Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Danny Fenton was around 8 when his parents sat him and Jazz down for The Talk. Unlike in other families, The Talk in the Fenton household went something like this: There are fourteen entities which embody and consume our primal fears, and we want to summon one and study it up close. Sweet dreams, kids!

Eight years later, and Danny figures it could have gone worse. At least no one died.

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why do you think Principal Bouchard is a murderer?”

“Right, so let me backtrack a bit. So, we all know Jurgen Leitner is secretly living in tunnels below the school - ”

“Tucker I am this close to - ”

“ - hang on, let me finish. Get this, it’s only Leitner’s ghost . Bouchard beat him to death with a pipe in the library two years ago, and he’s haunted the school ever since.”

Sam stirred her chickpea pasta salad. “And we’re back to how you know it was Bouchard.”

“He was the only one there that night!”

“ What night? Do you even know when Leitner supposedly died?”

“Well, no, but - ”

Danny munched a piece of fruit in his yogurt. The Bouchard Conspiracy argument was running three days strong, and no matter what, its inevitable conclusion was his friends’ debate on Flesh versus Hunt. He let his mind wander as he ate, scanning the room. Jazz made him promise to tell her if any new powers developed, and she’d gotten extra paranoid after reading this one story about a guy who knew when people were going to die. So, Danny was on the lookout for...something. Skull and crossbones hovering over someone’s head? He didn’t know how that power would work, but he figured if he hadn’t gotten it after three years, he simply wasn’t going to.

Sometimes he saw residual energy, though, leftover from ghosts passing through. Or, as was unfortunately often the case, trails of destruction from other hybrids. That’s what Danny thought of them as, at any rate. Half human, half...entity. Sometimes more entity than human. Always, they tended to be bad news. Cafeteria looked clear, aside from Valerie.

“Yo, Danny, cut it out. You’re messing with my PDA again.” Tucker’s voice broke into his thoughts, and Danny blinked, letting the trails of ghosts and entities fade from view. Tucker was tapping at his PDA screen in frustration. The screen blinked with static a few more times before snapping back to normal.

“Sorry, Tuck,” Danny said. “Just checking the room.”

The digital screen cut to static again, and Tucker sighed. Danny felt a prickling sensation on the back of his neck, like he was the target of a thousand stares. Ah, the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known.

“Shit, Principal Bouchard,” Sam muttered. “Speak of the Devil.”

Their potential murder suspect stood at the far end of the cafeteria, chatting with some teachers. 

“That has to be a breach of student privacy,” she continued.

“Yeah? How’re you gonna prove it?” Danny shot back.

“Eh, he’s not that bad,” Tucker said, tapping at his PDA again. “It’s already gone back to normal. Anyone who messes up my sweet babies from that distance for longer has definitely committed a crime. But this one I’ll let slide.”

Danny rolled his eyes. “You just said you thought he murdered - ah, hell.” He cut off and rolled under the table. “Actual murderer. Cover me.”

Sam and Tucker casually moved their backpacks with their feet to block the flash of light. As Danny tackled a knife-wielding Slaughter ghost through the wall, he caught a brief glimpse of Principal Bouchard scowling up at his ghost form, which was supposed to be invisible. Rude.

He escaped Casper High with only Lancer’s promise of a lunch detention for tomorrow, and flew home, dialing his phone on the way.

“Hey, Jazz. How’s the fancy internship?”

“I only just got off work,” she said. Loud noise in the background, hundreds of people talking. “Heading on the Underground now.” A pause, the sound of doors opening. “You’re out of school early.”

“Hey!” Danny said, indignant. “I can go more than one day without a late detention, you know.”

“Uh huh. Lancer saved it for tomorrow, I’m assuming.”

“Wh- don’t just assume - ” Danny gave up. “I- yeah, he saved it for tomorrow. Fought off a Slaughter ghost during lunch. You come across any more statements about those?”

Even with the trusty long-distance Fenton Phones, talking about the entities resulted in a crackle of static behind his words.

“Sorry, nothing. I’m only allowed down in the Archives if it’s relevant to the research followup. The security’s pretty strict. Oh! And I found out why there’s like, no structure down there. Their head archivist is ‘on sabbatical’, according to Rosie. But I mean, the research department is so well-organized it really doesn’t matter. Did you know the Institute’s considered to have one of the most important collections of folklore in the world? Even when the statements aren’t real , they tell us loads about the psychology of storytelling throughout human history, and - ”

“ - they’ve been collecting stories from oral and written tradition the world over for almost two hundred years,” Danny finished, in sync with his sister’s voice.

“Right, right, already told you that. Well, how about you? Anything besides the usual?”

“Last I spoke with her, Valerie put her Hunt for me on ceasefire, so, y’know, that’s progress. Principal Bouchard still has nosy bitch disease, though.”

“ Danny .”

“ Jazz . He may not technically be a hybrid, but he’s like, I don’t know. Head priest for the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known or something.”

“You can’t keep calling it that, Danny.”

“ Watch me.”

Jazz let out a long sigh. “Anyway, my stop’s coming up. Stay safe, Danny.”

“Bye, Jazz.”

Danny sized up his competition for lunch detention. The troublemaker squad was routinely exiled to the library, to let the oppressive feeling of being watched and dead silence settle over them. Three other kids were already at the table, eating sullenly. He recognized one by reputation, as the guy was one of Sam’s goth friends. Long dyed black hair, long coat, combat boots, those pants with the chains, the works. He was eating a sandwich and playing with a lighter in his free hand, which made Danny nervous enough to check over his shoulder to see if any of the watching eyes sensations were coming from the librarian. 

The other two weren’t people he knew, and they didn’t look like they hung out with Dash, so he relaxed somewhat. He slid into an open seat at the circular table.

“Hey,” said one of the other two. He was tall, with a hairstyle similar to Danny’s. “I’m Tim.”

“Danny.”

“Gerry,” said the goth.

He looked at the third kid. Definitely not a threat, he was more of a twig than Danny was, with glasses and the most regrettable case of acne scarring he had ever seen. He had long black hair swept up in a loose, messy bun, a singular line of silver threading through it. The guy wasn’t eating, just reading a book, lips moving silently. Danny didn’t even see a lunchbox or tray. Maybe he just finished early, in the five minutes from when lunch began to when Danny arrived. He didn’t seem to notice their greetings.

Gerry nudged him in the shoulder, and the kid jolted, looking up from his book. “What do you want?” he snapped. Oh, that accent had to be fake.

“Hi?” Danny said hesitantly. “I’m...Danny.”

“Oh. Hello. Jon.” His attention immediately returned to the page.

Danny looked away. Then he looked back. Jon wore a pendant around his neck, one of those glass evil eye protection charms. Blue and white, with a tiny black dot of a pupil in the center. There was another on his backpack. Danny couldn’t help himself. “Do those work?” he asked.

Jon slowly lifted his head again, murder in his eyes, and Danny backtracked on de-classifying him as a threat. Do not interrupt Jon while reading, noted . “What.” 

Too late to wish he hadn’t spoken, Danny gestured at the eye pendant. “Those charms. Do they really work? I uh, heh, always feel like I’m being watched in the library so…”

Jon blinked. “Oh. Sort of. My grandma makes me wear them. Now if you’ll excuse me…?” That fake British accent dripped so scathingly out of his mouth Danny was beginning to realize it might just be his actual voice. Back to the book. Danny took that as his cue to never speak to the kid again.

Tim and Gerry seemed happy enough to keep talking, even though they technically weren’t supposed to, so Danny spent the remainder of his detention in better spirits once they collectively decided to ignore Jon, since he clearly wanted to ignore them. Every now and then the librarian would re-emerge from his office and they would look studious and quiet (and Gerry would stop telling them how many times he’d been the one who set the fire alarm off this year), but overall Danny walked away considering it one of the more pleasant detention experiences of his career.

Jon was in his English class. Of course. Lancer briefly introduced him as an exchange student, but let the kid grab a seat in the back of the room without any further embarrassment. Turns out he was actually from England, although Danny wasn’t sure if he trusted Lancer’s information after the “Gregor from Hungary” incident. Jon didn’t participate in the class discussion or ask any questions, simply sat in the back and absorbed information with an intensity that made the skin on Danny’s neck prickle, but he was pretty sure this time it was just from the knowledge that Jon was there, watching, and he’d only seen him blink once for the entire lunch period.

The school day passed without incident, which Danny figured as both a blessing and a curse. No ghosts meant no distractions and no extra detention, but it generally meant future trouble. He met up with Sam and Tucker to walk home for once, and to catch them up on the new arrival since they were sadly in a different English class.

“He’s not friendly, but I figure getting a few of those charm things might be worth a shot. Maybe his grandma knows something we don’t.”

Sam frowned. “You said he was British, right?”

“Yeah?”

“I was thinking - no, probably not. Well, maybe .”

“ Sam , what is it?”

“So my parents travel overseas a lot to all these parties and shit, you know. They’re friends with this one family, the Lukases? Super rich, like more than us, anyway, they’re big sponsors of the Magnus Institute in London. Not that my parents are, they hate it, it’s all dark occult garbage to them. But my mom heard from one of the Lukases that the Institute’s head archivist is on leave to travel to their sister institutes around the world, and well...there’s one near Amity Park.”

“Oh- yeah, Jazz looked into internships there when she was considering the community college instead of Oxford. Wait, you think Jon’s superstitious grandma is the head archivist of the Magnus Institute.”

“I said maybe!” Sam stomped a few paces ahead of him. “You could always ask him next class.”

“Uh, no thank you,” Danny snorted. “Pretty sure if I never speak to him again it will be too soon.”

“Well, Gerry has a part-time job at the institute branch and at Skulk and Lurk. I could always ask him if he knows.”

“Hm. I guess- ah!” Danny’s ghost sense went off. “Oof. See you later.”

“Need any help?” Tucker yelled after him as he shot into the air.

“Nah, I think it’s Boxy again!”

“Suit yourself,” Tucker muttered.

Danny capped the thermos and hung in the air, enjoying the fresh spring breeze. Box Ghost, as expected. He floated down to sit on a rooftop water tower, scanning the town for any more entity or ghost trails. Boxy’s was fading now that he was caught and ready to be thrown back into the End. Danny frowned. An entity trail was arcing through the streets. He was too far away to sense which one it was. 

Then a shudder ran up his spine, and he didn’t need to guess the entity any longer. The pressure of a thousand eyes swept over him, but did not linger. Still, Danny tried to hide on reflex, for in that split second he felt pinned to the sky as if it were a wall, exposed and Seen. He...didn’t think it was Principal Bouchard, and that worried him more than he cared to admit.

Chapter Text

“I told some kid you’re my grandmother, for future reference.”

Gertrude Robinson looked up from her breakfast with a face that said: this might as well happen. “What kid?”

Jon shot her a glare. “Well I don’t Know , do I. Name’s Danny. He picked up on the Beholding presence in the school.”

“Interesting. The charms stay on,” Gertrude said. Jon sighed. “The whole town has a direct connection to the End. I suspect a ritual may have...well, not succeeded so much as not failed . The easiest way for you to stay out of notice of the other entities here is to mask your presence.”

“ Elias isn’t masking his presence.”

“Tough. Eat your breakfast.” Gertrude pushed a statement and a tape recorder across the table to him.

Jon rolled his eyes, but the Eye growled eagerly for the story as he picked it up. Gertrude absentmindedly hit the record button for him and ate her full Scottish breakfast while he read aloud.

“Statement of Paulina Sanchez, regarding a ghost ship that came to town. Statement given by subject 20 March, 2015. Statement recorded 25 March, 2015, by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.”

You know, I didn’t think it was that bad at first. I love my papá, but he’s been a little overprotective ever since mamá died. He always hovers when I bring home a new boyfriend. So when he disappeared, I just thought - whatever, he’ll be gone for a week and I’ll have the house to myself.

I came home from school - I had to walk home, ugh - because he didn’t pick me up. It was actually kind of nice? I was wearing flats that day, so it didn’t hurt my feet. But like, it was a nice day, I remember that. The sun was just warm enough, and it was bright, it was so bright, like nothing could possibly be wrong in the world. And it was just me. I passed a couple of cars at first, and there were a few more people out, but then everything got...quiet. I couldn’t hear any distant sirens. No dogs barking from people’s fenced yards. There were still people and cars around, but they made hardly any noise. Just a hiss of tires against the road. Nobody talked, and they didn’t look at me when they passed by. But the sun was still shining so brightly.

I walked all the way home like that, in a bubble of quiet that seemed to surround me wherever I went. And papá wasn’t there to meet me at the door. I found a cruise pamphlet on the kitchen counter, with a note. I don’t know why I didn’t think it was weird at the time. I think the walk home put me in a strange mood? So I just didn’t care.

But at school that morning, the fog started to roll in. I learned everyone else’s parents had gone to the cruise, too, and that... almost bothered me. But then Dash said there was going to be a party at Fenton’s house, and the mood lifted. I was excited about the complete lack of supervision, from what I heard almost everyone was bringing a bottle from their parents’ wine or beer stash, ready to have that kind of party you see in all the movies, where everyone in the school is there. The kind that just doesn't happen in real life. 

And it was great, for a while. I know I always make fun of Sam and Tucker, they’re - they’re easy targets, for me, people who are so not my style. But like, they can take it, you know? Especially Sam. I don’t think anything I say could ever really hurt her, she seems that confident in herself. They were DJ’ing for the party, and they had really good taste. Like, I knew most of the songs they picked, but they weren’t going for all the overplayed mierda you hear on the pop station. The kind of music everyone knew, but didn’t hear 10 times an hour. Then Sam got hold of the New Wave disc all our parents had been listening to and started messing around with it. At first it was all remixes, but then she - played it backwards, and suddenly the whole room went dead silent. It had a hidden message in it, telling our parents to just abandon us and go to the cruise ship.

It was like we all realized, at that moment, how weird it all was. And we didn’t like it. Outside there was fog everywhere, and the cruise ship wasn’t a cruise ship anymore, but an old pirate ship floating in the sky. I - I was afraid then, more afraid than I think I’ve ever been, and I’ve been attacked by ghosts before! That wasn’t anything new. But I think...in that moment, I realized my papá was gone , and that he would never do that of his own free will. The way mamá never chose to leave us, either. I was so afraid that he would never come back, that he would be alive out there, on that ship, and that he would - forget he even had a daughter, I don’t know. I just remember I wasn’t afraid of him dying. I was afraid he just wouldn’t be there. I realized I didn’t want to walk to school even on the brightest, prettiest day in the most gorgeous outfit for everyone to compliment if he wasn’t going to be there to tell me I was perfect on my own, too.

So when Danny Fenton came up with the plan to get them all back, I was awestruck. He - actually took charge, for once. He was in his element, talking about ghosts and how to fight them head-on. His parents are scientists, you know. They hunt and study ghosts for a living. I don’t know where they get the money, really. So we just...started fighting back…

After Jon reached the end of the statement, he breathed deeply. Gertrude had finished her plate and sipped thoughtfully at her tea.

“Danny, you said your new ‘friend’s name was? Well, I guess the mystery there is solved.”

“I wonder what his alignment is. The Hunt, perhaps? Unless he’s the strangest End avatar I’ve ever met.” The urge to fight, the sheer scale of the physical powers Danny seemed to gain in his “ghost” form, all suggested the Hunt. The End was usually much more subtle in the abilities it granted those it worked through, like the Eye. Jon did not think it would be quite fair if Danny got flight and super strength from a subtle patron while he managed at best a chronic case of too many eyes.

Gertrude snorted. “I think it’s safe to say we may as well assume his parents are the ones who did the ritual. Scientists investigating and hunting ghosts? I’ve never come across an End ritual before, either. I wonder what they used as a sacrifice…”

“Hm. At the very least, I’ll have to,” Jon grimaced, “make friends with Danny or something, to find out more.” He waited expectantly for a minute, then sighed and manually hit the stop button on the tape recorder.

His new grandmother watched, amused. “Ah yes, such a struggle. Some of us Archivists do always have to do these things the human way, you know.”

“The second I get an Archive of my own I’m not going to listen to a thing you say,” Jon grumbled.

“And I’m sure Beholding will be pleased when that day finally comes, if you survive that long, and if it cares, which I don’t think it does.”

Jon shrugged and reached for his backpack, swinging it onto his shoulder with a practiced motion. “We’ll See, I suppose. I’m the one with a more direct line to our God, anyway.” His fingers brushed against the glass evil eye pendant on his chest, and he hissed, blinking quickly. Ugh. Now he was itchy .

Gertrude’s smug aura followed him out the door.

Jon begrudgingly admitted that one benefit to the protection charm was that he could ask all the questions he wanted without worrying. It neutralized Compulsion unless he really put effort into it. He still tried to phrase his sentences carefully, though.

“I ah- can I- I would like to sit down here, if I may?” he gestured to the open seat beside Danny. The other avatar stared back at him in undisguised shock.

“What? I mean yeah, of course, I just thought…” 

Jon smiled, as friendly as he could make it. “I wasn’t having the best day yesterday, sorry we got off on the wrong foot. I’m Jon.” He extended his hand.

Cautiously, Danny shook it. His skin was ice cold. Definitely a servant of the End, then. With ridiculous amounts of powers. Jon tried and failed not to be jealous. He sat in his newly chosen desk. Mr. Lancer appeared to be running late on schedule - a note on the board told them all to begin the reading for the day and wait quietly for his arrival, a note which the entire class was ignoring. Jon really wanted to start the reading for the day. 

“So...your grandma’s pretty religious then? With the charms and all?” Danny asked awkwardly.

Jon laughed at that. “Actually, no. But you could say she’s...culturally religious. Caught the culture from working in the same place all her life.”

Danny rubbed the back of his neck. “She uh, wouldn’t happen to be the Head Archivist at the Magnus Institute, would she?”

Jon coughed. “What? Who told you that? ”

“My sister, sort of. She’s doing an internship over there, said that - and I just figured well, you’re British? We don’t get a lot of exchange students out here.”

Hm. Guess he asked that question too intensely. “Ah. Yeah, that’s where she works.”

Danny grimaced. “I totally understand the ‘culturally religious’ thing. I’m pretty sure half the town here worships Death, after the amount of ghost shit they’ve had to deal with.”

“Well, we worship libraries and Not Minding Our Own Business,” Jon said, belatedly realizing that could come across as telling Danny to take a hint and stop talking, which he did not intend.

Fortunately, the other kid was oblivious. He laughed. “Sounds like our principal does the same thing.” Then he paused, and furrowed his eyebrows, as if this meant something to him.

“Gertrude - uh, my grandma - has been interviewing any students that show up at the Institute branch in town. If you’re interested. You could stop by their library after school.”

“Sure,” said Danny, slowly. Jon tensed slightly, but at that moment Lancer entered the classroom and began telling them off for not opening their books.

Jon happily opened his, but he thought over Danny’s reaction to talking about the school’s principal as he did so. From lunch yesterday, he knew Danny at least recognized Beholding’s presence as a force. But was it also possible that he knew the Names? Jon skimmed the page, taking in the information unconsciously. It was annoying as hell not to be able to Know on instinct. Whenever he tried, the protection charms blocked his vision and made his eyes itch.

He weighed his options. Take the risk, or not. 

Lancer told them to pair up and answer the post-reading questions he wrote out on the board. Jon took this as a sign and numbered down the side of a blank sheet of paper, for all intents and purposes looking as though he was doing the work. Except Lancer only had seven questions for them, and when Jon passed the paper over to Danny, he had numbered up to 14. He held his breath.

Danny stared at the paper. His eyes darted and made contact with Jon’s so fast the movement was barely a flicker. Then he calmly wrote ‘Death’ beside the number 1, and gave it back without a noise. Fair was fair, so Jon wrote ‘Beholding’ by number 2. Danny pointed his pencil questioningly at the evil eye charm he wore. Jon tapped it, and then drew a closed eye beside Beholding.

“That makes sense,” Danny said, scribbling down an actual answer for the book work they were supposed to be doing on his own paper. He casually leaned over and added The Dark to number 3. Back and forth they went, occasionally discussing Shakespeare. Danny’s epithets for the entities varied wildly. Some were proper, conveying the wary respect of the people who named them. But then he also wrote down ‘Oh Worm?’ for the Corruption, which Jon did not want to admit he didn’t understand.

With the list completed, they exchanged calculating stares. Jon folded the paper and slipped it into his bag just as the Eye swept the room. The presence left as soon as it arrived. Just a cursory glance, then, a principal checking in on their teachers.

When class ended, Danny caught him by the sleeve. “Hey, listen. I think you should probably meet my friends so we can all talk. Wait outside the band hallway after school.”

“Oh- uh- that’s usually when I call my- yeah, okay,” Jon tripped over his own tongue. He had not anticipated that an End avatar would have any friends. Hell, he barely had any, although there were extenuating circumstances in his case. 

Jon managed to slip out of his final class early, winding through the empty hallways and out the door. He settled in the grass, leaning against the concrete wall of Casper High, the jazz band winding down practice inside.

The electronic device he pulled out of his backpack could barely be recognized as a laptop. It was cobbled together from various ancient relics, and it had two fans in the base, both exposed to the air like eyes. When Jon turned on the power, it wheezed and crackled with static electricity. The fans whirred. The screen flickered, but stabilized. 

He would not describe his desktop as “cluttered”. He used folders for their intended purpose, that was all, and kept everything organized. Although, he was about to run out of space for the folder icons on the screen.

Jon opened up his video chat and called Martin.

The call picked up with Martin in the kitchen, an array of ingredients laid out on the counter. “Jon!” he said. “How was your day?”

Jon relaxed, smiling. “Gertrude’s my grandmother now.”

Martin busted out laughing. “No way. I know everyone always assumed she’d adopted you when she brought you in, but- ”

“Yeah, it’s a whole thing now. Accidentally told my...new friend, I guess.”

Martin raised his eyebrows, chopping lamb into chunks. “Oh? That’s goo- wait.” He sighed. “Which entity were they marked by?”

“Hey,” Jon objected. “Why do you assume they aren’t normal?”

Martin just looked into his webcam. Jon gave up. “Fine, yes, he’s an avatar of the End, I’m pretty sure.”

“Huh. Be careful, Jon,” Martin said, voice soft. “I know you’re...I know. But still. Don’t take any unnecessary risks.”

“I’ve lived this long, I think I can put aside that fear, at least, for now,” Jon assured him. “Now - what are you making?”

“Mm, goulash. I’m suspicious of the garlic measurements on the recipe, so I’m doubling the amount I put in. Have to season the lamb before I cook it, otherwise it’ll just taste bland…” His voice faded a bit as he left sight of the camera to fetch a misplaced container of paprika. 

Back comfortable against the wall, Jon listened as Martin went through his cooking process. He didn’t really need to eat human food anymore, hadn’t for - a long time. But Martin’s food offered comfort in a way that was still novel to him. This was their routine, ever since Gertrude took him along to the States. Call around what would be dinner prep time for Martin in London, after he got off his after-school job, and spend time with him while he cooked.

“...I wanted to make you ma’amoul,” Martin said. “But I can’t find any dates, and you do not want to hear about the price of pistachios. I know those are - were - your favorite.”

“It’s all right, Martin. Whatever you’re happy to make.”

The final bell rang, and students rushed out from the doors. Jon glanced over his shoulder. “I think they’ll be here soon.”

“Ah! Yeah, it’s all right, go if you need to. This’ll be finished soon, anyway. Love you!”

“Love you,” Jon replied. 

No sooner had the call ended, than a voice behind him announced, “Oh, sweet! Danny, you didn’t tell me he was into computer building.” Jon flinched. He didn’t like not being aware of people sneaking up on him, but it was just a fact of his life right now.

He closed his computer and stood, stretching to mask his unease. “Uh, yeah, you get used to modern electronics never working right in the Archives without heavy modification.”

The friend of Danny’s who had spoken was taller than Jon, which didn’t say much, with smooth brown skin and a loose red beret on his head. “I’m Tucker Foley. That’s TF- ”

“And I’m Sam Manson,” his other friend cut in. Also taller than Jon, but pale and goth. “Trust me, it’s better if Tucker doesn’t finish introducing himself like that.”

Danny rounded out the trio, standing off to one side with his arms crossed. He gestured at his two friends. “So, you’ve met Jon. Sam and Tucker are uh, in on the entity thing.”

He figured as much. 

“Let’s head to the Nasty Burger, if you’re fine with that. No one really pays attention to anything we talk about there, no matter how weird. I’m pretty sure it’s a liminal space,” Danny said.

From the name, Jon had a feeling that he would not, in fact, be fine with that, but at least he didn’t have to eat whatever food was served there. The four of them set off walking, Tucker striking up a conversation about how to get technology to work in the presence of any discussion or manifestation of the entities. 

“Well, older tech works extremely well. We use tape recorders at the Institute all the time. Then there’s creatures whose true forms can only be seen in Polaroids or traditionally developed film.”

“But why does any technology work at all? There were computers and tape recorders made in the same decade, so why does one work while the other goes haywire?”

“We’re still not sure,” Jon admitted. “But old photography has a lot of chemicals involved, and the tapes are magnetic. So it’s possible there’s physical evidence of the entities that these kinds of tech capture, while more ephemeral ones don’t. Mind you, the Desolation can’t be recorded on wax cylinders, it just melts them all.”

They slid into a booth in the Nasty Burger. “Tucker, enough,” Sam said. “Important question - vegan or carnivore?” She looked back at Jon expectantly.

That was...hm. How to answer that? “Uh, well, carnivore? Tried going vegan once, it ended up being bad for my health in the long run. I still try to eat- vegetarian, I guess- as often as I can,” Jon answered. “I’m- not hungry now, though, so you don’t have to worry about me.” A lie, of course, as it always was, but not the kind of hunger he could in good conscience allow them to worry about.

Sam nodded, and got up to order the rest of them their usual meals. Danny leaned over and said in a low voice, “Sam’s a big supporter of the existence of the Flesh as proof for her activism.”

Jon nodded, understanding her reasoning. A whole entity born from the fear of animals in slaughterhouses...well, it made sense she would be upset about it once she found out.

By the time she returned with the food, Danny had apparently decided to broach the real subject. “So. The Magnus Institute works for the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known.”

It took Jon a minute, but then he snorted. “The Eye, yes. And your family works for the End.”

Danny tensed. “I wouldn’t say they work for any of the entities.”

“But there’s a reason it was the first one you thought of for the list.”

“I- yeah.” He sighed. “Everyone in town knows about it, even if they try not to think about it most of the time, so I may as well tell you since I’m sure one of those - stories - your grandma’s getting from the folks here will mention it. There’s like...kind of a direct portal to the End in my house?”

Chapter Text

Translation of a fragmented letter attributed to the philosopher Theon of Alexandria, circa 391 CE.

My [...],

It pains me to [...] of the great tragedy. Emperor Theodosius issued an order to ransack the Serapeum, our home and place of wor[...]. 

Our [...]ivist has [...] the rubble. I can only hope that it [...]. Forgive me, for I do not think you understand what took place there long before. I shall endeavor to explain.

When I began teaching there, I was taken to [...] to meet with [...], for what they called a test of faith. My words [...] the scroll as I spoke. I believe I passed this test. In my dreams, I saw [...] like Argus Panoptes of old.

I no longer have the dreams, but I do not believe this indicates that [...]. I fear something far worse has happened, for at all times now it is like I am being [...]. I have thought over what I should do. My dagger is ready, but I do not know if I have the conv[...]. It is such a choice to make.

Should this be the last time I open my [...] to [...] the page, I wish to give you fair warning. Do not try to recover the scrolls. Let the [...] lie Buried. With luck, it will starve.

Farewell, or until we see each other again,

T…

“Whoa, this is old. What’s this doing here?” Jazz muttered. The page itself wasn’t the original, of course, but it was typewritten. She was reshelving in the library when she found it, stuck in a labeled plastic sleeve and plastered between two books titled “Ancient Law Codes of Northern Wales” and “Gwynedd Yellow Pages, 1998”. Both books had clearly not been moved since at least 1998, possibly earlier. Jazz wasn’t sure how you could get more years of dust on a book than years it had existed, but the Magnus Institute likely could.

Jazz squinted at the case number on the sleeve’s label. “What the heck? This should be in the Archives. Who shelved it up here?” She knew the Archives’ organization was bad - apparently a running joke among the archival assistants was that their Archivist had come up with an entirely new filing system incomprehensible to everyone except her - but the library was immaculate.

She sighed, picked up the misplaced document, and walked out of the library and down to Rosie’s desk in the lobby. 

“Hey, Jazz! Is there a problem?”

“Kind of. I need Archives clearance to reshelve this thing I found,” she said, waving the letter to indicate its existence.

“Ooh, interesting. I’ll buzz you in and let the assistants know you’re on the way.” 

Jazz heard the woman talking into her phone as she went down to the basement. Although the actual Archives were climate-controlled, the temperature in the office space for them fluctuated wildly. She shivered, the hair on the back of her neck prickling, as she descended and opened the unlocked door. 

A young woman met her inside. “You’re...Sasha, right?” Jazz asked. “I think I met you a couple weeks ago when I came in with a statement follow up?”

“Yep, that’s me! Unforgettable, as I tell my coworkers.” She flashed a cheerful smile and guided her into the assistants’ office space. “Rosie said you needed to reshelve a statement?”

