Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jon had seen Elias Bouchard around the Institute before. Hell, he had met him, had shook his hand after his promotion to Head Archivist. And sure, Elias could be a little… ominous, at some points, but that wasn’t anything to get up in arms over. 

So where did that hatred come from?

It honestly surprised him. Jon never felt that he was one for violence, really, and if he was being honest with himself he would admit that he wasn’t exactly strong enough for it either. But when Elias stopped by after the so called “anglerfish” statement, the one Jon had been struggling to record for days, he felt a hatred so hot and violent he wanted to choke him, push his fingers into Elias’ eyes and—

Jon stopped himself, took a deep breath, and settled his expression into its normal vague annoyance. 

“Elias,” Jon said, despite the rush in his ears that screamed something indistinguishable and angry. “What brings you down to the archives?”

Jon heard Tim snort quietly, and in the corner of his vision, saw Sasha hit him with a folder. 

Elias smiled pleasantly. “Oh, just checking in. I’m sure that the archives  are different from what you expected. Is there anything you need?”

“No, Elias,” Jon said, a bit shorter than he would have liked. “I think we’re all settling in nicely. Unless you’ve got anything else Gertrude left?”

The archives were an unruly mess and you didn’t need a degree in library sciences to see that. 

Which was good, because Jon didn’t have a degree in library sciences, a fact that brought him some amount of dread. He didn’t know what he was doing! His assistants, one in particular , didn’t know either!

Elias smiled, something curled and twisting, and laughed politely. “I’m afraid not. Well, if there isn’t anything else, then I will leave you to it.”

The hissing in his head screamed to go for the eyes. Jon nodded at Elias and prayed it go away. 

He was not crazy. 

He was not. 

Jon had, as far as he knew, no family history of mental illness. According to his grandmother, there was something of a predisposition to arthritis, but that was about it. 

He had dug through his old papers to check, of course, but that old biology assignment remained the same, static, letters, dictated by her clear annunciation. Arthritis. High cholesterol. Color blindness, but only in the men; grandmother said that her brother had been colorblind, and her grandfather, but not her father and definitely not her. 

So the muddled voices that definitely weren’t his own was not the onset of some genetic condition. That didn’t make him feel better. 

Jon had already half suspected that it wasn’t. It felt different in a way that he couldn’t describe, something shifting and nebulous. 

Maybe it was a stress thing. His predecessor was presumed dead, after all, and that’s a stressful thing to have hanging over you. Jon half felt like her ghost was scolding him every time he changed something about how she had left the archives. 

At least the voices didn’t mean him harm. Jon could tell that much. 

It just felt disappointed. He couldn’t tell if that was worse.  

It must be a Leitner. It was always a Leitner, wasn’t it?

He must have touched something when going through statements. There were also sorts of things slipped between pages and in the cracks behind boxes. 

Once there had even been a spiders nest. Martin dealt with them which would have been great if he hadn’t been so preachy about the “importance of spiders to the ecosystem,” or whatever. 

If they were that important couldn’t something else do their job? Something a little less inherently evil?

Jon didn’t say that, of course, because he was a professional, despite not really knowing what a professional archivist did. Professional archivists went through the backlog of statements and didn’t ramble on about the moral failings of a bug, for Christssake, so Jon stopped thinking about it. The voices, or feelings, or whatever seemed to agree.  

Jon still wasn’t sure if they were malicious or not. But not all the statement givers seemed to react the same way to every Leitner. Some of them even seemed to believe that the books were good for them. 

It was a Leitner. An evil one, insidious, lying to his senses and general morality. Why else would it call for him to kill Elias if it was not some violent monster? Why else would it call for him to burn the archives and save them in the same breath if it was not trying to drive him mad?

It was a Leitner. It had to be. 

He just had to find the source. 

Something was wrong with a section of floor in the archives. 

Something was very wrong about a section of floor in the archives. 

And Jon didn’t know what , which was possibly the most annoying thing about the whole situation. The voices were never helpful except when they gave him the sense that he shouldn’t trust Elias which wasn’t even that helpful because it wouldn’t tell him why. 

Something called to Jon about the floor, though. There was something so different about it that made it shine in his mind’s eye, highlighting something that made no sense. 

Why would there be a trapdoor in the archives? There was nothing beneath them! They were already in the basement!

Martin was the one who caught him checking because of course it was. 

It was Jon’s fault. Martin brought tea at just about the same time every day. Hell, Jon looked forward to it, grew accustomed to moving his papers to make space for it when it was around the designated tea time. 

“Jon?” Martin called. Damn. He had checked Jon’s office and found that he wasn’t there. Jon heard the sound of ceramic being gently set on wood and relaxed for just a moment. Martin would leave him alone, he only wanted to tell him that his tea was waiting, that was why—

Martin rounded the corner of the shelving unit that the strange floor was nestled by, saw Jon on his knees, hands scrambling against the cracks in the wood floor, and froze. 

“Are you alright?” Martin asked, getting nearer instead of walking away. 

If Jon had found his boss trying to pull up the floorboards he would leave him to his business but apparently Martin didn’t think the same way. 

“Did you fall?”

“I’m fine, Martin,” Jon said, hoping he sounded as irritated as he felt. Based on the expression on Martin’s face he had succeeded. Jon pushed himself to his feet and brushed the dust from his slacks. “I was looking for something, that’s all.” 

“Okay,” Martin said, drawing out the word. “Did you find it?”

“No.” Jon decided to push past Martin instead of staying and explaining himself. “I was wrong.”

“Do you want—”

“No, Martin,” the voices decided to stay silent because of course they did. Jon internally cursed them once again for their lack of help before remembering that he didn’t want help from something that likely resulted from a Leitner encounter. 

Jon left Martin behind him and shut himself back in his office. Steam still rose from the tea, carefully placed in the one clear space on his desk.

Jon sighed and drank. 

Jon could read about one real statement a week. The real statements were the ones that refused to be recorded on tape and made anyone who read them exhausted. 

The statements also seemed to delight the voices. After reading a statement sometimes a clear sentence could come through, though the voice wasn’t really distinguishable as any specific person's voice and more like many people, chanting the same thing. 

Jon could read one statement a week. 

He decided to do something reckless. It had been over a month since his last reckless idea so he figured it was about time. 

Back to back the exhaustion was much more evident. The first one, as predicted, was fine. Creepy, sure, but fine. Jon could feel the heavy weight of fatigue settling down on his eyes but it wasn’t too bad. After all, it wasn’t like he would just read one and go home on a normal day. 

The second was worse. If the fatigue of the first was like a blanket, the exhaustion that Jon felt after the second was like someone dropped a box of rocks on him. Suffocating and painful. 

“I have decided to not list any of the follow up,” Jon said, half expecting the recorder to spit some garbled static at him for failing to properly do his job. 

 It didn’t seem to mind. The voices made pleased sounds in the back of his head, each distinct from the rest. Overwhelmingly distinct. 

“I can return to these statements later and add in the research. Besides, some of these haven’t had any follow up.”

The third and fourth were quicker, at least, but by the end of the fourth it was really starting to hurt. 

Jon had been aiming for seven. He got about halfway through the fifth when the tears in his eyes covered his vision completely. His hands had already been shaking, rippling the words on the page, but the tremors turned into earthquakes and he couldn’t hold the paper. 

The quakes spread up his arms and down his chest and he gasped, a strangled sound, before falling out of his desk jar. The sound his head made when it hit the floor was almost as unpleasant as the feeling and Jon gasped again. 

Over the blood rushing in his ears was the sound of a woman’s voice, clear and sharp, resounding from what felt like the back of Jon’s soul. 

“Well, that was foolish, but it did work, didn’t it. If you can’t remember anything I say after then remember this:  you are in danger, Jonathan. You can’t trust Elias. Don’t let him know, he—”

Jon hoped that the woman wouldn’t think too poorly of him for not listening, and passed out. 

