kick about making good memories. It was her resolution, he remembers: making sure to capture all the good bits of the year, so the bad bits didn’t feel so heavy.
So she’d snagged Tim, before they left, right outside the shop. She’d roped some passing businessman in a suit that probably cost more than Tim spent on rent into snapping a photo of the two of them.
The photo, held tightly in Tim’s sweaty, trembling hand, is a little blurry, but it is undeniably real.
There’s Tim, standing in front of a familiar café window. And there, standing with her arm around his shoulders, is…
Well, Elias was right: Tim doesn’t have any idea who this woman is.
She’s taller than her imposter; the Sasha he remembers stands nearly a foot shorter than him. This woman almost comes up even with him in the photo, only a handful of centimeters shorter at most. Standing flush with her, leaning into her side, Tim’s making a face, holding up rabbit ears behind her head.
Tim, here and now, stares at her. She wears thick-framed glasses, smiles up at him from two years ago with a crooked, carefree grin. Freckles smatter themselves over light brown skin, and her round face is framed by thick, wavy hair. She has a big nose and eyes so brown they’re almost black and there’s that same scarf around her neck, the one Tim gave her back in research.
Tim swallows around an awful lump in his throat. What really gets him is how happy they both look, relaxed and buoyant like Tim hasn’t felt in… he can’t remember how long, now. It’s painful to look at her, but… It feels right, in some odd way.
Tim… Doesn’t remember this woman, there’s no doubt there, but… it’s almost like his heart can remember loving her, buried somewhere deep under cement and plaster.
Tim’s eyes sting, but there’s no real tears there this time.
What he feels now is like the ghost of grief, and that’s almost worse. Maybe if he could remember her, could make himself accept that the person who beams up at him out of an old polaroid is really Sasha James, he could mourn, properly. But instead all he gets is… is confusion, and anger, and so many questions no one will ever be able to answer.
Shutting his eyes and taking deep breaths until they stop shaking on the way out, Tim stands, walks over to Martin’s desk. “Hey.”
Martin jumps, swivels in his chair, blinking owlishly up at Tim. “Oh! Hey, Tim,” he says cautiously.
“Will you…” With a deep, heavy reluctance, he holds out the polaroid. “Will you look after this for me?”
Martin looks down at the photo, and his eyes go wide. “O-oh. A-are you, are you sure, Tim? You don’t want to… h-hang onto it?”
Tim shakes his head. “We don’t know what’s going to happen, with all this—” he gestures vaguely— “this Unknowing crap. Can you just keep it safe, ‘till everything’s over? If I don’t—”
“Tim—”
“Martin, don’t. This is dangerous, let’s not pretend otherwise. Just. Keep it safe, please.”
Martin inhales sharply, nodding slowly on the exhale. “Alright.” He takes the photo from Tim, holding it like it’s a bomb about to go off, or some ancient holy text. “Yeah, ‘course. Whatever you want.”
“Thanks,” Tim says.
“No problem.”
Tim bites the inside of his cheek, runs a hand through his hair. He gives Martin one last look, and then, feeling wild and hopeless and angry, he turns on his heels and walks away.
—
“From what I can tell,” Tim says, the sound of tape unspooling grating on his nerves, “there’s only one person who’s ever managed to hurt them — to really hurt them, and that’s Gertrude Robinson.”
He’s been thinking a lot, lately. None of it’s been good, but he can’t seem to stop. These… things, whatever the hell they are, they’ve hurt him plenty. They took Danny, and then they took Sasha, and they left him here, alone, to hurt and mourn ineffectually and wonder why.
Well, not anymore.
“She was cold,” he goes on, throat tight with every scrap of anger and pain that’s been building up inside him ever since Danny died. “Ruthless. She hit them when they were vulnerable, and she sacrificed a lot of people to do it. Honestly, I hope that Jon learned something from her, because—”
He’s not just going to sit here and watch anyone else he loves get hurt, even if it’s just because he’s not around to see it anymore.
“— Because I don’t expect I’m going to be coming back from this. I don’t know if I want to. And if he needs to pull the trigger, to use me to stop it…”
He looks up, eyes landing on an empty desk across from him. Melanie sits there, now; he can see her GHUK mug, her What the Ghost? hoodie hung over the back of her chair. But that used to be Sasha’s desk, way back when. Tim remembers sitting on the edge of it, pestering Sasha until she would sigh and look up at him with a fond smile and ask him, in her most put upon voice, what he needed.
“Well. He’d better have the guts to do it.”
Tim closes his eyes.
“Timothy Stoker. August fourth, two-thousand-seventeen.” He chokes around a laugh. “Statement ends.”