“Yeah- well, I wouldn’t really call it a statement, it’s barely readable. I think it might be related to the Library of Alexandria? Which now that I think about it, that’s amazing, do you have any other- ”

“Sorry.” Sasha cut into her excitement before it could take off. “Gertrude doesn’t want Alexandria statements being messed with for the time being. Something about how she’s still doing ‘personal follow up’ on a statement from 1997.”

“Oh.” Jazz pouted, then a lightbulb went off in her brain. “Wait a minute, she didn’t find the Library of- ”

Sasha had already taken the letter out of her hands and disappeared through the climate sealed doors.

Jon was not taking the news well. “Let me get this straight. You have. A direct portal to the End. In your basement? ”

“That’s basically it. Ghosts keep coming out of it.”

“Oh, ghosts keep coming out of it, he says,” Jon whispered into his hands. Finally, he looked up to see Danny and both of his friends staring at him with equally nervous expressions. Most of all Danny. “It’s not that it’s bad , exactly. It’s just - well, it’s better than the End manifesting in our world fully - but something like this, it’s- it’s supposed to be impossible . I can’t- the sacrifice that kind of ritual would even need is- ”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Danny said, holding up his hands. “There was no ritual, no cult chanting involved, I promise. Just science. My parents drilled a hole in the wall and hooked up a bunch of gear that runs off residual ectoplasmic energy, and then it...got turned on. Like with a button.”

Jon didn’t trust that pause. He assumed it had something to do with how Danny became an avatar of the End, and he was getting tired and cranky from not Knowing things. He decided to go for the kill. “So is the ghost flying around that shares your name and looks exactly like you just a coincidence or…?”

All three of them froze, wide-eyed. Danny gasped. Jon thought that was a bit overdramatic, until a ghost tackled the kid through the wall. Jon did not scream. He just yelled in surprise. Tucker and Sam vaulted out of the booth, each grabbing one of his hands as they ran for the door.

In the parking lot, a large bird circled in the sky, enormous and pulsing with light. Its beak curved downwards into a razor-edged point, and its wings crackled with fire. Jon stared up at it, mind cataloguing the details, slotting them into place against a backdrop of different points of comparison. Harpy eagle, native to the rainforest, likely killed due to human encroachment. The flames suggested it became aligned with the Desolation in death. Unbidden, the thoughts came to his mind; the evil eye charm on his chest blocked Beholding from feeding him external information, but it could do nothing against its hold within him.

beak dripping blood

a feathered crest casting a shadow upon the earth 

as it crushes the ones in its path, destroys

their lives and makes them suffer -

“Uh, hey Jon? As much as I am really appreciating your goth vibes, I’m not sure now is the best time.” Sam’s voice broke into his awareness, and Jon stumbled a bit, dazed, looking down at the tape recorder that had somehow gotten into his hand.

“I- ahh- ” She yanked him off his feet, pulling him into relative safety behind a parked car. Then she calmly took out a gun and leaned over the hood of the car, sight trained on the ghost bird.

Tucker knelt beside the rear tire, a strange cast to his eyes as he watched Jon struggle to regain his composure. “What was that about?”

Jon gaped for a minute, then said the first thing that came to mind. “I- I have to say weird shit or I’ll die.”

“...Fair enough. I guess you can continue, then?”

Distantly, Jon heard himself say, “Recording resumes…”

Sam cracked off a shot at the bird, clipping its right wing, before Danny rejoined the fight. He was Phantom, in the same way that right now Jon was the Archivist. When he said Danny and Phantom looked exactly the same, that had not been strictly speaking accurate. Oh, if one were to look closely, they would notice the same body type and facial structure, the same sense of humor and focus. But no ordinary human would think to compare the two. The ghost that was Phantom moved in a way Jon recognized from himself - feral, driven by his connection to his God. The fear of Death itself, extending a hand from its vessel. Phantom’s white hair rippled in the air like silk through water, at times longer, at times shorter. It gave only an impression of flame. The eyes set in that face glowed green and inhuman, like a mark of Beholding. Except the eyes of Death do not watch with that impassive coldness, but with a heavy judgment of what they see, ringing with finality.

The bird struck with lightning speed for Phantom’s heart, but the avatar flipped easily through the air in a back handspring and landed on top of a light pole. His crouch was practiced. In a fluid motion, one leg shot out and kicked the eagle in the beak. For a second the leg was longer than it should have been, like an artistic exaggeration of the movement.

Then the legs twisted and disappeared entirely into a streak of black as Phantom arced up, off the light pole, curving over the eagle in a crescent brushstroke. His tail wrapped around the creature’s wings and he sank fangs into its neck.

The bird struggled, and then, clearly weakening, sagged in the air. Its form - flickered, just once - and then it was gone in a flash of light, sucked into a metal tube that Phantom now held in his hands.

“Recording- uh, recording ends.”

This was getting ridiculous, Jon thought as Danny landed, licking his lips. How and why was this kid not an avatar of the Hunt?

No one else from inside the Nasty Burger was watching, so Danny simply transformed back into his human form. Almost immediately, that feral glint to his eyes faded, although Jon warily noted that some of it remained. He gave them all a sheepish grin, his eyes darting nervously to meet Jon’s.

“Holy shit ,” Sam said, punching Jon in the arm. “I am so taking you to the next poetry slam at the Skulk and Lurk. What was that? Danny, you have to hear this tape.”

Jon found himself clutching his recorder in much the same way Danny clung to his metal can, which up close he realized was a soup thermos. Huh. The hunger metaphor was apparently more literal in his case. “I’m- I’m not sure I’m quite - comfortable - with- ” he stuttered.

Danny held up a hand to stop him. “No, you’re fine.” His expression shifted, eyes friendly and curious. “What’s that about, though?”

“Ah- Archives...tradition, I suppose. A living record of- of stuff.” Damn, was he ever going to stop being afraid when face to face with another entity’s power? He thought after all this time he’d at least think Death was the least threatening. Hard to maintain that opinion after Death nearly ripped a ghost bird’s throat out, but still.

“Uh, I guess that - ” Danny gestured to the parking lot in general “ - answers your question about the ghost that looks exactly like me?”

Jon nodded carefully. “You’re an avatar of the End.”

“Avat- oh. I’ve been calling what I am a hybrid. Or halfa, that’s what the ghosts call me.” Danny chuckled. “How’d you come up with ‘avatar’? Or is that like, the official Magnus Institute terminology?”

“My own term,” Jon said. “You’re...basically an extension of the entity itself, since they can’t physically manifest in our world the way it is.”

“Ah. That might explain a few things.”

Jon glanced at the sky. The sun was lower than he thought. “Look, I should really be getting back to my grandma’s. I didn’t anticipate being out this late.” He hesitated. “Ah, weekends I’ve been helping her in the branch library. So...if you want, you could meet me there tomorrow? It’s on the other side of the park.”

Afternoon was well into evening by the time Jon figured out the warren of streets leading back to his and Gertrude’s apartment. The sky had turned a burnt orange. When he let himself in, Gertrude was sitting at the kitchen table, sipping tea like a nice old woman. 

She considered his appearance with a critical eye, and then said with obvious amusement, “I assume you were able to get the information you wanted. Will you be needing dinner, or did you take more than a snack?”

Jon sighed and fished the tape recorder out of his pocket. “Bore direct witness to an event, not extracted a statement, thank you very much. You’re in a good mood. Blow up any buildings lately?”

“Just got off the phone with Sasha,” Gertrude answered. “Apparently one of the research interns found a piece of Alexandria evidence in the library. I thought I’d moved them all out years ago, but apparently even I can forget where I hide something.”

Jon, who had been about to fling himself into the other chair, paused halfway and settled slowly. “Really? What- what was it about?”

“Oh, a letter from Theon of Alexandria to someone he knew. Maybe his daughter Hypatia, maybe someone else. Not much chance of that being able to be traced anymore. It was about the destruction of the Serapeum.”

Jon tensed. “And?”

“Well, I suppose it doesn’t help my research, I think that’s why I hid it in the library at the time...no matter. The thread I’m following here might lead us to one of its scrolls, though.” Gertrude sighed. “Not for the first time, I feel as though someone has gone to deliberate pains to wipe out all information regarding the Archives throughout history. If we could just find another Archivist to talk to, besides you- but I suppose that’s why they call it the Eye, hm? It’s certainly a jealous God. It’s not the Eye s , after all.”

“You still think there can only be one seat of power at a time?” Jon asked.

“Mm,” Gertrude said, taking a sip of her tea. “Maybe. Maybe not. There’s more than one battlefield of the Slaughter, and more than one abattoir of the Flesh. But I’ve never come across more than one active Archives overlapping the same time period. The sister libraries of the Institute don’t spawn any Archivists, either.”

“Hm. If the last seat of power was an Archive in the Schwartzwald mausoleum, that would likely push back the next Archivist a few hundred years or so,” Jon said, helping himself to an extra cup and the tea kettle. “Which means the likelihood of that Archivist still being alive is…”

Gertrude drained her cup. “I don’t think the Magnus Institute instantly shifted the seat of power at its creation. And the Schwartzwald Archive was already out of power by the time Albrecht von Closen found it. By the time of von Closen’s death, it had certainly shifted to the Institute. But for however long a period between the abandonment of Schwartzwald and the Institute becoming the next Archive, there could have been any number of other seats of power.”

“We also don’t know for sure that Schwartzwald was an Archive.” Jon gritted his teeth. “Is the Library of Alexandria really the most recent? It was buried almost 2000 years ago, for Beholding’s sake!”

“Calm down,” Gertrude said. “As I said earlier, I’m on a potential lead to one of its scrolls. A scroll which I believe could tell us more about Archivists in general. I’m sure there’s someone younger than Alexandria in the same situation as you.”

Chapter Text

Danny shot through the air, the wind rushing past him. Shots fired behind, and he executed a playful, easy loop. “I thought you said we had a ceasefire!” he yelled.

“I said ‘cease of hostilities’! That’s not the same thing!”

“You’re shooting at me!”

“Yeah? You afraid, ghost boy? ‘Cause I could be hostile,” said Valerie, gliding to run alongside him. Her toothy grin was evident through her visor.

In response, Danny stepped on one end of her hoverboard and unbalanced it. He caught Valerie as she lost her footing and stopped in the middle of the air. 

“Hilarious,” Valerie said, unimpressed. Still, she rolled her eyes and with a wave of her hand, the hoverboard shivered out of existence, back to wherever it went now that her suit was an extension of her body. She retracted the helmet so she could better look Danny in the eyes. “Billboard as usual?”

Amity Park: Houses for Sale - Not Haunted! proclaimed the massive sign at the entrance to the town. Danny and Valerie sat atop it, watching car headlights maneuver the streets below. Night had well and truly fallen, and the moon was a waxing gibbous.

“So how’s the Hunter groupchat going?” Danny asked. 

“Surprisingly well. Reached out to a couple teams here in the US, and then we’ve picked up at least one from the UK as well. The rules say specifically not to invite your parents. They mess around enough as it is.”

Danny smirked.

“We’ve been exchanging tips and tricks. I’ve learned loads about what else is out there, by the way, no thanks to you.”

“Hey! I told you about the entities!”

Valerie raised an eyebrow. “Okay, but did you tell me about vampires?”

“No way they exist,” Danny said. “Wait, do I not count?”

Valerie turned sideways on the billboard and put her feet up, leaning against his shoulder. She ticked off points on her fingers. “One, you move your mouth when you speak and you can’t mind control people. Two, your fangs are too aesthetic and not horror enough. Three, if you ever kissed me like a real vampire I would dump your ass and then set you on fire.” She pulled up the chat window on her phone, showing Danny the message explaining vampire traits by way of explanation of her last point.

“Oh. Oh, gross . Why would you put that image in my head?”

Valerie cackled.

Then her tone turned serious. “Speaking of, I caught the scent of an Eye freak the other day. Someone new, not Bouchard. Very strong.”

Danny nodded. “Yeah, me too. It was there and gone in an instant. I don’t know what happened.”

“You don’t think someone pulled the same trick you did, do you?” she asked. “I can’t believe it took me until the thing with Danielle to figure out why I kept losing your scent.”

He shook his head. “Nah. Only other End halfas seem to be able to.”

“What about that new kid you were talking to today? The exchange student. Don’t think I didn’t notice those Eye charms he was wearing.”

“Jon. Believe it or not, those are so he doesn’t have to submit to the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known,” Danny said. “We should think about getting some for ourselves. And I was around him all afternoon. He didn’t give me any of the spooky vibes. But...”

“But?”

“I mean, uh, I guess he does also serve the Eye.” 

“A ha ,” Valerie said. “So even if he isn’t the new player, he likely knows who it is.”

“Mm,” Danny said, pressing a soft kiss to the top of her head. Then, “Oh. Shit. His grandma.”

Silence fell in the night for a moment. The distant rushing sound of cars on the highway, interspersed with all the crickets and night birds in between, filled the void as Valerie politely waited for clarification.

“His grandma’s apparently the Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute.”

“The place Jazz went? With all the information about the entities? Gee, Danny, I wonder if the all-knowing fear god might be interested in that.”

“Yeah, yeah, and it turns out the whole place works for the Eye. Wait. Wait .” Danny suddenly jumped off the billboard into the air, and Valerie flailed, grabbing the edge of the sign for balance. His form frayed like smoke at the edges, and he flew around in a high speed circle of frustration. “Oh, that asshole .”

Valerie crossed her legs and laughed. “Rookie mistake. How much information did he get out of you, then?”

Danny came to a halt and crossed his arms grumpily. He felt his hair flowing to match his mood. “More than I got out of him. I think he fed me just enough to keep me talking. Damn. I was kind of starting to like him, too? Like, he’s weirdly formal, but also pretty funny.”

“Do I need to beat him up for you?”

“You’d snap him like a twig with a single punch. Besides, it’s his grandma I’m worried about. If we’re thinking she was that huge Eye presence...look, one person telepathically spying on half the town is bad enough.”

Valerie leapt back onto her hoverboard and joined him in the air. “Right. So you need to turn this interrogation back on them.”

Danny agreed. “Jon invited Sam, Tucker, and I to the Institute’s little outlet here in town. I’ll get in touch with them before we head over. We’ll be prepared to deal with his spooky grandma and then some.”

“If that’s sorted, then.” Valerie artfully maneuvered her hoverboard and gave Danny a quick kiss. “Start running, ghost boy. You owe me another hour of good hunting.”

Danny, Sam, and Tucker were in no way prepared to deal with Gertrude Robinson.

The aging woman who met them in the library of the Amity Park Research Center looked nothing like Jon. Her skin was pale and thin, her steel gray hair bound up in a tidy bun, and dainty half-moon glasses attached to a little beaded chain hung around her neck. She wore a knit argyle cardigan over a loose turtleneck sweater, and carried a stack of books under one arm. 

Danny matched stares with her for all of one second before he desperately wanted to be Elsewhere. They had all anticipated feeling the full intensity of the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known in her presence, but they received no warning of its presence before they met her gaze. In that brief moment of contact, Danny felt like all of his many secrets had been neatly peeled and sliced out of his brain. He didn’t even know if it was because she belonged to Beholding, or because that’s just how she looked at people all the time.

“You must be Jon’s friends,” she said, a frail quaver to her voice. “How lovely to meet you all. I’m Gertrude Robinson, Head Archivist at the Magnus Institute.” Then Danny shook her hand, and her iron grip cracked three of his knuckles for him.

Sam spoke. “Uh, nice to meet you. Where- um, where is Jon?”

Gertrude fluttered a hand behind her at the shelves and study tables. “Oh, he’s in...Reference, third shelf from the right.” At her words, Danny finally felt a faint prickle of watching eyes. A breath of subtle power.

She sailed away in a cloud of floral perfume, adjusting the stack of books to carry them in both hands. Danny looked at Sam and Tucker, who in turn looked at him with slightly dazed expressions.

When they were sure she was both out of range and not watching them by other means, Tucker said to Sam, “What the hell? That was not the plan. Where was your rebellious confrontation?”

“I panicked!” Sam snapped back in an equally low voice. “She looks like my mom , but older.”

“Guys, focus,” Danny whispered. “We can’t do anything about it now. Besides, I was looking for entity trails when we walked in. She has one, but it’s like...kind of washed out. I don’t think she’s that powerful.”

Sam and Tucker both turned their heads in his direction and let the silence speak for itself. 

“Well, I mean- ”

“Save it,” Sam said. “Let’s just find Jon. He’s the one we really need to talk to, anyway.”

They walked over to the stacks, which stretched the width of the building and contained the Amity Park Research Center’s expansive collection. Unlike the public library, all the materials here tended to be part of the academic culture. The local community college shared its space and ensured that books and research relevant to the classes offered were on hand.

When Jazz had looked into applying for an internship, however, she was more interested in the private collection of supernatural phenomena-related books, letters, and personal statements which represented the academic culture of its parent Institute.

The library’s Reference section contained shelves and shelves of identical blue hardcover ledgers, only distinguishable by months and dates written on the spines. Access to the private collection was restricted, but the open reference books featured the material titles and their cross-references that a researcher could bring to a librarian and request to see the archived document. The content within the ledgers refused digitization.

As Danny and his friends made the journey down the rows, he scanned the room again for entity trails. His vision exploded in light.

“Ow!” he hissed, clapping a hand over his eyes.

Sam and Tucker spun around. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s here,” he said. “It’s been here a lot . Its trail keeps overlapping itself, so it’s just- like this one giant mess of color.”

Carefully, he uncovered his eyes and squinted against the light until he adjusted to seeing the glowing trails of the entity. He led the way, following what appeared to be a regular path for the creature, until it - disappeared. “What.” His voice went flat.

Sam and Tucker glanced around, as if they could help. “It faded?”

“No, it’s just gone . Like someone cut a cord.” Danny stared at the floor. “Like what happens with mine when I’m human. But it’s definitely the Eye’s trail, not another End halfa.”

Tucker walked on ahead, peering around every bookshelf. “Gah! Oh, hey Jon. What are you doing?”

Danny’s head snapped up. 

From somewhere down the row, Jon’s voice answered, “Ah, Tucker- I- don’t- uh, shit, don’t tell my grandma I took it off, I’m supposed to keep it on all the time and- ”

A rather flustered Jon emerged from the shelves, patting down his shirt and adjusting the chain of his evil eye pendant. He looked at Danny warily, shoulders hunched. “Please don’t tell her I took it off.”

“I don’t think that was a safe idea,” Danny said grimly. “If it’s supposed to be protecting you from the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, you should keep it on. There’s a powerful Eye hybr- avatar, I guess, in the building either now or often enough that it’s left a mark.”

Jon froze in fear. “You...you can tell that?”

Danny started to explain the entity and ghost trails he could see, before he forcibly closed his mouth and remembered why they were here. “Uh-uh. My turn to ask the questions. Why are you so afraid of other Eye people if your family and the Magnus Institute worship the thing?”

Jon flinched. His fingers twitched at his sides, clutching at air, and his eyes darted from Danny to the bookshelves. It was a very obvious tell, and Danny counted the seconds in his head until - yup, Jon darted for the open space in between Danny and the next shelf - and caught him by the arm.

Jon’s arm was surprisingly thin under his long sleeves, and he nearly wiggled out of Danny’s grip. “ Answer the question ,” he growled, feeling his eyes flash green. Jon giggled a bit, then outright chuckled, like that was the funniest sentence Danny could have said.

“ No ,” he said, with a wild sort of glee.

“You- !”

“Danny,” Sam interrupted. Danny’s head whipped in her direction. She made a calming motion with her hand.

He sighed. “Look, Jon,” he said. “I’m not happy with how much you learned about me yesterday. What I am? That’s a secret . My parents don’t even- I need to be able to trust that you don’t have some ulterior motive, and I can’t do that when the most I know about you is that you’re like. A Ravenclaw.”

“R- right, yes, let- let me go first?” Jon pleaded. Danny moved so that Jon’s escape route was cut off, and let go of his arm. 

Jon’s hand moved in a nervous action to brush the chain of his eye pendant again. “Just because another person also works for the Eye does not mean we all like each other,” he said, regaining some composure. “And if that one person gets it into their head to stalk you , they can be hard to deter.”

Danny...guessed that was reasonable. But still… “And the new Eye presence that coincidentally arrived in Amity Park with you and your - scary as hell , by the way - grandma?”

“That’s just the Beholding itself,” Jon said. His voice dropped, fading until Danny could barely hear it. “It- it just likes me, that’s all. It’s not- there’s nothing else here. You don’t have to worry about it.”

“You know,” Danny said conversationally, “when someone tells me that the main presence of an eldritch fear god is ‘nothing to worry about’, I tend to worry anyway. What do you mean by ‘it likes me’?”

Jon’s fingers ran along the necklace chain at an increased rate. “I meant what I said.” His jaw clenched. “I’m not going to tell the whole town about your secret , either. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” He took a deep breath and squinted hard at Danny through his glasses. “ Let me go .”

And Danny stepped aside. Before he really registered that his body had moved, Jon had slipped quickly out of reach and disappeared into the maze of shelves.

“Danny!” Sam cried. “I thought you were going to get more information than that out of him.”

“Look, he just- I think we shouldn’t push him,” Danny said, struggling to come up with an explanation for his actions. “Besides, he’s stuck in school just like the rest of us, and I see him every afternoon with Lancer.”

“He just said the Eye likes him,” Tucker pointed out. “And you said that was worrying, which it is . Fear entities don’t just follow people around like stray cats, Danny.”

“Actually,” Sam remarked thoughtfully, “they do. A stray cat follows you because it’s hoping you’ll feed it.”

“What do you even feed to a big eyeball in the sky?” Tucker wondered.

Danny shivered. “Knowledge. Information. Stories . He recorded my fight. He said his grandma is collecting stories from people at school. Experiences with ghost attacks.”

“Shit, Casper High’s a buffet,” Tucker said.

“The whole town is,” Danny corrected. “No wonder the Eye is focusing on Jon when he’s surrounded by more ghost stories than anywhere else on the planet.”

Sam shook her head. “Right. You know what we need to do, then.” 

Danny crossed his arms. “Cut the link between it and its food source.”

BONUS

Daisy Tonner has joined [The Pack]

Daisy Tonner has changed her name to teen wolf

teen wolf: yo who advertised this chat on a warrior cats rpg proboards forum in the year of our lord 2015

Chapter Text

From the private journal of Gertrude Robinson, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute.

27 March, 1998

I must admit I am unsure how to proceed. I cannot use tapes - it immediately showed an affinity for them, and I have caught several in various rooms of the house. I suppose I should not be surprised at how quickly it learns, but it is one thing to understand your “god” in abstract terms and quite another to look it in the - well. I have marked the front of this journal with the symbol of the Dark, and I will not be using any of its names within the pages, but I think it likely that when the journal is open, if it so wished it would be able to See inside.

This may have been a very rash idea.

My initial observations are still correct, I believe. The body was once human, and an Archivist. However, I believe at this point no trace of the original consciousness is present. Whether that consciousness is merely dormant or fully extinguished, I cannot yet tell. The consciousness currently inhabiting it is the Entity itself. Not physically manifested, of course - last I checked, the world has not been reshaped in its image - but perhaps the Archivist the body belonged to...ascended, in a manner of speaking, and has merged fully with its “god”. It is like a conduit for the greater consciousness, if such a thing can truly be said to have one. I am unsure if the destruction of its native Archives was the catalyst for such an ascension, or if this was a natural change in the Archivist’s life.

Caring for it is...a delicate matter. I am Compelled to bring it offerings at least twice daily. It does not speak to me or give me Knowings, so I cannot be sure it is truly aware other than as an instinctive force. Although, when I have tried simply reading statements to it instead, it seemed...cranky, for lack of a better word. Looking directly at it makes my ey - the “things in my head that I see with”, rather - hurt, but seeing the way the offerings are affected afterwards I must admit it could be worse. My attunement to it offers me protection.

Its room is warded all around with more symbols of the Dark, which I still do not trust to be true containers. I couldn’t find the right Smirke architecture on such short notice, so it will have to do for now. It’s content to stay there, at least.

Ah. I can hear it moving. In a moment, I will

My Archivist. Hello .

Jon woke with a start. His usual dream walking had faded shortly before dawn, leaving behind the memory of - well, what he called his childhood. He lay there for several minutes and looked up at the ceiling, reveling. He felt warm.

He padded out of his room and stretched, joining Gertrude in the kitchen. She was still cooking for herself, her back turned to him. Words came sluggishly to his mind today, and he paused over his thoughts several times before he hazarded a sentence. “Good morning, my...Archivist.” No, that wasn’t what he usually said, was it?

Gertrude did not whirl around, but she did turn quickly. “Good morning, Jonathan Sims ,” she said, voice firm. She met all his eyes briefly, and her gaze flickered to the open door to his room. “Forgetting something, are we?”

Jon blinked at her. “Forget?” He mentally poked at her, curious. Oh, right. His powers during sleep could not be contained by the evil eye charms, so the necklace lay beside his bed. He ducked back into the room, and slipped the chain over his head. Immediately, the warmth cocooning him faded, like someone had pulled a blanket off of him. His eyes itched, and he rubbed at his forehead uselessly. The door was back, neatly partitioning the two sections of his mind.

He made a second attempt at greetings when he returned. “Good morning, Gertrude. I- sorry.” He flushed, and slunk into his seat at the table.

Gertrude relaxed, bringing over her usual plate and a statement for him. “Every year, I swear.” She narrowed her eyes. “It needs to not happen accidentally at all, even on your...birthday. What do you think would happen if you went to school like that?”

Jon poured himself some tea and took a long drink, contemplating. “I imagine I’d have the best day of my entire life, in all honesty,” he said calmly. 

Gertrude took her glasses off and rubbed at where they rested on her nose. “When we came here, I wasn’t expecting there to be quite this kind of situation. It certainly means that there’s no shortage of fresh statements, but the number of manifestations in the town are an added complication, and of course there’s the issue of Elias.”

“ So , let me out,” Jon argued. “I can’t help if I can’t get my powers under control, and I can’t get my powers under control if I never practice.”

Gertrude tapped her finger on the table. “It’s not really your control over your powers that I’m worried about. You mastered that long ago, even if you don’t remember the process.”

“Learn to balance myself, then,” he amended. 

“Young Archivist- ” Gertrude began.

“I’m older than you- ”

“You’re functionally 17 and you Know it, be quiet - Young Archivist ,” Gertrude continued, “if you partake in the buffet that is your current schooling situation, I’m putting dynamite under your pillow.”

“Rude. One hour, then. I’ll look human, I’ll walk to the park, and I’ll just sit and be on my best behavior.”

“And if one of the three different Hunters in this town gets it into their head to attack you?” Gertrude queried, eyebrow arched.

“They won’t. I do Know how to be subtle.” Jon held his breath, trying not to let his own desperation show in his eyes. Ordinarily he could just deal with the discomfort of the protection charm, aside from sneaking brief minutes without it, but today of all days it felt stifling .

“This is a bad idea,” Gertrude muttered. “ One hour. I need to finish my research first, in case your half-baked plan goes to hell and we have to leave town. You’re coming with me to the Research Center. Uncovering your history and learning more about the Archivists is still our priority. Funny how you can’t just Know that yourself, isn’t it?”

“Tch. An eye can’t see inside itself, I guess. Beholding either can’t Know its own history or can’t tell me because I’m too much a part of it.”

Jon was fairly certain Gertrude was moving this slowly on purpose. She hammed up the fragile old lady so much that one of the librarians actually came over and took her arm to help her with her “weak knee”. Eye twitching, he waited for her to finally make it to the desk with an armful of documents.

“This should be the last of it,” she said with confidence. “A facsimile of the original scroll, and corresponding information connecting to it. Idiots, they don’t know what they’re dealing with. They think it’s from a completely different ancient library.”

She slid the large sheet over to Jon. His fingers reached for it immediately, passing over the scan of the crumbling papyrus as if he could feel its texture. “Yes, Beholding’s seen this before,” he breathed. “I- I think I- I Know- the Archivist wrote this. Like how I used to write to you. ”

“What does it entail?” Gertrude asked.

Without thinking, Jon reached out and took her hand, giving her the Knowing. Gertrude snatched her hand back instantly, snapping, “Do not do that. Tell me with physical words.”

“ But now you Know .”

“Humor me.” The words came through clenched teeth. She glared at his evil eye pendant, as if it were faulty. Jon reached up and felt its chain idly. This sort of direct and deliberate outwards reach from himself wasn’t something it could stop, but Jon made an effort, if only because he really wanted Gertrude to still let him have his free hour.

He took a deep breath. “A man told the Archivist a story about the day he saw the Sun become a great Eye. Its warm rays reached down into his own eyes and instead of blinding him, it gave him knowledge. He walked the earth without food or drink or ageing for fifty years and collected tales from travelers, until one day he could hold no more scrolls in his bags. He came to the Serapeum to relinquish his Archive to the Archivist, and on that day was Archivist himself no more.” 

“Thank you. Oddly lacking in fear, that story.”

“Beholding does involve more than simple fear,” Jon reminded her. “It includes simply the pursuit of knowledge- ”

“ -right up until that knowledge kills me,” Gertrude finished.

Silence fell between them, and they watched each other from either side of the table.

“So we have some differences of opini- ”

“ -Take your hour. I fully expect you to mess it up.” Gertrude leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “I want to watch you walk out of here, though, in case I don’t like the way it looks. And you’ll keep the charm on you just in case, somewhere you can’t lose it.”