The doors in the archives aren’t as thick as one would like. Definitely not soundproofed. The door to Jon’s office is sturdy and thick and even so he can hear his assistants talking. On most days the noise can get irritating, especially when Tim’s laughter interrupts Jon’s note taking time. 

Well. Jon also got the door cracked open, just a hair, which probably helped the sound travel. It needed the help, especially since they were whispering. 

“I’m just, I’m worried! It’s not normal to be poking at the floorboards! It’s not!” 

Martin. The betrayer. 

“And he passed out the other day! I’d think he was drinking if it wasn’t so clear that he’s never touched anything but books in his life.”

Tim. Rude ass. There was a shifting sound, like all three of them had turned to look at Jon’s door. He stood extra still and took his trembling hand away from the handle. The damn thing rattled and hadn’t been fixed in sixty years. 

“I think he just… likes his job too much.”

Thank you, Sasha. 

“I’ve got a plan to lure him out. There’s this— okay, so I was honestly going to wait until more things happened, but this morning I saw something strange. Definitely supernatural. And it was in a cafe! I figure that I tell him that and then we go out for some practical research.”

“Brilliant, Sasha!” Tim’s voice rang out loud and clear and would have been easy to hear even if Jon hadn't been purposefully listening. The other two frantically shushed him.

The fact that his assistants decided to only tell him something important as a ruse to get him somewhere where they could stage an intervention admittedly stung a bit. But as it stood, information was information and that was always good. Besides, Jon figured that it might distract him from the whispers. 

Just as Jon decided to go back to his desk and sit until one of them brought in Sasha’s report, he heard the distinctive creak of the door into the archives opening. 

“Oh, I’m sorry, did I interrupt something?”

Elias, the king bastard himself. Jon could barely hear the beginnings of a conversation between what sounded like Sasha and Elias over the rush of voices, yelling to both protect assistants and keep them as a buffer. Over all of it was the same woman’s voice, less clear than when he had slammed statement after statement. 

Act normal , she said. 

Jon flung open his door and stepped into the main room.  

Everyone went silent. 

“So,” Jon said. The need to protect his assistants must have come from the same need to attack Elias. Neither were helpful. “What’s… going on.”

Jon’s casual lean against his door frame was apparently not as casual as he hoped. All four eyed him suspiciously, though his assistants looked at him with something like concern. 

There was a flicker of delight at the corner of Elias’ expression. The voices told him in turns to attack Elias and to stay calm. Jon decided to stay calm. 

“Oh, Jon! We have a lead for you!” Tim took the initiative to break the awkward stillness.

Sasha nodded, too quickly, and spoke with too much cheer. “Right! Yes! I saw something supernatural today and I think you should know because you’re the archivist!”

“Right,” Jon said. He turned his gaze to each of his assistants in turn. Martin flinched. Sasha and Tim did not. Elias smiled when he looked at him. “Is there anything you need, Elias?”

“Oh, just checking in. I’ll leave you all to it then if there’s going to be an investigation.”

“Great. Leave, then.” 

Elias raised one eyebrow before he nodded and finally left. Tim did Jon the courtesy of waiting a beat after the door had closed to speak. 

“Damn, boss! What do you have against Elias?”

Jon groaned and rubbed his head with his hand. “Many things, none of which make sense. You said you had something for me?”

“Right,” Sasha said, still looking toward the door.  She shook her head once to clear it and turned to Jon. “Yes. Let me tell you about a strange man that I saw.”

“Michael,” Jon said. Sasha hadn’t told him what the beings name was because it hadn’t told her, but Jon Knew. 

It had cornered him in the narrow alley behind the Institute. Dryly Jon wondered if his grandmother had been right; smoking would kill him. 

Micheal didn’t look right. Not that it didn’t look human, because it didn’t, but there was an overlay of a young man, smiling and blond, that tried to fit over the monster in front of him. The hands were too big, the smile too stretched, the eyes too wild, but the image kept trying to slide into place. 

It laughed like a headache and anything helpful the voices might have said dispersed with it. A hand shooing flies, Jon thought, though he supposed that the monster's fingers were sharp enough that it probably could just cut the flies in half. 

Was he the flies in this metaphor?

Jon didn’t know. He hoped not. 

“Archivist,” it said. It’s smile was…

Wrong. It felt wrong to look at.

“What do you want?”

“What do I want? I want many things, Archivist. I don’t want the Hive to win. I don’t want you to win, either, but that can be dealt with later.”

Jon took a step back and immediately regretted it. Micheal’s smile widened and Jon’s nose started to bleed. He knew that it wasn’t unrelated. “You’ll help us against Prentiss?”

“‘Help’,” Micheal said, using its long, pointed fingers to make air quotes. “Yes, I suppose I am helping. Carbon dioxide will kill the Hive and their ilk. Consider stocking more fire extinguishers.”

Jon had to test it, of course, but that was much more direction than he had been expecting. An actual solution! “Thank you.” 

Jon pulled a tissue from the pocket of his coat, oversized and well worn, and wiped the stream of blood away. He was probably only making it worse but that was a problem for future Jon, wasn’t it?

Micheal laughed and the blood soaked through the tissue. “Don’t be so quick to run, Archivist,” it leaned in very close, very quickly, entering Jon’s space with a speed that made his stomach drop and tighten with dread. “I said that I would deal with you, didn’t I?”

When Jon did nothing Michael laughed again and reached out one of its long and desperately wrong hands to stroke his face. The fingers, knife sharp, cut into his skin without issue and Jon bit back a cry. 

“I hope that you sacrifice less assistants this time, Archivist. I would hate to have to compete to kill you.”

It smiled, pulled its hand away from Jon’s bloody face, and walked away. 

As Micheal got farther and farther away the voices came back in. They were slow at first, just a murmur in the back of his mind, but when Micheal was far enough away they all crashed in. Some were screeching with displeasure, calling for violence, others scolding. 

Jon pressed his hands to the split skin of his face and collapsed to his knees. 

“I’m sorry, Jonathan,” came the woman's voice. Jon knew who she was. He Knew. 

He didn’t want to say it, though. Because then he would have to admit that his dead predecessor was haunting him and there was no Leitner that could explain that. 

Prentiss and her Hive were going to kill them. Jon was going to die before he got strong enough to figure out what Gertrude’s deal was. 

There was blood on his pant leg. There was blood everywhere, along with a half-squashed worm corpse, but mostly just blood, because Martin had to do impromptu surgery with a fucking corkscrew to get a malevolent worm out of his flesh. And Sasha wasn’t being very supportive of the fact that it was fucking awful, thank you very much. 

“Why record it?” Sasha asked. “Why did you go back for the recorder?”

“I don’t,” Jon paused. Apparently the strain of having his leg all sliced up was enough to quiet Gertrude and the rest of them. No one would be helping him answer. Jon wasn’t sure if that was what he wanted. “I don’t want to become another mystery. Gertrude, she,” he paused again. 

How much would he tell them? How much could he tell them? Jon wouldn’t have believed any of them if they had come to him, rambling about the voices of the dead.  

“Gertrude is officially a missing person but I know that she’s dead. She died, she left the archives like this, and for what? Something… something very terrible is happening here. No,” terrible wasn’t quite right, despite the definite terror involved in everything that was happening. “Something strange. Inhuman. And I think that something strange and inhuman is happening to me, too. And if Prentiss kills me then I don’t want to just vanish , leave nothing for whoever follows me. Whoever is chosen as Archivist next.”

Sasha looked contemplative, her face creased in thought. Martin just looked scared. 

“How do you know that Gertrude’s dead, Jon?” She asked. “And what do you think is happening here?”

