Archive of Our Own

The tunnels beneath the archives are always damp. Always, there seems to be new areas dripping with water, familiar stones that are shiny under torchlight from some kind of … liquid. Was it water? Jon never thought to check. Maybe he should, but what else would it be?

Everytime he’s down here he wonders where he’d be if he managed to dig upwards. Maybe it's just a bathroom. It’s just water. Blood can’t be clear, it’s not blood, the dripping is not blood, it’s just—

“Jesus Christ,” Tim barks behind him, “you’re staring off into space again, aren’t you? Do you know how damn creepy that seems now?”

“Right!” Jon sputters, the echo making it evident he’s far from ready to be ripped from his thoughts but, really, is he ever ready anymore? “Right—right, we’re, ah, almost there.”

“You haven’t even told me where there is.”

The two of them start walking forward once more. Jon is tracing the walls with his hand, eyes flickering from his feet to his fingers, feet to fingers, feet to fingers, anything to stay here. He licks his lips. The atmosphere beneath the ground is humid and moist, but his mouth feels so dry. He’s almost tempted to take a sip from whatever was dripping from one rock onto another but quickly realizes that’s … probably not a temptation to act on. So he pushes further. 

Tim is quiet behind him. Well, quiet for how Tim acts now; if Jon sees a worm carcass on the ground and avoids it he can hear the echo of a stomp behind him, if Jon stops to ponder a moment about direction he can hear a sigh, sometimes the kicking of stray pebbles, and in all honesty he doesn’t mind. It’s a reminder that Tim is still there. Just like how his fingers on the wall reminded Jon himself was there, Tim’s been a constant known presence. Much to Tim’s dismay, though, Jon’s sure.

Then there was that sighing, bitter laughter Tim always makes before he’s about to combust either verbally or physically, and says “Okay, boss, thirty minutes of walking in our very cool spooky hideout, and you’ve still given me no idea why the hell we’re down here.”
“We’re almost there,” Jon says, distantly, mind more distracted by remembering directions.

“ Where is “there”?” He’s rubbing at his face now, Jon knows what that sounds like and could picture it in his mind if it wasn’t so busy, “I swear to—to what ever there is to swear to, you are becoming Elias day by day just give me a straight an—”

“Here.”

Jon stops, and Tim does too. Jon turns around to see him, and he sees the familiar twitching face of hysteric anger he’s come to know as his resting state. He also knows Tim can see where he took him; it’s a small circled… hole, of a room, that seems relatively open. That is, as open as the tunnels can be, but not enough to make it feel unsafe. Dry enough to sit down and put your back to the wall and close enough to talk. Jon catches a glint of familiarity in Tim’s eye.

Faintly, he wonders if Tim knew every twist and turn of the tunnels the way he does. Maybe he knows them better. He hopes he’ll be able to ask him at a later date.

Tim is staring over him, and Jon makes his way into the deadend and sets his torch down with the light facing up. 

“... Why—”

Jon cuts Tim off by taking off his bag. He opens it, he opens every pocket, even keeps count out loud as proof, before holding it up and turning it over. Books, journals, his wallet, pens, glasses case, Jon dumps his bag onto the ground. Tim takes a step back in confusion, face twisting in a way that seems as if he twisted it anymore it would twist off. Next, Jon takes off his coat. He pats his pockets, unflips the ones he has to, and dumps that out as well. More pens, hair ties, a smaller notepad that he remembers he uses for his shopping list, and other miscellaneous items scatter onto the ground with a cheap and hollow echo. Now Jon looks at Tim.

“Okay,” Tim says, “what the fuck, and why?”

Jon simply picks up his torch and shines it on his items. “Look,” he tells him, and to his surprise Tim takes a step forward and does. “Not a single tape recorder.”

Tim blinks. One, two, three times, and then Jon watches his eyes scan over every item on the ground, all of Jon’s possessions, every coin and pencil and book. When he’s mentally confirmed Jon’s statement, he turns to him and goes, “If you think that answers a single question I’ve asked you in the last hour, maybe Elias should’ve picked a better Archivist, because you’re pretty stupid.”