Jon tried not to be too eager and just tear the chain off his neck. He put the pendant in the zippered pocket of his jacket, right next to his tape recorder. The door in his mind re-opened, the warmth of his God flooding back through and wrapping around him securely.

“ See you in an hour,” Jon said, and got up from the table. Gertrude walked him to the door and watched him leave, and then, shaking her head, said, “I give him half an hour before something happens.”

Jon sat on a park bench and people-watched. The Sunday afternoon was warm, and there were several human picnickers lying around on the grass. Also one ghost, invisibly trying to get a tan. He let information filter into his head, plucked from the minds of the creatures passing by. He catalogued details, made predictions based on the evidence provided. True to his word, he made himself look human. It was harder than he thought. He had so much to keep Watch over,  so much work to do, all while giving his best impression of a normal teenager.

The fear started to creep over the park-goers several minutes in. One girl sitting alone with a book in a cluster of trees began to notice that the knots in the wood were starting to look more and more like real eyes. A picnicker started to think that everyone was watching him, criticizing his diet. Then they all started to notice the teen on the park bench, drinking it all in with hungry eyes. Who was he? Why did his eyes look so... yellow? Why was he staring at them like that?

“Hello,” said a small voice next to his knee. Jon looked down in surprise to find a toddler staring at him in that unashamed way that young children do, when they want nothing more than the knowledge their eyes can give them and see no reason that they should not have it.

“Uh- hello? ” he said. “ Do you want something? ”

“You have a nice voice,” said the tiny human. “And a pretty halo. Are you a ghost angel?”

Jon did not think he was qualified to answer that question, and simply waited until the child’s mother manifested and grabbed her by the hand, leading her away with a sharp, fearful glance at Jon.

“But he has a halo!” the child insisted. “It’s right there!”

“It’s just the way the light shines on his hair, sweetie,” the mother said. The nervous look she cast over her shoulder told Jon that she saw him, saw his many eyes, and was so deeply afraid. Jon put the Knowing into her head that he was not a ghost. He was something else. The strength of his Gaze focused on her for a moment. The spike in her fear made him relax, reclining on the bench and closing his physical eyes. He was so hungry, and endless sources of offerings to him wandered by. Gertrude wouldn’t have to know. He could just-

And that was when a net closed around his entire body and yoinked him off the bench.

It was surprisingly difficult to See out of the net, even with his Gaze scanning the city. He felt - disjointed, like the different parts of himself were all behind different doors that were swinging back and forth in their frames. Entirely unpleasant. He was going to glare at whoever opened the net first and watch them claw their eyes out. No need to look human for it.

In a moment of clarity he Saw Gertrude, checking her watch and waiting patiently as the time ticked over to one minute past the hour. Jon did not like the satisfied smirk on her face. He tapped her on the shoulder and let her Know he was going to be a tad late.

At the same time, an eager part of his Gaze wandered over to England and gave Martin Blackwood a mental hug. Martin, who had been in the supermarket stressing over ingredients for a new recipe, suddenly felt like approximately fifteen thousand eyes were intensely focused right behind him , and startled so badly he nearly dropped a glass container of pasta sauce. “Jon!” he hissed. “What are you doing?”

Being kidnapped, I think . It was a simple task to place the words in his boyfriend’s head, like a thought. Martin’s mind had reached for him at the touch of his Gaze.

“ What? ”

Might be late for our call. Sorry .

But the moment of clarity slipped away again, and he didn’t catch Martin’s worried reply in words.

Then he felt the strong presence of the End nearby, and his Gaze turned to look at it in curiosity. They were technically all connected, so it was like looking at your own detached hand, waving at you.

The net opened, and Danny Phantom’s ghostly face appeared in his physical vision. Jon grinned, deciding that perhaps he would not make him tear his eyes out. “ Hello, Danny ,” he said and made Eye contact with him.

Danny yelled, something to the tune of “Ohholyshitwhatthefuckisthat” and staggered backwards so fast he tripped and fell through a metal table. 

Jon unfolded himself from the net, stretching. His fingers flexed, long and thin and deceptively delicate.

Tucker and Sam stood frozen behind him, their mouths open. They hadn’t even seen him properly yet. He heard Tucker say, or think, “Oh this was such a bad idea.”

“Y- you- you’re- ” Danny made several attempts at speech as he picked himself up off the floor. “ Jon? ”

“ Yes. Why did you kidnap me? ”

“We figured that if the Eye likes you, and it wants the stories from all of the people in town, that you’re the link between it and its food. Capture you, and get it to go away once you can’t feed it any more.”

“ Ah. There may be a small problem with that plan. ”

“I’m getting that too, yeah,” Danny said faintly. “You’re an avatar for the Eye.”

Jon held up one hand horizontally and wiggled it a bit. “ Mostly. Bit more ah, complicated than your usual avatar .”

Behind him, Sam found her voice at last. “What’s up with your voice? It’s…all whoosh .”

Tucker: “What’s up with his voice? That’s the pressing question on your mind about him?”

“ Hm? ” Jon tilted his head to the side, turning around. Sam and Tucker both took a step back. “ This is my Archivist voice. This is my voice, as it sounds through my Archivist’s body. What do you call me? The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known? My name is also Jon. I like the name Jon. Martin gave me that name .”

All three of them were making a lot of eye contact. Jon was rather impressed. Their fear was thick in the air, the kind of horror that comes from seeing what you would rather not, but feel compelled to witness.

That is, he was impressed until both of the humans started crying blood. Sam wiped an eye at the sudden burn of pain, and stared numbly at her red fingertips. “Sam!” Danny shouted from behind him.

Ah. Shit. He struggled to regain humanity, found he couldn’t. Fumbled for the evil eye charm in his pocket, shied away when his fingers brushed against it and it burned . He settled for what measure of control he could find in his rising panic: his voice. “Just- don’t- you need to look away! ”

They turned and hid their eyes, almost a cower. Jon searched for cover, found it in the shape of another metal lab table. He turned it on its side and ducked into its shelter, shaking. He was - it was laughable, that he was afraid, he was Fear - but he was afraid. He didn’t really Know where he was, he didn’t want to kill them or blind them but it would happen so easily. He reached a portion of his Gaze back out to Martin for comfort, just the slightest brush of eyes on the back of his neck, and then reluctantly began the work of drawing it all back to himself.

There was movement on the other side of the table. Danny was checking Sam and Tucker over. The bleeding had stopped. Blurry vision for a little while, Jon Knew, but they’d be fine.

He flexed his fingers again. Still long. It would have to do. He carefully reached into his pocket once more, this time grabbing the necklace by the chain. He slipped it around his neck and his awareness closed in on itself, cold and uncomfortable. But safe, mostly. His body was- not quite human, he didn’t- he couldn’t- God, he was ravenous .

“Beh- E- J- ” Danny made several abortive attempts at a name, and finally settled. “J-Jon? Are you- you? ”

Jon breathed, once. “Yeah. I’m- ha! Decent. Mostly. It’s- easier to think of myself as separate, at least- ” He grasped the leg of the lab table, and dragged himself up onto his feet. He didn’t move further, keeping the table between himself and the others. Didn’t trust himself to move, barely to speak, he could hardly think through the hunger, he needed to Know-

“We uh- we need to talk,” Danny said.

“Yeah,” Jon said, knuckles clenched on the table edge. “But first, and I’m so sorry about this- I want- I need- please ,” he breathed, his voice rising into a keening cry. “I need their stories.”

Sam and Tucker stared at him, blinking away the last of the blood. Danny glanced between them and him. “To feed- you?”

The tape recorder clicked on his pocket. Jon gave in.

“Statement of Sam Manson and Tucker Foley, regarding their encounter with the entity known as the Archivist. Statements taken live from subjects, 27 March, 2015. Recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.

“In your own time,” he said quietly, as gently as he could manage. “ Tell me- how did that make you feel? ”

Chapter Text

Danny knew something was wrong. He, Tucker, and Sam caught Jon leaving the Amity Park Research Center. A brilliant stream of light flowed off of him, the trace of an entity’s presence to Danny’s eyes. The Eye - this close, Danny held his breath and clutched his friends’ hands, turning them all invisible. It may not keep them out of sight if Jon looked his way, but it was a habit and it made Danny feel safer.

When Jon sat down in the park, Sam checked the net gun and nodded to Danny. They would take a lap around the park’s jogging trail - if they were Beheld, they could honestly claim that they were getting in some ghost hunting practice. Lying or covering up their activities as anything other than what it was, Sam argued, was the quickest way to draw the Eye’s attention. 

Tucker waited in the getaway RV, and had the Fenton Phone to contact them if anything changed with Jon. Danny’s parents may have been a bit too keen in their wish to study the primordial fear gods that ruled their world, but the byproduct of their experiments was that many of their defenses against ghosts usually held some measure of protection against all the entities. Tucker sat in comfort with a pair of binoculars, safe inside the RV’s ghost shield.

Danny and Sam rounded the curve through the woods, bypassing someone reading. His senses stayed alert for even the slightest feeling of being watched. 

“So - how are things with Valerie?” Sam said, grinning as she flipped around and jogged backwards. She wiggled her eyebrows.

“I- uh- I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Danny fumbled. “She’s not trying to kill me anymore, if that’s what you mean.”

“Danny, you do realize we talk. She invited me to her Hunter groupchat.”

“Oh. Um, things are good? I mean...I guess our dates are unconventional- why are you bringing this up now?”

Sam faced front again and laughed. 

The trail was nice, thickly wooded and bright with birdsong in the day. Danny usually chased ghosts through it at night, and didn’t often have the time to take in the scenery. A little creek ran through it, with small footbridges as it looped back and forth across the path. When they hit the third bridge, Danny felt it. Death, fresh and close. The air in his lungs chilled.

“Oh, no,” he said under his breath. “I swear to God, if Boxy interrupts us…”

But when he turned to find the source of his ghost sense, he discovered only a small bird ghost, newly formed, chirping in confusion and perching unsteadily on a log. Sam slowed, seeing that he had stopped.

“Danny? What’s- oh. Huh.”

He stared at the ghost. Something about it gave him the creeps. Even in death, its beady black eyes watched him with a piercing intensity. Then it flew closer, and he realized - it didn’t have eyes. Two empty voids watched him. Danny looked behind the log, and sure enough, there was the bird’s body, completely unmarked aside from the bloody holes where its eyes should have been. 

He turned slowly, the sense of unease growing. Yes - something was watching him. Not too intensely like a bug under a magnifying glass, but more like...a cat, leisurely observing from a distance the mouse that it could play with or eat at any time. Was this playfulness? An eyeless bird and its accompanying ghost thrown into his path to make him nervous. 

Sam tapped him on the shoulder frantically. Danny started to open his mouth to ask what she wanted when she shook her head and put a finger to her lips. Then she pointed to the tree next to him. A knot in the bark, the remnant of an old branch long discarded, blinked. It wasn’t looking at them. Danny and Sam silently backed away up the trail. 

Tucker’s voice sounded in his ear and scared the shit out of both of them. “Uh, hey guys? You...might want to hurry up.” He sounded strained.

“Tuck? What is it? Is Jon on the move?” Danny asked.

“No, no, he’s still sitting there, but uh- it’s a little hard to explain. He’s um. He’s just, being really weird?”

Danny and Sam looked at each other. By silent agreement, they ran faster. They broke out of the woods, up the hill, and down towards the park benches. Jon had barely moved. The only difference was that now he was lying down, and- oh, yep, that was a lot of eyes.

On reflex, Sam pulled the net gun from its holster and fired, the ghost net closing around Jon’s body. She reeled him in, and Danny picked him up - the guy was light - and they both made a run for the RV before someone noticed.

Inside the vehicle, Danny set Jon down in an empty seat. An indignant screech came from the net. Sam kept watch over him, while Danny hopped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. “Tucker?”

Tucker sat motionless on the passenger side, binoculars abandoned in his lap. His teeth were gritted, and his beloved PDA was clutched in his hands. “Yeah. So, you know the ghost shield? Does not keep out the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known.” He gave Danny a weak smile and held up the device. Frozen on the screen was a close-up image of a human eye, wide and staring.

“What the hell? Turn it off . It’s looking at us!” Danny said, taking a turn too sharp.

“Danny, I took the battery out .”

He glanced in the rearview mirror. It was looking back at him. Danny hit the brakes, throwing everyone forward. The net slid off the seat and Jon landed on the floor with a thump. Eyes were starting to manifest all over the inside of the RV, on the walls, the windows, the many dashboard buttons. None of them looked quite real - they all seemed painted on, but they blinked and changed perspectives, and their pupils moved around. The lines they were drawn with glowed in bright gold or neon green like Danny’s eyes.

“Just drive!” Sam yelled from the back. Danny hit the gas.

The eyes all seemed a bit frantic. They flickered in and out of existence. Tucker experimentally shook his PDA, and the eye stuck on the screen winked out, leaving it dead.

When Danny finally pulled up in front of his house, his hands were shaking. The steering wheel had been solidly judging him for the past five minutes, with one very big, very real-looking eye. Its iris glowed green, and whenever it blinked the long eyelashes tickled against Danny’s arms. He let go as soon as he could and turned off the RV. 

“Come on!” he said, jumping out of the seat and grabbing the net. “We should have a few more hours before my parents realize there isn’t actually a ghost at North Mercy.”

They all headed down to the lab, and Danny put the net in the middle of the floor. “Right, he’s probably going to be mad at us, so you two stand behind him in case he makes a break for it.”

He reached down and undid the net, looking in at...what should have been Jon. Danny’s brain stopped functioning. He stared blankly. A single, brilliantly gold Eye stared back, casting stark shadows from its inner glow against brown, pockmarked skin and deep black hair. Then a mouth split open below it, revealing a shark’s mouth of razor-edged teeth, lips stretched in a grin.

The voice that came out of it pulled at Danny’s core, every word tugging on him, forcing him to watch helplessly and listen to everything it said. “Hello, Danny,” said the thing that was not Jon.

At this point, Danny’s brain rebooted into panic mode. “Ohholyshitwhatthefuckisthat,” he said, and scrambled away so fast he went intangible.

The creature that stood up from the net was...wrong. It looked vaguely human, but its body was thin, its fingers long, and its face bore only the Eye and a mouth for it to speak. Now Danny felt the pressure of its attention, and it was overwhelming. It flattened him to the ground. He was on a stage in the spotlight in front of a crowd of millions, he was a deer caught in headlights, he was a ghost in his parents’ crosshairs.

For that long moment of helplessness, Danny thought the one Eye in the middle of the creature’s face was the entirety of the world. Then he saw the halo behind its head. It hurt to look at, blinding golden light crowning an impossibly black void, its rays forming eyelashes, and then a second, central ring of gold light within the void like an iris. Where the Eye on the creature’s face sat, where what should have been Jon’s head rested, the pupil of the halo was centered and it was Beholding him. A myriad of additional eyes, like pinpricks of light, surrounded the creature’s body and clustered on its skin.

But the voice...that voice had been Jon’s voice, infused with static and echo. Clutching to that one thought, Danny managed to croak, “Y- you- you’re - Jon? ”

It was the hunger in Jon’s eyes that made Danny step silently back and let what happened, happen. He watched as his friends spilled their innermost thoughts and fears from the entire day’s events. He listened as they described the terrible pain in their eyes, the numb disbelief that rose in them when they realized that they were bleeding. He waited as Tucker’s story came to a close in perfect, unnatural prose that Tucker could not have come up with as fast as he did.

Jon said, “Statement ends,” and the click of the tape recorder seemed to echo through the lab. He - purred , that was the only way Danny could think to describe it, a noise of such contentment that made him sick to his stomach.

Jon put the tape recorder in his pocket and lounged against the overturned lab table, eyes half-lidded and golden. His fingers were still long, his teeth still sharp, and little black eyes dotted his skin, like small tattoos, but they did not move or look around. The evil eye necklace fell directly over his heart.

Sam said absolutely nothing at first. She walked over to the lab fridge, pulled out two bottles of water, then walked back over and handed one to Tucker. She twisted the cap off in a violent motion, downed half the bottle at once, and then, finally, breathed.

“I thought.” Her words came out in clipped half-sentences. “That. Your grandma. Was the Head Archivist.”

Jon licked his lips - whether from nerves or... digestion , Danny wasn’t sure. “It’s more like a title. For avatars of the Eye.”

“But if she’s the Archivist, and you’re the Archivist, then who’s running the Archives?” Danny asked. “You say it like there’s only one person it can be.”

“We don’t- we don’t know. I think there’s only supposed to be one at a time, officially, but uh.” Jon hesitated, some of that contentment fading from his posture, and he shifted on his feet. “I’m- I was a previous Archivist, from...well, a long time ago.”

Carefully, with small movements like the three of them were animals prone to spooking, Jon moved out from behind the table and then sort of melted onto the floor, his back leaning against the table and his knees drawn up to his chest.

Danny took a deep breath and walked over to Jon. He sat down next to him, legs stretched out. Jon blinked at him in alarm. Sam and Tucker sat across from them. 

“So,” Danny said. “You’re some ancient Archivist. How old are you? What happened?”

Jon shifted, clearly uncomfortable. “I don’t- really know. I know where my Archives were, but I don’t know how long they were mine or when I was born. Gertrude...found me like- like that .” He gestured over to the empty net on the floor. Danny guessed “that” included what had just happened. “I was trapped in the ruins of my Archives.”

“Jesus,” Tucker said. “For how long?”

“I- I don’t- I can’t remember that time? I was...I was gone. Lost in Beholding. It kept me safe,” Jon added in a small voice. “And I’m- we’re- the same now. I’m not- ” He sighed, struggling for words. He turned and addressed Danny. “I told you the other day that avatars are an extension of the entity, a way for it to physically manifest. You still have your own will, your own personality, but your powers come from the entity and therefore you do its will as well.”

Danny swallowed. “But you don’t? Have your own will, that is.”

Jon sighed. “I’m- my will is Beholding’s, my personality is- it’s hard to explain. When Gertrude...I had been absorbed into the greater consciousness of the Eye for so long that I just- became it. There’s no clear line where it stops and I begin. These charms help,” he gestured to the pendant and its defiant imitation of the Eye, “they help me compartmentalize, I guess. I’m able to think of myself as separate from Beholding. It also makes it...safer for other people to be around me.”

“Dude, you were manifesting eyes all over the park,” Tucker said. “ Why did you take your necklace off in the first place?”

“It hurts ,” Jon said, cross. “I’m not supposed to be separate. Besides, today’s my birthday.” He buried his nose in his arms and squinted over them at Danny and his friends.

“I thought you didn’t know when you were born,” Sam said.

“It’s the day I...came back to myself. First real memories I have, like I started my life all over again. Everything else is like- like shards of broken mirror. I know my favorite food, there’s a couple random faces or places I recognize, but they’re so far away, like- like a past life, and I’ve reincarnated. I don’t even know what my name was.”

“So who’s Martin?” Danny asked. “You- uh, you as Beholding, said he gave you the name you’re using now.”

Jon blushed, and fully buried his face in his knees. The tips of his ears darkened, and a muffled “M’boyfrien’” came from the pile.

A completely involuntary noise of surprise came out of Danny’s throat.

“You’re dating someone?”

“He’s- oh. Oh. Oh, I need to call him and let him know I’m okay.” Jon scrambled to his feet, and Danny quickly rose in a half-crouch.

“Wait, how does he even know?” Sam asked.

Jon just looked at her and blinked a few times before miming a giant eye sending out brain signals. Then he turned to Danny. “Do you have a computer that works around entities? Also, where am I?”

“Uh, yes, it’s over there, and this is my house.” Danny waved a hand at the large room. “We’re in my parents’ lab.”

“Wait, your house with a portal straight to the End?” Jon said. His eyes looked over Danny’s shoulder to the giant octagonal entryway set in the wall, with its yellow and black striped hazard door. “The portal that’s right there? Were you- ” his voice was incredulous. “Were you going to throw me in? ”

“No!” Danny cried, at the same time that Tucker said “Yes” and Sam said “Maybe.” He glared at them. “I thought we agreed, guys.”

Jon shook his head and turned around to the back wall, where Danny had pointed out the computer. It took his parents, and some background help from Tucker, to convince the electronic that entity-related phenomena was not a threat to its existence, and it ran with hardly any static. Jon eagerly sat on the stool in front of it and after a moment’s consideration, brought up Facebook. When he logged in, Danny noted that while he had his profile picture filled in, the only content on his news feed appeared to be from Martin. Jon shot Martin a quick message and then called him on Messenger.

Martin picked up almost immediately. “Jon! I didn’t know what to do you just left so I just went home, grabbed my phone and hoped you’d be able to reach me- ”

“Martin! Martin, it’s all right. I’m all right,” Jon promised. “These are my- ah- well, my kidnappers. Also the people I was meeting the other day.”

Danny, Sam, and Tucker clustered around behind Jon. The other teenager on screen was an absolute bear, tall and broad with curly red hair and a smattering of freckles. His voice was friendly and filled with emotion. Danny gave a little wave. “Uh, hi. Sorry about the kidnapping, I guess. It was, I’ll admit, a terrible plan.”

“Yeeah, I’ll bet,” Martin said with a nervous laugh. “Sorry Jon, have to ask them- are you hurt? Did he feed on you?” His voice was serious, and he looked past Jon to the three of them.

“Bit shaken up,” Tucker admitted. Sam nodded in agreement. “He asked us to tell our stories and um- I don’t think I’m normally that good of a storyteller? Kind of cathartic, but in a really, really draining sort of way. So, I’ll get back to you when I’m processing emotions again?”

“Right. Shit. Uh, just so you should know, um, you’ll probably have nightmares,” Martin said.

There was silence for a moment, before Sam said, “That’s not really anything new for us.”

“...Oh. Great! That’s not concerning whatsoever. Um, well, Jon’s going to be in all of them from now on.”

“ Excuse me?” 

“It’s- it’s an Archivist thing,” Jon turned his head slightly, but didn’t quite look over his shoulder. “If I could control it, I would. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll be having the same nightmares.”

“That does not , in fact, make me feel better,” Sam said flatly.

“It’s my fault,” Danny told Martin quietly. “I shouldn’t have kidnapped him on a whim.”

“Danny, shut up,” Tucker and Sam said together. “We kidnapped him too.”

“Right,” Martin said. “Um. Jon told me you’re an avatar of the End?”

“Hey! You said you would keep that a secret!”

“I told him before I made that promise,” Jon said quickly.

“I just meant- I guess you...understand, then, about the. The hunger.” Martin winced.

“Yeah,” Danny said. He was not going to elaborate on his own issues.

“I can- I guess I can answer any other questions you might have, you know? From- from a human perspective.”

Jon sat silently on the stool, one elbow on the countertop. He watched Martin, not blinking, leaning as close to the screen as he could. Martin’s eyes flickered to track Jon’s movement, and he started to reach out a hand, like he wanted to put his arm around him.

Tucker shrugged. “I guess I’ll ask it if no one else is going to. How does the Beholding incarnate get a boyfriend, exactly?”

“Oh! Well, I have a couple part-time jobs, one of them’s at the Magnus Institute - just office assistant stuff for the research department, I mostly make a lot of paper copies and stapling - and I saw Jon in the office one day, he was sulking- ”

“I was not sulking.”

“Yes you were,” Martin said affectionately. “And I thought I’d bring him some tea to cheer him up. It became a whole routine.”

“Classic,” Tucker laughed. “I like it.”

“Who are all of you, by the way?”

They hurriedly introduced themselves, realizing no one had mentioned their names. When Danny spoke, Martin’s face lit up with recognition. “Wait, not- your sister isn’t Jazz Fenton, is she? One of the research interns?”

“Yeah, actually, that’s her. She’s doing a semester-long work program over there while she’s at Oxford. Psychology and paranormal science dual degree.”

They chatted with Martin for several more minutes. The surreal atmosphere of the conversation settled over them, and Danny felt his keyed-up fighting energy from the confrontation with Jon fading away. Sam and Tucker were brightening up as well, although they kept a careful distance from Jon. For his part, Martin’s eldritch boyfriend was content to simply rest and listen to them talk, occasionally interjecting comments.

When they finally hung up the call, some of that uneasiness came back. They all looked at Jon, unsure what to do now. He stood and scratched nervously at his forehead. At some point, he had reverted fully back to human form, the eye tattoos disappearing and his eyes fading from gold to green. He still had long fingers, but Danny was beginning to realize that maybe his hands were normally like that. 

“I should- I should go. Gertrude is going to be mad- well, actually I think she’s probably going to be smug, which is worse,” he said. “Sor- sorry in advance about the dreams.”

Jon started to head up the stairs. Danny stopped him in his kitchen and asked in a low voice, “How much of a threat are you?” He had to know. If Jon was going to be living in Amity Park for any length of time, Danny wanted the reassurance of one less enemy on his hands.

Jon gave him a level stare. “I just want to have a life. That’s all.” He thought for a second. “A life, and an Archive. The Beholding is a quieter entity than most. It just wants to collect knowledge.”

And scare the hell out of everyone while doing it , Danny added to himself. But he said nothing, because he knew his own situation was the same. He may have pledged to keep the people of the town safe and guard the portal, but after everything, he still represented to those same people one of their oldest, deepest fears. A fear that would claim them all, in the End.

After Jon left, Danny, Sam, and Tucker regrouped in his room.

“So that happened,” Danny summarized. “What do we think? Is he still on as a potential friend, or…?”

Sam leaned against his dresser, tapping the heel of her combat boot on the bottom drawer. “Hard to say. I think I’ll reserve judgment after a night’s sleep.”

“Same,” said Tucker.

“You want to be friends with him, don’t you.” Sam gave him a sad smile. “He’s really the only other person like you who’s our age.”

“I mean, Val is a Hunter- ” Danny began.

“Yes, Danny, but she’s still...mostly human. Ghostly technology gifts notwithstanding.”

“And I’m mostly not.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But it’s true. I’m not- not half End, not really. I think...I think I might be closer to what Jon is than another avatar.”

With that in mind, they sat in silence until Danny’s parents announced their presence from downstairs.

BONUS

Sam Manson has joined [The Pack]

Sam Manson has changed her name to Xxqueen-of-the-damnedxX

Xxqueen-of-the-damnedxX: so i hear some of you have experience with sniper rifles

Chapter Text

School that week started a new routine for Jon. Gertrude did not have much to threaten him with beyond eternal disappointment, but she did add a symbol of the Dark to his bedroom door so that his powers of Sight were diminished. He called Martin after school let out, and then he...hung out with friends.

That first day, Tucker and Sam met him ahead of Danny’s arrival to discuss their dreams.

“I mean, it’s still a nightmare, don’t get me wrong,” Sam said. “But when I woke up I started laughing. You were just standing there with your arms crossed.”

“It’s- that’s just what I do, I can’t move except to watch. How is that funny?”

“I don’t know, it just was .”

Tucker simply produced a sign, which Jon didn’t even look at. “I’m not wearing that while I sleep.”

“Aww, c’mon.”

“More people than just you two see me in their dreams, you realize that?”

“Wait- wait, Tucker. That’s genius . Jon, just hang on a minute.” Sam dug around in her purple spider backpack and pulled out a bunch of large campaign buttons. “These will be unobtrusive, and they’ll help a good cause.”

She pressed several into his hands before he could protest. Support the National Parks and No Pipeline, among others. He supposed they were better than Tucker’s ‘Wakey Wakey Vegetables and Sadness’ placard. “I will consider wearing one,” he conceded.

Danny found them at last and offered to show Jon around town. So, he found himself learning the locations of the mall, the movie theater, and several construction sites which Danny included on the tour. All places ghosts had attacked. Jon found that the steady influx of information was like chewing gum, taking the edge off of his hunger. Not enough to call a meal or even a snack, but tasty at least.

They ended at the park, which was far quieter on an afternoon when most people had school or work. “This is where we come to practice when my parents are in the lab,” Danny explained. “The woods are good cover, and Val lets me know if other Hunters are close, so you won’t have to worry about them.”

Jon stopped walking, cautious. “What do you mean?”

“He means it’s safe for you to- to be yourself here,” Tucker said.

“ Safe ,” he laughed to himself. Louder, he said, “Gertrude wasn’t happy about yesterday.”

“Gertrude isn’t here.” Sam grinned. “Rebel a little.”

“I nearly burned your eyes out .”

“Danny tried to eat me once,” she said, far too cheerily. “I mean, he was half-asleep and thought I was a ghost. You realized what was happening and told us to look away.”

“Besides, recording and training with entity powers is kinda our area of expertise,” Tucker added. “We have a good handle on Danny’s powers, so we know which ones to get out of the way for and what they might do to us. We don’t know yours.”

Jon looked from one to the other. Danny held out a hand to him, an offer of trust. He transformed, white light sweeping over him, hair drifting gently like eelgrass. Jon gave a half-nod, and carefully removed his necklace, tucking it into his pocket. Hesitantly, he mirrored Danny’s gesture, extending his own arm. A point of light opened in his palm. 

They shook hands, the End and the Eye.

Danny ran through his powers, his form wrapping and twisting through the trees like shadow. Jon folded his arms and opened an eye directly in front of the ghost, and Danny shouted and dropped onto a branch.

“That’s what we’re talking about,” Tucker said. “Is your sole power looking too hard at everything and manifesting eyeballs, or is there more to it?”