There was a feeling about the Institute that was hard to describe. It followed Jon, chased him home with its heavy weight, always present in the back of his mind, draping itself over his shoulders like the worlds shittiest boa. 

It was normally unsettling or off putting. But when Sasha asked her questions it sharpened suddenly, heavy and oppressive and filled with something like delight. Something was Watching, and fear settled into Jon, bone deep. 

“I just have a feeling,” Jon said, the best thing he could say that would put Sasha off while still keeping his cards close. “Can one of you check the window? I want to know what’s happening out there.”

Sasha looked at him for too long, sharp eyes analytical and searching for something that Jon Knew he couldn’t say. 

“Alright,” she said, finally, and stood to check. 

Those goddamned worms. 

Those goddamned tunnels. 

There were tunnels beneath the Institute. Because of course there was. And of course the worms there were violent and fast and far too quiet. 

The wave of worms that swept between him and Martin and Tim looked almost like water, writhing and splashing and doing all sorts of terrible, un-wormly, things. 

The worms were no longer Jon’s biggest problem, however. It was Gertrude. 

Sitting in a chair, slumped over, surrounded by dusty cardboard boxes a tapes. Very dead. Extremely dead. 

Just as he suspected, though not the victory he had hoped. 

Gertrude’s body wasn’t as worn by rot as Jon had expected it to be. 

Well. He wasn’t really expecting to find a body at all. 

Gertrude’s voice, calm and collected as ever, knocked Jon out of his stupor. “Be quick. Take the tapes and leave.”

“What,” he couldn’t stop looking, though. Gertrude’s body was in front of him. Her actual body. Her actual, super murdered, super dead body, three bullet wounds in her extremely deceased chest. “Uh, why do I need the tapes? What’s going on? Why are— what are the voices?”

“You should probably sit for this, Jonathan.”

Jon sat where he stood. 

There was old blood, dried blood, black as ink, on the floor across from him. 

“There is only one Archivist. There has only ever been one Archivist. You, me, and every previous ‘Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute’ was simply the host for its spirit.” Her voice was calm and clear despite the desperation that crept its way into Jon’s blood and circled his bones. He wanted to cry. He wanted to scream. 

“And that’s me now. That’s what the voices have been.” The other voices had gone silent, apparently content enough to let Gertrude explain. God, how many were there? How many had come before him and we’re trapped in his head, part of him? “Does this mean I can’t die?”

“Jonathan Sims can die. The Archivist cannot. Rather, the Archivist has been forbidden.”

“Great,” his voice was nearly a whisper. “Lovely. I think I need to—”

“There is no time to panic. The Archives are under attack and while the Hive cannot change the world to the extent that it may hope, it can still kill your assistants. And it will.”

“Right,” Jon stood. His legs trembled, his arms trembled. He desperately needed a cigarette. “What can I do? Do I still need to take the tapes?”

“I suppose not. Now that you’ve Become enough to be aware of the spirit of the Archives anything on them would be redundant. Perhaps we can come back, get the tape with my murder, but it should still be here when Prentiss is dead.”

Gunshots echoed inside Jon’s head, one, two, three. “Murder— Elias killed you, right?”

“He did. There’s no time to dwell, Jonathan—”

“So that’s why I hate him!” Vindication!

“At least partially.”  The annoyance in Gertrude’s voice was clear. “Have you decided to sacrifice your assistants? You’ve only just Become, Jonathan, and just barely, you don’t need to extinguish them so quickly.”

“Right!” Jon said. Martin, Sasha, Tim— he couldn’t leave them to die. He wouldn’t. 

The wave of worms that crashed over him as soon as he stepped back into the tunnels probably should have surprised him but at that point Jon was up to his eyeballs in new information so it didn’t really register. 

Probably should have, though. They overwhelmed him so quickly, crawled up his legs and bit and squirmed and dragged him down. 

The last thing Jon heard was Gertrude and the other Archivist’s clucking at him sadly. 

That only sweetened the relative joy of waking up minutes later to the worst noise he had ever heard, shrill and wailing. Jon was covered in dead worms and half bit to death. 

Elias was the first person to see him once Jon had dragged himself out of the tunnels. The look in Elias’ eyes was unsettling. 

Jon decided then and there to not give him the satisfaction of feeling afraid. He would not be cowed into submission. He also decided not to get murdered. 

“Not really up to you,” Gertrude said. 

“Not your choice,” Jon hissed back, quiet enough that the emergency responders checking over him couldn’t hear. “I’m going to win.”

Jon wasn’t sure if the wave of excited determination was his or the Archivist’s. He didn’t particularly care. 

Chapter Text

The steel door rose shakily, squeaking and squawking on rusty tracks. Jon pushed it up over his head until the momentum of it was enough to bring the door up fully. A beam of light, cast by the setting sun behind him, illuminated the storage unit in pale yellow. Shadows stretched behind tall shelves, taller than Jon himself. 

“This is it?” Jon asked, eyebrow risen as he took in the scene. Though the room wasn’t very big it was absolutely packed to the brim. “Our great hoard?”

“Quit your sarcasm ,” Gertrude said. “This collection would make a great many people extremely happy.”

“Why keep it then?” Jon asked, “Can’t you just tell me everything?” Still, he walked in, careful to not bump too hard into either of the shelves that made up a narrow aisle. When one book seemed to call to him he grabbed it and opened it, checking the front cover. When no bookplate appeared Jon began flicking through the pages. It was a diary, apparently, entailing some poor soul’s interactions with various creatures of the Stranger. 

“This is why we keep them,” Gertrude said, sounding satisfied. “Besides, you can’t tell your assistants everything, can you? Nice to have a reference.”

“Like you ever told your assistants anything,” Jon sniped, and settled down to read. 

“Explain it again?” Jon grabbed a box of wine off the metal shelf of the grocery store and inspected it carefully with his free hand. In his other he held a shopping basket, gradually filling with the various things he needed. Pressed between his shoulder and his cheek was his phone, awkwardly positioned as to not look like a complete lunatic as he spoke to himself. “Maybe use a different metaphor? The tree one doesn’t make sense.”

“The tree one makes perfect sense, but fine,”  Gertrude said, sounding disgruntled. “Think of us as a person.”

“Oh, wonderful, you did it.” After much contemplation, Jon added a box of red and a box of white. 

“Let me finish. We are the Archivist. The Archivist is one person. In my life as Gertrude Robinson I was a host to their spirit, but I still informed what they thought of and believed in.”

“Still not helpful.” Jon slid his phone back into his newly empty hand and made his way towards the dairy section. He put his phone back up to his ear, “And?”

“This is why the spirit shouldn’t emerge until later. Gertrude was difficult but still understood what was happening,” Gertrude said, but it wasn’t quite her voice. It was deeper and higher, richer and lighter, scratched with age and smooth in tone. Contradictory in a million ways and yet it sounded so right. 

The Archivist, then. “I don’t like the way you said that.”

“You still don’t understand that you are me and we are on, Jon. Think of it like stages of development, if you will. Gertrude was my most recent era of life, so her memories and opinions are the most recent. Past hosts inform action, yes, and what they learn and do aids me, but they’re not quite so present. You don’t think in the same way now as you did as a child, do you?”

  “You’re making my head hurt,” Jon said, quietly. He propped his basket against the bottom shelf of the dairy aisle, put a half gallon of milk in, and then leaned in further and let the cool air wash over him. 

“You’re not as developed a host as you should be,” the Archivist said, but their voice was Gertrude’s again. “And that’s mostly on you for rushing things.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Jon said. “You don’t get to blame me for any of this.” He shoved his phone in his pocket. It wouldn’t do anything, of course, since the Archivist, or Gertrude, or whoever, didn’t need a phone to speak to him. 

They took the hint, though, and shut up, allowing Jon to check out and walk home in blissful peace. 

