Chapter Text
Joseph Stern takes a deep, unsteady breath and watches the world as he knows it finally unravel for good. It’s been . . . it’s been a hell of a day, gates to an alien world and a girl he’s laughed with over the dinner table turned into something feral and furious and Barclay dragging her, howling and snarling, away into the woods, and Ned Chicane —
Joseph’s never seen anybody die before. Not really, not like that, not vicious and brutal and unexpected, and for all he’s been trained to expect the worst he cannot help the fact that somewhere, deep down in the core of him, he’s still shaking at how swiftly and suddenly Ned Chicane stopped being a person.
But he can deal with that later, maybe. After he deals with the impossible and terrible sight of the top of a whole actual mountain torn off and looming up into the sky. People are screaming in the woods behind him, voices fading away because Joseph, spurred totally by adrenaline and training, is running towards the floating mountain instead of away from it like any sane person would do.
Joseph’s not a sane person, he thinks wildly as his feet find their way through the woods and his breath comes in swift, sharp rhythm, runner’s body taking over while his mind does its own running in endless, awful circles — Ned’s dead, aliens exist, Barclay knows so much more than Joseph ever could have guessed, he can’t write a report that eases this out of the record, Ned’s dead, that mountain is floating, what’s really on the other side of that gate, his sister always laughed when he said he believed in aliens, Owens knows this area better than he does so he’ll follow Owens’s lead, Ned’s dead, dead, dead —
The mountain is falling.
Joseph has just enough time for that though, that wild and horrible thought, to break through the cacophony of every other thought in his head, and then falling becomes fallen and the world, for a moment, shakes apart so violently that he and Owens both go flying and Joseph wonders if this is when he dies and all his unanswered questions wither and blow away, unanswered now forever . . .
The impact doesn’t kill him. It knocks the wind out of his lungs and he lays there, dazed, staring up into the cold February sky, past the bare branches of the trees above him. Unnatural light plays across the iron-grey clouds, everything is so silent that he lifts his fingers to his ear, checks them for blood, but it’s not him, it’s the world that’s broken open and fallen still.
Sheriff Owens hoves into view above him, shaken and white-faced and grim, offers Joseph a hand up which he takes in a daze.
“What the hell just happened?” Joseph says, staring at the misshapen heap where the summit above them used to be.
“I don’t know.” Owens says grimly. “But I got an inkling I know where to ask.”
He turns on his heel and stalks off and Joseph follows him, knowing already where they're heading, wondering what they're going to find when they get there, thinking: no matter what, this is the end.
Every puzzle he was partway into solving in Kepler is tipped out now in a jumbled, broken mess, and God only knows if people with higher clearances than his are going to get here and try to sweep all the pieces back into the box without solving a single one of them. If all his hard work and curiosity and research over the past year will end up being for nothing.
He should have kissed Barclay when he had the chance.
That's a wild, foolish thought, considering everything, considering Barclay's probably hiding even more than Joseph suspected he was, but he thinks it anyway, however briefly.
Ms. Cobb's no longer crouched by Ned's body. Most of the people who were gathered around the stone archway have scattered, retreated away from the slope of the mountain and back towards the relative safety of town. Joseph can't blame them, he doesn't even know what that . . . event must have done to the mountain's stability, for all any of them know it's going to fall the rest of the way down and bury them all.
He takes a short, sharp breath and pulls himself together. He's expecting UP backup within the next two hours. Until then he's the sole FBI presence on the ground at the site of the world's first confirmed alien contact.
Joseph checks the gate, confirms that whatever power makes it possible to pass through it has faded and it’s once again merely stone, and then he turns and heads out of the clearing, towards Sheriff Owens’ police cruiser.
***
In a different world, Mama would stay with Ned while the whole world goes to shit around her, until she could be sure he was taken care of. She owes him that much, she owes making sure he’s not alone on the hard-frozen ground where he died for the damnfool failed life’s work she dragged him into.
But in this world Jake bends down at her side and tries to coax her to her feet, his face gone paler than ever as he says Mama, come on, we gotta go, and in this world instead of shooing him off to the Lodge to help corral the others she lets herself be pulled. Ned’ll have to keep himself company, and she’ll never be able to make amends for that, but there’s a whole lot now that she’ll never be able to make amends for.