“My parents say that Beholding is the fear of being watched and of having your secrets known,” Danny said, landing. “What does that mean, in your own words?”

Jon took off his glasses and twisted them in his fingers, thinking. A buzz swelled in his chest, the warmth of his Being humming with power. “ I am Knowledge. Humans crave it as much as they fear it. The more you Know - the more aware you are of your surroundings - the more you realize how much there is you do not. People chase that unknown every day, obsessing over ignorance until it kills them. I am all the things you are ignorant of .”

“Jazz said there’s a motto, written over the door to the Magnus Institute. ‘ Vigilo, Audio, Opperior .’ It means- ”

“ I watch. I listen. I wait ,” Jon said instantly. “ A prayer to me .”

“Ah. O- okay,” Danny made a calming motion with his hands. “Um, Jon? You’re getting a little...too much right now.”

“ Hm? Ah, sorry.” Jon closed his awareness, felt the change in his vision as he focused on being more present and human. “May- maybe stay away from those kinds of questions while I’m like this. And don’t say the Magnus Institute’s motto again. It’s...it draws my attention.”

“Right. Uh.” Danny’s hand reached up unconsciously and rubbed the back of his neck. “So...I’ve gone through my powers. What have you got?”

Jon snorted. “Nothing nearly as impressive. Not a lot of physical strength.” He picked out the gentlest of his powers to start with. “Your middle name is James. Your sister is currently busy trying to research the Library of Alexandria; she isn’t having much success. You became an avatar of the End because you were inside the portal when it turned on. You have a recurring nightmare of your future- ”

“Whoa!” Danny stopped him. “That’s. That’s enough.” Then, softly to himself, “Fear of having secrets known. Right.” 

He cleared his throat. “I can pull Knowledge of almost anything if I wish to. Certain things are...hidden from me, but aside from that. And if I... Ask you a question, you have to answer. Resisting, if you’re even powerful enough to, could have- let’s just say negative effects .”

“What does it feel like?” Tucker mused. “I’m thinking, if Principal Bouchard can do the same thing, it might help to know if he’s using it on us.”

“Elias is not one of my Archivists,” Jon said primly. “I’ve given him only as much power as is fair trade for the way he serves me.”

“If your scary ‘grandma’ asks us something, then,” Tucker revised. “We may not be able to resist, like you said, but...I’d still like to know when someone is using spooky telepath powers on me.”

“ Spooky? ” Jon scoffed. “Fine. Why do you use a PDA as your preferred source of technology when smartphones exist? ”

“Because I stole it from my dad in 2005 to write Cyberchase fanfiction on and never gave it back- oh, wow I do not like that.” Tucker blinked. “It’s like I vomited up the words. Also rude. My PDA is a superior piece of technology, Mr. Tape Recorder.”

Jon reflexively patted at the pocket with the device. “It’s- that’s not- I can’t record digitally and you know it. I have to Archive knowledge somehow .”

“...Are you saying slam poetry is one of your powers?” Sam asked.

“Ye- no- it’s not poetry. It’s just how I think,” Jon said. “My Gaze is everywhere . Drawn down into a physical body, it can get overwhelming.”

Awareness tickled the back of his mind. One of his acolytes in the town was on the move. Perhaps that would be a good demonstration? Jon settled cross-legged on the leafy ground and held the tape recorder in his hands. He closed his physical eyes, and bent his Gaze towards Gerard Keay.

Gerard Keay spent most of his life moving from place to place. His mother Mary dragged him along, chasing the trails of anything tied to the supernatural. After settling in Amity Park, she opened up an independent bookstore named Pinhole Books, to fuel her hunger for artifacts and information of those most dangerous creatures.

He devoted himself to the Eye mainly out of spite for her. She wanted nothing to do with their family’s past, and liked toying with entities more than was respectful. Gerard may have been a teenager, but he already Knew three things: that his mother’s greed would kill her, that the Eye would protect him, and that he hated stupid idiot motherfucking Jurgen Leitner, avatar of the whore .

Which was why Gerard was in the tunnels below Casper High, headlamp set to red light. An old mine networked below the school, full of endless pockets of hiding places. Old elevator shafts, blocked off by rusted metal barriers, plummeted towards the distant bottom. Down, and down, and down, into the realm of the Buried and the Dark.

The quiet made Gerard uneasy. Little trace of Leitner’s presence could be found - a crumpled bag of chips, a stray pencil. In all likelihood, he had one of his cursed books with him. Gerard would need to be careful.

The mine had a weight to it, an oppressive emptiness. The knowledge that somewhere above your head, a school full of people studied and stressed and lived without thought to the past below. The knowledge that long-dead people who once worked the mine had sweated, and suffered. The knowledge that there was one other person, here under the earth, and you couldn’t find them.

Gerard felt eyes on the back of his neck. He spun, arm swinging out in a dangerous arc, but there was no one there. Taking a deep breath, he touched the metal of his Eye pendant and leaned into the feeling that crept up on him. 

He marked the walls with small chalk arrows whenever he took a turn, always keeping one hand on a left wall. The process was slow, but with every dead-end passageway he eliminated another location Leitner might be hiding. The longer he spent in the mine, the stronger the Eye’s presence became. Gerard wondered what it was so curious about. Currently, nothing showed itself besides the usual structures of abandoned mines everywhere, bathed in eerie red from his lamp. He hadn’t even seen a ghost, which was surprising for Amity Park.

And also wrong . According to local urban legend, there should be at least five ghosts and a cryptid down here. Six if you counted the one about Leitner having died already. Gerard clutched the can of compressed air in his hand tighter.

He suddenly felt a tickle in his mind, the pins and needles of a Knowing. Leitner was close, if he kept straight at the next bend, and then, turned right-

He swung around the corner and clicked his lighter in front of the air can.*

A fireball shot out in front of him, illuminating the terrified face of an old man. He emitted a strangled screech, scuttling backwards and cringing against the wall as Gerard advanced with his makeshift flamethrower. The air flickered orange and red. 

His thumb got too close to the flame, and Gerard hissed, the lighter falling from his hand with a metallic clatter against the stone floor. That’s okay , Gerard thought, Plan B , and swung his fist into Leitner’s face.

There was a crunch, and the man screamed, cutting himself into a strangled cry as the sound echoed down the tunnel behind them. Gerard kicked his legs out from under him, and he fell to the ground.

Then he hesitated. This was Leitner? Collector of so many fucked up if true books? 

“Please,” the man said, tears watering down the blood from his nose. “Please, child, you have to get out of here. If they find me- ”

Gerard kicked him a second time for calling him ‘child’. His 18th birthday was in two and a half months, thank you very much. “If who finds you?” he demanded. “Who else could possibly be down here?”

Leitner didn’t answer, instead choosing to make a lunge for something he had dropped. Gerard stomped on his fingers and snatched up a small pamphlet. His lighter lay nearby, undamaged.  He straightened, held the pamphlet aloft in the red glow of his headlamp, and watched Leitner’s face as he clicked on the lighter and held it directly below the bottom corner. 

“Who else is down here?”

“I- I- I can’t say, please, or he’ll know ,” the man said. “He’s already watching us, you won’t believe me- ”

“I’m fairly certain that’s just my patron,” Gerard said calmly. “It led me to you .”

“Oh. Oh, shit ,” Leitner said, miserable. “ Another of Beholding?”

“Yeah. Now, if you want your book back un-singed, you’ll tell me who else is down here.”

“You mustn’t! He’s- I cannot tell you .”

“Okay.” Gerard shrugged, and lit the pamphlet on fire. It was dry, and went up nicely for once, one of the easiest Leitner burns he’d had in a while.

Leitner himself was horrified. “What have you done?” he whispered. “You’ve killed me for sure, now that I can’t hide from his Sight.”

“That’s your problem,” Gerard said, and turned, leaving the man alone in the dark.

He retraced his steps back to the last chalk mark before Beholding told him where to go, and started the long process of walking back out of the mine. He was annoyed. Leitner as a person, for someone who spent so much of his life playing around with dangerous books, barely even deserved the infamy he’d obtained.

Gerard shoved his lighter into one of his coat pockets and stomped past an elevator shaft, unseen eyes following him all the way. He was so caught up in the anger at what a massive waste of time and energy this had been, that he almost missed the voices, rising from the depths of the elevator.

“...iel is doing?”

“Yes, I am.” Gerard started. Principal Bouchard? Damn, damn, damn. Why didn’t he think of him when Leitner mentioned another Beholding acolyte? 

“Splendid. Then we’re on the same page.” The other voice was suave and seemed to be competing with Bouchard’s for being the most self-satisfied and condescending. “I don’t want him talking to Gertrude Robinson any more than you do.”

“Mm. Her grandson is...well, let’s just say he’s a potential problem for both of us.”

“I did hear something from Lukas about your little misadventure in England two years ago,” said the other voice. It oozed delight. “Had to leave town in a hurry, did you? And now you’re stuck with a bunch of brats.”

“He had no right to tell you about that,” Bouchard spat. “What happened at the Institute was- ” He broke off with a cough that echoed loudly up the shaft. “Laugh all you want. That child she’s raising has some relationship with the Ceaseless Watcher that I don’t know how to describe. But he is dangerous.”

“Well, young Daniel really is the more pressing concern for me. I need your guarantee that you can keep him out- ”

“Sh. Listen.”

Gerard tensed and turned his headlamp off, plunging himself into total darkness. Had Bouchard noticed him?

“Do you feel that?” Bouchard said in wonder.

“Ugh,” said the other voice. “Your God , I presume? Nasty thing. Back off .” The last words were spoken in a true growl, from some otherworldly creature.

“Don’t be disrespectful,” Bouchard said. “Or you’ll find eyes choking the inside of your throat.”

The answering growl from below sent a shudder up Gerard’s spine.

“Ah ah,” the other tutted. “Don’t get feral with me. Honestly, are you sure you don’t belong to the Hunt?”

“You forget, the Hunt was born from us .”

“... or ,” came the quiet invocation, barely reaching Gerard’s ears. Then again, louder. “... opperior. Vigilo, audio, opperior .” The intensity of the Eye’s gaze heated, until Gerard’s entire body shook with adrenaline as he tried not to run, too many eyes singling him out, staring, watching, judging-

-

- Jon collapsed on the forest floor, still mumbling into his tape recorder. He shivered, too small, too physical, too much in this world. Elias’ chanted prayer resounded in his head. It drew in his Gaze, thrilled and captivated it.

“Jon?” Danny’s voice.

“ Look away ,” he Compelled. He spread his conscious awareness as far as he could, feeling the distant parts of himself that worked in the background like an organic machine. Still the prayer called to him, offering up the fear of the one who backed away from it, the one with so much power and so many secrets to give up.

“ In the depths of the earth stands the man who is called Vladimir Masters ,” he growled into the recorder. “ He thinks himself a god of Death, he sends his spies to crawl and creep and learn, vile twisted mockery of my being that he builds and warps. I See you . I will always See you. ”

The curse spat, the binding worked, Jon shuddered, his Gaze retracting until his physical eyes could see through the light surrounding him. The air squealed with static. He waited, until it faded into a distant hum and his fingers seemed human again. His many ethereal eyes settled onto his skin like light rain, one by one winking out.

He Knew that Danny sensed it was safe to look again, just before the other avatar turned around. “Vlad Masters?” he asked, face grim and hard.

“ He is an insult ,” Jon snarled. “ I will rip the truths from him before this is over .”

Chapter Text

Having math class at eight in the morning seemed particularly cruel. At least Danny somewhat understood triangles. Mr. Falluca had assigned them a massive packet of only word problems to work through over the next few classes, and even if they took over ten minutes apiece for Danny to puzzle through, he enjoyed drawing boats and mountains and lighthouses to mark the details of the situation. You’re driving towards a mountain and estimate the angle of elevation to be…

The mountains rose in the distance, purple and snow-capped. But he was falling, he and his mother, deep into the untamed forest below. For some reason their parachutes weren’t open, but they drifted down like dandelion puffs, slow and weightless. Vlad appeared in front of them, the crimson lining of his cape spread around his neck like a frilled lizard. “This is going to be a snap ,” he said in Dan’s voice, lifting one hand with fingers poised. Danny somehow knew that if he snapped his fingers, the world would end. Then Jon appeared. “ I See you ,” he said, and Vlad’s eyes began to melt, blood and ectoplasm mixing into a toxic brown that flowed from the sockets. He held a tape recorder like a weapon, the tape spooling out of it, the fluttering ribbon becoming paper in the air. Overlapping everything were words; Jon’s recorded voice talking and talking, and Jon’s handwriting appeared on the long yellow scroll that unfurled out of the tape and wrote and wrote. The words, over and over, were “ I See you .”

The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known jolted Danny awake. 

“So nice of you to join us, Mr. Fenton,” Falluca announced. Everyone in the room was staring at him as if he didn’t fall asleep in class on a regular basis. Danny mumbled an apology and tried to return to the problem packet, but around him whispering started up and he couldn’t help but hear.

“I’ve never seen him do that before.”

“I didn’t even know that was possible .”

“Must have been a weird-ass dream.”

Confused, Danny once again focused on the math in front of him. Then he realized that the paper was covered in his handwriting, sloppier than usual from writing it with his eyes closed. I See you , over and over again, from top corner to bottom corner. He quickly started scrubbing at it with his eraser.

“That’s definitely weird, Danny,” Sam agreed, taking a bite out of her tempeh, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. “And we should talk to Jon about it. But I don’t think he’s responsible for it. You didn’t give him your statement, and Tucker and I sure as hell don’t write in our sleep.”

“Where is Jon, anyway?” Tucker asked, looking around the cafeteria. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him at lunch.”

Danny shrugged. He wasn’t sure Jon ate human food at all. “Falluca didn’t write me up for it, at least. I think he was a little freaked, too.”

“At least you got to see Vlad get his just desserts. All I ever get is Jon judging me while my eyes bleed and silently telling me to practice Leave No Trace, thanks to Sam,” Tucker joked.

“I guess.” Danny stabbed his fork into his government-provided sad school spaghetti. “I’ve been worrying about him all week.”

“From what Jon was narrating,” Sam said, “it sounded like Plasmius is playing the long game on something. I don’t think you’re due for an attack from him for a while.”

“That does not make me feel better, Sam.”

“What? I’m just saying. May as well burn that bridge when you get to it. I can’t believe how I missed that Gerry worships the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known. He keeps talking about how he’s going to get eye tattoos as soon as he turns 18 and moves out.”

“Yeah, is he okay? Jon didn’t really narrate if he ever got out of the tunnels, and I haven’t seen him around all week either.” Granted, the only place Danny had looked for him was the goth table at lunch.

Sam laughed. “Oh, he’s got senioritis bad . Lancer gave him two straight weeks of lunch detention for skipping and not doing work, last I heard. Just like someone we both know, hm Danny?”

“I only had detention twice last week,” he defended himself. He blinked. That was where he'd met Jon. “I’m- I’m going to go to the library,” he said quickly, getting up and dumping the remains of his tray in the trash.

Tucker and Sam called after him, but he swung his backpack onto his shoulder and darted up the steps from the cafeteria to the main hall. Valerie gave him a questioning glance as he passed where she ate with Star, but he shook his head.

The library was quiet, and Danny briefly scanned the room for the librarian before he slid into a free chair at the lunch detention circle. Gerry sat eating, and Tim was there again, playing a game on his phone just below the edge of the table. They both gave him a brief wave. And Jon was reading again. This time, Danny waited until he was done, watching carefully. Jon didn’t seem fully aware of anything else in the room, lips moving silently, a hungry light in his eyes as he took in the contents of the page.

Eventually, Jon tucked the paper into his backpack and looked up at Danny. “You didn’t get lunch detention today,” he said.

“No, I wanted to talk to you,” Danny said. “Fell asleep in class, had a super weird dream.” He widened his eyes to emphasize what he meant, conscious of Tim and Gerry three feet away.

Jon tapped the chain of his evil eye necklace meaningfully. “Interesting. And you’re telling me this because…?”

“Apparently I was writing in my sleep,” Danny said. “I guess I was wondering if you’d ever come across anything like that at the Institute.”

At that, Gerry’s head shot up. “You mean the Magnus Institute?”

Jon and Danny both stared at him. “What?” Danny said.

“It’s just- my family has some history with that place, is all,” Gerry said. “I uh, I’ve run into your grandma at the Research Center some, too.” He nodded at Jon.

“We do get statements involving automatic writing of varying types,” Jon said. “I’m- I’m not- What did you uh- ” He made a choked noise, then picked out his next sentence one word at a time. “You might want to talk to the Research Center about it. Later.”

“Oh, yeah, I can set you up with a time at work this afternoon if you want,” Gerry said. “You go in, write down whatever weird shit happened, walk out. Piece of cake, really.”

Danny wondered if Gerry had made a statement about beating up Jurgen Leitner. Probably not, he decided. 

The lunch bell rang, and Tim darted out of the library with a cry of “Freedom!” Gerry picked up his own bag and followed suit, but when Danny stood, Jon caught his arm. There was absolutely no strength behind it.

In a low voice, he said, “Listen. Whatever dream you had wasn’t normal. I can sense that much even through the charm when I’m this close. St- Stay away from me until you’ve written your statement. It’s too- too fresh .” He let go, an exhausted sag in his posture.

Danny slipped away to English ahead of Jon, who took a desk in the back of the class. The entire period, Danny felt Beholding’s Gaze on him, steady and pressuring. It made him antsier than ever to get out. When the bell finally rang, to Lancer’s cries of “The bell doesn’t dismiss you, I do! Get back here!” Danny shot out of the room at lightspeed.

After school, he collected Sam and Tucker and gave an apologetic wave to Jon as they left. Jon was leaning against the wall of the school behind the band room, computer open and presumably talking to Martin. 

Danny caught his friends up on what had happened as he steered them towards the Amity Park Research Center. 

“I thought he looked a little tired,” Sam said. 

Danny shivered, rubbing the back of his neck to shake off the last vestiges of the sensation he had dealt with in class, and again briefly when they had passed Jon. “The sooner I get the experience off my chest, the better. I’m- I know he’s doing it mostly on instinct but...you know how it is,” he finished awkwardly.

They nodded. “You know,” Danny sighed, “I didn’t think of it before, but I’m probably lucky that I don’t feed on humans. Everything else related to the entities does. But since ghosts are formed out of a fear of Death…” It didn’t make it better , exactly, but Danny could deal with the guilt of feeding on sentient ghosts. He thought about Jon’s old life, in some long-ago time, when his powers were new and foreign to his still-human mind. How had he felt then about the hunger? About Compelling stories from people and condemning them to an eternity of nightmares?

Part of Danny hoped Jon would never remember.

The interior of the Research Center was cool and inviting. Gerry was checking in at the front desk, clipping a nametag to the lapel of his long black coat and talking with Gertrude Robinson.

The three cautiously approached. Danny kept an eye on the old woman.

“Hey, Gerry,” Sam said.

“Sam!” Gerry smiled. “Bringing any more football poems for slam night at Skulk and Lurk next week?”

“Oh my God .” Sam rolled her eyes. “That was two years ago .”

“Gerard was telling me you have a statement for us, Mr. Fenton,” Gertrude said, scrutinizing him from behind her glasses. Danny caught a flash of that same hunger that was in Jon’s eyes. However, with her it was far more contained.

“Uh, sort of,” he said. “Um- Jon suggested I come, actually.”

“Ah,” Gertrude said, mouth twisting into a grimace. “I’ll get out of your way, then. Gerard, give him the usual form.”

Gerry handed Danny a manila file folder, which contained a small stack of paper. Then he led Danny to a small office, empty aside from a table and two chairs, one on either side. A few scattered pens lay on the surface, and he closed the door behind him. 

Danny sat down and picked up a pen, a little nervous. He’d never been the best at writing - that was honestly more Sam’s talent. He filled in the form’s few personal details, then pondered over the blank lined space below and on the following pages. The pen had a weird paper card attached to its top. On one side was printed a black circle, and on the other side, a pair of open brackets enclosing empty space. He rolled the pen between his palms for a minute, thinking, and realized that as he did so, the movement of the card created an optical illusion. He watched it, fascinated, as the two images spun together into one. An eye, of course, watching him. When he spun the pen faster, he swore he saw it blink.

And then he Knew what to write.

As soon as the pen touched the page, Danny felt all of his emotions welling up. He wove a story, in his own voice and yet beautifully crafted. He found that to tell the tale of the dream, he had to tell the tale of his history with Vlad. Anger, pain, fear, all poured out into the words. He kept nothing back, not his identity as Phantom, not Dan, not any of his private guilt or thoughts, and that terrified him. It was raw, ugly, truth, and he wrote with the dawning dread that Jon and Gertrude both were probably going to read this.

Towards the end of his description of the dream, Danny once again found himself writing I See you over and over, until the spell finally broke and he slumped back in the chair, emotionally exhausted. Every single page was full, with a neat conclusion on the last.

He looked at the pen and its illusion card. He carefully set it to one side. Then he collected his form and arranged it in order in the file folder and walked out of the room.

“...Leitner,” Gerry was telling Gertrude when he emerged. Danny’s ears perked up at hearing that name, but he tried not to look too invested and catch their attention.

“Fine,” Gertrude sighed. “But please take it into the back courtyard this time. We got a call from Mrs. Manson in support of burning dangerous material last week.”

Gerry was holding a small leatherbound book gingerly between two fingers, with a glove. “It’s Corruption, I’m pretty sure, so it should go up nicely.”

Danny would swear up and down later that the Eye’s hypnosis hadn’t fully worn off, and that’s why he walked up to Gerry and Gertrude and announced his presence, like a fool, by saying, “Oh, Worm?”

Sam would argue that Danny simply couldn’t resist making other people witness his bad puns. Sam was probably correct, given Phantom’s track record.

Either way, Gertrude and Gerry both turned and leveled him with the exact same expression of disappointment. Then Gerry furrowed his brows in suspicion. “Wait, you know about…” Danny felt a brief touch of eyes on the back of his neck, and a flicker of realization crossed Gerry’s face. With the hand not holding the book, he snapped his fingers. “The End.”

That was unfair, so Danny snapped back, “Beholding,” just because he could.

Gerry’s chin looked down at his own brass Eye pendant, then up at Danny. “Fair’s fair,” he said. “I can’t help what it decides to clue me in on.”

“Gerard, please go burn that Leitner,” Gertrude said. “I’ve been meaning to have a discussion with Mr. Fenton here for a while now.”

Gerry turned and walked towards the back door, while Danny tensed in apprehension. Weaker connection to the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known or not, Gertrude was like Jon. The Archivist.

She gestured him over to one of the study tables and sat down across from him, interlacing her fingers in front of her. “You understand, Mr. Fenton, that my... grandson can have a peculiar effect on people.”

Danny nodded slowly. “Where is this going?”

“There are parts of himself that are less- less conscious processes, shall we say. Trust me when I tell you, Mr. Fenton, that it is not the eye of the storm that is the most dangerous. If I’m reading things correctly- ” here she slid Danny’s file around to her and opened it, skimming through it to the last page “ -you’ve encountered one of its rain bands.”

“I mean, I kind of already guessed that?” Danny said. “But it’s not like what- ”

“ Beholding is dangerous ,” Gertrude emphasized. “Once it has decided to act, all those in its Gaze belong to its plan.”

“That’s- that’s not,” Danny tried. “Jon didn’t- ”

“ What do you want more than anything right now? ” Gertrude said, quite deliberately.

“To find out what Vlad Masters is doing,” Danny said automatically. “Put a stop to it, and- ” He slapped a hand over his mouth.

“ And what? ”

“And kill him,” he whispered. The dream replayed in his head. Vlad, dying as his eyes burned, while Danny simply watched, leisurely and distant. “But that’s- no, no, that has to be Web, that’s controlling me- ”

“Is it now.” Gertrude raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been in Beholding’s presence. It simply offered knowledge. But you are of Death.”

To Danny’s horror, the Archivist was right. Whatever Vlad was doing - he had to know, and Beholding was offering to lead him straight to that knowledge alongside Jon. But he also understood what Vlad was. Nothing could prevent that bone-deep understanding of his enemy from settling in his gut like a blood blossom. Sooner, rather than later, Vlad Masters would do something Danny could not forgive or fix or walk away from. And when that happened, he would have to die.

Chapter Text

Private tape recorded by Martin Blackwood, 27 March 2013.

“‘Currently Untitled,’ by Martin Blackwood.” A throat clears nervously.

“ Alas, the moon is lowering
And soon the owl will sleep,
But I shall ne’er forget his face
When I leave his wooded keep.

The elf-king crowned in silver
Long months had watched me pass
Through his endless forest
And across his streams of gl- oh! Oh my God. I did not see you there!” Martin stammers. 

There is a gentle sound of breathing, and then a crackle of almost musical static. “What are you doing?”

“Oh! Um, just- just recording a poem. I found a tape recorder on a shelf while I was cleaning, and I thought, ‘hey, this would be neat!’ I thought the office would be empty. Um.”

“Why poetry? ” The question is scathing. “ Why not simply speak in prose and be done with it?” 

“Huh? I mean, I like the musical quality in a good metered poem. It’s like- singing, almost, only I can’t really sing and- ”

“Why would you want to sing, why don’t you leave music to some- never mind.” The other voice takes a deep breath. “My Archivist has suggested I not Ask so many questions. I don’t understand her.”

“Archivist- Ms. Robinson?” Martin’s voice is curious. “You’re not an Archival assistant, are you?”

“No, no, nothing like that. She’s...my guardian, I suppose. I’ve been living with her.” The other lets out a frustrated sigh. “She won’t let me in the Archives, though. Says I’m too greedy with the statements.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize she’d adopted- uh, or fostered?- anyone. I’m Martin. What’s your name?”

There is silence.

Then, the other says, so quietly it is barely audible, “I- I don’t know. I- used to have one, I think. Before. I have names that people call me, but does that make them mine?”

The slow sound of a chair being scraped across a linoleum floor. Martin sits. “Wow. Okay. Uh. What’s a name people call you, then?”

“Beholding. Ceaseless Watcher. The Eye.”

“Ah- that. That’s. Interesting.”

“But are they my names?” the voice pleads. “I don’t- it’s hard to think. Like this. In the physical . I am Beholding, but I’m also the Archivist, but that’s not a name either. Who am I?” The musical static returns, louder this time.

“I- th- uh- would you like some tea?” Martin squeaks.

“Tea,” the voice says without comprehension.

“Yeah, I’m- I’m going to make you some tea.” In the office, the sound of an electric kettle being turned on. After a few minutes, the gentle sound of water being poured into two mugs.

Martin takes a long sip. He talks to himself under his breath. “So. Eldritch being in the Magnus Institute. Right.” Louder, he says, “Um- names. I don’t- I guess you could say my name is just what other people call me, too. My mum named me Martin, and I’ve never wanted to change it.”

“You can change your name?” The voice sounds surprised. “Just because you want to?”

“Well yeah. If your identity changes - who you are - or if it never matched your name in the first place. Or if you just don’t like the name you were given.”

There is a pause as the other thinks. “I- I like my names, but they are the names of my- I guess you would call it a soul. I want my body to have a name again, for the Archivist.”

“Hm. I could help you come up with one?” Martin offers. “Where- uh, where were you born?”

“Egypt. I remember that much. But- but I’m- I have a new life now, and this one began in England, with my Archivist.”

“So- so you’d like an English name, then?”

“If that’s how this works.”

“Okay. Um. How about...Jonathan! Jonathan- Sims! That sounds sort of proper and dignified. Do you like that?”

The other voice tries the name on its tongue several times. “I...yes, I think I do. It’s- it’s a human name. And I’m- perhaps that makes me a little bit human, too.”

“Well, then,” Martin says. “Hello Jonathan. Or Jon. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Hello, Martin,” says Jon. He takes a sip of his tea. “Oh, this is disgusti- ” The tape recorder clicks off.

Gertrude nudged him awake with a cup of tea. Jon blinked, bleary-eyed, as the owl-shaped mug Martin had given him for his birthday last year swam into focus. “My Ar- Gertrude? I was asleep?”

“Not for long.”

Sunlight streamed into his eyes, bright and golden. Jon was laying his upper body across a study table next to the window, half-completed homework scattered in front of him. Gertrude’s own stack of papers, crisply organized and stacked, occupied the other side.

He straightened quickly. “You never bring me tea.”

“No, I don’t,” Gertrude said, clearly irritated. “But you said, ‘make me some tea,’ in your sleep.”

“Oh.” Jon realized he’d been dreaming of Martin, and flushed. He ran a hand over his hair and combed back some of the strands that came loose from his bun, and glanced at the top of Gertrude’s stack. “You were working on the scroll.”

“Supporting materials for it, yes. It’s been...rather enlightening.”

Jon took a sip of his tea and grimaced. Had she put salt in it? On purpose? Oh well. “And?”

“See for yourself. This one was attached to the back of the facsimile.” She placed a paper in front of him, and Jon read.

I have examined the papyrus thoroughly, and found strange evidence. I do not believe any sort of writing implement ever touched the page. The letters have not aged or faded like ink of the time. The only damage appears to be from worms and rot. It is as if the words simply wrote themselves onto the page. Clear indication of an ancient Archivist’s power.

This scroll, if my translation is accurate, appears to reference a time when two Archivists interacted. I call the storyteller here the Wanderer, or the Wandering Archivist. The story suggests that the Archives represent a continuous chain, a flow of knowledge from one place of power to the next. 