Something was wrong with Andrew from artifact storage. Something was deeply wrong with Andrew from artifact storage. 

Jon hadn’t been able to stop the full body shiver that took him when Andrew handed him a cursed book. A Leitner, because of course it was. Jon suspected the Web (because of course it was) though Gertrude wasn’t telling him anything. Said he needed to learn how to identify them on his own, said it would help him make better connections. 

But the Leitner wasn’t what was making Jon so uncomfortable. 

“He’s not quite right, is he?”

“No,” Gertrude said. “But you’re not strong enough yet to See why.”

“Can you?”

“You only have one pair of eyes, Jonathan.”

“Does that mean I’ll get more?” Jon didn’t want more eyes. 

“It means that I don’t know what’s wrong with him either. Keep studying, keep growing. You’ll get there.”

Elias, or Jonah— “Whatever the bastard calls himself,” — entered the archived with an infuriating smirk on his face. 

“Jon?” He asked, standing so that all of Jon’s assistants, his precious assistants, were between them. “I’ve been meaning to follow up with you again since Prentiss, but you’ve been ignoring my emails. Can you come with me, please?”

Tim snickered, whispering something along the lines of “Boss’ in trouble,” to Sasha, who elbowed him as subtlety as she could, but laughed just as quietly. 

Jon smiled a very tight smile and nodded, placing his mug gently on his desk. He looked into himself for Gertrude’s advice but found no response. He paused. 

Something felt… off. Not quite wrong, but to call it right would be an oversimplification, and there was no way to simplify the words that rose from his throat and burned through his eyes and spoke with his voice. 

“Why did you kill me?” Jon asked. Well. The Archivist formed the question. Jon simply spoke it, not yet having Become enough to verbalize it himself. He still viewed himself as separate from them and he wasn’t entirely wrong, but he also certainly wasn’t right. 

Tim and Sasha’s quiet joking cut off abruptly and Martin looked away from the statement he was going over with enough force to knock it off his desk. 

At once, the three of them spoke. 

“The fuck?” Tim.

“Jon, are you feeling alright?” Martin. 

“Did you touch something in artifact storage?” Sasha. 

Oh, she would be a good host, if it came down to it. 

“Well, Jon?” Elias asked, emphasizing his name. Trying to call him back to himself, then, save a scene. His face played a realistic enough expression of concern. “Have you read something that—”

“I can’t imagine that you thought it would win you any good will,” The Archivist continued. If Jon was aware of himself enough to think about looking in a mirror he would have seen that his eyes were, well. Not quite wrong, very, extremely, complicatedly, right. “Did you think I would forget?”

“What the fuck ,” Tim repeated. 

“I think you’re right, Sasha,” Elias said, frowning. Oh, his precious work, his handcrafted Archivist, ruined too quickly. “Best you three run along and check to see if there’s anything missing from storage.”

“And leave you alone?” Martin asked, eyes flicking nervously from Elias to Jon, Jon to Elias. They landed on Jon, locked on his eyes, and froze. 

“Yes, I think so.”

Elias put something a little extra into his words, enough compulsion to urge his assistants up, out of their seats, and away. The Archivist sighed at that. They would have to teach them better than to follow Jonah’s commands.

“Will you kill me again?” They asked. “Or do you think that’s too suspicious?”

“I really would rather not start over so soon,” Elias said. He strode across the room, closing the distance between the two fairly quickly, and towered over the Archivist. 

It wasn’t so hard to be taller than Jon, they thought. Stop fucking bragging, they thought. 

“I ask again: why did you think it would be a good idea? I am not them that held my title, Jonah, I am me, and they are me, and they didn’t like it when you shot her.”

“Gertrude was always a little more independent than the rest of your hosts, Archivist. I Know that you didn’t entirely approve of her decision.”

“Oh, pity,” the Archivist said. They tilted their head and crossed their arms in a gesture that was all Jon but echoed backwards, repeated for eternity. “I didn’t approve of your killing me at all. Guess we’re at an impasse.”

“Hm.” Elias frowned again. “You’ll burn this host out if you don’t let him back in soon.”

“I Know,” They said. “I’m allowed to kill my hosts. You’re not. Are we at an understanding?”

“And your assistants?” Both Knew that Martin, Sasha, and Tim would be back quickly, having found no signs of the situation being artifact related. “Have you chosen to sacrifice them again?”

“Not these ones, not yet,” The Archivist said idly. They looked across the room to the various desks, cluttered with photos and fun pens and statements, real and fake. “So don’t touch them either.”

“Will you tell them?”

“Oh, are you nervous?”

Jonah looked like it, underneath his smug exterior. His plans unraveling so quickly. It pained the Archivist to no end that they didn’t Know their own true ritual, didn’t Know what Jonah wanted of them. 

That didn’t need to matter, though, not yet. 

“No,” Elias said. “Just curious.”

“Aren’t we all. I’m going to sleep, now,” they said, and collapsed. 

Jon woke to the welcome sight of his assistants hovering over him and the extremely unwelcome sight of Elias, lurking nearby. When he opened his eyes, squinted against the light, all three relaxed. 

“His eyes are back to—” Martin began. 

“God fucking damn it,” Jon interrupted. “Did you mean to do that?”

“No,” Gertrude said, or at least the collection of Gertrude’s memories and feelings, bundled together at the front of the Archivist’s being. “Sometimes it happens. I’m sure you’ll adjust.”

“Mean what?” Martin asked. “Jon, are you alright? We couldn’t find anything in artifact storage.”

“That strange effect came from something slipped into a statement,” Elias said, calm as ever, smiling down at Jon with his unnerving gaze. “Once I tore the statement, he came back to normal. Jon, you need to be more careful.”

The bastard. Jon put off answering him by struggling to sit up, pushing off the wood floor with hands spread wide. 

His assistants were still looking at him with concerned eyes. 

Jon groaned and nodded. “That is exactly what happened.”

“Calm down. We’ll get him.”

We fucking better , Jon thought back, a vicious bite in it. And try to warn me next time that happens? Or at least try to be a little less creepy?

“No promises.”

Chapter Text

“Do you think we should tell the police?” Jon asked. He was alone in the archives, his assistants out for lunch, him squatted over the trapdoor to the tunnels. He traced the marks in the floor with something like reverence. Being in the tunnels hadn’t felt right and Jon didn’t really want to go back, but at the same time, it also didn’t feel right to just leave Gertrude’s body there. 

“What do you expect will happen? Do you really think Jonah would allow himself to be arrested?” 

“You’re the one who knows him,” Jon said, crossly. He sighed and stood. “It was just an idea. I don’t like that you’re just… rotting down there.”

“My body is not the only thing in the tunnels,” Gertrude said. She offered up a quick memory of speaking with an old man in a narrow stone hallway, supplying the name Jurgen Leitner. 

Jon went right back down. “He’s—?”

“Don’t,” she warned. “We worked very hard to hide him.”

“Is that why you don’t want me in the tunnels? What use is he? What does he do?” Jon didn’t say it, but privately (or as privately as he could, considering they shared a brain ) wondered if the Archivist had him in mind as a possible host. 

Gertrude scoffed. “No, he wouldn’t work for that. Jurgen was always more motivated by the want to have than to know. No, we kept him because he had connections and experience. You forget that while we can Know many things, most are mundane facts or related to statements. Pulling in completely unrelated Knowledge is difficult at best and simply impossible at worst. In addition, we were never as good at finding cursed objects as he is. He is quite good at concealing himself but I’d rather not risk it.”

“Fine, then,” Jon said, and stood once again. “But what do you think about me taking another trip down? You had tapes.”

“You know the tapes.”

Jon paused in his walk back to his office. A Flesh statement was waiting for him which was a good and a bad thing. They and the Corruption were so disgusting, made his skin crawl. At least it was a long one, which would be nice; he was hungry. “Why are you so opposed to this?”