Jon makes sure to turn the torch away quick enough so Tim doesn’t see him roll his eyes.

Instead, he places it in the middle of the hollowed-out room once more, light facing upwards. The way it lights up the room, reflecting off of the ceiling of rounded stones, it almost reminds him of using a torch under his covers to read when he was a child. Jon wishes he was under those covers again. Does he still have his grandmother's quilt? Maybe in his—

“Jon.”

Tim’s tone is stern and cold like steel. Standing utop his own possessions, Jon looks at Tim, who looks like he’s about to start bashing things—and Jon thinks he himself is included as a “thing” now—with rocks. Simply, Jon replies with, “Yes, Tim?”

“Why. Are. We. Here?”

Then Jon sits down.

Jon sits down in a circle of his surroundings, in a dead end tunnel beneath the archives, if they’re still beneath the archives. He sits, and he gestures to the spot in front of him, on the other side of the torch light, and he looks up. 

“Because we’re going to talk,” he says, “down here, with no tape recorders, no one watching, just us. Talking.”

He’s giving Tim an offer, and he’s pretty sure Tim knows that. Or, at the very least, he knows that if this isn’t what Tim wants he can turn his heel and find his way out of here even with no light. Knowing Tim, though, he probably brought his own. He’s always had a habit of being a well-prepared bastard.

“About what? This...” Tim throws his hand in the air and waves it around, as if that would allude to anything that’s ever happened to either of them, “this ritual mess?”

“No,” Jon says, then looks down. 

He should’ve prepared more for this. Always have a step one, but Jon never finds himself having a step two. “No,” he says again, “just … talk. To each other. About anything other than that, really.”

Tim just stares at him. His face looks lifeless, bags with bricks tied to the bottom dragging down beneath his eyes, lips in a straight line, hair now frizzy from the humidity in the previous halls.

He just stares.

“What if this is a trap?” He asks. “What if you’ve just got me down here to kill me?”

“And what if you take the chance and kill me where no one will see it?” The words rush from Jon’s mouth before he’s able to register that he had a feeling Tim would ask that exact question. “With no recorders, no one watching—no one would be able to find this place in the tunnels beside you and me, Tim. So what if you killed me?”

Tim’s face doesn’t soften like it used to now. Now it’s more like weathered rock slowly making a realization of its own situation. Then, Tim steps to the side where Jon recommended, and ruffles in the pockets of his pants. He tosses a torch and a knife on the ground.

“I was ready to, if I had to,” he says, and Jon knows it’s true. Even as Tim sits across from him, he knows that’s true.

Jon lets out a quick, short sigh as he nods. “Right then.”

Tim looks at him expectingly. Jon finds himself picking at the seems in his pants. He half expected the other to start yelling; finally tear into him, implying he hasn’t done that already, a thousand times. But he was sort of just intended there to be some kind of eruption. Some kind of final break, somewhere to start. Jon needed to start at the right point, and he thought if Tim blew up at him he’d find a place to start from there. Now, he’s just getting scowled at from a crossed-armed Tim, staring daggers into him. Jon swallowed hard. A lot of people have done more than stare daggers into him, but this was a different kind of water to tread in. It’s his co-worker, they used to be friends. It’s Tim. Jon clears his throat.

“I understand my behavior these last several months has been… unacceptable.” Jon opens, and apparently, that’s all he gets in.

“Oh, has it been?” Tim leans forward to ask. “Really? “ Unacceptable?” What, did the Corporate of Creepy get on your ass about being gone for, oh, I don’t know, a year? If you brought me here just to tell me things I already know, I’m just going to see my way out.”

“Corporate Creepy isn’t a real thing,” Jon says back.

“Okay,” Tim says, standing.

“No! No, no, just— wait, Tim,” Jon runs his burnt hand down his face, feels every bump of scarring. He lets out a shaky breath. “I’m trying to … apologize.”