Perhaps the Eye always has two Archivists, one to go out and gather stories, and one to record them. However, I think it more likely that this scroll represents something far more important - the moment in history when the place of power was transferred. The Wanderer claims that as soon as he surrendered his Archive, he was ‘Archivist no more’. My theory is that the transfer of power occurs when the torch is passed, so to speak, in a moment like this one. I wonder if the Wanderer still remained bound to the Eye in some way, or if it released him. 

It also begs the question of what happened to the Serapeum of Alexandria. The Archive should still have been active at the time of its destruction. With the flow of information disrupted, I believe the Eye would naturally shift its place of power to a rising Archive. But where, and what happened to its previous Archivist? Is it still alive, somewhere in the ruins, unable to move on without an Archive of its own?

I desperately wish to send this scroll and my theories to the current Archivist in London, but my own connection to the Eye has...informed me that would be unwise. I have a feeling this information should be kept as far away from the hands of James Wright as possible. So, brother, I’m sending it to you in America. Keep it somewhere out of Sight.

“There’s no date,” Jon noted. “And no signature.”

“It refers to James Wright, the previous Head of the Institute,” said Gertrude. “Therefore it must have been written some time between 1973 and 1996. And I found both it and the scroll facsimile misattributed to another library and filed as a Greek legal document.”

Jon huffed softly to himself. It sounded as if the writer’s equally anonymous brother studied the Gertrude Robinson method of library science. “Someone knew what they were doing, then.”

“Indeed. I’ve half a mind to burn it.”

“You will do no such thing,” Jon growled. “That’s information!”

“I’ve burned plenty in the past. Now that we’ve found the scroll, it’s only a matter of time once I put it back before whoever may be looking for it does the same.”

Jon crossed his arms, angry. “If someone is going around removing my history as an Archivist and as an Entity, why the hell should we do their work for them?”

“Do you think it’s a coincidence that our search led us to Amity Park, where we happen to find Elias Bouchard hiding?” Gertrude pointed out. “He must know there’s information here, and I’d rather not give him any more ammunition for whatever game he’s trying to play with our lives.”

“Please,” Jon said. “Like I’ll let him play games with my life.” Although there was the issue of Elias working with another avatar of the End. He’d sworn to root out every secret Vlad Masters had, and currently the only ones he knew were the ones Danny knew.

He turned the pieces of the puzzle over in his head. “There’s two,” he realized. “Elias, who wants to use the information, and the person who wants it destroyed. They can’t be on the same side.”

Gertrude tapped the piece of paper. “Why would this particular information be dangerous for me to know?”

Jon considered it. “If the theory is right…” His breath caught. “You could transfer the place of power away from the Magnus Institute, and leave Elias powerless.”

He felt his bottomless hunger stir, longing for something more substantial. “You could transfer the place of power to me . To an Archive I create.”

“Is that wise?” Gertrude asked quietly. She watched him with a familiar, too-knowing expression. “We don’t even know if the theory is true. There’s no one to ask about it.” 

Jon looked down to where the evil eye protection charm sat above his heart, staring up at him mockingly. He ran his fingers along its chain, feeling the metal links connecting one to another. From the first storytellers of humanity, to his own lost Archive, to the Magnus Institute. If a link broke, you replaced it, and the chain carried on.

“I know who would want this information destroyed, and I know why,” he finally said. “The writer theorized the existence of an Archivist like me , whose Archive was destroyed. Someone is trying to hide from the Magnus Institute, and they don’t want the Head to know they’re still alive.”

Gertrude furrowed her brow. “Another Archivist.”

“Jonah Magnus clearly already knew about the transfer of power,” Jon reasoned. “Otherwise, how did he ensure that his Institute would become the new Archives?”

“You think he destroyed the previous one.”

Jon nodded. “Where is the Archivist whom Jonah Magnus replaced?” he asked simply.

Chapter Text

The Serapeum of Alexandria, 391 CE.

The Archivist sat in his Archive. The only light came through the high windows, filtering down into the room. He would not tolerate fire near the scrolls. Spare papyrus and inks and charcoals lay scattered across his desk. Someone had brought flowers several weeks earlier. The vase held the now artfully dried arrangement of irises. 

He was hungry. Always hungry, these days. His assistant was due to bring him a story.

When had his fingers gotten so long? At what point in his life had they crossed the threshold from odd to unnatural? ‘When does the Eye make me monstrous?’ he thought, and chuckled. Of course, there had never been a clear line between one stage and the other. He - tried to resist as long as he could, but in his heart he knew that he had given himself to the Eye willingly. It loved him, if such a thing could love. The Archivist was its favorite child, its own kin. He communed with it in his dreams, when he walked the nightmares of the past and knew its embrace to be as warm as the Sun. In that other world, there was no difference between him and the Eye, only endless basking in the stories he had collected.

It should scare him, he figured. When his Archive was complete, when there was no more room for another scroll no matter how many shelves he built, he would pass the knowledge on and - he would not die. That was not the bargain. The End of All Things had no claim to him. He Knew that he would instead fall, willingly as ever, into the terrific might of his God.

He should have Known they were coming. He should have Known what would happen.

But they caught the Archivist by surprise, and the very stones of his Archive were brought down around him, his own home sunken and Buried like a desertified Atlantis. He didn’t- he couldn’t- understand, so he ran to the Eye for comfort. 

Something went wrong.

He met it halfway, already running to him.

There was a- moment, a long, brief, horrible moment of pain and confusion and overwhelming fear. Then he was launched, weightless, into a place where there was only knowledge. He was everywhere, he was nowhere, he existed only in dreams and the emotions that ran through human minds. And he would remember none of it. He would not remember watching as the Serapeum was ruined, forgotten, faded. He would not remember how his Archive faded out of meaningful existence like some ancient king’s prideful boasting.

Sometimes he dreamed of being trapped. Nobody else in the nightmare, nobody to watch, just him. The Archivist, alone beneath the earth in a suffocating stone coffin filled with rotting scrolls.

He drifted, and remembered nothing.

Danny spent a long time in his room, thinking. He wished he could contact Dani - last he heard, she was backpacking the Appalachian Trail, just because she could. But a ghost left no trace better than any human.

On his bed, he scattered every scrap of information he had on Vlad, every piece of damning evidence of his crimes. Sam’s notes and pictures of the lab where they’d first discovered Vlad’s cloning experiments. A list of quotes and threats thrown Phantom’s way. Even the story of the future, written down to give Danny a reminder of what he hoped to avoid. A list of ghosts or people known to be working with Vlad.

This last caught his attention. He remembered that he wrote down potential entities that they were aligned with.

Skulker - The Hunt
Fright Knight - The Eye
Technus - The Spiral
Valerie - The Hunt

Of the beings on the list, the Fright Knight bothered him the most. An old worry, lurking in the back of his mind for the past two years. Something Vlad had said. “That I used two 14-year-old pawns to turn a knight and topple a king? It’s chess , Daniel. Of course you don’t understand, but- but then you never really did.”

He thought that perhaps now, he was beginning to. 

Danny grabbed the list and a printed file on the Fright Knight, swept the rest of the papers back into the wall where he hid them, and flew to meet his friends at the park.

He arrived to chaos.

“Just hold on! Once Danny gets here- ”

“You got up there by yourself, you can get down!”

“Sam, not helping! Jon, just hang on to the branches- ”

“ What is going on here?” Danny asked, landing beside Sam. By way of answer, she pointed up. At the top of one of the park’s pine trees, Jon clung in terror to the spindly trunk, swaying in the wind. Golden eyes popped into existence and clustered around Danny, blinking rapidly and swiveling around to look between him and Jon.

Sam was grinning. “Jon appears to have discovered a new power - teleportation.” She shouted up to him, “Look down!”

“No!” came the distant cry.

Tucker punched Danny in the shoulder. “What are you waiting for? Fly up there and go get him. He can’t get back down.”

Danny sighed and took off again, perching in the air next to Jon. His hair had come loose, blowing around his face in a black tangle. From what Danny could see through, Jon had his eyes tightly closed. 

“How did this happen?” he asked.

Jon cracked one eye, the glimmer of gold piercing Danny’s head like a knife with the intensity of its stare. “Ng,” he said.

“Do you need help?” Danny extended a white-gloved hand.

Jon clutched the tree trunk tighter for a minute as a particularly strong wind gust came through, then seized Danny’s hand and yelped as he spun down through the air and landed back on the ground, setting Jon gently on his feet.

Jon’s legs shook as he leaned against the base of the tree. “Thank you,” he said. He drew in his eyes around himself. Some settled back into his skin, but others stayed behind and around his head, scanning the environment.

Danny tried not to laugh. “I still can’t get the hang of teleporting, although my way is probably different from yours. What happened?”

Jon steadied himself and breathed. “I think I- may be able to transfer my body anywhere I can See? It- by accident I just- And I don’t know how far it could reach, possibly anywhere , but I don’t want to risk, you know, dropping into the middle of the wilderness.”

“Always a bad time,” Danny agreed. He turned to Sam and Tucker. “Sorry I was late. That’s actually what I need to talk to you all about. I may have gotten a lead on Vlad’s plans.”

Jon’s eyes turned on him at that, hungry. Danny tried to ignore the way all of his senses insisted there was a threat, that some unseen predator was watching him from the shadows. “The Fright Knight,” Jon said, voice confident with unnatural Knowledge.

“Danny.” Sam pinched the bridge of her nose. “I thought we agreed at the time you were overthinking it. It’s been two years, and nothing has happened.”

“But now we know Vlad’s working on something bigger,” Danny argued. “Probably bigger than anything he’s ever tried before. Haven’t you noticed how he’s been getting less- stable? More desperate?”

“The Fright Knight would have been one of my acolytes,” Jon said. “Forcing others to relive their own fears in a nightmare? Sound familiar?”

Danny held up the list. “Yeah, I had him marked as Eye-aligned. But in the Ghost Zone - or the End’s realm, I guess - he served the Ghost King. Vlad took advantage of me overthrowing the king to get the Fright Knight to serve him .”

“And absolutely nothing has happened with that since,” Sam finished. “Which is why we stopped worrying. A lot of Vlad’s plans have fallen through between now and then; I think he’s just one more goon at this point.”

Danny wasn’t convinced, but speculation without proof was getting them nowhere. Jon combed his hair back into some semblance of order, capturing the few silver threads and tucking them back in with the rest. The eyes on his arms casually watched Tucker and Sam debate what original plan of Vlad’s had been nullified by Danny’s actions.

With a small gesture, Danny beckoned him over. He had a feeling Jon could demonstrate something for him. Jon approached, cautious. “Is teleportation a normal Archivist power?” he asked.

Jon shook his head. “None of my acolytes are able to do that. I think it’s- it’s probably a product of the mixture between my physical body and my - soul. I’ve- I think with the protection charm removed my two sides are learning to balance, whatever that means for me.”

“So, new powers even you don’t...Know about,” Danny summarized.

“Apparently.”

They looked at Sam and Tucker, who had stopped talking. “I think Jon needs to learn how to use his new power,” Danny announced. “If he Sees something happening and accidentally jumps to where it is, like the top of the tree, that’s a problem.”

“I am not going back up there,” Jon said immediately.

“I didn’t say that. Just start with something simple. Like…” Danny cast around for something within view to test his hunch. “Like that log over there.”

Jon focused. Danny felt the prickling feeling on the back of his neck fade as the Eye’s concentration shifted. Above the log, several extra eyes gathered, glowing brighter and brighter until Danny was squinting against the light. Then a crack appeared in the air, and Jon’s body - flickered.

The crack widened, golden light streaming out of it, and Danny felt his stomach drop as the world wrenched . As he thought, the feeling was the same as when the Fright Knight’s sword had tried to pull Amity Park into the Ghost Zone for his king. The same as when the End portal had opened on him, before it stabilized. The feeling of reality warping, breaking as two worlds tried to occupy the same place.

Then there was a brief, wet pop, like an eyelid unsticking itself, and Jon was on top of the log. The crack in the air had disappeared. “Huh,” he said. “That wasn’t so bad.”

“Did you feel that?” Danny asked Sam and Tucker. “Just for a second - like the portal.”

“We didn’t, Danny,” Sam said gently. “But I believe you. What’s your point?”

“It’s like what the Fright Knight can do. Bringing the entities’ other worlds to ours. You don’t think Vlad might be interested in that ability?”

“Vlad already has a ghost portal,” Tucker said. “Or, well, if it’s blown up again, he at least has the technology to make another one.”

Danny waved his arm around. “This is different. The ghost portal allows passage between the worlds. This- this almost drags the worlds together.”

Jon walked back over, a distinctly sick expression on his face. “My world - or my part of our world - you think that’s the entirety of my being trying to push through. But because I’m- already here , in a way, I just- ”

“Teleport,” Danny confirmed. “What would happen if you didn’t?”

“Your world would change,” Jon said, grim. “And I don’t- I like the complexity of it. The secrets, the tradition of stories and knowledge passed between generations. Without that...this world would fade into so much dust. No mercy, no passion, no curiosity. Just us.”

“Vlad’s desperate,” Danny said. “Could he- could he try to make that happen, but not for the Eye?”

Jon frowned. “The End doesn’t want a ritual either. It’s patient . It gets to all of you.”

“But Vlad’s getting less patient by the day,” he countered.

Tucker tapped him on the shoulder. When Danny turned around, he discovered his friend putting on a set of Fenton Phones. “If there’s even a chance of you being right,” Tucker said, “you need to act before Vlad does. Take the fight to him.”

“No, it’s too early for me to attack him directly,” Danny said. “I think it’s time I had a chat with the Fright Knight.”

“These wall-stones are wondrous -
calamities crumpled them, these city-sites crashed, the work of giants
corrupted. The roofs have rushed to earth, towers in ruins.
Ice at the joints has unroofed the barred-gates, sheared
the scarred storm-walls have disappeared -
the years have gnawed them from beneath. A grave-grip holds
the master-crafters, decrepit and departed, in the ground’s harsh
grasp, until one hundred generations of human-nations have
trod past.”

Jazz flicked through the book of Old English poetry. She was researching a statement about strange experiences in historical ruins, and it led her here. The statement, although she had privately already discredited it - it was practically plagiarized from a past episode of the What The Ghost? podcast, which Jazz listened to religiously - still called to her. Maybe it was because of what Danny told her about those nights when he woke in a silent scream and quietly checked in on their parents, then her, to make sure they were still alive. About seeing a wartorn, destroyed future, nothing left but the inevitability of Death. About how the horror he felt came more from seeing the physical reminders of the world that was, the way people’s work and life was swept away so completely that even their names were forgotten.

So she checked out a translation of the Exeter Book from the Magnus Institute’s library and sat with it at the coffee shop down the street. If she was being extra honest, the gradual decay of ‘The Ruin’ text also reminded her of the fragmented letter about the Serapeum of Alexandria. The two documents held the only memory of a long-forgotten place as it fell to ruin, and that was sad and beautiful.

“All right, enough. You’re our hardest-working intern, but I am officially cutting you off.”

Jazz looked up from the book. Sasha sat down in the chair across from her with her own cup of coffee, a friendly smile on her face. “It is my solemn duty to prevent people from studying Institute materials while off the clock. We don’t get paid enough for that.”

“I’m an unpaid intern.”

Sasha snorted. “Honestly, you’d think with Lukas running things now we could at least pay you. Although I guess he and Bouchard are between divorces, so it can’t be helped.”

“Sounds like I am glad to be missing out on the office politics,” Jazz said, raising an eyebrow.

“You have no idea,” Sasha remarked breezily, taking a long sip of her drink. “Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about your program. So Oxford’s offering paranormal science now, huh?”

“ Well ,” she began, “not...exactly? It’s sort of an independent study thing. They’ve had to acknowledge the existence of ghosts, the whole world has with Amity Park getting on the news all the time, but from what I understand they don’t want to make it really known that they’re letting people study- and it’s like, a whole ordeal so I just tell everyone I’m dual degree.”

“Ah, say no more. The Institute gets the same shit from other academics, never mind the folklore preservation we do.”

“I will admit it did take more direct ghost encounters than it should have for me to believe.”

“Mm. If you’d seen the worm queen she would have made you a believer from day one,” Sasha said. “Although that day does also remind me of watching Bouchard get run out of town...”

Pariah’s Keep lurked, red and silent, in the depths of the Ghost Zone. Danny landed on one of the broken fragments of stone floating around it and crouched, contacting Tucker.

“I’m here.” Danny didn’t say there had been no trouble, and Tucker didn’t ask. Trouble found him often enough anyway.

“Great. Now don’t touch his sword.”

“I’m not a complete idiot, Tucker.”

“Really? ‘Cause last time you decided touching the sword was a fantastic idea that could in no way go wrong. And the time before that.”

“Are you done?”

“Just saying.”

Danny shook his head and drifted down onto the main grounds before the gates of the castle. A few scattered skeletons sat almost motionless, their heads turning to follow his movement. Danny pretended he didn’t notice.

The Fright Knight’s sword was sheathed in a pumpkin, but the Knight himself sat comfortably on the throne. Danny felt a twinge of anger at the sight. Wreathed in purple flame, he crossed his legs and tilted his head questioningly as his own enemy walked calmly up to him.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit, child?”

“You made a deal with Vlad Plasmius two years ago,” Danny stated. “I want to know what it was.”

The Knight laughed, a great belly-laugh that shook his entire body. “I gave a Knight’s oath. I’m not about to break that troth.”

“Fair enough.” Danny shrugged. “I’ll just take a guess. Vlad wants to use the power of your sword to combine the two worlds.”

“Now where would you come up with an idea like that? ”

Danny started to pace back and forth before the throne. “Your sword is unique. Your power is unique. Vlad has been getting more and more destructive.”

“His only crime is serving Death, until he gives his final breath. You are of the same cloth, are you not?”

He gritted his teeth, biting back a snarl. “I am nothing like him.”

The Knight considered his words. “Indeed. You’re more powerful, or you will be. I must admit I am surprised that you have not come to see me before now.”

“Why?” Danny blinked, stopping his pacing. “You haven’t bothered me since Pariah.”

He couldn’t see the Knight’s face, only the suggestion of his eyes glowing in the shadows of his helmet, but his voice was amused. “Do you not know? Ah, but you are a modern boy, then. So far removed from the age of king and kingdom.”

“Not know what?”

“Nothing! I simply...thought you would take greater offense to me making my home here, with the castle and throne.”

“Have you declared yourself Ghost King?” 

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Then I don’t see the problem.”

The Knight leaned forward and rested his chin in his gauntleted hands. “Fascinating. You see, but do not understand.”

“Anyway, you’re changing the subject.” Danny steered the conversation back to Vlad. “Whatever your deal with him is, you’re going to call it off.”

The Knight’s eyes flared, his purple flames snapping in anger. “Is that a fact,” he said flatly.

Danny popped a ball of ecto-energy into his hand. “Yeah.”

Slowly, the Knight uncrossed his legs. His armor scraped against the wood of the throne. “You pick a fight for honor’s sake, but is it not really for the hunger you must sate?”

Danny froze. “Don’t- don’t you dare,” he said.

Perhaps the Knight smiled. “Surely you can feel it. For so the rumor goes, the halfa’s hungrier than his friends know. Are you convinced your real reason for coming here wasn’t so that you could drink the core of a powerful ghost?”

A shudder ran through Danny’s body, and his ball of ecto-energy sputtered out. Now that he said it, of course. He swallowed, trying to resist the urge to bare his fangs. He took up pacing again, eyes on the enemy, and attempted to not imagine what the fear of an ageless knight would taste like.

In his ear, a friend’s voice. “Don’t listen to him, Danny. You’ve got his attention, now draw him in.”

Danny nodded to himself. “Why don’t you meet me in battle and find out which is the truth?”

The Knight grabbed his sword and might have grinned.

Danny arced around the swinging blade and launched off the flat, flipping over the Knight’s head. He twisted a hand into the purple-flame hair and yanked. The Knight staggered backwards, one hand reaching up over his shoulder to try the same tactic on Danny’s hair. The white tresses parted like water, rippling out of reach of the grasping fingers. Danny released his hold and kicked the Knight in the shoulder, dancing backward.

Some of the skeleton guards had begun making their way towards him, disturbed by the hostility. Danny shot a few ectoblasts their way without looking and let the resulting crash, like a bag of Skittles being dropped, reassure him that they wouldn’t be creeping up behind him.

The Fright Knight lunged, sword spouting green flame before him. Danny met it head-on with a blast of his own, an explosion of light. He rolled through it and kicked the Knight in the chest. His enemy fired an ectoblast from his eyes, clocking Danny in the same spot.

After he caught his breath, he barely managed to dodge the slice from the sword, somersaulting backwards. The Knight rolled his wrist leisurely, his blade spinning into a new ready position. Danny narrowed his eyes and waited. 

When the strike came, he dodged, got in close, and - punched through the Knight, letting his momentum and intangibility carry him behind. He grappled the Knight into a headlock, forcibly twisted off his helmet and slammed it into his wrist. The sword clanged on the ground.

Danny seized the Knight’s arm and shoulder in a painful hold and forced him to his knees. He struggled, but the involuntary, guttural growl that issued from Danny’s lips made him still. Hunger surged through him, especially now that the Knight had lost. Fear radiated off of his prey- his defeated enemy . Take a ghost’s ectoplasm, the blood that powered its core, and it would feel the closeness of the End. Take it all and the core itself, and they felt their final death. And Danny wouldn’t be so hungry . 

He leaned in, about to- he didn’t know. He stopped. “Tucker, put Jon on the line,” he snapped. He nudged a button on the device to put it on speaker.

The Fenton Phones surged with static, and even here, in the depths of the End, Danny felt like he was being watched. From the way the Fright Knight almost- relaxed , he felt it too.

“ Hello, Sir Rowan de la Peur ,” said Jon.

He answered as if caught in a dream. “I never thought to hear again the Ceaseless Watcher’s own refrain.”

“ You wouldn’t answer Danny’s questions ,” he chided. “ So you will answer mine .”

“I- I don’t- I swore an oath.”

“ What deal did you make with Vlad Masters, or Plasmius? ”

“Don’t- I don’t- want- to tell you.”

“ Tell me if you don’t want to die .” The roar of eldritch static rang like a choir through the throne room.

“I- I- ” The Knight’s form spasmed dangerously. The words crawled out of his throat. “He- Plasmius- wishes- to- make himself like a god. Only then, he says, will Daniel and his mother have no choice but to belong to him. In a world that is only Death, he will be their only sanctuary for protection. I don’t- my- sword- is the cornerstone of his ritual. I don’t know more than that. Please, I don’t know .”

Danny’s eyes darted to where the sword lay abandoned on the floor, glowing ominously.

Before he could move, the Fright Knight broke his hold and dove for it, disappearing in a cloud of bats and out the window.

Danny swore.

The static and Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known faded, and Tucker’s voice returned. “Shit. He escaped with the sword?”

He tried for humor. “You did tell me not to touch it.” Another wave of hunger rocked through him. “Look, Tuck, I’m- I need to find something to eat. I’ll be a little while longer down here.”

There was a moment’s pause. “Yeah, so does Jon. Reaching his power through to the Ghost Zone took a lot of energy, I think. Danny?”

“Hm?”

“Stay safe.”

Chapter Text

Jon made his apologies to Sam and Tucker and stumbled away. The sensation of pushing his Gaze beyond the physical world had been heady, comfortable in a way he couldn’t properly explain but that gave him a sense of déjà vu . It also, however, opened up his soul into a yawning maw. He couldn’t stand to be near the two humans. They carried so many stories still, deep and resonating against the brush of his vision. He didn’t want to Compel them again. 

So he made his excuses, claimed that he would be fine to walk home, that Gertrude would have a written statement waiting for him. The lie made him feel sick. 

He wore his protection charm again, to prevent his body from slipping. The presence of Beholding hummed against the door in his mind. The separation bothered him, as always, but he needed - more human thoughts. Needed the relative safety from any other Eye acolytes that may have been watching as he stepped back into places filled with other people.

Human thoughts did not stop him from walking directly to someone he had taken note of as if his feet were bound to the path. His mark turned, already feeling the pressure of the Eye, and looked at him in confusion. “Jon?”

Jon opened his mouth to say “Run,” and out came “ Tell me your story .”

The recorder clicked on in his pocket.

“Statement of Timothy Stoker, regarding a circus that came to town on 9 June 2014. Statement taken direct from subject, 9 April 2015. Recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist. Statement begins.”

“I had just finished my junior year. And my little brother, Danny, was only in middle school, seventh grade. You know, there’s a kid at Casper High named Danny, too. I- I try not to let it get to me, but I’ve seen him twice recently and it was kind of a shock. He’s nice. Funny. Makes a lot of bad puns. Not his fault he has the same name.

Anyway, I should probably start by talking about the first time the circus came. This was a couple years ago, also in June. The news was showing ads for it, and it looked super cool. Circus Gothica. I mean, I’m not a goth, but Danny was really into spooky stuff at the time, and it looked right up his alley. So I got us tickets for the opening ceremonies. We skipped school.

We arrived, and I think the entire goth population for miles around was there. The circus train lay waiting on the tracks, steam from the engine blowing over the crowd like fog. Inside the main tent, I could hear the sound of an organ. That music is still so clear in my mind. It sounded cheerful, like nothing bad could ever happen while it was playing. And then the train doors opened, and out rolled - these things . People cheered and clapped. I’m- I’m not sure what they saw. Contortionists? Medieval torture devices made into art? People said later that the things were ghosts, but that- that isn’t right. I’ve seen ghosts, I live in Amity Park, I know what a ghost looks like, okay? 

The things that came out of that train were like...shadows. Long, thin, stretched imitations of human figures. Have you ever seen your shadow stretch away from you in the evening, becoming a taller, more alien version of yourself? They looked like that. They danced and grinned and cavorted like any regular circus clown. I couldn’t move, I just - sat there, watching, my mouth open in horror. Beside me, Danny cheered. He told me later that one of them was a girl in a cape with tattoos that came alive, that one of them was a giant. He didn’t see them as I did, as these faceless nightmares that walked among the crowd and juggled lit torches and knives with arms like telephone wires.

Some disgruntled parents came and protested the whole circus, and I was so relieved that their arrival shut down the whole opening ceremonies that I forgot my brother and I were truants. I lost him in the moving crowd for a minute and panicked. I looked from face to face, desperately searching for him, but all I saw were strangers. 

Then he was there at my side, like he never left. I grabbed him by the hand and took him home, and I told him we were never going back there.

The second time the circus came to town, it was...different. Odd. Danny had been weird all year. He threw a fit about his polaroid photo collection and burned them. Said they were all wrong. I was pretty hurt - we’d shared a lot of good times when he went through the photography phase, and those were a lot of our memories that just. Went up in smoke. Didn’t know why he did it, not back then.

The thing is, I don’t...the circus never came to town . But for a few brief moments, it was like the whole world was the circus. Nothing made sense. Nothing was supposed to make sense. We were- it was like we were on a carousel, that same organ music all around us. Round and round and round, until we lost all sense of who we were. I don’t- I didn’t even remember my name, in that haze. I remember a...ringmaster? And a dancer, dancing to make the world anew.

And then I woke up at home. It was all a dream, or so my mind tried to tell me. Except Danny was gone. According to my parents, Danny had never even existed. I told them that was impossible, he was my little brother. When he was five I climbed the tree in the backyard and fell and broke my arm, and he cried because he thought it would come off like the arms on one of his dolls when they broke. My parents asked me what he looked like, humoring me. When I said he had red hair and looked nothing like me, I realized that- that wasn’t right. So I said ‘actually, maybe it was black hair?’ and of course that solidified in my parents’ minds that Danny was imaginary.

I couldn’t sleep that night, because how could I not remember my own brother’s correct hair color? I ransacked Danny’s room, which my parents claimed was and had always been the guest room. Of course, all those photographs had been burned. But I remembered that back when he’d been going through that phase, we buried a ‘time capsule’ underneath the tree. I spent the early hours digging holes in the yard, looking for it. I finally found it at five in the morning, delirious from lack of sleep.

It was an old metal box with a clasp. I flipped it open and sure enough, it was filled with polaroid photographs and letters and knick-knacks. Danny’s careful explanation of current events, popular movies, prices of basic goods. Dozens of letters to our future selves, to future people, to the aliens that would take over Earth in the future. But the photos. Danny had black hair, like me. He was short, kind of chubby. And yet in all of my memories, he was tall and red-haired, with an angular face. I didn’t understand at first. Then I made the connection. I think one of those things from the circus, the first time, the stretched-out shadows, stole Danny and took his place. I lost him in the crowd and they took him. And I didn’t notice. For a whole year.

Whatever finally stopped it - whatever force wiped it from existence like the fucking Thanos snap - thank you. I don’t forgive you for taking every memory of my brother off of this Earth, but thank you for getting rid of whatever the hell was pretending to be him.

‘Dear Future Tim, Hi. Today I’m eight years old, and the sun is shining and it’s bright and we don’t have school because there’s two feet of snow on the ground. Love, your past brother Danny.’

I don’t know why that’s what broke me. I cried for three straight days. I had to retake my final exams over the summer. I still have the time capsule under my bed, but I haven’t opened it since that day.”

“Statement ends,” Jon said, and the tape recorder clicked off. He felt settled, sated, the words ‘thank you’ on the tip of his tongue but he just managed to hold them back. Dread crawled down his throat as the realization of what he had done sunk in.