Leitner isn’t why, Jon thought, but didn’t say. He would keep to himself and stay hidden. That’s not the true problem. 

“I,”  The voice no longer wore Gertrude’s tone. The Archivist, then, or at least as close to the essence of them as they were willing to show. Great. Another headache day. “I think things are moving too quickly. I had planned for my great escape to be soon but this is so fast. Besides, we already know what’s there and I doubt that revealing the corpse would do much. Jonah will avoid being arrested if he doesn’t want to and I don’t wish to once again fall to his tricks.”

“You’ve got to tell me your backstory sometime,” Jon said idly. He made it back to his office and shut the door soundly behind him. “I don’t know. I think it would be respectful if we got her body, though, and to do that we’d need to get police. Maybe I could pose it as a learning experience, take some of my assistants? Sasha, maybe?”

The Archivist made a pleased sound. “Yes, take them. Fine. Go to the tunnels. But if this kills you then I will be very disappointed. I’ve put too much work into you for you to fail so soon.”

“You’ve been sloppy, you mean,” Jon said. He settled at his desk and picked up the statement. “Now leave me alone. I’m hungry.”

The Archivist clicked, a small warning, but they still sounded very pleased. 

Jon knew that they were proud of him. He didn’t know if he liked that or not. 

The yellow door, sickly yellow, was pressed into the blank space of wall between Jon’s living room and kitchen. 

“It only comes out if I knock, right?”

“Are you asking me if the creature whose whole thing is doors can’t open doors?”

Thanks, Gertrude, Jon thought. “Just checking. Great.” He rolled his eyes and went over to the door. Jon hesitated for a moment and took a deep breath before balling his hand up and knocking. 

He stepped back, one step, two, to make room for the slow swing of the door. It creaked as it did, just like any old door, different from any door, and the creature that called itself Micheal stepped out. 

“Hello, Archivist,” it said, smiling so wide. It was unsettling, the way it twisted its fingers and shifted its limbs, but at least it didn’t hurt as much to look at as the last time Jon had seen it. “I see that you’ve Become more since the last time we met.”

“I have,” Jon said, regarding it, then sighed. “Do you want some water? Can you drink water?”

The air crackled and popped. 

“Yes,” Micheal said. “I can.” It stepped closer to Jon, getting in his space with a single movement. “Has no one taught you that it’s rude to do that? I understand that I’m speaking to the host, but really.”

“What?” Jon asked. Gertrude chose to help him and a brief flash of information flooded him. “Ah. I didn’t mean to. I’m still learning.” And then, because he was tired, because fuck it, “do you want that water? I’ve got some wine if you’d want that instead.”

Jon walked away. He wasn’t a complete idiot, despite much evidence to the contrary, so he did his best to not fully turn away from Micheal. To his surprise Micheal followed, looking a bit confused, looking a bit happy. Its steps were in turns silent and thunderous, which seemed on brand. 

“I’d take some wine,” it said. 

“Great,” Jon said, and poured two glasses. He handed one to Micheal, doing his best to not touch its skin, sharp and twisting and wrong, and made his way back to his small living room. “Have you come to kill me?”

It laughed and followed. At least Jon’s nose didn't bleed again.  

“No, Archivist,” it said, sounding delighted. “I wanted to see how you were doing. I wanted to see if you were as… headstrong , let’s say, as Gertrude.”

“No,” Jon sipped his wine and tried to not look directly at Micheal. Despite his growth it still hurt. “I doubt any of the, uh, hosts have ever been like Gertrude.”

Micheal hummed and a twisting, hairline fracture appeared in the wooden coffee table. “Interesting. I’ve been hearing that you have plans. Do you?”

Jon frowned. “Did you come to gossip?”

Micheal’s languid shrug made Jon’s head ring. “Maybe,” it said, brightly, voice light and echoing. “Maybe not. So do you?”

“I, Jon, haven’t had a plan since I became the Archivist.” He took another sip, ignoring the laughter of the monster beside him. 

“Oh, you’re funny! I didn’t expect you to be funny, Archivist. I am so very interested in seeing how this ends.”

With that, Micheal set down its glass, warped by its fingers, and stepped back to its door. Jon wasn’t sure how exactly it opened, considering Micheal never got near the handle, and it had definitely been closed during their conversation, but the door was open. 

“Goodbye for now, Archivist. Thank you for the wine. Let me know if you ever need a door,” it waved, a twisting curl of fingers and color, and then the door was shutting again, and it was gone. 

Jon inspected the warped glass. It still held its basic shape but pressed into the glass were small spirals, and the lip of the cup had been ground down into grooves that twisted and joined the flat patterns of the sides. Jon knew without needing to Know that trying to drink from it would cut the shit out of his face. He set it down. 

“Great,” he said, frowning and adding to no one in particular, “they don’t make this set anymore.”

  “Oh, you can’t use your cup. Pity,” Gertrude said. 

“You made it, you don’t get to be like that,” Jon said idly, then froze. “Wait. You made that? You made Micheal?”

“In a… yes, you could say that.”

“Why?” He couldn’t imagine ever turning one of his assistants into that twisting, wretched, creature.  “Wait, that was— Micheal was one of your assistants?”

“Once,” she answered. “If you couldn’t tell, I, as Gertrude, as the Archivist, had a different relationship with my assistants than most. Hell, I had a different relationship with the Archivist than most. I kept my being together for much longer than any of our predecessors while still gaining the powers given. The Micheal that you know resulted from a, well. A failure for the Spiral and a success for me, or at least what I perceived as a success.”

Jon decided to get some more wine. 

“Each entity has its own ritual. I haven’t fully explained these to you yet but I know that you’re at least vaguely familiar with the concept. After all, you’ve felt our rage in not Knowing our, Beholding’s, true ritual.”

“It makes me furious,” Jon said idly, filling his glass. 

“Yes. Each entity has a ritual that, if performed by their followers, will bring them into the world and make it new, their own perfect world of fear. Or so they believe. 

“I believed it too, as the Archivist before, as Gertrude. I sacrificed Micheal to stop one such ritual attempt just as I sacrificed others. We had no reason to doubt the possible success of a completed ritual, as if we were wrong, the world would end. 

“I can’t tell you when exactly the thought came to me. The Archivist did not Know so I didn’t bother to look, but I eventually came to hypothesize that the rituals could never work. The entities, for all that Smirke’s taxonomy and their followers' chosen name, separate them, cannot exist without each other. The rituals can cause a lot of chaos, a lot of fear, but can never be completed. They collapse from the strain. I know this to be true as, eventually, I decided to let one ritual take place without interfering. It failed.”

Jon felt cold. “So you killed him for nothing.”

“Yes.”

“Do you regret it?”

Gertrude paused. “My hypotheses led to my plan to burn the Institute and my death. If I had learned earlier I would have been in a worse place when I died, and you would not know as much. As it stands, I believe we can Become something greater while you are the host.”

“Great,” Jon said. “Great.” He downed the rest of his glass and put it in the sink. He’d have to deal with it later but he hurt, from Knowing and knowing, from learning, and his teeth still ached from Micheal’s visit. “Will you ever tell me what that is? What our supposed plans are?”

“Eventually. But before that, well. I promised you my backstory, didn’t I?” The Archivist sounded almost coy. “Sleep, Jon, and I will tell you a story. It will be so much more digestible that way.”

“Fine,” Jon said. He was so tired. 

He did a crossword out of spite, just to stay awake a little longer before the siren call of his bed eventually dragged him away.

Chapter Text

The Archivist has been sitting at a long wooden table in an inn when they first heard of Jonah Magnus, but just before that, they were traveling down a long dirt road in a very nice wagon. It had been a nice day, the kind of day where those in the country might travel to the city to see the sights and do some shopping with their beloveds. 