She swings herself up into the bed of the pickup against Moira and Jake’s protests, holds on grimly to the side as they peel out and haul ass back to the Lodge. The mountain falls with a crushing, awful sound, the earth shakes beneath them, but bless Jake Coolice’s heart, he never let a thing like that throw him when it counts and they skid to a stop in front of the Lodge all in more or less one piece.
Her people are scrambling, throwing a few possessions into their bags, shouting to each other down the halls, shaken into an evacuation they’ve technically practiced for but clearly never thought would actually come. That’s her failing, too, she thinks bitterly, as she stumbles her way towards the springs looking for Barclay, for Dani.
She finds Dani first, all hundred and ten sopping-wet pounds of her, drawn and ragged and scared as a rabbit, and Mama pulls her into a tight, tight hug that takes time they can’t spare. Christ, how’d she not notice that Dani wasn’t Dani? How’d she let things fall this far apart?
“Where’s Barclay?” She asks, pulling away, reluctantly, and Dani pulls the towel closer around her own shoulders and points towards the side door, towards the cellar.
Thacker.
Mama shoos Dani off in the direction of the yard, towards the van and the truck, watches long enough to make sure someone else has got an arm around her before she turns and makes her way towards the cellar.
Barclay’s already coming up the stairs, Thacker slung in his arms like the other man don’t weigh a thing. Thacker’s unconscious, eyes rolling white in his head, and she doesn’t know what that means, feels a shot of awful fear go through her that Barclay meets with a comforting noise.
“He’s breathing,” He says, making for the truck, and Mama follows after him just a little bit too slow, cursing that bad leg, leaning on her cane too much to be any goddamned use.
Barclay swings Thacker up into the bed of the truck, hands him off to Oliver who hooks his arms under Thacker’s body to hold him up off the cold metal. Then Barclay turns to her and takes her shoulders.
“C’mon, up you get.” His hands are shaking, he’s about as sopping wet as Dani was, his hair’s come loose from its bun and is falling, wild and tangled, in his eyes.
“Fuck that,” she snaps, pretending she isn’t about as scared as he is. “I got folks to —”
“That’s the last of them,” he interrupts her, jerks his head towards the van where Sev raises their hand in a sharp, quick wave before they yank the sliding door shut and haul themselves up behind the wheel. “It’s just us.”
Which’d be just fine, except — “The office,” she tries to spin on her heel, go for the door, but his hands won’t let her go.
“Ollie took a hammer to the laptop already,” he says, and before she can ask about the papers and the photos he gets his arm behind her knees and sweeps her up like she’s made of driftwood. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Goddamnit, Barclay Cobb, you put me right the fuck back down —” Mama doesn’t beat her fist against him even though this is the most undignified fuckin’ thing she’s ever had done to her, because she can’t bear hurting him, she can’t bear anyone else hurt.
“Okay.” He drops her (gently) into the bed of the truck, tosses her cane up after her. She snatches it out of the air with a scowl and only Moira’s hand around her wrist prevents her climbing back out.
Dani’s sandwiched up against Jake’s side in the cab, shaking head resting on his shoulder, and he twists and shouts out the open slider window “Are we going?”
“You’re going!” Barclay confirms, thumping the side of the truck bed once to punctuate it, and he leans in and kisses Mama on the cheek before she can protest.
“Go on,” He says, soft and solid like he ain’t scared out of his wits, “I’m right behind you.”
“You better fuckin’ be, you stupid noble sonovabitch, or I’m gonna —”
Jake slams the gas pedal down, the truck lurches forward with a protesting squeal, and the rest of her threat tumbles out and gets lost in the cloud of dust they leave behind them.
***
Barclay turns on his heel and bolts back into the Lodge as the truck squeals away. He can’t give himself the time to see them safely off, he’ll have to trust Jake and Sev to follow the plan. He’s got things of his own to handle.
Barclay scoops his hair out of his face as he goes, boots sounding hollowly down the empty halls of the Lodge as he makes for the office. Sev already got the fire in the common room stoked up to a nice, steady roar before they went.