Rather than some random passer-by, preferably a tourist, he had gone to someone from school. Worse, someone who had seen him before.

Jon and Tim stared at each other, wide-eyed. Tears streaked both of their faces. Then Jon took off at a dead sprint.

He knew he looked a mess as he yanked open the apartment door. Gertrude, settled in the living room with a murder mystery novel, looked up as he barreled through. “It’s late,” she began, checking the clock. “What- ” Her eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”

“ Do not start ,” he warned. “Leave me- leave me the fuck alone, I need to talk to Martin.”

He slammed his bedroom door behind him. 

The added power of the Dark’s symbol outside calmed him, like pulling a weighted blanket over his entire body. He took off the evil eye charm and undid his hair, shaking it loose around his shoulders. He leaned gratefully into the blinding presence of his God and felt whole again.

With shaking hands, he opened up his computer and messaged Martin. When the video chat connected, Martin yawned, his room dark and lit only by the glow from the screen. “Jon? What’s up? I was about to go to sleep, I’ve been watching Netflix in bed.” Then he noticed Jon’s expression and sat up straight, flicking on the light switch beside his bed.

“I- I- Martin, I- ” He couldn’t get the words out. Breathe, try again . “Fed. On someone I- that I shouldn’t have.”

“Shit,” Martin said under his breath. “Jon? Are they all ri- are they safe?”

“I- I don’t- don’t know. Don’t...Know. Not going to try and Look. Gertrude’s made my room Dark again, anyway.”

“Right, okay. How bad was it?”

“Bad,” Jon said. “Encounter with the Stranger and the ritual of the Unknowing, deeply affected. Martin, the kid is- he’s seen me before. He goes to school with me. I- I can’t stop- he’ll know by tonight, and I can’t- he’s going to find out about me and he’s going to tell Elias and- ”

“Jon!” Martin interrupted. “Jon, breathe. Easy. Easy. Look at me, Jon. Come on, Look. Tell me what you see.”

Jon listened to his boyfriend’s voice, opening several of his eyes and hunching over the keyboard. A few small ones lifted out of his skin and gathered around the image of Martin on the screen, bouncing gently off it in a series of kisses. “I see you, Martin,” he said, quiet and tender.

Martin pressed two of his fingers to his lips and moved his hand in such a way that Jon Knew he was touching them to his heart, on the image of Jon that appeared on Martin’s screen. “I see you, Jon,” he answered.

Jon shuddered and folded his legs underneath him on the bed. “I- I don’t want to go to sleep.” Normally it was a meditative state for him, drifting endlessly through nightmare after nightmare, drinking in the fear that was his by right. He didn’t want to face Sam and Tucker as his other self stalked forward in eye-shattering light like an unholy angel, he didn’t want to face Tim the next day and have to explain what zero waste meant and why his badge was telling corporations to practice it. He didn’t want to make Tim relive all of his pain over and over, for the rest of his life.

Martin cracked another massive yawn. “I’ll stay up with you, as long as I can.”

“Martin,” Jon sighed. “It’s already past midnight over there. You have school tomorrow.”

“So do you.”

“ I don’t need sleep.”

“Hmm, tell that to your dark circles. Now,” he rummaged in a drawer and took out a book, “where were we the last time we did this?”

Jon gave in. “Ivan and the Grey Wolf, I believe.”

Martin nodded and took a drink of water from the glass beside his bed, leaning back against his pillow. “Once upon a time there was a Tsar named Berendei who had three sons, the youngest of which was named Ivan. Now this Tsar had a splendid garden and the most splendid thing about it was an apple-tree with golden apples…”

Jon let Martin’s voice tell him a fairy tale of a long and dangerous quest with a happy ending, and forgave him as they both, despite their wishes, slipped into sleep. The call dropped on its own like the click of a tape recorder.

As he sat down at the circular table in the library, Jon tried to swallow down the lump in his throat. He was on edge, and Elias’ invisible eyes following him around the school were not helping matters. The pressure eased in the library - the principal had other issues to catch his attention - but that meant all of Jon’s focus was now on the inevitable arrival of Timothy Stoker.

Gerry was already there, an assortment of materials spread out on the table in front of him. To distract himself, Jon made conversation.

“What- uh- you’re tattooing yourself.”

“Yep,” Gerry said, poking a needle into his knuckle. “Mom said she hated tattoos. So.” He carefully wiped down his finger.

“Is- is that- that’s an eye.”

“Yep.”

Jon made a valiant attempt not to stare at the three simple eye tattoos currently dotting Gerry’s knuckles, with a fourth in progress. “You’re doing this during lunch detention,” he observed.

“Mhm.” Gerry adjusted his grip on the needle, the blue medical glove on his hand squeaking against itself. “Librarian decided it wasn’t his problem.”

“May I ask- that particular design- ”

He inspected his hand critically. “I’m putting them at all my joints. It keeps the Web from pulling strings, among other things. You know about the Web?” Gerry raised an eyebrow at Jon. “Your grandma knows.”

“I- yes,” Jon said. “She did practically raise me in the Magnus Institute.”

Gerry nodded. He opened his mouth to say something else, but at that moment the library door swung open and cracked against the wall. He jerked and nearly jabbed the needle into his face.

“What, and I do mean what , the fuck? you fucking ...eyeball man!”

Tim looked a mess. His hair was uncombed, shadows under his eyes, backpack slipped down to his elbow as he stomped into the room.

Gerry’s eyes widened in alarm, and he pointed at himself questioningly.

“Not you, him .” Tim stabbed his finger directly at Jon. “He knows what the fuck I’m talking about.”

Jon cringed in his chair and tried to make himself look even smaller. Tim seized the front of his shirt and dragged him to eye level. “You’re going to tell me what the hell you did to me, and you’re going to tell me right now .”

“I- I’m sorry, I didn’t- didn’t mean to- well I did mean to, but- not to you?” Jon offered.

“Hey dude, back off,” Gerry said. “What’s going on?”

“You- I don’t tell anyone about him,” Tim said. “But oh, I tell you when you ask. Like some kind of Jedi mind trick. To you and your fucking eyes- and then you’re in my fucking nightmare , what the hell? ”

He let go of Jon and rounded on Gerry. “You’re into that occult shit, right? What the hell is he? Eyes fucking- eye city, him.”

Gerry stared at Jon’s face, then dropped to look at the evil eye charm on his chest. “Jon?” he said carefully. “Are you- like Gertrude?”

“Who the fuck is Gertrude?”

“My- grandmother,” Jon mumbled.

“Oh, great. It runs in the family. Buy one spooky-eyed telepath, get one free!”

“Tim, please- I can explain - actually, I really can’t - but just- I don’t- I didn’t want to hurt you,” he pleaded. “You were just- you were there and you had a story and I- ”

“Yeah, you fucking slurped it out of my brain .”

Jon winced, and cast around desperately for something he could say. “It’s- the thing with the circus, with the whole world going wrong, it’s- it’s going to happen again.”

That caught Tim’s attention, and he went deadly silent. “You want to run that by me again?” he asked, low and dangerous.

Jon exhaled. “Elias- Principal Bouchard- ” he checked his senses, but Elias’ attention was still elsewhere “ -is helping someone who wants to try another ritual, like- like the one you were caught in, but a little different. I’m - we’re - trying to stop it.”

A light seemed to come on in Gerry’s head. “By ‘we’, do you mean Danny Fenton? The guy who came to the Research Center?”

Tim looked at Gerry. “How can he help?”

Jon shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he, and his friends, are in on the plan to stop the ritual.”

“Shit. Finding a few more Leitners and destroying them for Gertrude isn’t going to cut it, is it?” Gerry said.

“Sorry.”

“Then I want in.” Gerry pulled the medical glove off his hand and held it out for Jon to shake. 

Jon hesitated, before reaching out and taking the hand. With the physical contact established, he overrode his protection charm and tapped Gerry’s mind gently. 

Hello , he said.

Gerry’s hold in the handshake tightened in surprise, before he quickly let go and rapped the freshly tattooed fingers of his left hand on the table, staring at the eyes.

Tim watched the procedure like a hawk, and crossed his arms. “If - and I mean if - I join you freaks, I have two conditions. One, you,” he indicated Jon with a jerk of his head, “never talk to me again unless I say so. Two, if there is an opportunity for me to do some damage to this ritual thing, you get the hell out of my way.”

“That’s fair,” Jon said.

“Then count me in, too.”

Chapter Text

The Schwartzwald, 1818-1831

Once upon a time in the forest lived the Archivist, and she was angry. She lived in a fairy hill beneath an ancient elm tree and took her stories from travellers, and she was kind. She carried her stories with her like a turtle carried its shell until she found the ruins of an older Archive, and there she settled, and she was clever. She spoke with the Lonely guardian of that place, and tore out his eyes so that his mind held no image of her. She knew that other followers of her God could See through them, and she knew where the next Archive would be.

For now, what had been built merely served its purpose as a temple. The Gaze of It-Knows-You observed it in curiosity, far beyond the borders of her forest. The temple slowly, slowly, gathered its own collection of stories, and so the Archivist knew where she would have to go when she had no more room to store her own.

In the damp mausoleum for almost ten years she stored her Archive, book after book on the shelves, and adopted the ones already there, forsaken from her predecessor long past. But in truth, her real Archive was her home, beneath the old elm tree at the edge of the estate’s land. It-Knows-You took up humble residence and watched the people push back at the forest.

She returned one day, almost ten years after she moved in, to find that her books had been taken. Now they lived in the grand house in the clearing, and she cursed the man that took them. She said, I See you. I will always See you . There the curse began. Forever the pressure of It-Knows-You would dog his steps, no escape - only the eyes watching, staring, judging, until the man knew the wrong he had done and begged for her mercy. Her stolen stories changed him, bound him. She thought that was the end of it.

But the temple came calling, and her true Archive, her home, was burned because someone told the cursed man that it would lift the evil that plagued him. The old elm tree on the edge of the forest, and she screamed as it fell. She raged and called her books back to her, and watched with hungry eyes as the cursed man and his friend put them back in the old mausoleum.

The books were blank.

The far-away temple had stolen them.

So she killed the cursed man on the spot and filled his bones with eyes to judge him in the End for all he had done, and because her rage could not reach the new Archives.

For a new Archivist was rising.

Already, she felt...untethered. Without her tree, without her books, she was alone with only the warm presence of her God to guide her.

She began to wonder how the acolytes of the temple had known what to do. How did they know to burn her tree, the home of the ‘all-knowing fairy-woman of the forest’? How did they know it would break the hold of It-Knows-You in that place? 

Did they think it would kill her? Or did they know she would live on like a ghost, now that her Archives were gone?

The Knowing came to her - no, they did not. They thought she was dead.

The Archivist made an oath to her God. Never again. Never again .

She wandered, and she searched, and she burned the evidence she found of any hint of her kind’s purpose and culture and life.

Then she moved close to the new Archives. She took a new name, one that meant ‘defender’. She would get her Archives back one day. And she watched. She listened. She waited.

Once upon a time in the forest lived the Archivist, and she was angry.

“Danny, slow down! Tell it to me again,” Jazz said.

“Vlad’s going to try and perform some - Jon called it a ritual - something to I think merge the Ghost Zone and our world. Except worse. I think it might definitely be worse and we need to know what his plans are and you’re smart and- ”

“All right, all right,” she broke in. “I got it. And this new friend of yours - Jon? - I don’t understand, is he another ghost or...no, okay. But what can I do from here to help?”

“I- I don’t know. But we might need information from the Magnus Institute side of the ocean. Vlad’s working with someone else, Principal Bouchard. Jon said he used to work at the Institute, before he came to Amity Park two years ago. What if he left something behind? Like- a corkboard with all his plans, something .”

“Danny.”

“What! He could have a conspiracy corkboard.”

Jazz sighed fondly. “I can’t just break into his old office and take a look. Mr. Lukas works there.”

“What’s this I hear about breaking into Bouchard’s office?” Sasha asked, coming up behind her.

“Oh! Um, Sasha! Hey there!” she yelped, covering the mic on the Fenton Phone with one hand.

 She had thought no one else would look in this corner of the library, and figured it a private enough spot for the sudden phone call.

“Jazz? Who else is there?” Danny’s voice, muffled but still clear enough to make out.

Sasha smiled. “That your little brother?”

Jazz nodded.

“Hey! I’m not little!”

“And he’s trying to plan criminal activity for you why, exactly?” Sasha’s tone was sharply curious.

Jazz opened her mouth to lie, but hesitated. What Danny was talking about...it was big. She might need allies. So, she found herself telling the truth. “Bouchard is trying to do a ritual for a...sort of fear god together with this awful guy we know from Amity,” she said. “My brother said his friend Jon said- ”

“Wait,” Sasha interrupted. “Jon? Martin’s boyfriend? Gertrude’s...case?”

“Uh,” Danny said. “I mean, yeah. You know Martin, too?”

“He brings us Archives staff tea,” Sasha said. “They’re adorable together. But- these entities- this ritual- this is something Jon knows? ”

The emphasis on the final word caught Jazz’s attention. She pronounced it as if it implied more than simple confirmation of fact or fiction. More than that, Danny responded in the same fashion, like he understood.

“Yeah. He knows .”

“Well, shit,” Sasha said. “I thought we’d have more time.”

“Ah- Jazz, I have to go. The others are here. Just- just see what you can find out, all right? Anything- anything would help us at this point.”

Danny hung up. Jazz blinked. Sasha took her by the arm and led her out of the library and down the hall, towards the office. “Remember what I said about the worm queen that attacked?” she threw out over her shoulder.

Jazz tried to keep up and not stumble at the rapid pace the Archival assistant set. “Jane Prentiss? I thought she was dead.”

“She is,” Sasha said. “But the reason she attacked at all was because Bouchard planned a ritual. We still aren’t sure how she factored into his plan, but Jon got all eaten up by worms and- let’s just say he wasn’t happy. He convinced her to go after Bouchard, ran him out of town.”

They arrived at the office. Inside, Martin hastily clicked off a tape recorder and hid a small personal notebook behind his back. “Oh- um, Sasha, sorry, I was just recording some lines and uh- ”

“It’s all right, Martin. You know what Jon’s up to, right?”

“Uh, yeah he- oh. How can I help?”

Sasha clapped him on the shoulder. “I want to go back down into the tunnels. Jazz wants in to Bouchard’s office.” 

Martin grinned. “I will go socialize with Mr. Lukas and ask him lots of questions.”

Danny’s leg bounced against the ground as he lay on his back. “What do you think they’ll find over there?”

Jon shrugged. “Hopefully, evidence of what Elias’ plans are. I managed to chase him out of the Institute with worms, but I still think he saw it as a win in the end. They did injure me, after all.” He scratched at one of his acne scars, and Danny had a horrifying moment of realization. They were flesh-eating worm scars.

Tim said nothing, and crossed his arms. When he and Gerry had shown up to their after-school meeting, Danny felt uncertain. The look on Tim’s face was dark, and he stood as far away from Jon as possible. Neither spoke to or looked at each other for the entire introduction. Gerry had several bandaids on his knuckles.

“We need to focus on what we can do to stop Bouchard and Vlad here ,” Tucker said. “Getting the Fright Knight’s sword sounds like a step in the right direction.”

“He called it the ‘cornerstone’ of the ritual,” Sam noted, “but he didn’t know how Vlad planned on using it. That’s strange. Isn’t it a simple matter of getting it to the human world and sticking it in the ground?”

“Maybe it has to be - I don’t know, primed or something - or else it won’t work the way Vlad wants it to.”

Danny tapped his fingers on his knee, sitting up. “I can ask V- the Red Huntress if she can pick up the Fright Knight’s trail.”

Tim snorted. “Phantom’s girlfriend? You know her?”

“Long story,” Danny said, shifting uncomfortably and eyes darting from Gerry to Tim. He wasn’t sure how much Gerry had pieced together about his identity after picking up on his connection to the End, but he knew Tim was ignorant and would prefer him to stay that way. An alarming amount of new people had discovered his secret in a short amount of time, and Danny wanted to keep the number from growing.

Gerry said, “I can talk to Gertrude. She probably knows more about ending rituals than any one of us. And she has...resources.”

Jon agreed. “That’s true. I- I can’t say her methods are always the best, however. And I’ll need to be focusing on balance.”

Tim shot him a glare out of the corner of his eye, as if thinking no one else would see it.

Danny looked to Sam and Tucker. “Tim, if you want to work with Gerry getting your hands on the kind of supplies we might need to take this thing down, that would be for the best.” He smirked. “Unless you want to come to the Ghost Zone with us.”

“Oh, hell no.”

“Then Sam, Tucker, and I will work with Phantom and the Red Huntress to track down the Fright Knight’s sword,” Danny said. “Everyone, meet back here in three days.”

Tucker threw a hand into the middle of the circle their little group formed. “‘Ghostkateers’ on three?” he joked. Sam slapped his hand down.

Chapter Text

Jazz told herself that she only brought the blue hazmat suit in case of dangerous ectoradiation leakage. Just in case. As she put it on, she told herself that she in no way liked it or would consider it for daily wear.

Night in the Magnus Institute: the main staff gone for the day, and Sasha’s assurance that the only eyes watching the security cameras would be hers. The knowledge that anyone at all witnessed her stealthy creeping down the quiet hallways raised the hair on the back of her neck. Jazz was conscious of every creak in the old walls, every accidental loud footstep she made. These were actions not meant to be seen, recorded, catalogued, but to exist only in the dark and the unknown.

Night was also, apparently, when Peter Lukas, interim Head of the Magnus Institute, tended to work most often, because there was less chance of running into other living people. There were night shift employees, but they only added to the sense of loneliness that pervaded a working building at this hour. Jazz waited in the shadows outside the Bouchard-Lukas office for him to emerge. She had been waiting for an hour. Martin paced back and forth under the hallway lights, under the pretense of reading a file in confusion. Finally, it became obvious that Lukas simply did not plan on ever emerging, possibly for the next year, and she gave Martin the go-ahead signal.

He rapped smartly on the door, a stack of papers in his other arm. “Good evening, Mr. Lukas!” he called out. “I have some office work that I believe needs your attention.”

“Martin,” a muffled, gravelly voice replied from within the office, “Surely one of the other employees can be of service. I’m rather busy.”

“Oh, I know!” Martin said. “I wouldn’t bother you unless it was urgent. Sasha wanted me to tell you that a boatswain’s whistle went missing from Artefact Storage, and- ”

The door immediately swung open, and the man who stepped out had a distinctly frantic aura to him. “What?” he said. He had mostly salt hair with some pepper, turned full white in places, and a clammy pallor to his skin. Lukas locked the office behind him and patted at the pockets of his peacoat. “You’re sure she said a- a boatswain’s whistle?”

“Yep!” Martin took a step back. “If you’ll come with me? She said there would be paperwork and that I would need someone with Artefact Storage clearance to come with me, so…”

Lukas took the lead down the hallway, setting a brisk pace that Martin scrambled to follow after. “Oh, and while I’ve got your attention! I’ve been meaning to ask you loads of questions about some things that have come up, and of course then I’m just curious about some of the Institute’s history in general…”

As Martin and Lukas disappeared from view, Jazz quickly slipped from her hiding place and confronted the locked door.

She and her mother spent three hours trapped in the Fenton Weapons Vault one time. After the initial panic, it was a great mother/daughter bonding experience. Maddie Fenton knew how to pick several kinds of high and low-tech locking mechanisms, and patiently taught them all to her daughter. In the end it came down to angry usage of the Fenton Ecto Saber and melting a hole directly through the door, but her mom counted it as lockpicking.

Jazz felt secure at the sight of the lock on Elias Bouchard’s office, a standard Mul-T-Lock that she practiced on all the time at home. She unzipped one of the pockets of her suit and removed a torsion wrench and a pick, and after a few minutes of careful leverage and wiggling, the lock turned smoothly and she somersaulted through the open door with a faint squeak of rubber on the tile floor.

She locked it again behind her and surveyed her surroundings. Lukas had left the light on, and Jazz could read the signs of two contrasting personalities having worked in the same space. At some point she bet the room had been meticulously organized, not a dust speck out of place. Everything that looked business-related was still neat and tidy, but scattered personal objects littered the desk and chairs and windowsill. A smoking pipe here, a model ship there on the mantelpiece of the enormous empty fireplace.

Above the fireplace hung a massive painting of the Institute’s founder, Jonah Magnus. His smirking blue eyes followed Jazz as she paced from one side of the room to the other, testing the old wooden floorboards experimentally to see if she could detect any hollow places. Approaching the painting made her nervous. The prickling sensation of eyes on the back of her neck only increased when she turned away from it, and after startling at nothing for the third time Jazz decided enough was enough. She rolled the desk chair over to the fireplace and squared her shoulders, then climbed up to lift the heavy painting off the wall. She turned it around and leaned it against the side of the room so that it didn’t see her.

Jazz stared at the space where the painting had been in disbelief. “Wow,” she said aloud. “He actually did that.”

A small box was set into the wall. It wasn’t quite a safe, having no lock to speak of, but when she opened the box’s little door she found a stack of papers.

Jazz glanced at the entrance to the office and listened carefully, but heard no sounds to indicate that Lukas was back yet. She flicked through the papers, realizing that they were letters - old letters, all addressed to Jonah Magnus.

Dear Jonah,

I’m afraid I must decline the offer of your company this month. I’m sure you know how it is with myself, and will bear me no ill will for this gentle rebuff.

I am, however, writing to reassure you that your Institute’s predecessor shall not be troubling you further. I can find no evidence to suggest that the former Archivist lives. Her place of residence caught fire, and no research I have done suggests that she can exist without it. 

I am happy, of course, to search farther afield for greater understanding of this most peculiar of professions. You send me to such distant, lonely places that I scarce can wait to discover where the next one shall be. I am thinking, in fact, that I may become a traveller by nature rather than stay settled in a city that grows so rapidly with each passing day. I find I have too many neighbors even at our estate.

This must be a short missive, as I have a coach to Edinburgh due to leave within the quarter hour. I hope the new Archivist works well with you.

Sincerely,

Your friend

Mordechai Lukas

Jazz’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t understand the context of the letter, but she could read between the lines well enough to spot murder intrigue.

The corded phone on the desk started ringing.

Jazz jumped and spun around. Her heart hammered. Should she answer it? No, Lukas was supposed to be the only one in the office. But what if he was close enough to hear it and came in to answer it?

She lunged for the phone and compromised with not betraying herself by speaking first.

“Good evening,” said a cool, measured voice. It was not the generic Midwest American accent of Principal Bouchard that Jazz now knew was as fake as it sounded. It was , however, his attitude , a smug posturing condescension that reminded her strongly of Vlad. It was even worse in a British accent. “Might I assume this is not Peter? He usually waits until the last ring, or second call.”

The voice paused, considering. “You know, you should really put those letters back, they’re quite old.”

Jazz’s grip on the phone tightened. Her eyes flickered to the painting. It had been watching her. She thought of Martin, chatting up Lukas as a distraction. From the depths of her brain she yanked the most annoyingly terrible American-trying-to-do-a-British-accent she could think of and put a smile on her face and in her voice, responding with Lancer-worthy levels of pep.

“Sorry! I’m Mr. Lukas’ unexpected secretary for the evening! I’ll just let him know he has a message from Jonah Magnus waiting, and he’ll nip right over in a pip!”

“I- what.”

“Wot wot,” Jazz added helpfully.

“What was that last part?”

“Mr. Lukas will nip right over in a pip?”

“No, before that.”

“I’m his unexpected secretary?”

“No! In the middle.”

“I’m to take a message from Jonah Magnus?” Jazz said innocently.

The line went dead.

Jazz set the phone back on the hook and smiled. Sasha’s information came through. How she knew it was another matter.

She spent some time going through the remaining letters, but frustratingly they were all either boring personal correspondence or stories of the supernatural. There appeared to be no pattern, other than a lot of discussion about Millbank Prison. Jazz suspected that the letters might be meaningful parts of Bouchard’s plan, but only made sense to Bouchard himself. She hung the smirking portrait back on the wall, left the office with time to spare and made sure the door locked behind her.

“Martin, I- I really don’t care ,” Peter Lukas finally said in complete frustration. “While I am flattered that you thought to write a poem about my - loneliest building in London - ” he said through gritted teeth “ -I am far more concerned with my - I mean the - missing boatswain’s whistle, so I will be returning to my office and making some calls immediately.”

He stalked off, passing Jazz on the way. Martin sighed in relief as she caught up to him. “How’d it go?” she asked.

“Perfect,” Martin said. “I introduced him to the night shift Artefact Storage staff, and they invited him to trivia night. Did you find anything?”

Jazz shook her head. “Sadly, no. If he writes down his plans at all, Bouchard didn’t keep them in his office. We can only hope Sasha found something.”

They headed down to the Archives. Martin led the way to a room where a trapdoor was set into the floor, currently closed. Noises came from below.

“That’s more than one voice,” Jazz realized. As the noises came closer, Martin grabbed a tape recorder off of one of the tables and held it out in front of him like a talisman.

The trapdoor burst open, and a handcuffed teenager was thrown bodily out. She landed on her stomach with an oof , and after a moment, Sasha climbed up and hauled the teenager to her feet.

“Who is that? ” Jazz stared.

The teen growled. “Daisy Tonner!” She glared at Sasha. “I’m a monster hunter.”

Sasha calmly met her eyes. “I’m not a monster, kid.”

“Yes, you are. Too many eyes ,” Daisy snarled. “I can smell it on you.”

“Anyway, I found this girl in the tunnels, trying to kill me,” Sasha explained. “Also, I’m going to need help moving a body.”

“You- what?”

“Don’t worry about it.” She pulled a chair over and plonked Daisy down into it. “Now, listen. Daisy, was it?”

Daisy fumed silently.

“You’re a skilled Hunter, I can see that much. We’re on a hunt, too, and I’d like to ask you some questions. Would that be okay?”

“Do you really need my permission? I know you can make me tell you, pull my secrets out of me like - teeth.” Daisy bared her own to emphasize her point. Jazz noted the canines were longer than they should have been.

“I can, yes,” Sasha admitted. “But I have safeguards in place so I don’t do it accidentally.” She reached down the side of her collar and pulled a long necklace chain out from where it was tucked into her shirt. At the end of it hung an evil eye protection symbol.

Daisy laughed. “Oh, that’s rich. An eye for an eye.”

“I know, right?” Sasha made a face.

Martin gaped like a fish. “That’s- Jon wears that. You- and he didn’t know about you? ”

“I’m good about keeping the necklace on.” She looked back at Daisy, and slowly removed the necklace, setting it in her lap. 

Daisy’s bound hands twitched into clawed shapes, then relaxed. “You can ask me one question,” she said. 

Sasha took a deep breath. “D o y ou - whoops, bit rusty - do you have any dealings with Elias Bouchard, or as otherwise known, Jonah Magnus? ”

Her eyes glowed neon green, like Danny’s ghostly eyes. Jazz’s mouth opened without her knowledge, watching in amazement. The question poured from Sasha’s mouth in musical static, bringing with it the sense of the world warping around her and the pressure of unseen eyes.

“No, I do not,” Daisy said, enunciating clearly. “My turn for a question. What are you, if not a monster?”

Sasha smiled. “ I am the Archivist of the Schwartzwald .” She threw the evil eye pendant back around her neck. “Now, harmless question time - who wants to help me move Jimmy Magma’s body?”

Chapter Text

From the private journal of Gertrude Robinson, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute.

20 January, 2005

ARCHIVIST. ARCHIVIST THERE’S A SPIDER.

I am trying to write, Watcher. It’s not the Web, it’s most likely just a normal spider. Leave it alone and it will leave you alone.

Anyway. The New Year celebrations came and went, and I have been so busy I haven’t had the chance to write in this journal until now. So. This is a record of the 8th year of the Ceaseless Watcher’s...incarnation. He still occupies the house, and seems content to stay. Even so, the outer doors and windows remain marked with the Dark. My apartment is not far, but I keep these journals in the house, away from other eyes.

The Watcher is developing roughly along the same lines as a human child, although at times he appears older, taking on what I assume to be the same age as the human body of the Archivist he used to be. Those moments have diminished greatly as he grows more confident in his new form. He feeds mostly on written statements now, ones that I sneak from the Archives.

His personality is- well. Demanding. Snide. Unexpected, at times. He is afraid of spiders. He constantly asks for new books, but is exceedingly picky. If the Watcher feels as though he has read a book before, it is of no interest to him, and so I have become a scourer of every library and bookstore in London.

We are making steps towards speech. At first, I could not hear his voice at all without being seized with great pain, my eyes beginning to bleed, yet having all damage healed by my connection. I am thankful to report that he can now speak through the tape recorders. The voice is often garbled with static, but otherwise fine. His preferred method, however, remains as manifesting words directly into my notebook. I wonder if the handwriting was the old Archivist’s, or if it is entirely new. I suppose I would have to see one of the original documents of his time, but of course those are nearly impossible to trace, if any still exist at all. The ones still in his Archive with him were fouled with rot and worms, and unsalvageable.

Archivist. The spider has been defeated, but there is now a hole in the wall.

What.

I threw a brick at it. It's dead, but I didn't anticipate the wall being so weak.

Don't move. Let me see this. And where did you get a brick?