Their host was a nice young woman named Catherine who had been born into a wealthy family out in the English countryside. Her family’s library had pushed Catherine to her love of knowledge and her eventual Knowing, likely the reason why the Archivist had been reborn in her. They had been having a rather splendid time in the less-settled west of America as the owner of a brothel, where information was just as powerful as gold, and despite Catherine having Become, she was just so boring. 

Pity that that American host had not Become enough for the bullets to not matter. That had been a good time. 

Still, Catherine was a fine enough host. Even though it took her forever to Know enough to Become she was at least able to Become, unlike most of the Archivist’s previous hosts. Besides, at least some things worked in the Archivist’s favor: Catherine’s newlywed husband, her James, had an encounter with one of the Twisting Deceit’s many doors and, badly shaken, told her the story. 

The fear was laid deep enough that he tasted delicious and Catherine had Become, and it was glorious. Besides, James most likely would not have survived his encounter if he had not been married to the Archivist, his mind too twisted to properly perceive anything. They considered his state a gift for what remained of Catherine. 

They really needed to thank the Twisting Deceit for its work— it had allowed them to Become and gave them someone to hollow out such that Catherine would have an easy escort to those many places women were not allowed. Thanks to the Twisting Deceit, the Archivist was sitting gracefully beside the husk that had once been Catherine’s James, before the Knowledge of many was pushed into him. The Archivist could wear their pretty dresses and their hair in nice long pleats and travel with speed and style. James was also a good enough reader that, in the event that the Archivist could really build their Archives, he would be an excellent assistant. 

They leaned over and kissed James once on the check. He didn’t react much, just a smile, but it made the Archivist preen. 

They were going to London because London was a city of stories and dresses, and those were the Archivist’s two current wants. The stories were, of course, more important, because Becoming and maintaining that hold on all of the past hosts took effort, and they were starving. The dresses were important because they were young and fashionable. Still, the stories. They needed them. Much longer and they would surely lose control, go feral, become something with many faces and voices, all screaming. 

A creature of the Mother of Puppets was waiting for them in the inn that they stopped to rest in. Wordlessly, the Archivist sent James to tend to the horses, before sitting besides the creature. 

He was young, newly imagined, and a terrible, spindly, thing, he looked human enough to sit on a bench in an inn, looked monstrous enough for those few who bothered to be inside to sit far, far, away. 

“Hello,” the Archivist said. “I Know that you were waiting for me.”

He smiled, and it was terrible, and it was lovely. He was eating a wretched stew with an alarming vigor that the Archivist recognized in themself. 

“You picture yourself living for a while, then,” they said, and offered, “I Know that you will grow many legs and become something so wonderfully frightening.”

While it was true that no one could see the future, the Archivist Knew well enough of the patterns of past creatures. They could half See it already; this spidery beast, strong, one that could incite awe in its terror. 

At that the creature sighed, satisfied, and turned to face the Archivist. Many eyes on his face, he had, which made them jealous, because Catherine would never be strong enough to grow them. 

“Hello, Archivist,” he said. “Are you heading to London?”

“I am,” they told him, because they were young, because they were starving. “I Know that you have something to tell me.”

The spider nodded, a motion that made all the limbs on his body jerk and tremble. Fear spiked deliciously from the barkeep, marked by the sound of the large glass mug that he had dropped shattering. When the barkeep looked up he saw the Archivist’s Eyes on him and began to cry. They looked at the spider, and both smiled. 

“Yes,” the spider said. “My Mother has sent me to tell you of the Ceaseless Watcher’s new favorite.”

That made the Archivist frown. They paused to Look for who this could possibly be. “Jonah Magnus has done nothing. The Ceaseless Watcher doesn’t care about him more than me. Besides, it doesn’t play favorites. Jonah Magnus is not important.”

“He has started a collection,” the spider corrected, smiling, likely in response to their complaining tone, “which will grow most wonderfully. Besides, I have heard that he has… plans.”

The Archivist looked further, and found nothing, beyond “Plans of grandeur?” They scoffed. “He will go nowhere and will be abandoned soon enough.”

The spider shrugged. “If you believe that, fine. My Mother has sent me to tell you that Jonah Magnus’ collection will need an Archivist.”

At this, they frowned. A collection of the size that Jonah was intending, well… not only would they be sustained enough by the written stories, but if the collection grew, maybe those that would send in a written description would instead tell their Fear willingly. No hunting required. 

“An Archivist for his temple? And has your Mother told you if I would be bound there by him or by her and her machinations?”

The spider shrugged again and made as if to stand. The Archivist snared a hand around one of his many skinny wrists and dragged him back down. “Wait,” they said. “Is Jonah looking for a curator or is he looking for me?”

“As of now, a curator.” The spider sat down willingly. Ah, the Archivist Saw, his knees had been bent already, his mimed leaving an act. “He doesn’t know of you yet, Archivist, though I imagine that when he does he would be very eager for you to manage his collection.”

They released his wrist and played with the ribbon in their hair, thinking the proposition over. They Knew, then, that Jonah had plans for their ritual. He was going to attempt it. 

A choice: go to him before it, when he was weak, and gain favor with the intention of ruling the new world together (with the added bonus of being more powerful than him, at least for a while) or wait and see. 

Well. Few would call them proactive. 

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Spider,” they said, standing. They would go find their James and go to another city, one where they could observe Jonah in peace before making their decision. “Pass my thanks to your Mother.”

The spider nodded, another jerking motion that renewed the barkeeps tears, and went back to eating his stew. The Archivist left him there and went to find their James and inform him of their change in plans. 

They couldn’t stay too far from Jonah if the Mother of Puppets was to be believed in what he would Become. They were starving, after all. But they were young. They wanted more time away before being bound, when their hosts would inevitably be chosen for them. 

So the Archivist collected James from the twisting hallways he had gotten lost in and left, and they watched, and did not meet Jonah Magnus for many years after they first heard of him. 

“What the fuck ,” Jon whispered, jerking awake clutching his blankets. “What the fuck. That was— that was a memory?”

“Yes,” Gertrude said. She sounded subdued. “Of our greatest mistake.”

Her tone made Jon sit up further. “Why? I mean, it, it didn’t seem so bad? Beyond,” beyond the fact that apparently the spirit that he was host to or, in turns, Becoming, had spoken with the monster that destroyed his childhood. But there was no way to say that. 

“You could say that Mr. Spider stole both of our childhoods,” Gertrude said. Right. Same brain, same thoughts. But it wasn’t really Gertrude’s cluster of memories speaking, just her voice, just her takes on different situations. “I doubt we would have lived as long as we have if I had not gone to Jonah Magnus. Still, we would have been unbound.”

And now their voice was sad. “Bound?”

“Just as the assistants can’t quit,” they silenced Jon’s coming question with a quick blast of information, telling him exactly what circumstances would need to happen for them to be released, “so can't we. So can't I. My choice of host has been taken away from me and while the Institute allows me to grow, learn, Know, I have lost much of my agency. I am without form and purpose for however long it takes Jonah to choose my next host and it is terrible .”

Jon didn’t think that they meant to show him the nothing of the place in between. A darkness deeper than night, something that is not and has never been and is waiting, a place that they are forced to wait in for a time indeterminate. A place that, if they were unbound, would simply mean death and the bliss of coming apart eternally, of rest. But that had been forbidden for them and so it was just nothing . 

The Archivist probably didn’t mean to show him it. Jon wished that they had tried harder. 

“My Knowledge has been limited; I can’t even find Jonah’s true plans, he has been able to hide them from me. The hosts he chooses are weak ,” they spit, “uninformed, unfinished, unable to contain my true potential, I am forced to spend all my energy just to keep myself from falling to pieces.”

“What about Gertrude?” Jon asked, not sure whether or not to feel offended or afraid. 