“Well, Jon, you’re doing a pretty shit job at it.”

“ I know. ”

Tim is standing with his arms crossed against the wall. Jon knows this despite having his face buried in his hands, and he also knows this is his second and final chance at getting to have any sort of conversation with Stoker. Internally he panics; reaching for words just to let them go, sentences fading in and out like strings just connecting random loose ends to random loose ends, he needs to say something. He doesn’t look up from his hands, he keeps his eyes screwed closed, and then Jon just lets his mouth talk.

“Remember how you said you couldn’t trust Melanie or Basira because of—” he breathes in an uneasy sip of air, “... that?”

Tim shifts against the rock. Jon doesn’t look up, and he didn’t hear him come any closer, but he can feel a long and angry shadow loom over him. “What of it?”

“That’s why I was outside of your house,” he rushed. “That’s the same kind of … fear, the uncertainty, I couldn’t—I had to constantly make sure, and—”

“Is that your excuse?” Tim hisses. “Because you don’t see me watching people sleep.”

“ I’m not as smart as you, Tim.”

The quiet seeps through the walls of the deadend. It seems into the back of Tim’s shirt, into his skin, and into his body, and it slowly drags him to sit back down. The daggers in his stares haven’t been put down yet, Jon can feel that, but at least Tim is staying. Jon runs his teeth over his bottom lip again and again like mowing grass.

Eventually he does come out of his hands. He has to. He has to sigh, put them together and rest his head on the fingers. His eyes are fixed on the tunnel they came from. If he wasn’t so used to the unrealish kind of darkness in the tunnels he would’ve thought they were trapped.

The darkness looks like one big wall, it doesn’t look like darkness. Jon stares at it to gather courage. Then, with the light making his sight splotch so he wouldn’t have to see Tim’s whole face, he took in one deep breath, and let all the words come out with the exhale.

“I was scared— terrified , actually, that I was going to die. I let that get the best of me, at the extent of—” He laughs. It’s bitter. It’s sorry. “Everyone, really. But mostly you. I didn’t want any of this to play out the way it had.”

Quietly, even as Jon’s vision re-focuses, he can hear Tim go, “Yeah, cheers to that.” Jon doesn’t even fight with the attitude. He just waits for Tim to meet his eyes, and when he does, Jonathan Sims stares into the honey-brown iris of Timothy Stoker, and he says, “I am so, so sorry.”

“Good.”

It’s an immediate reaction. Tim was planning on for him to apologize, and was planning to deflect it, or at least that's what Jon thought. Studying his face, though, it was… twitching. Not in the way it did when he was angry or about to yell over something, just like his body was having a fight with himself. In the end, Tim turned away, muttering, “good, you should be.” under his breath. 

And then they sit. Jon’s leg starts bouncing. Now what? Tim isn’t saying anything, Jon doesn’t know what will and what won't make Tim detonate, but he didn’t bring him down here for quiet-time. So he starts to ramble.

“And about not being here, I—Christ alive, I can’t even begin to explain the cryptic scavenger hunt I’ve had to—”

“Save it.”

Jon’s shoulders tense. Fuck. He never knows when he crosses a line with Tim, not anymore. Jon never knows if he’s pushed the limit until he gets there himself, and he’s starting to realize that goes far beyond a safe amount of curiosity. 

“I don’t need to know about your oh-so important spooky-ooky field trips or what have you,” Tim spits. “I have my own bullshit to sulk over.”

“Right,” Jon says quietly, shamefully. “Right, you’re right, I’m sorry.”

Then the quiet sets in again.

It’s so quiet, Jon thinks something will go wrong. Quiet isn’t comfort anymore; Jon isn’t sure what comfort could be anymore. Tea, maybe. With honey. Martin always knows how much honey for the right kind of tea. His dry mouth can almost taste it, almost. Suddenly he’s sitting up straighter. The quiet’s in his mouth. Suddenly Jon’s eyes are darting around.