He yanks the top drawer of Mama’s desk open, finds a rubber band and gets his hair back out of his way. That done, he goes through the drawers of her filing cabinet one methodical step at a time, gladder than he can say that he got this shit all sorted while he was stress-cleaning during the weeks she was lost in Sylvain.
Most of the maps, the notes, the photos can stay; it’s just the handful that point to other sylphs in other places, to the people who got them fake documents, to who among them isn’t really human. Those have to go. There’s not many; they were careful. They’ve always been careful.
Just not careful enough, in the end.
Barclay feeds it all to the fire, watches it blacken and curl and go up in smoke, while part of him’s counting down, listening, waiting for the inevitable. He’s always been faster than Mama, even before her leg got hurt; if he does this quick enough he can be away and join them where it’s safe. If he doesn’t, well, then he doesn’t. He’ll have a better chance than she would’ve, and that’s what matters.
When the ashes of the documents are so much scattered powder he douses the fire with buckets of water carried sloppily from the kitchen, leaves splashes on the wooden floorboards that on any other day he’d stop to mop up before someone slipped and got hurt. No time for it now. Not enough time for anything, now.
He stirs the sodden ashes until they’re paste, until no expert in the world could salvage what he’s burned. He’s got just enough time to do that before his luck runs out. The front door slams open and Zeke Owens strides into the Lodge with Joseph Stern on his heels and Barclay . . .
Barclay thinks about running, about taking the back door, about vanishing into the trees. He thinks about it, and then he thinks about Ned, about Mama, about the gun on Zeke Owens’s hip. He spreads his hands out, slow and easy, holds them away from his body in a gesture of surrender even Owens can’t miss.
He flicks his eyes to Joseph’s face and can’t read anything there. No trace of the slow, sleep-muddled grin he’d give Barclay at breakfast, no hint of the easy laugh he had when Dani and Jake would roughhouse around the common room. Barclay’s just selfish enough to hope that somewhere under the stillness of his expression there’s a little regret, anyway.
Barclay lets Owens handcuff him (on suspicion of “Fuck it, I’ll figure it out later”) and usher him to the cruiser despite the fact that if he really wanted to he could snap the cuffs and throw Owens onto the roof of the Lodge without having to really try. He can’t decide if that would make things worse. He’s not sure this day can get much worse.
He changes his mind about that when the helicopter passes over them on their way into town, low and black and loud as thunder. Owens barely glances at it; Jos - Agent Stern grimaces, almost imperceptibly. “That was fast,” he says quietly, and Barclay feels a cold kind of dread creep up his back.
They shuffle him into the Sheriff’s office, deposit him in one of the empty holding cells. The other’s already occupied, Pigeon huddled in a miserable, silent heap on the bunk, and Barclay’s guts twist up in sorrow and sympathy and the aching horror of the loss he hasn’t even let himself start thinking about.
“I want a lawyer,” he says, because that’s what you’re supposed to say in these situations.
“I’m sure you do.” Owens goes to his desk and starts shuffling paper. Stern’s cell rings and he takes the call, looks long and hard at Barclay before he retreats outside, phone cupped to his ear. Barclay wonders if maybe he should’ve just taken the chance and kissed Joseph Stern anyway, since stopping himself didn’t save him any trouble in the end.
Too late now.
The rubber band in his drying hair is starting to pull all wrong, a sharp pinching discomfort that shouldn’t even register, but it’s something he can fix so Barclay pulls his hair free, shakes it out around his shoulders. He flicks the rubber band in Owens’ direction, a petty little fuck you gesture. It misses. He’s always been a lousy shot.
Barclay paces, tries to keep his mind off the trouble he’s in, tries not to let himself panic. Tries not to let himself dwell on the bad outcomes that are always lurking right there on the edge of every decision he ever makes, the strings of catastrophic failures that his brain spins out without his permission. Tries to make himself believe that Mama and the others got out of town safe, that they’re clear, that taking care of Thacker will distract Mama from trying to come back after him.
That they’ll be okay.
That he’ll be okay.
The front door of the office opens and Joseph Stern comes back into the building. There’s two men on his heels, men in dark suits and dark glasses, men with the same unmistakable air of Fed that Stern has but without any of the soft edges that make Joseph feel approachable, feel like a human instead of a suit full of rules.
Barclay’s heart sinks.
He’s screwed.