“She was magnificent,” they said, and the smile in their tone was clear. “Strong and bold, she was. Held off on Becoming long enough to Know, able to Know enough to shape her own Becoming. She molded me from my many-hosts acquired personality into something a little more unified. I’m split on some of her decisions, yes, but overall, oh, she was incredible. I am not what I am now as I was before her,” they said, “I am better .”

“And me?” Jon needed to know. He had to know, even though the words of the Archivist were growing heavy with static around the edges, even though his head hurt with the force of it, just like how it hurt when they had possessed him completely. 

“I think you will do me well too,” they said, voice much more gentle than the fervor when they had spoken of Gertrude. “I think you will do me very well.”

Chapter Text

There was a yellow door embedded into the wall between a large rack of unsorted statements and the beginnings of the sorted ones. As far as doors went, it looked fairly normal, except that it was in a place that it couldn’t logically be. There weren’t any rooms beyond the archives, just solid earth. 

Sasha sighed. Before she could be dragged away on some tangent or adventure she filed the statement she had finished working on, slotting it into its correct spot. They were sorted chronologically, or at least, they were supposed to be, but Jon had started muttering about subcategories. That would likely call for a change to the placement of everything. 

Statement put away, Sasha returned to the door. Ugly as always. She knocked and it swung inwards with a drawn out creak that echoed strangely in the space. 

“Hello, Michael.”

Michael leaned out of the strange twisting doorframe, a lazy smile stretched across its face. It stayed inside the hallway. Sasha was fairly certain that it didn’t like being in the archives. 

“Hello, Assistant,” it said. “How’s it going?”

“Just fine,” Sasha said. She stuck her hands into the pockets of her jacket for lack of anything else to do. “Did you come by for a reason?”

Did it know she knew? Did it care?

“Am I not allowed to visit my dear friend Sasha?”

“Are you?” Sasha’s eyes flicked down to where it was standing, feet firmly planted within its halls. Michael leaned out in such a way that it looked like it was fully in the archives, a sharp bend in its knees, but it was just pretending. “Because the way you’re standing it doesn’t look like it.”

Michael laughed. “I could come in if I wanted to. I’ve decided to give the Archivist a break today.”

“Jon?” Sasha turned backwards, half expecting to see Jon lurking in the aisles. He wasn’t, though, and she turned back to Michael. “A break from what?”

“An interesting question,” it said. It stretched out one hand to look at its nails, long fingers twisting and curling back on themselves. “You could say that I have decided to give him a break from my noise, if you were to simplify it. My being— or what you would call my being, as we understand ‘me’ as two very different entities— is extremely irritating to the Archivist right now.”

Sasha avoided the question of ‘so what do you understand yourself as’ to focus on the more important part. “Right now? Will that change?”

Michael laughed. It covered its mouth with a hand, fingers bending backwards to obscure the movement completely. The gesture somehow dampened the noise of it, made its laugh less shrill and piercing and wrong. It didn’t hide everything, though, and Sasha still winced.  “Probably! Oh, this is exciting. I can’t wait to see what happens next. Good luck,” it trilled, and slipped back inside of its door in a tangle of limbs and laughter. 

Sasha shook her head to clear it and stopped: someone was coming. If it was Tim or Martin, and they had heard Micheal, then she would have to explain it to them. If it was Jon…

Sasha wasn’t sure what to do if it was Jon. She was fairly sure that Jon didn’t like Michael, given how much he had shook when he had tended to the long thin cuts on his face back before Prentiss invaded the archives. He never said anything, but she had seen Michael’s fingers and had felt them in her back; she knew. So Jon didn’t like Michael, then, and probably wouldn’t like it if she had been talking to it. And Tim and Martin might feel hurt if she revealed that she had hid something that big from them. 

She decided to avoid the problem by slipping sideways through the small space at the end of the aisle she was in to stand in the next one over. Through the spaces between files she watched the person walk slowly down the aisle she had just vacated. As they got closer Sasha realized it was Jon, and that he had a strange expression on his face. 

His eyes were wrong, she realized, and had to cover her mouth to stop from audibly gasping. They were wide, but not vacant, rather, they were too full. There was too much inside of his eyes. 

Jon stopped walking just in front of where Michael’s door had been, just a few feet from where Sasha hid. 

“It was here again,” he said, sounding a little petulant. He paused, before saying, “I know that it can’t do me harm. Fine, okay, it could, but— fine, it would attack me before them. But what if it’s hungry?”

Hungry. Sasha tightened the pressure of her hands over her mouth. She knew that Michael was a monster, she knew that it could not be trusted, but would it kill her? 

“I know, I know. I don’t want to,” he said, his tone changing suddenly from what sounded like an amicable conversation into desperation and despair. “I really don’t want to. No. No, I won’t.”

He paused again, like he was listening to something, before sighing and saying “I won’t” one last time. Then he just walked away, back to where he had come from. 

Sasha stood, frozen, for a few more minutes, before finally taking her hands away from her mouth. She shook herself again. 

So their timeline needed to change. Fine. They could do that. 

She allowed herself another minute of stillness, of breathing deeply and coming back to herself, before she made her way back towards the office. 

Sasha waited for the sounds of Jon muttering to himself to stop before she knocked on the closed door of his office. The day was over and she had been packed and ready to go for the last fifteen minutes, but she needed to see Jon before she left. 

She wasn’t sure if it was to prove something to herself or prove something to the others. A quick glance over her shoulder proved that Tim and Martin were still waiting for her, their coats on and buttoned. Martin smiled nervously at her, Tim gave her a big thumbs up. She swallowed and carefully knocked on the door. 

“Hm? Oh, Sasha, come in!”

Wide eyed, she looked back again, before calming her expression and stepping inside. 

It was like the mess of Gertrude’s archives had settled in Jon’s office— the archives themselves were getting in order and, Sasha predicted, would be immaculate in a few years, depending on how often Jon decided to completely revamp the organization system. Jon’s office, though, was covered in papers like some kind of statement monster had passed through. Jon himself had a few papers on him, over the green sweater covering his arms, over the slacks on his legs. Papers covered his desk as if a tidal wave had swept over it, the only neat spot remaining where Sasha assumed he kept Martin’s tea, a little cup shaped circle of clarity that showed the dark wood of the desk. 

“We’re heading out for the night, Jon,” Sasha said carefully. 

Jon’s eyes had gone back to being mostly normal. Not completely, but mostly, and Sasha figured that that was enough. They were a little glazed over, and maybe a little more colorful than they should have been. They cleared once Sasha said his name. 

“Oh?” Jon said, looking surprised. He checked his watch and startled. “My god, five already?”

It was past five and had been for the last thirty minutes. Sasha had waited for Jon to leave his office on his own terms, of course, but he hadn’t. Then the random number generator that Tim pulled up picked her number, and, well.

“Work day’s over!” Sasha said, pushing as much cheer into her voice as possible, pushing away the despaired tone that she had heard Jon speak with that still echoed in her head as best she could. “We’re getting drinks tonight. Would you like to come with?”

Jon frowned, and as he did, his eyes slipped out of focus. Just a little bit, barely noticeable. He raised one eyebrow before shaking his head. “I better not,” he said, not managing to sound remorseful, “I hope you all have fun. Oh, avoid Kickstop, if you were thinking of that, they’ve got some nasty plumbing issues.”

“Right,” Sasha said. As a matter of fact they had been considering Kickstop. It was a nice bar, a bit of a dive, but cheap beer. She hadn’t heard anything about their plumbing. “Thanks for the warning. I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t stay too late, we don’t get overtime!”

Jon laughed and shook his head. His eyes were clear. There were dark circles beneath them.  “It’s interesting enough that I don’t need overtime, Sasha, but thanks for your concern. Have a good night.”