“She was the only one I told, you know.” Tim says, voice reverberating off of the stone, saving Jon from choking on silence. But he shoots Tim a puzzled look.

“About what?”

“About my brother,” Tim laughs something short and hurt, “before I gave my statement that is.”

Jon stares. Then he remembers how much time Sasha and Tim spent together. Images of Tim sat upon a desk talking and a staticed, censored out person laughing in a way Jon only recognized from recorded memories. He remembers ice-cream, and Tim and a hazy figure shoving each other playfully. He looks down.

“I’m not surprised. You two were …” Jon swallows something thick in his throat. It's the opposite of quiet. “Close.”

“ Yeah, ” Tim says, pushily, in an annoyed tone of voice, confirming Jon has yet again just pointed out the obvious. But then something sullen takes over Tim’s face. Something Jon hasn’t seen in a while. He can’t quite place it, since it’s always been hard to map Tim’s expressions to his feelings, but Jon settles on grief being a good guess. “Yeah, we really were. I’d say she was—” Tim looks away again, and he coughs, but it sounds shaky and fake. “—she was my best friend, and I can’t even remember her face.”

Jon just stares. How does someone respond to that? He has no idea what that feels like, the loss of someone who could’ve known you better than you did. Twice, even: his brother and Sasha. Jon didn’t have a brother, nor ever a “best friend.” Guilt suddenly grabbed his chest and dragged down through his body until he felt like he might double over. He didn’t, though.

“Blame me,” Jon says stiffly. “It’s my fault it got loose.”

I know,” Tim says, just as firm, “but you didn’t take Sasha.”

That isn’t what Jon was expecting. In fact, he was prepared for Tim to grab that knife and bury it into him, and for it to all be over. But Tim is still sitting against the wall, and the Archivist's heart is still beating. Jon just stares at the ground.

Then Jon says, “I remember, one time, Sasha dragged me out for… God, smoothies? Milkshakes? I can’t tell the difference most of the time, something cold. It was summer, and you know how hot the archives get, and you know how many layers I wear and how thick my coat is.” He’s rambling like a statement. But when he looks up, he finds Tim’s eyes on him. They aren’t angry nor impatient, they’re listening. Jon doesn’t put his head down, but he keeps talking. “I remember she sat us outside and we just talked. It was when we’re all new to working in the archives. I think she was just trying to get to know me, and I was just trying to get to know her. She was so…”

“Funny?” Tim finishes. He’s smiling, faintly. No one else would be able to see it in this light but Jon. He gave a small chuckle.

“Yes, yes she was very funny. She was quite the character.”

Tim nods in agreement, but keeps his head down. Jon lets himself give him a sorry look. He is sorry. He’s sorry in ways that he still can’t understand. Jon feels like a man made of words, but he can’t even pin down the right ones to verbalize his shame, and that just adds to the growing list of unspeakable apologizes.

Part of Jon wishes Tim would trust Melanie and Basira. The other part of Jon just wishes nothing ever happened. That no one ever worked at the archives beside himself, that Sasha got to live a happy life, that Martin felt safe in his flat, that Tim and his brother would still see each other every holiday. But that part of Jon knows those days are gone. He knows Tim knows that, too. Probably more than anyone else. 

“I miss her.” Jon’s eyes find their way back to Tim, who’s still looking at the ground. “I miss her—I miss her like hell, Jon. I miss my brother too, but at least I can remember his face, his voice, the way he’d—” There's a choking sound from Tim’s throat, “the way he’d call me Timmy and mess with my hair, at least I remember him.”

“Tim—”

“Not even her voice. ” Tim’s head snaps up, and Jon suddenly sees liquid aguish on his cheeks. “That thing took everything of her. She’s nothing but a blurred out image like someone caught on TV and not wanting to be seen she’s—” then whatever choke in his throat broke and he sobbed, “—she’s more gone than Danny.”