Jon traced the pages in the old notebook, thoughtful. Gertrude was at the Research Center for the day, investigating. He was expected to be at school. Instead, he stayed in the apartment, experimenting and thinking.

His evil eye pendant lay on the counter, but he kept his Gaze to the confines of their living space. Gertrude brought the journals everywhere now, the record of his struggle to- to Become, to adopt humanity once again. He didn't remember the struggle to hang onto it as it slipped away. He didn't remember ever being human, not really. That human life was so distant it was hard to believe he had not always been himself, a god and its avatar bound together.

Jon thought about the scroll from Alexandria. About its hypothesis that the Archivist lived on past the destruction, and how it had been correct. He considered his own hypothesis, that the last Archivist from before the Institute survived. Late yesterday evening, he- he felt it. A flicker of awareness, a tug on his power from the direction of the Institute. Distant, careful, his Archivist lived.

Martin was caught up in whatever was happening at the Institute. Jon breathed, in and out, tried not to worry, and focused on the exercise. 

He stroked the marks of his own handwriting, the impression of thought without care for pen or ink. His other hand rested on a tape recorder. Here, in the safety of a room with no other person to witness, Jon let himself Be.

The tape recorder clicked on, squealing with static. No words beneath. A sound issued from Jon's mouth, deep and musical, and there were no words in it either. The sound was seen by the thousands of glowing gold and green eyes that opened on the walls. One by one, those other eyes began to weep, the blood coming in smooth rivulets that ran down the walls and flowed to his feet. If there were words, this is what they would have said:

“Statement of Jonathan Sims, the Eye that Knows You, Beholding Ceaselessly, the Watcher, the Archivist and Archive of Knowledge.”

“There are things I do not know. I do not know when I was born. I do not know why. I do not know my first name. I do not know the future.

I do not know why people are afraid of me. 

That they are afraid and that I am a predator that feeds upon that emotion, of course, I do know. But I do not understand where that fear comes from. Why do humans, who strive so hard for the notice of something they call God, cower when it finally does? Humans, who work and suffer and pray that someone will take notice and help them. Why do they run in pursuit of knowledge and cry when they receive it? Why do they resent witnesses? Why do they destroy themselves and everything around them for the sake of any one of these questions?

It is a delight to watch, and yet confusing. 

And I am human, too. In the ways that count. Martin said so. I’m not sure if I fully believe him. But I find myself experiencing the same fears. I am afraid of being Seen the way I am, the things I am capable of, the emotions and thoughts I keep hidden. I am afraid of what knowledge I may uncover as much as I am afraid of not knowing all the answers. 

Two thousand years ago, there was an Archivist. He was scared of all the same things I am. But he was human, Becoming me. Now I am me, Becoming human. How similar are we now? There are powers that belong to my soul, pushing forward into the physical world. If I focus my Gaze, my body can transport away, through my own world and back.

Humans see my world in dreams, sometimes, whether I am walking through them personally or not. When the salt rains fall, they only scream because the great iris in the sky is watching their pain and drowning them in it. They do not question why it is crying.

It is a world where all things are Known, and Watched, and it is beautiful, and it is terrible, and I do not want it to be the only world. It should always exist behind the human mind, out of sight but always watching. How else could they fear properly?

How else could there be hope? This is a human thought. Hope is filled with so much fear and doubt, and it is delicious. This is not a human thought. I am full of both, struggling for balance.

I would ask Michael, but he hates Gertrude now and I have not Looked for the Distortion's door out of respect. 

My powers bend the world. Already I can feel the paranoia of Vladimir Masters as my curse sinks into him and feeds me his fear. His plans are rushed, as the pressure of my Gaze suffocates him. Does he know what game Elias Bouchard is playing with him? I do not know, either. I need to know.

There is a knock at the door. I Know who it is. Oh God.

I hope- I hope."

Jon threw his weight against the door to hold it closed just as the knob rattled. "You're supposed to be at school!" he said, frantic. Static still clung to his words.

"So are you, Jon," said the voice of Elias, only slightly muffled through the wood. "And my , I couldn't help but come investigate such a display of power, especially with Gertrude out. These Dark symbols hardly have any use at all, don't they? Pity." A scratching sound. Elias was picking at the closed eye stuck to the front like a wreath. 

"Piss off," Jon spat.

"Hm, language. I wanted to ask if you are aware of what your little friends in England are up to. They're stalled for now, but they are exceptionally rude."

"Good. I don't think they'll be stalled for long. What are you so worried about them doing?"

"Now, now. Jon, you're only a child. Be reasonable and stop this nonsense. Surely someone as tied to the Eye as you clearly are would want my ritual to succeed."

"Sorry, I can't quite hear you," Jon said. "There's a door in the way."

"As if you don't know what I mean." Elias paused. "What are you?"

Jon giggled. The man clearly wished he could Compel.

"You're not the Archivist," he reasoned. "Gertrude already took that role. And you're not like me. But you're not a normal acolyte, either."

Jon remained silent, leaning against the door. It was locked, but he didn't trust Elias.

"When the Ceaseless Watcher's Gaze pulls back from everything, it is rather obvious," he continued. "What was so interesting about you that it shifted its focus? You should be a scorch mark on the rug after that."

He bit back the threat he so desperately wanted to throw out, that if he opened the door then Elias would be no more. And Jon would have gotten rid of a regrettably good source of food. A distracted part of himself understood that without his strongest acolytes, his hunger would be unleashed in its full strength. Better to run circles around Elias and disrupt his plans.

The doorknob rattled again, another test. “Jon, I know you’re in there.”

Jon’s thoughts spun. He didn’t want to reveal his true nature to Elias, but he would if it came down to it. To see his face upon realizing that his God was a twitchy teenager. But it was risky. He wasn’t sure what would happen if someone found a way to kill his physical body. He wouldn’t die , but he had a feeling he would...no longer be himself. Return instead to that primordial state. 

He didn’t remember the long years of waiting in the Buried. But he remembered what he told Danny, what he told Martin once as well: I just want to have a life. That’s all. A life, and an Archive.

A life. A human life, and all that entailed. Joy and pain and sorrow and hope and love and boredom and fear . He didn’t want to ever give it up. He was Beholding, and he was Jon , and he would be human. He was human before he was either of those names, once. The Knowing came to him so suddenly it brought tears to his eyes. In that moment of perfect balance, with the halo of the Eye still surrounding his head, Jon remembered.

The smell of dust when the Nile flooded. 

The way the lighthouse looked at night.

The noise of the city and the way the people moved and talked and laughed and cried and screamed.

How it felt to realize his humanity was being stripped away and replaced with something else. 

How it felt to accept the change.

What he could do.

He opened the door on Elias, and watched the man’s eyes widen in surprise before a flicker of realization crossed his face and he shut them tight. “What are you?” he said again, this time in a whisper.

“ I am what I have always been ,” Jon said, calm. A rustle at his back, and wings unfolded. Dusty, pale yellow-brown like paper, shedding scales of salty crust from age. Riddled with worm lines and damp patches, but strong. On each hindwing, black eyes watching like an owl’s. They blinked away sleep. Tiny markings covered each, wrapping around the eyes and speckling across both forewings, moving and twisting and changing. They were words, the story of Jon’s life writing itself on papyrus wings with every beat of his heart, the words that tried to speak but could only ever be heard as static.

“ I am the Archivist of Alexandria. I slept below the earth as a city built and built and built itself over the grave of my Archive. I was hungry. I was wild. Gertrude Robinson stepped into that place with dynamite and thought to destroy me. And I said, I want to live. Save me .”

Jon stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind him, locking himself out. Then he shifted his Gaze, beat his wings, and slipped briefly into that other world to fly from one point of the Eye to another.

Chapter Text

[From an unmarked tape hidden in the Head Archivist’s office:]

[ Sounds of labored breathing, along with rocks and dust settling. ]

“...well, then. Let’s get to work.”

[ Footsteps crunch in a confined space .] 

“For posterity’s sake, I suppose I should at least describe the place. [ sigh ] This is Gertrude Robinson, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, currently exploring the lost area of the Serapeum of Alexandria. I have just passed through the bronze grate and tunnel detailed by a contact of mine last year, and now stand in what I believe to be the entry room. 

“There are...strange carvings on the wall, in between scroll alcoves. My own torch is not enough light to see them by, but the figures are not human, nor of any recognized Egyptian mythological beings. I can see- wings, of some sort, and there are eye motifs, naturally. Lots of carved writing. A shame. If I were an archeologist no doubt I would take rubbings of some to bring back, but. This looks like a support pillar.”

[ A shifting of weight, and a bag is set down .]

“No sense of the creature, yet, but I must work quickly. I could only smuggle so many charges with me.”

[ Gertrude’s footsteps move slightly distant, as she works on something away from the recorder .]

“That’s one.”

[ Click .]

[ Click .]

“...have I been here before? I could have sworn- no, no, I- no , this isn’t important, you silly thing. I’m just lost.”

[ Click .]

[ Click. There is an edge of static to the recording .]

“No sign of the creature. No sign of the Crusader’s body, either. I don’t like the implications of that. I can feel its Gaze on me, though. It’s watching me. Why won’t it attack? Does it sense that I am an Archivist, is it- bound, somehow?

“I’d appreciate it if it could show me the way out, at least. The marks I left on the wall to show me my way seem to have disappeared. [ An edge of sarcasm .] I wonder what could have done it. [ Her voice increases in volume as she shouts, the sound echoing in the caverns .] You quit that nonsense this instant!” 

[ The static increases to a low squeal .]

“Ah, that got its attention. If I can lure it to the center point- if I can find the center point again- it should be Buried enough when this place goes down to at least neutralize it, if not kill it outright.”

[ Gertrude’s footsteps pick up speed to a run as she rounds corners. The static over the recording comes in waves, as if something grows nearer and then farther at times. As Gertrude skids on loose rocks, the static grows into an ear-splitting shriek. Her voice can barely be detected beneath the din, breathy and panicked in a way that Gertrude has never shown .]

“...here you are, oh dear, I- argh- no, that’s not possible, how can you- no , my mind is my own, I am not one of yours- ” 

[ The words are spat with venom, but the static grinds and crashes and pops ever louder. All at once Gertrude’s breathing slows, and her words take on a dead calm that falls to the faintest sound below the static .]

“...I...See. Oh Great Watcher, my God, Vigilo, Audio, Opperior . Show me the way. Lead me out of this place with you.”

[ The static fades, but it never disappears from the recording from this point onwards. Gertrude is still eerily calm, and she now walks alongside a second set of shuffling footsteps .]

“ That was extraordinarily rude.”

[ Strange pauses in the conversation, as if something is being communicated but the recording cannot hear it. The static takes on different qualities, sometimes musical, sometimes simple white noise .]

“Can you even understand me? This- Compulsion, I don’t qualify that as proving you have consciousness beyond instinct. What am I even supposed to do with you? I’m blowing up this place, preferably with you inside, but since I’m apparently not allowed to do that…”

[...]

[ A scoff .] “I mean, what, am I supposed to bundle you into a taxi, take you back to my hotel room?”

[ Click .]

[ Click .]

“...Wh- where to, Miss?”

“On El-Gaish Road, if you please.”

[ The static makes a noise of agreement. An audible swallow from the taxi driver. He makes a valiant attempt to acknowledge the other figure in the car .] “R- right, and you as well, si- ma- …...sir?”

[ An explosion drowns out even the static. The driver swears in Arabic .] “What- ”

“I wouldn’t worry about it.” [ Gertrude’s voice is smooth, practiced .]

[ Click .]

[ Recording ends .]

Gertrude organized the papers and books at her library desk, deep in thought. If they could find the suspected other living Archivist, if they could transfer the focus of power away from the Magnus Institute...she had a way out. Free of charge, duty fulfilled. She would be free , truly, without such drastic measures as Eric Delano had taken. Gertrude imagined she would go on stopping further rituals until the day she died, but she had her doubts. Rituals had been attempted long before she was born, and nothing came of them. A more childish mind could think up some secret society sworn to defend the world from evil, interfering in a great never-ending battle.

Gertrude had not been a child in a long, long time. Not since the first time she killed something nameless and supernatural, and both her naivety and a building collapsed around her. Humans worked randomly, at times together and at times apart, always with changing morals and beliefs. No pure-hearted Knights of the Round in this fairy tale, just people being people. 

She held no illusions of herself. She stopped caring about collateral damage at some point, holding it in balance with all the cold calculation of a fallen angel still convinced of its divine reasoning. The day she rescued Jonathan from the Serapeum, 17 people died in the explosion. Perhaps they were innocent, perhaps by some stroke of luck they were all evil to their bones. She never checked. People died, and an incarnation of Fear lived in their place.

And that incarnation of the Ceaseless Watcher was...human. He lived, and loved, and feared, and hoped. He also fed more richly the more frightened a person was, but obligate carnivores only had so many options, so Gertrude didn’t entirely look down on him for it. On the other hand, he Compelled, and stole, and cursed, and haunted. This was the life that others had bought. Asking if it was worth it was someone else’s question, Gertrude decided.

Now she knew another ritual was stirring, now she knew Jon wanted no part in it, now she knew he was doing everything in his power to stop it.

Now she knew the hunger of the End was stirring.

Chapter Text

Gerry and Tim got along like a Leitner on fire. After splitting off from the group, they set to work gathering supplies and preparing to meet with Gertrude the next morning. Supplies, a word which here means “copious amounts of incendiary devices”. Tim didn’t know much about rituals, or the overarching fear gods, but he agreed with Gerry that trying to kill them with fire probably wouldn’t hurt in this case.

Gerry checked the contents of his black backpack for the fifth time and slung it over his shoulder. Despite the heavy weight, he hopped easily up the steps of the Research Center.

“So we just walk right in with- ” Tim said. Gerry looked back over his shoulder. He stood on the first step, uneasily playing with his shoulder straps.

“Yeah, don’t worry, I do this all the time.”

Tim seemed the opposite of reassured, but finally followed him through the front doors.

Gerry navigated his way past the main desk and wove through a warren of study tables until he found Gertrude, sporting a pastel pink cardigan and sipping from a mug of tea as she paged through a journal, occasionally adding further notes.

“Gerard,” she noted, not looking up.

“Gertrude,” Gerry replied. “We’re working on stopping a ritual. I...assume Jon has told you?”

Gertrude’s head lifted sharply at that. “Not in so many words, no. But I have gathered as much, yes.”

“Great.” Gerry motioned to Tim. “He’s helping. What do you know about cornerstones- things rituals hinge on?”

“With the Unknowing, it’s skin,” Gertrude said. Tim shuddered. “With the Great Twisting, it was...well. A place , you might say.”

Gerry narrowed his eyes. He knew only a fragment of the story of what had happened with Michael Shelley, but it meant his and Gertrude’s business dealings had always been rather frosty. He trusted her about as far as he could throw her.

She took another sip of her tea. A calmness filled her eyes. “Stopping any ritual while it’s in progress requires sacrifices. The End has never attempted one, to my knowledge. It should have no need to do so. But with a colleague of mine pulling strings, it now begins to take shape.”

“We can all make it through this,” Gerry said. “With enough power in the right places.”

Tim’s eyes furtively flitted between the two of them, detecting the undercurrent of animosity. “Look, could I get a word in?”

Before either of them could speak, he continued anyway. “I’m gonna be honest, normal people don’t use the word sacrifices in that tone of voice. Not sure I like it. Moving on, we’re in a bit of a time crunch here. We know there’s this- sword?” He looked to Gerry for confirmation. “Sword. Not sure what it does, but it’s bad news. What if we just destroy that? Will that be enough to stop it, if it’s the cornerstone?”

“Perhaps,” Gertrude said. “Destroying the thing before the ritual gets underway would be ideal. But these kinds of artifacts generally can’t be broken by ordinary means.”

“You managed to get rid of one of the skins the Circus was interested in for the Unknowing,” Gerry pointed out.

“Yes,” Gertrude agreed. “With C4. Which I am not entrusting to teenagers.”

“Strange that’s where you draw the line.”

“Gerard.”

“It’s a sword,” Tim cut in. “How hard could it be to break?”

Gerry snorted. “A ghost’s sword, one cut of which transports you into a limbo state between our world and the world of the Entities. Your own personal hell.”

“Okay, but that means you can physically touch it, right?” Tim mimed karate-chopping it in half. 

“The problem with ghosts here in Amity Park is that the realm of the End changes things. How do you break - how do you kill - something that’s made of Death? It might just reform from its ectoplasm no matter how many times you snap it.”

“The sword’s owner could likely destroy it for you,” Gertrude said, a nasty smile on her face.

Gerry huffed in irritation. “The ghost helping with the ritual? Yeah, that’ll go over well. Are you being unhelpful on purpose? Or you’re just letting us run in circles while you get all the real work done.”

“No, I think I’ll sit this one out, actually,” Gertrude said.

“ What? ”

“You’re not going to help? ” Tim cried. “You’re the only adult here with access to bombs!”

Gertrude chuckled. “I think it’s better that I don’t interfere. Gerard, you’ve made it quite clear that you don’t approve of my methods, and Jon is...more than capable. Somehow, I have faith it will all turn out for the best.”

“But you still won’t give us C4,” Gerry said flatly.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Please. The more reckless of you would no doubt blow yourselves up.” She leveled Tim with a stare worthy of Beholding itself.

“Hey,” Tim said in weak offense, but made no move to deny that possibility.

“How about negotiating for some dynamite?”

Gerry stomped down the steps of the Research Center, grumpy. After Gertrude denied his dynamite request with a roll of her eyes and a statement that C4 was a much more stable explosive, he and Tim were forced to leave with only their backpacks full of impromptu flamethrowers and Molotov cocktails.

“At least we know the sword can be destroyed,” Tim said. “And maybe we should burn it a few times first, just for fun.”

Gerry nodded, not really paying attention. He was still angry at Gertrude for suddenly dropping what felt like her life’s purpose: ending rituals with extreme prejudice.

They worked their way back down Amity Park’s streets, towards the Skulk and Lurk. Gerry knew the Fright Knight was a popular book subject, and maybe he could find other information…

He turned down an alley shortcut, Tim on his heels. They had barely gone five paces when Gerry felt his connection to the Eye wrench , and Mothman attacked them.

“Gah! What the hell- ” Tim shouted. Papery wings beat against their faces. Gerry’s mouth filled with flaky dust and old glue. He coughed, trying not to breathe it into his lungs. The pressure of the Ceaseless Watcher was immense, and every instinct warred against him. The part of his mind given to the Fears said relax and let go , while the rational part of him said runrunRUN .

Then Mothman said, “ Oof. What on earth are you two doing here? ”

“You had better not be Jon,” Tim growled.

“We’re on our way to the bookshop- Jon? ” Gerry first answered the Compulsion, then joined Tim in appallment. 

The creature flapped dust into their faces a few more times as it scrambled backwards. Gerry...stared, and felt his eyes begin to burn. Tim squinted as if against sunlight, one hand raised to shield his face. The air warped around the figure, and for a moment Gerry couldn’t tell whether it was taller or shorter, old or young. He could only discern eyes , blazing golden light and staring into his soul, reading his life, shimmering on outstretched wings, all horribly fixed on him .

He felt suddenly ashamed of every misstep he had made in his life, every moment of guilt or embarrassment. Some of the eyes looked at him with pity, others with anger, or no emotion beyond mild curiosity. He writhed on the ground of the alley, broken glass grinding into his palms, and pressed the back of a hand to his forehead to cover his eyes as his vision became blurred with red pain.

“ Sorry abo ut that,” it said, and gradually the many eyes closed and the warped quality to the air settled. The figure took on a more certain shape, until Gerry could finally look again and see that it was Jon, with those wings closed, hanging like a cloak of yellowed parchment from his shoulders.

Tim took the opportunity to speak, “What the fuck?” into the silence that followed.

Jon’s wings twitched nervously. He opened his mouth to speak to Tim, but then thought better of it and addressed Gerry. “Long story. Elias is uh, might be after me?” A far-away look of Knowing came over his face. “Yes, he’s trying to come after me.”

Gerry made a vague gesture at the wings on Jon’s back and wiped something out of his eye. His fingers came away bloody, but the burning sensation had stopped.

Jon looked at the wings, spreading one slightly so that an eyespot was showing. He blinked at it and it blinked back. “I- it’s a whole thing. Not really new- new to this life, maybe?”

Tim hauled himself to his feet. “My day just keeps getting better,” he muttered. “Can’t you put those away?”

A flinch moved through Jon. “Uh, no. Haven’t- haven’t quite figured that bit out yet. A- and my protection charm is...not with me. Left it.”

“Where’s Elias now?” Gerry asked, deciding to save some of his questions for later.

“Following me,” Jon said with a groan. “I can’t exactly hide like this. He just has to Look.”

“Not what I asked.”

“About five blocks away. This is the third time I’ve had to move positions.”

Gerry grabbed Jon’s arm and started running. Tim made a noise of surprise and matched pace. “Why are you running? We’ve got weapons, we know Bouchard is part of this ritual plot, why not wait around for him?”

He shook his head. “Too dangerous. Elias is…” Gerry looked to Jon for answers.

“ I’d like to avoid accidentally killing him ,” Jon said, unhelpfully. Static crackled at the edge of hearing.

Gerry blinked. “Uh, all right then. Or that.”

Tim elbowed him in the ribs, and he stumbled. “What if we distract him instead?”

“Distract him how - what would - he can be distracted.” Jon’s tongue skipped over questions.

Tim casually took a bottle and rag out of his backpack and smirked when they stopped moving. “Y’all know where his house is?”

Elias Bouchard’s mansion squatted on the edge of town in the rich neighborhood, with its ugly neighbors. It was built in an old Regency style, a cream white with front columns on either side of the main doors. A massive, obnoxiously empty grassy lawn stretched away in front of it, edged by neatly trimmed bushes. The white cobblestone driveway wrapped around in a circle, wide and desolate. 

This layout meant that the walk up to the house was almost entirely exposed. Tim kept looking over his shoulder, and Gerry firmly tried to put the sense that someone was watching him from every one of the numerous windows out of his mind. He flipped off the security cameras at the front gates when they climbed over the fence.

Jon had bought them time, drawing Elias on a wild moth chase all around the town. 

When they finally made it to the base of the structure, Tim and Gerry took a moment to take in the scale. Gerry rummaged in one of the zipper pockets and removed several lighters. He looked from them to the house, and frowned. “Damn, I should have brought more.”

Tim laughed. “Hey, I only have two. And a fire extinguisher. Should we leave it out front, as a nice present?”

“Absolutely.”

Tim set the small extinguisher down on the cobbles, where the shadow of the mansion loomed over it. “Okay. You take the left wing, I’ll take the right?”

By way of answer, Gerry lit a Molotov and threw it with pinpoint accuracy into the window of what looked like an office.

Chapter Text

It had to be Bouchard’s work. He never should have trusted the slimy Observer. ‘ Be respectful, or you’ll find eyes choking the inside of your throat. ’ Foul man, playing at immortality as if he knew the reality of Death.

He was watching Vlad now. No matter how many sigils of the Dark he cloaked himself in, no matter where in the Ghost Zone he fled. The arrogant intrusion of the Ceaseless Watcher, clawing at the back of his neck. It infected his dreams, and it had the audacity to do more than watch. It interfered , cold and brutal, and it tore statement after statement from his throat in the form of mangled prayers. 

Vlad awoke those nights screaming with rage, still babbling in barely coherent sleep-talk through the growls - 

I was always a servant of Death, I think. From my first experiments cleaning roadkill and extracting ectoplasm from the lungs, to my first glimpse of a real ghost. Jack was a necessary hindrance. Infatuated with Maddie as he was, and alongside her superior intelligence brought a certain degree of...I am loath to say creativity , but the machines he invented could only be brought to life by the three of us working together. Such wondrous ideas...I take pleasure in the knowledge that without my willingness to play with the End, he can never truly bring them to fruition .

Elias, that bastard coated with a rind of smug self-congratulation. What had he done? 

Vlad had been awake now for five days, seven hours, forty-three minutes. Between the eyes in his sleep and the eyes skittering around his peripheral vision, and the prickling nausea of eyes watching his insides, he feared something in him would snap that hadn’t already. He needed that razor-edged focus. 

But the Fright Knight was twitchy. Lingering in his laboratory, unsheathing and examining the sword over and over again as if he had any right to claim it. It belonged to the King, not his errant servant. 

Sir Rowan de la Peur...a former servant of the Eye . As too with Pariah before him, wielding a sword to contain and bear impassive witness to fear. Did he know? He must know, the way he caressed the sword. De la Peur was planning to betray him, it was obvious. Still harboring loyalty to a fallen king, or the risen one? He knew . They all did, they were all laughing at him and it drove him mad.

Vlad ripped through a dozen insignificant ghosts that week, and he was half-tempted to devour the Knight’s core and find someone else to be the sacrifice. But it wouldn’t be right . It had to be the Knight, offered up to the End itself. The King must take back his sword from the lake of Death.

Jon felt Elias’ Gaze leave him the second the house fire really got going. He rested briefly on a telephone pole to admire the glow. A fire truck went screaming in the mansion’s direction, which Jon took as his cue to disappear. 

The crack between worlds he created with his wings opened far easier than before, when he simply forced an opening with his Gaze. Now the wings did the Looking ahead of time. His aim was still off, though. He ran into the sides of buildings and lampposts, anything that caught his ambient attention too long. As such, his movements were distressingly similar to those of a real moth.

Jon focused, ready to flit back across town and grab his protection charm from the apartment. He overshot it a little, the eyespots on his hindwings distracted by orange flame and the hum of the End.

He neatly teleported himself into Vlad Masters’ laboratory. He overcame his shock quickly. Now that he was here...

The avatar had seen better days, and Jon took the time allotted thanks to the element of surprise to admire his curse’s handiwork.

Vlad’s hair hung wild and loose from his ponytail. His teeth were sharp, and he prowled back and forth across a tiny section of the expansive steel floor as if held by an invisible cage. This close, Jon could almost see the eyes rolling beneath the skin, but their effects were evident on the outside of the man as well. His furrowed eyebrows twitched and stretched with every movement of his head from side to side, scanning for unseen watchers. And always, half-whispered beneath his breath, a phrase repeated over and over - “Cast it away.”  

Curious. Jon tilted his head to one side. The curse hinged on an obsession of the man’s, and so it never took the same form twice. Some source of forbidden power and knowledge that the Eye revoked. A brief Glance around the room saw an open portal to the End - ah, the cause for his accidental detour.

“ Take me up, cast me away. Cast it away. Cast it awa- ” Vlad’s head shot up.

Jon smiled serenely, feeling the way his Gaze pinned that man in place. “Hello, false god. Enjoying the attention, are we?”

“...Elias?” he said, uncertain. “What - no, you must be Gertrude’s grandchild.” Vlad’s eyes narrowed with the fever of paranoia. “That liar. He sent you.”

“Wrong on all counts, I’m afraid.” Jon folded his wings behind him and paced the lab. He knew how to play their game - give the impression of aloof superiority. His heart felt too human for it, though, beating rapidly in fear. He grit his teeth and tried to calm down. Despite himself, despite how close to his true, full self he was in this moment, he would never be rid of the fear of death. How could he, when every facet of the greater Entity knew that even they were ultimately mortal?

And this avatar of Death was broken, yes, but dangerously wild. 

“You expect me to believe you have no knowledge of his plans?” Vlad sneered.

“Mm. No. But I have less knowledge than I would like,” Jon said. “I am ever-hungry for it. Your statements are appreciated, by the way. Thank you.”

Vlad shuddered. “You...you did this to me.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I’m the Archivist. I’m the Beholding. All I have to do is See you.”

Without warning, a second Vlad snapped in front of Jon and seized his throat. It happened faster than lightning. The double snarled into his face. “All I have to do is Kill you.”

Panic shot through Jon, and he scrabbled at the avatar’s hand ineffectually. A mistake, staying here, goading a cursed man he had nearly beaten. Death was in all places at all times, of course Vlad could make copies of himself. This could ruin everything, attacking Vlad too soon before the ritual. 

His wings flared, the eyespots shaking and glowing and watching . Both Vlads hissed and the choking grip was released. Jon scrambled backwards, out of reach for now. The two copies circled around, working perfectly in sync with each other. 

“You’re not the Eye,” said one.

“No, not the Eye,” said the other.

“Just its experimental pet .”

Perhaps Jon understood the Slaughter. His form exploded into light, the mockery of a halo transformed utterly into a staring eye. Static and squealing noise crashed down on the room. Eyes, physical and wet with blood and tears, opened on every spare surface. Jon’s wings spread haughtily, the eyes rimmed with blazing gold. The constantly shifting words of his life, writing themselves on papery scales, twisted into a language that hurt to look upon. The language of Fear, spoken in beating hearts and screams and sobbing and quiet panic, in nervous tics and mounting dread.

“How dare you,” the Eye spat in a voice that was entirely static. “Is the Archivist not my vessel for the lifetime of every Archive? What do you know, Vlad Masters, of communion with Fear? You, who are only its reluctant avatar because you stuck your nose where it did not belong. You, who wanted glory. You forced the hand of the oldest facet of myself, thinking it was yours to control.

“Statement of Vladimir Masters, regarding his obsession. Talk. ”

I am not in love with Maddie Fenton. That much should be obvious after so long. She is in love with her work, with a world beyond, fascinated by a god beyond. She dances the line between being a mere affiliate and the path of belonging to one of the great powers. A little of the Hunt, a little of the End, of the Eye. They call her, I know. I saw it in our college days.