Tim doubles over, face in hands, crying like no one could hear him. Jon can hear him, though. The sounds echo off of the stone and suddenly the rounded-out deadend is filled with mourning. Jon leans in, just a little, and says he was sorry, that he missed her too, that if he could have it any other way he would. Tim can feel a tear land on his knee. He knows it isn’t his.

Soon enough, Tim’s hands move to his hair. He grips at his curls, trying to shove his head farther into his knees, but it all just ends in a sigh. He lays his cheek on his knees and stares at the wall.

“Crying to the reason we’re all in psychic jail.” There’s no emotion in Tim’s voice. “Pathetic.”

“I don’t think it is,” Jon offers.

“Like you’d know what’s pathetic and what isn’t.”

Okay, rude. Fair, Jon thinks, but rude.

“You know,” Tim sits back and wipes his eyes with the heel of his hand. He doesn’t look phased. It hardly seems like he was ever really crying—the water on the stone has already dried. “Martin started comparing me to you.”

Jon’s eyes open so wide that he thought he could feel his eyelashes against his eyebrows. “What? What for?”

“Being paranoid.” He brushes a tear off his own face like shoving someone away. “Being shifty, not trusting anyone. I hated it.”

“I would’ve too. Both being compared and just… feeling that way.”

An understanding passes between the two of them as they both sit in still silence. Internally, like a spider slowly making its way over Jon’s brain, he can feel something come to him. He doesn’t know if it’s knowledge or Knowledge, he can’t tell the difference, but his head shoots up like a dog hearing another’s bark. 

Tim’s does too, and his eyes immediately flash to the open tunnel, making sure Jon isn’t hearing something, but a wave of Jon’s hand makes Tim’s attention turn back to him.

“Melanie remembers,” he says quickly. “I remember she—she asked if there were two Sashas working here, because the… “new one” wasn’t Sasha.”

“ What?” The fury is louder than the volume he said it at. Jon’s gulp is audible. He doesn’t know if he’d want Tim to talk to Melanie right now, though, because the chances of them plotting to kill either himself or Elias would skyrocket, and that’s just not a loop Jon needs to get stuck in again. Instead, Tim just tsk s, and looks away like he’s hurt. “ She can see her face but not anyone else? Man, this shit stinks, and it stinks bad. ”

“She had glasses,” Jon says hurriedly, quick to fix a leak he didn’t know he’d caused. “Melanie said glasses and long hair. Long, dark hair, I think.”

Tim stares at him. Jon stares back. Tim looks like he’s trying to piece together a puzzle; like he has just dumped all the pieces out and is trying to find the picture. Only his eyes aren’t moving. They just hold place with Jon’s, with his brow furrowed and his shoulders still rising and falling at an uneven rate. Tim’s head is tilted. He’s thinking.

Slowly he lifts his head straight. His eyebrows slowly come up from his eyelids and faintly, ever so faintly, he smiles. He smiles and he nods.

“Long hair,” Tim says, laughing. “I—I remember. I remember braiding it, messing with it, always— haha —always lifting the end and holding it up to my face to make a mustache.”
Then they’re staring again, until Tim’s true and genuine chuckle begins, and his true and genuine chuckle has never been anything short of contagious. Jon lets himself laugh too, laugh with tears spilling over his cheeks. He laughs for Sasha, and for Danny, and for Tim. Jon doesn’t think he can laugh for himself anymore.

Tim looks at the ground again with a fond kind of sadness. His fingers twist in the air, and Jon can almost, almost visualize thin and long black hair twirling in and out of his fingers. “She cared about you,” Jon says finally.

Tim just lets out a, “Heh,” that’s more physical than verbal and looks to the side. “I hope so,” he answers.

Jon sits up straight again as memory strikes again.

“I have tapes.”

Suddenly Tim snarls, “With you?”

“No! No, no, no, of Sasha, of—of Sasha Sasha, of her voice,” Jon runs his hands through his hair, staring at the ground. “How could that have slipped my mind? I still have them, second drawer to the left of my desk, every tape where Sasha came in, every tape with her voice.”

Tim suddenly leans in close. His eyes are intense, and suddenly Jon feels like he’s on trial, or that he’s about to make a very dangerous business deal. Only… looking deeper into Tim’s eyes; the pupil, the iris, cornea, veins, he can see pleading. 

“How do you know it's really her?”

“I got the other—what was pretending to be Sasha on tape, too.” Jon begins laughing roughly, “And I double checked. Multiple, multiple times.”

Tim runs a hand through his own hair. His hand lingers on the shaved part in the back, moving it up and down, up and down. For a moment the thought runs through Jon’s mind that that might’ve been something he picked up from Sasha doing it, maybe to comfort him, but Jon isn’t sure. He still isn’t sure if he can trust the things that run through his mind or not. Certainly not yet.

Tim opens his mouth to say something, but Jon answers him before he can even ask; “They’re yours.”

Suddenly anger passes through Tim’s face. “I told you not to Know things about me.”

“I didn’t have to,” the smaller replies, the calmest he’s sounded in a while. “I want you to have them. I know she cared about you, and I don’t think she’d want anyone else to have them. Certainly not me.”

“Her family—” Tim cuts himself off there. Jon just shakes his head. What, give Mr. and Mrs. James tapes of a voice they didn’t recognize of their daughter scrubbed from the world? Giving that to them almost sounded worse than the incorrect not Sasha picture they were still using as a “missing person’s” photo. The idea had run through Jon’s mind before; if he was leaving tapes to his descendant as the Archivist, shouldn’t he give Sasha’s parents what she left behind?

But, no. What good could it do? The voice in Sasha’s parent’s memories isn’t Sasha’s. Sasha’s graduation pictures don’t have her face on them. In her mother’s memory, when she gave birth, she probably doesn’t even look the same then. Jon wishes he couldn’t comprehend the grief they felt, the weight the James family carried for the Sasha they don’t even know they forgot, but he does. In his bones, in the deep depths of his mind, in his eyes, he did.

Tim takes out his phone to check the time. Then, he stands, and looks at Jon.

“Tomorrow, I come into your office for the tapes.” Jon just nods along. “And I’ll listen to them, and…”

Jon furrows his eyebrows. “And what?”

“... And before we leave to, uh, save the world I guess, I’ll take them to her favorite park, and bury them.” Tim reaches down to grab his torch and knife off of the ground, but Jon can see the tears drip to the rock beneath. He shoves his items back into his pockets. “It’s the closest thing to a proper funeral.” 

“Would you like to do that with the statement about your brother, too?” Jon asks.

“No,” Tim says quickly, as if he already thought about the question. “It wasn’t—it wasn’t his. It wouldn’t be the same. Maybe—Maybe after we stop this ritual.” Tim nods to himself. “Maybe after I kill what took him.”

Jon nods, and silently begins to put his items back into his bag. To his surprise, Tim waits for him. Every so often he’ll flick on his own torch and check their way out, make sure they’re safe. Jon recounts all of his possessions, muttering to himself softly, putting everything exactly where it was before, and Tim doesn’t seem impatient. No irritated comments about his meticulousness, no rushing, just silence saved for the occasional off and on of a torch.

He stands up and looks around his feet, satchel back over his shoulder. Everything is accounted for. The same amount of weight is back in his coat pockets and his bag, and some kind of weight has been lifted from beneath his ribcage. All that’s left is the torch on the ground. Before he can bend down to get it, though, his eyes lock with Tim’s, which were already boring into him.

“I don’t forgive you.”

“I wasn’t expecting you to,” Jon says, truthfully, but internally a bit dejected. That is, until Tim sticks his hand out.

“But we’re going to stop this shit,” Tim says, with a grin Jon hadn’t seen since meeting Tim the first day in the archives, “and we’re going to make those fuckers sorry.”

Jon smiles back. His thin hand clutches Tim’s for the first time in what seems like forever, and they shake them tightly. Jon nods.

“We will,” he says, with a new hope he isn’t sure he’s allowed to have. “I know we will.”