Perhaps I should start with the vultures. When I was a child, I saw a vulture dead on the side of the road. It had been struck by a car as it fed on the corpse of a deer. There were three more vultures at its side, eating it in turn. They ignored the deer. I had gone for a walk in the fields, and happened upon the sight. The summer heat was strong that day; I remember the cicadas filling my ears with room for precious little else. A breeze sprang up, and I followed its path as it bent the stalks of wheat. 

Then the wind stopped. It wasn’t natural. A gust rises and dies, but this reached its peak strength and vanished . The cicadas no longer buzzed in my ears. For the first time all morning, my head was clear of noise. I strained to listen, but could discern no distant cars or planes. Every step I took forward into that hollow place without sound or breath seemed an intrusion. I was conscious of how alive I was. There were cicada husks at my feet: dead, shed shells of a former life, when they crawled out of the choking ground and broke into a new creation. Some clung to the wheat, backs split, foggy brown eyes still staring lifelessly up at the sky they had been left behind for. I liked to collect them. Line them up on my windowsill and sketch their shapes.

These were...wrong. I did not want to touch them. I picked my way between the shells littering the ground, afraid of stepping on them and adding a horrifically loud noise to the dead air. So focused on where I put my feet, I didn’t notice the birds until I stumbled out onto pavement and came almost within arm’s reach of them. 

The vultures made no noise as they picked at the carcass. The dead one lay on the asphalt, beak extended towards the deer in the ditch. Its neck twisted, feathers bent at odd angles. Its fellows had their heads buried in its stomach, and did not see me at first. I scarcely dared breathe, just cooked under the hot sun with no wind to lessen the blaze and watched the strange ritual. The birds were large, turkey vultures. When they withdrew their heads to tip up their beaks and swallow pieces of flesh, their red, featherless skulls were wet with blood.  

All three noticed me at the same time. They turned their necks to look at me and stared. I had never before seen hatred in an animal’s eyes. These vultures looked at me with such disgust and derision that I knew instantly I was not welcome, not meant to witness this funeral. They shuffled around the body, spreading their wings until it was completely hidden from my view, and bent their heads again to feed.

A car honked at me to get out of the road, and whooshed by when I backed away. When it passed, the vultures, even the deer, were gone. The cicadas were back, and the wind was blowing as if it had never stopped.

You may understand, then, why this engendered in me a curiosity and fixation on death. Not the act itself, not murder and brutalization, but the stillness. The little rituals we perform in the face of the End. Our theories and conjecture on what comes after. Those vultures, I knew, had their own theories. They belonged to a world I did not and had blocked me from further understanding.

I pursued the paranormal from then on. 

Maddie reminded me of the vultures. She understood Death in a way I did not. Oh, I could dance with it, lead it around and pull secrets from it, but it did not yield to me the way it did to her. It did not call me. I had to call it, again and again, left waiting while she spun the talk of calculations and portals into tangible evidence.

Perhaps it looks like love from the outside, even in my own eyes sometimes. If she, the flirt of the End, would only dance with me until Death do us part, it would let me in. Let me be a full part of that other world which stabbed itself through my eyes and gifted me stolen power.

I hate that the End loves her son, Daniel. He fell into it body and soul, and it transformed him. Is it fair that it should fight me at every turn, for no reason? By right it belongs to me, who has loved it since that day.

To his credit, Vlad did not cower or scream as his ears and eyes bled, even around the tightly  shut lids and the hands he clapped over the sides of his head. He withstood the storm, and dropped to his knees only when Jon pulled back on his anger. The humming of the portal to the End barely carried through the deafening silence that followed. Jon’s wings rustled gently into their cloak at his back. His physical vision was still strange, the single, lidless eye within his face lingering with the memory of centuries trapped and bitter in a forgotten library. Unable to move forward. Unable to move back. An incarnate god of knowledge, cut off from knowing. He held no mercy for lies .

And Vladimir had been lying to himself for a long, long time.

The static and pressure of Beholding grew one last time in the laboratory, as Jon focused his attention elsewhere. And then with the dust-beating sound of moth wings, he left.

Chapter Text

Sam grit her teeth and clung tightly to Valerie’s waist as her hoverboard looped and twisted, dodging the shots fired by angry denizens of the End. Tucker dangled unceremoniously from Danny’s leg. He answered fire with the Fenton lipstick laser, swinging wildly whenever his friend’s half-human form shivered and changed shape in his grip.

“ Please stop doing that, you’re going to drop me!” Tucker griped.

Danny rolled his eyes. “Would you rather get shot out of the air?” 

The speeder was a smoking wreck, drifting lazily down into the endless depths of the Ghost Zone.

“Danny, I thought you said this way was supposed to be less guarded.” Sam flinched as an ectoblast barely missed her ear.

“It was. ”

From the looks of things, the Fright Knight had woken up the King’s army of skeletons and other assorted gremlins. Ethereal arrows whistled through empty space alongside the more direct ghostly attacks. Most avoided aiming at Danny, which Sam thought only fair given their past history and the time Danny beat up the entire lot. Regrettably, this meant she was a prime target.

There was no way for her to fight back with an already unsteady footing on the hoverboard. Valerie’s guns helped, pink fire knocking bones back into unmoving piles, but Sam couldn’t reach the rifle strapped to her back without letting go.

Ahead, the castle loomed, red and ominous among the crumbled domain. Their mission was more desperate now than before, when they only sought answers. Now, they needed to get the sword away from Vlad’s control before it was too late.

Valerie suddenly dipped down in a dive, and Sam’s stomach rolled as they fell towards one of the old islands. “Hop off,” she said through her helmet’s vocoder. “I’ll cover you.”

Sam jumped, rolling as she landed and finally lifted the strap of her gun over and off her shoulders. Now with firm ground beneath her (or as firm a ground as the Ghost Zone had to offer), she sighted down the barrel and started taking shots. Tucker joined her moments later, dropped from Danny’s tail as the ghost snapped back around and swept towards the next wave.

“Leave them, Danny!” Sam shouted. “We need to focus.”

They played a game of leapfrog from floating island to island, gaining ground on the castle. Sam was prepared to hold outside the gates, but as soon as their team reached the main part of the domain...the attackers stopped.

“Well, shit,” Valerie said.

Sam nodded in grim agreement. The skeletons were silent, staring at them from across an invisible boundary. As if commanded, they slowly began returning to their usual patrol. Some even let the earth of the domain swallow them back up. The message it sent could not have been clearer, and it made her feel sick. They had been toyed with.

They were expected.

They were in Vlad’s plan now, and the pieces were already moving.

His eyes still burned, even though they no longer bled. In his ghostly form, their bloodshot effect rimmed red with crusted green. This was not how he wanted his plan to go, but he was afraid and so it must happen now if it were to happen at all. Vlad laughed and choked at equal turns, the spasms of humor clearly unsettling the Fright Knight, who shifted on the throne. These children and the creature they had befriended caused so much chaos in such a short amount of time even servants of the Slaughter would be impressed.

“You are…sure, about this, my - my liege?” Sir Rowan questioned, the first thing the ghost had said in quite some time. The armored fingers of his hand tapped anxiously on the hilt of his sword.

“Of course, of course,” Vlad soothed. Eyes watching him, ever present, he only had to wait for the conclusion and his ritual would destroy the threat. 

“But the King – ”

“--will be me , Knight.” All young Daniel had to do was be fooled by the lie.

The sounds of battle beyond the great doors stopped. Ah, then, it was time. He gestured impatiently to the Knight, who rose into the air, ready for his final act.

Danny poked his head through the door to the castle. “Hey, any assholes in here?”

Two, apparently, as he caught sight of Vlad leering ominously behind the rapidly approaching shape of the Fright Knight. He danced backwards, barely clearing the impact site as Sir Rowan simply slammed shoulder-first into the doors, breaking them open and already moving his sword into a downswing. The greater problem followed as soon as Danny dodged, a stinging blast of energy launching him into an unceremonious tumble through the Zone’s atmosphere.

Vlad and the Knight came at him as a unit. The act, so markedly different from the puppetmaster villain, struck Danny with unease. But he had no time to puzzle out if this was a duplicate of his enemy, or truly the desperation of an increasingly enraged entity.

Sam, Val, and Tucker provided cover fire as soon as they realized what was happening. Sam cracked Vlad in the forehead with her rifle, and the man’s red eyes snapped to her in clear offense, allowing Danny a kick into his stomach.

Around them, the Ghost Zone itself suddenly shook. Vlad, clearly expecting the disturbance, flipped easily back into the air and away as Danny stumbled on nothingness, inner anti-gravity balance momentarily lost. He glanced over his shoulder, to where Valerie had engaged the Fright Knight.

Pink ectogun bullets flew wide of their target as another quake occurred. The Knight’s movements also accounted for an expectation of imbalance, and he expertly darted and swooped around Valerie. Before Danny could understand what he found so wrong with the picture, Vlad was back and pummeling him.

A single punch, accompanied by another quake of the Zone, sent him spiraling. He grappled with his head, groaning at the sensation of nausea. “What ever could be the matter, little badger?” Vlad said.

“What are you doing? ” Danny shouted. “Your ritual won’t work!”

“Ritual? I prefer to think of it as a coronation . Those spies of the Eye have their Crown, after all, and we have ours, don’t you remember, Daniel?”

“ You are no King,” he hissed. Danny didn’t even know why he held such conviction of that fact, other than that picturing Vlad as King of Ghosts was such a twisted image he rebelled against it on principle.

“You think? But the Fright Knight, servant of the old King, serves me now, and – well, surely that makes me his liege lord?” Vlad smiled easily. “Or it will, at least.”

The Zone rumbled again, and Danny finally fully turned his back on Vlad, though his core screamed at ignoring the obvious danger.

There, that’s what was wrong. The Knight wasn’t fighting back. Valerie was trying to hit a target that had no interest in battle. Instead, with every swoop and slice of his sword, Sir Rowan de la Peur carved into the air of the Ghost Zone, leaving behind long green gashes that warped at the edges, like some great force tugged at them, pulling them wider. It looked like a river steadily widening, like a doorway, like a portal . 

On the other side, entropy. Fear flooded Danny’s veins. This had the same feeling as his parents’ portal opening right on top of him, the same unholy wrenching of reality as Jon shifting through space. He had thought the Ghost Zone was a stable and comprehensible plane of the End. Yet, ultimately an afterlife was not, after all, Death.

It yawned before him, quiet and stillness and cold. He was afraid. And he could feel the fear of everyone around him – even Vlad, masking it behind a grin. Valerie reversed on her board, away from the gap in the Zone. 

“Fright Knight – stop! ” Danny choked out, for all the good that would do.

“He is bound to the process, Daniel,” Vlad called. “As am I. Can’t you feel it?” He spread his arms wide, cape flared behind him, a wide and ecstatic expression on his face. “My coronation is at hand.”

“NO!” Danny rushed the Fright Knight, tackling him and pinning him to the ground of an island with an unearthly growl. The sword clattered out of his hands, hit a rock and spun, blade pointing towards the growing fissure. The Knight struggled against the restraining force of Danny’s fingers around his wrists, and Vlad hovered between them and the doorway with amusement, making no other moves.

“Tell me how to stop it!” Danny ordered, and the Knight cringed away, the purple flame of his hair meekly shrinking. 

“The – sword is the cornerstone,” Sir Rowan huffed. “It is bound to me as its wielder. You can – do nothing.”

This close, Danny could smell the Knight’s fear better than anyone else’s. His words were fat with it. Bravado , Danny thought. His eye’s flickered to the portal, which grew ever larger, showing no sign of closing even with the sword physically out of the Knight’s hands. Why did this situation remind him so much of Pariah’s invasion? A knight, a sword, a king, a ritual.

The whisper of the End in his core asked, What would happen if you removed the instigator?  

Surely, if the Knight were stopped, the sword, no longer able to draw power from its wielder, would be unable to complete the ritual. And Danny was hungry . 

From his expression of horror, the Fright Knight could see the emotions tumbling through his opponent’s eyes. The knight panicked, wriggling and kicking, flickering intangible to no avail as Danny’s fangs caught the light. “Plasmius, this wasn’t the deal!” he screamed.

“Danny!” shouted someone.

“It was always the deal, Sir Rowan de la Peur,” said Vlad.

And the flow of energy and fear into Danny was bliss, soothing and horrific in equal measure. He drank it in like the taste of ice water in the middle of the night, until the glass was drained and there was, suddenly, nothing beneath him but the churned earth of the island. Slowly, he got to his feet, filled with a startling amount of vigor. The End guided his movements, too fluid, too inhuman. He watched his enemy dancing in the air, the expression of dismay painted on Vlad’s face. 

Some part of Danny knew he had made a fatal miscalculation. It was only when he picked up the fallen Fright Knight’s sword that he knew what it was. Vlad smiled , and bowed to him as the portal and the sword cracked open worlds for their true master.

Chapter Text

The tunnels below the Institute wound ever downward, further than Jazz thought possible. With Sasha leading them, the four shuffled through the darkness, punctured by a few flashlights and the occasional reflected eye glare from Daisy. It put her in mind of Orpheus’ journey to the Underworld, into a long-forgotten tomb. 

In some places, the hewn stone walls were slimy with seeping groundwater. Under her fingers, it felt like mucus more than mud. “How much longer?” Jazz asked.

Sasha turned. “Not far, I think. Can’t see right down here, but from what I remember the center is close.” They spoke in quiet tones, but the enclosed, elongated tunnels still captured a fragment of their voices and echoed. Jazz became suddenly convinced someone would hear them, that their movements must be known by some unseen observer. The influence of the Eye, she told herself, but irrational fear remained hard to shake.

Finally, she began to see signs. Twisted iron bars trapped in stone, even a skull lodged in the wall like old catacombs. Then the tunnel opened onto a grand amphitheater, the stage of the Panopticon. Jazz recognized it instantly - it had come up more than once in her psychology classes as a point of discussion and ethics. This version was like a lighthouse. A low roof around its balcony shaded that malicious guard tower, and instead of a sweeping spotlight, only darkness. Still, Jazz thought for a moment that she saw two pinpricks of green light within the shadows of its peak, before she blinked and they disappeared.

Daisy growled, low in her throat.

Sasha made a hum of agreement. “Magnus left Lukas behind to guard this. We won’t have much time before he figures out Martin’s distraction.”

“Let’s get him then,” Daisy said, drawing a knife from her belt. 

“Not so fast,” Sasha said. “We can’t just kill the body. That will trap one of us in his place, and cause damage to the Institute staff as well.” Daisy scoffed, but made no more moves towards the tower.

Jazz slowly stepped down into the center of the prison, walking in a circle around the Panopticon. The base of the tower had no visible door, only a narrow, rusted metal ladder leading to the top.

Sasha and Martin followed her. Jazz sucked in a breath, and started to climb. “No time like the present,” she muttered. “Where are we going to put it - him - it?”

Sasha’s boots clunked on the metal. “Not sure. For now, let’s just get him out of the Panopticon. It will cut him off from the extra power it gives him.”

Martin had been silent the entire journey down, but now he spoke up. “It won’t hurt Jon, right?” he asked nervously. 

“Nah,” Sasha said. “It might make him a bit hungrier, but the Eye is always like that.” After she spoke, the entire room shook with a rhythmic quake. The ladder groaned. Jazz froze and didn’t dare breathe.

“What was that?”

“Can’t be the Tube, we’re too far down,” Sasha said. “Let’s hurry.”

Jazz needed no further prompting. She scrambled as quickly as she could up the remainder of the ladder and dragged herself onto the relative safety of the tower’s balcony. The other three came up swiftly behind her. 

“Oh, gross.” Jazz wrinkled her nose. Inside the tower, on a throne, sat the withered husk of Jonah Magnus. “I know you said body , but seeing it is different.” It grinned ecstatically, sunken flesh and empty sockets contorted and frozen. Mercifully, it was too old to smell like anything more than musty earth.

“And we really have to touch it? ” Martin said.

“We don’t have time for this,” Sasha said, moving over to the body and grabbing it firmly around the chest. “Daisy, grab his legs, I don’t want you stabbing anything important.”

The teen sneered. “Shoulda brought an axe; he doesn’t need legs anyway.”

“ No, ” Sasha said, firm. “We have to remove it wholly.” The room rumbled again. Jazz resigned herself and carefully slid her arms around Magnus’ waist. Martin swallowed hard and helped Daisy with the legs. 

“On three.”

“Two.”

“One–”

The air cracked open in a blaze of green. 

All four of them could do nothing but watch in horror, arms full of corpse, as the wall of the Panopticon disintegrated into the void. The slash warped and blurred at the edges, burning with green and fading into a cold, empty black that stole the air from Jazz’s lungs in a heartbeat. A second tear opened beside it,  and Jazz recognized the space on the other side. The Ghost Zone, the domain of the End.

“Danny!” she cried.

The sword hung limply from his hand. The portal widened and popped like a seam. Everywhere, more and more splits opened in the Zone around him. Vlad came and hovered at his right-hand side, his smile settling into a pleased smirk. “What say you to welcome your new kingdom, my Lord?” No earnesty in that address, only mockery. Danny couldn’t even find the space in his emotions to care. He had the vague sense that, once this process finished, Vlad might kill him. For now though, everyone hung motionless.

“That terrible new friend you’ve made of the Eye has been a pain,” he continued. “But that’s over now. We are the ones in charge of the world.”

Danny’s ears rung. Imaginary sirens blared, until it was all he could hear. The rifts grew wider, closer to joining the true one, the one that would End it all. And still the sirens. Obnoxious, actually, now that Danny thought about it. His friends looked around in puzzlement as well, as if they could hear them. 

“Wait…Tim? Gerry?” Sam said. Danny looked down, in the same direction she did. One of the portals opened back to Amity, and a host of fire trucks and police cars, sirens going. Through the hole in space, a mansion burned. Tim and Gerry were arguing with Elias, before all three of them stopped and stared through the portal back at them.

Elias’ eyes widened in understanding. “Masters,” he hissed.

“Bouchard,” Vlad greeted cordially. “Enjoying the show? Here I thought you’d love a grand ritual.”

“Danny!” That was Jazz. Danny spun, and there was yet another portal, showing - what the hell was his sister doing?

“Jazz!”

“ Hey! ” Elias screeched. “Put that down!” 

The four people in Jazz’s portal all formed wide-eyed, identical expressions upon seeing Elias. Jazz shifted her grip on the person in her arms, hoisting them higher. This caused a chain reaction of the other three having to shuffle the weight as well.

Danny’s only sense at this point was of confusion. “Who’s the old guy?”

“It’s Jonah Magnus!” said the person beside Jazz, hugging the man’s chest, and - oh that was a desiccated corpse wasn’t it. “I’m Sasha by the way, the Archivist.”

“Yeah, we uh, spoke over the phone,” Danny said faintly. Beside him, Vlad’s smile slipped ever so steadily. The great portal hadn’t consumed and connected everything yet, and that gave Danny a flicker of hope. Maybe this wasn’t the end.

“Martin!”

“Jon!”

Danny didn’t have to turn around to know that another portal behind him must have let Jon into the party as well. 

He stopped listening, thinking hard. Why had his parents’ ritual failed again? Was it fundamentally flawed, or had something - some one in his case, simply gotten in the way? Stopped that portal from exploding outward and destroying everything. One person, in the right place at the wrong time. 

Danny raised the sword of the Ghost King, and pointed it low, at an angle, towards Jazz and Sasha. Trust me, he mouthed.

“I claim this land in the name of the King of Ghosts,” he said, and dove for Magnus’ body. A rush of air as Vlad tried to snag his tail, but he was free, zooming for his sister. He kept his hope clutched tightly in his chest, against his core, that this would work. He twisted the sword, plunging up, at an angle, into the body’s heart and connecting his world to theirs. It made a brittle noise, like puncturing paper mache. Sasha, Jazz, Martin, and an angry girl who glared at Danny as if he had just stolen her glory, all let go as the force of the stab ripped the body out of their hands. 

Something large and stony crumbled behind Jazz when he did so, but Danny was already wheeling around, and threw both the sword and the corpse headlong into the great portal of the End.

The tears in the sky shuddered, the green flickering. On Tim and Gerry’s side of town, Elias fainted. Then their portal snapped close and vanished. Each did the same, shutting down one after the other. The Ghost Zone shook again, but this time Danny intuitively held his place. He was glowing brighter than usual, a blinding white even to him. He faced the great portal in the sky, hands empty. The black central void shrank like a pupil, overtaken by green.

Danny gazed at the eye of the End. It looked at him, and then crinkled at the corners, like someone smiling, before closing and leaving nothing behind.

Chapter Text

“For the End, such a ritual is anathema. Instead, it burrows into you, chewing on your heart until your breath is shallow and your eyesight weak. From the beginning of all, the universe has run from it, fearing creeping cold. Entropy cannot occur in a moment, but a process; the slow ticking of an engine cooling, a body losing warmth, a great release of stellar energy gradually winding down.

“In a flash, we think we see the true End, ready to devour. Yet it is only a reminder, a gurgling gasp. Run and run, but have this image forever fixed in your eye as you flail through a slowing lifetime.”

[Click.]

The interior of the Skulk and Lurk bookstore stayed appropriately quiet. The gathered let those words settle, in part to process the way they had been transfixed by the speaker, and in part because the speaker ended such a point with a dramatic flare of his cape, four papery wings and staring eyespots. The eyes widened and then folded, away from view, and the spell broke.

A cheer went up, in heavy boots stamping the ground and a rattle of bracelets as hands struck tables. Sam leaned back in her chair with a sigh. Even though the rest of her friends looked out of place amidst the aesthetics and the low, thudding store music, they too were grinning and chatting with other people around the tables.

Jon appeared beside them and slid into a chair. He combed some unruly hair back behind his ears. “Well that was horrible.”

“You needed it.” Sam gestured at the crowd. Even though she couldn’t feel the thrill of fear in the same way he or Danny did, from the slight flush in Jon’s cheeks and the half-lidded cast to his eyes, clearly the Eye fed well.

Jon fidgeted, his wings rustling. Then he closed them completely and they disappeared from existence. “Gertrude would be appalled. Or amused. It’s hard to tell with her.”

Tucker clapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s go. Danny’s already outside.”

“And likely getting farther away by the second,” Sam added, rolling her eyes. Despite her blasé tone, she smoothed her skirt nervously. Since the ritual, he had been the same old Danny. Which meant emotional repression and a chipper attitude. When Jon first started speaking and Sam felt the hint of Fear roll over her, Danny’s face had paled and he slipped silently out of the bookstore.

Contrary to her prediction, Danny still lingered on the sidewalk out front. His black hair caught the wind just slightly too languidly to be natural, drifting and roiling. He didn’t seem to notice their arrival, and twisted a black ring around his finger in obvious anxiety. Sam nudged him, and he bristled. His eyes glanced quickly to her elbow, down to her empty hand, before he relaxed.

“How’s it going?” she asked softly before Tucker and Jon drew near. 

Danny shook his head and forced a smile at all of them. “Heard the cheering. All good, I take it?”

“Depends on your definition,” Jon said. Danny’s mouth twisted wryly. “We can’t choose what we are, as Fears.” He pulled his evil eye pendant out from his pocket and turned it over in his hands, staring at it and blinking every time he made eye contact with it.

“Are you going to keep wearing it?” Danny asked.

Jon sighed and threw it around his neck. “At least until Gertrude gets back from the airport. Don’t want to give Sasha a bad impression.”

“Too late!” called a voice from down the street. “My flight landed early!”

All four of them jumped and looked up. Sasha strode confidently towards them, Gertrude following a few steps behind at a brisk pace.

“How did you know we were–Eye people. Right,” Tucker began, and then finished.

Sasha nodded to Danny. “Your sister’s been a big help, by the way. Don’t think Gertrude’s over-the-phone orders on their own would have had us packed nearly as quickly.”

“Oh, uh, don’t mention it. She’s a neat freak.” Danny rubbed the back of his neck.

Jon looked between them curiously. “Packed what?”

“The Archives,” Sasha said proudly. “They’ll arrive in a few weeks, customs and all that.”

Jon’s eyes widened. “You don’t mean–”

“I organized everything,” Gertrude stated. “I’m far too old to keep running around after these nonsensical rituals. And Sasha is a far better Archivist than either of us.”

“I’ve already got a lot of plans for the renovation of the Amity Institute.” Sasha’s cheeks were wide and smiling. “You should have seen Lukas’ face.”

“Feel free to come look at Principal Bouchard’s,” Tucker cut in. “Dude offers endless entertainment any time he makes an appearance.”

Jon marveled at Gertrude. “You can really do it? You can leave?”

The old woman lifted her chin. “It’s my choice. No-one’s moldy corpse is trapping me.” Her gaze turned severe. “Don’t think this means you’ve gotten rid of me, young man. You are still underage and in need of guardianship.”

“I–of course not.”

Danny and Valerie sat on the Amity Park welcome sign (Book Your Historic Downtown Hauntings Tour Today!). Neither of them were in alter ego form. Just two normal teenagers, having a date in an improbably accessed location.

“Sam’s a good friend,” Valerie said. “She’s not pushing you about the Ghost King thing, or the Fright Knight.”

He hunched up. “Mhm. Can we not talk about it too?”

She narrowed her eyes. “I’m your girlfriend. This is a communication thing.”

“Can I communicate later?”

Valerie huffed. “Not when it’s causing you pain now .” She gently caught his chin and turned his head to look her way. Danny hid half his face in her palm to avoid eye contact. 

“I didn’t want this,” he said quietly. “And the Fright Knight, it–” he shuddered. “What if it happens again?”

“A ghost isn’t an herbivore, Danny.”

“I know that, but–it was still my choice.”

“And we can always choose differently. Not in the past–trying to agonize over old choices will do you no good. But there’s a future, and it’s full of change.” Valerie gestured with her other arm, even though Danny could only catch some of the movement from his position. “I could have been resentful and Hunting out of hatred forever. Imagine where that could have taken me. What if I became a cop?”

Danny snorted. “Yeah, no.”

“My dad’s in security. It could have happened.”

“Someone around you would have made you see reason before that.”

“Like who?” Valerie asked. “The friends I didn’t have?”

They lapsed into silence. Overhead, the blinking red lights of a plane taking off from O’Hare.

“I see your point,” Danny said after it faded into the distance.

“You’re in a position now to do so much good, regardless of past choices.” Valerie hugged him. “Just keep making new ones.”

[Click.]

“‘The Elf-King’, by Martin Blackwood. Er, should I go ahead with you here or–”

“It’s fine. I want to hear your…poetry.”

“A-all right then.”

[A nervous squeak on the last syllable, followed by unnecessary throat-clearing.]

“Alas, the moon is lowering
And soon the owl will sleep,
But I shall ne’er forget his face
When I leave his wooded keep.

The elf-king crowned in silver
Long months had watched me pass
Through his endless forest
And across his streams of glass.

He found me by the river;
With a smile at his lips
He leant his arm to guide me
And lured me with a kiss.

I fell upon him readily
We danced through ancient mist
But soon he turned to leave me,
Yet I took him by the wrist.

‘Come back to me, my Watcher’,
I said with earnest plea
‘You know my every step here,
Stay, and dance, be free.’

The elf-king sadly gazed
Beyond me to the forest
He did not think as we do,
His mind a fae folk chorus.

‘My father’s gone and left us,
My mother for me cares not,
There’s no one left to know me,
I shall not be forgot.’

My words perhaps did stir him
To look at me once more.
With one hand he caressed me
But behind him loomed the door.

It rose up out of fog
Between two lonely birch
Their former branches eyes
That for the elf-king searched.

I had to let him go then
His hand still warm in mine
And softly came his whisper
‘I’ll watch for thee and thine.’

He turned, passed through the door
It faded from that land
‘Twas then I saw my fingers
Upon the left a band

I went then through the forest
I felt no more his eye
Yet unlike all before him
I knew he did not lie.

In dream he’s still beside me
Watching from the trees
And though we dance no longer
It’s me he always sees.”

[Click.]

Bonus:

[Credits start rolling as characters go about their day.]

[Freeze frame on Tim and Gerry burning something.]

[Text:] Tim and Gerry became renowned Leitner hunters during college, after which Tim went on to pursue a successful publishing career.

[Pan to Sasha, arms crossed, looking on in approval as boxes of Archives material arrive in her new domain. She and Gertrude shake hands. Freeze frame.]

[Text:] Sasha became the new Archivist. Gertrude went on to become a five-time lightweight boxing champion.

[Cut to Danny, Sam, Valerie, and Tucker, arguing with Jon in front of the Fenton Ghost Portal. Freeze frame.]

[Text:] Jon was invited to Danny’s official coronation, but refused to enter the End. He watched via livestream.

[Pan to Vlad, sitting uncomfortably on a metal chair in the lab and glancing from Danny to Jon in evident dismay. Freeze frame.]

[Text:] Vlad was also invited. His attendance was non-negotiable for truce reasons.

[Cut to Daisy, hiking with a large backpack. Freeze frame.]

[Text:] Daisy moved to Scotland and her whereabouts are unknown. She still keeps in touch through the Hunters group chat.

[Cut to Elias Bouchard, pale-faced and distracted during a school administration meeting. Freeze frame.]

[Text:] Elias remained principal of Amity High, until he resigned following the graduation of the next senior class. His whereabouts are Known.