Sasha took the clear dismissal and walked out of his office, closing the squeaky door behind her. 

The sound of the door closing firmly prompted her.  “Let’s do takeout instead,” she said, preemptively shutting down the clear questions on Tim and Martin’s faces. Can’t speak here, she didn’t say, I bet he can hear us, she didn’t say. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

Sasha pushed her door open, flicked the light on, and dropped her keys in the small blue bowl beside her door before stepping fully inside. The clatter of metal hitting clay rang out in the space, echoing through the unfortunately open floor plan. Her apartment was empty because of course it was, why wouldn’t it be. Just her being paranoid.  

Her couch, soft and red and covered in throw pillows, was empty. Her kitchen, clean and silver and scattered with plants, was empty. She resisted checking her bedroom and the bathroom, but only because she had company. Even though she was fairly sure both Tim and Martin did the same thing. 

Ever since Prentiss’ attack on the institute Sasha had been on edge. She felt like she escaped something very bad, something terrifying and dangerous, but just barely. 

She wondered if Jon had fallen to whatever caused the creeping dread and anxiety that being in the Institute caused but dismissed it— whatever strange feelings she felt near Jon was completely different. That meant that at least two things were wrong. Great. 

Tim set the large paper bag of Indian takeout down on Sasha’s coffee table and began unpacking the individual containers. Martin set the six pack of beer beside it while Sasha grabbed a pad of notebook paper and three pens. She set them on the table, sat on the carpeted floor beside Tim, pulled her food closer to her, and faced Tim and Martin with a serious expression. 

“So,” she said. “What do we think is wrong with Jon?”

Because that was the core of it, yeah? Something was wrong with Jon. Something had been wrong with Jon since almost the beginning, when the four of them moved down to the archives. 

Tim took a deep breath. “I think he’s been replaced.”

“Replaced?” Martin sputtered. “By what?”

“Does it matter? We know that there’s some spooky fucking bullshit going on here. Do we really need to know which flavor of spooky?”

By the end of it Tim was looking furious. Not just furious though. He looked scared. 

Of course he was scared. He had gone to the Institute because of Danny, because of someone being replaced. He had told Sasha his fear two years after they met; he told her his purpose for being at the Institute with eyes hard around the edges to stop crying, she returned his trust by passing any books she found about the Circus to him. 

“If we think he’s been replaced, well. I think he was fearing what would happen to him since before we noticed anything going on.” Sasha took a deep breath. “Martin, do you remember the conversation we had with Jon when we were hiding from Prentiss?”

“I was a little too caught up in everything that was happening to really internalize anything,” Martin admitted, shaking his head. 

“He said he was afraid,” Sasha said, and put her fork down. “He said that he thought something ‘strange and inhuman’ was happening to him, and he was scared of it. Well,” Sasha snorted quietly. “I guess it’s happened.”

With much more force than Tim normally used on anything, he grabbed the notepad from Sasha, flicked the cap off a pen, and wrote ‘not human.’ 

“Is that what you planned?” He asked, and the anger in his voice hadn’t faded. “Did you have us have this meeting so we could agree our boss is a monster?”

Sasha frowned and gently tugged the paper back to the center of the table. He let her. “I didn’t say that. I said he was afraid of becoming one.”

“That’s worse,” Martin said, frowning down at the bold words on the paper. He took a long drink. “That’s much worse, I think. Do you remember when he was all weird with Elias?”

“You’ll need to be more specific,” Sasha said, half a joke and half very much not. “Do we know why he doesn’t like Elias? Is that new?”

Both Sasha and Martin looked at Tim. He shrugged. “I guess? I mean, it’s not like we saw him that much. Head of the Institute doesn’t really have a reason to be down with the researchers, does he?” Tim frowned. “I mean, thinking about it, maybe? I remember Elias visited Jon a lot, actually, when he first got hired, lots of ‘just checking in’. Did… did Elias do something?”

Sasha took her pen and wrote ‘Elias?? Creepy??’ in large, swooping, script. “God, I hope not. But if anyone had anything to do with whatever Jon is, it would be Elias, right? I mean, as head of the Institute he sure seems to not know what’s happening. You’d think that someone with his experience would be a little more proactive.”

“Are you saying Elias made Jon into a… into a monster? Why would he do that? How could he do that?” Martin asked, nervously looking at the small amount of information that they had gathered. “What about one of those books? A Leitner?”

“Jon did say that he read something wrong when he got all ‘why did you kill me’ that one time,” Sasha mused. 

Time scoffed. “That was very clearly a lie, guys. You did notice that, yeah?”

He was met with blank stares. 

“Jesus. You two need to get out more.”

“So he lied, then,” Sasha said, smoothly ignoring Tim and writing ‘Elias a murderer?’ on the paper. “Was it just an act? I don’t know if you’ve heard him read any statements but sometimes he gets really into the theatrics of it.”

“I don’t think he was just pretending,” Martin said, frowning. He carefully uncapped his pen and scribbled ‘EYES’ on the paper. “I mean, not only pretending. Did you see his eyes? When he accused Elias? They were— they weren’t right. They didn’t look right.”

Sasha nodded and kept herself from shuddering at the memory by clasping one hand over the opposite arm. 

“So he’s gone, then,” Tim said, mouth set into a tight line. “Right? That’s how these things work, isn’t it? The monster gets you, the monster steals your skin, the monster can’t mimic your eyes.”

“Jesus, Tim,” Sasha said, and moved her hand from her own arm to Tim’s. She wrapped it around his forearm and squeezed gently. “No, but I don’t think he’s fully gone. I think he’s changed, or changing, but I don’t think he’s gone.”

“His eyes were right when I brought him tea today,” Martin offered. “They were just his normal eyes.”

“And you would know,” Tim teased, gently, slowly losing the tension in his shoulders. Martin blushed. “So what? He’s not a monster, he’s just becoming one? That seems unlikely.”

“Prentiss became a monster,” Martin reminded him. “She was a normal person and then she wasn’t.”

Frowning, Tim wrote ‘becoming monster? worms?’ on the paper. 

“Hopefully no more worms,” Martin said, and he and Tim both valiantly looked away from the others worm scars. Martin picked up his pen from where he set it down and crossed out ‘worms?’.

Sasha frowned to herself and wrote ‘Michael Shelley’ under ‘becoming monster?’, connecting the two with a straight line. 

“That supposed to mean anything?” Tim asked, leaning in to get a better look. 

“Do you remember the distorted man I met?” Sasha asked, carefully, slowly. Her last cards. “How we used his appearance to stage an intervention for Jon?”

Tim and Martin nodded, silently urging her to continue.

“It came to me later, after that unsuccessful stakeout. It told me to call it Micheal. It told me to be careful around artefact storage and to be especially careful around the Archivist. It didn’t call him Jon, never called him by name, just ‘the Archivist,’ and I know it attacked him later. I asked it why it was helping me and it smiled, said that it wanted to see what would happen. Said it was rooting for me.”

Sasha took a deep breath. “When Prentiss came I avoided artefact storage even when I thought it was my only option. I made what I thought would be my last stand on a desk with an extinguisher in each hand and I lived .”

She still dreamt about it most nights— standing on a chair stacked on a desk in research, as far from the ground as she could, thanking whatever gods she could name that she had worn a shorter skirt and leggings that day so that she could see if the worms were burrowing into her. They ate away at one of the chair legs, sent her crashing to the ground, and she sprayed them until she could get onto another desk. That worked well enough, nearly got her through to when Elias could release the gas, but they came at her again. 

They surged up the sides of the desk she stood on and surrounded her. One of her extinguishers sputtered and stopped and she cried out and threw it at the worms that she knew she would be swarmed by. She promised herself that she wouldn’t fall, that they wouldn’t get her tongue and her eyes like they had those poor, damned doctors. 

And she was mostly right. She had collapsed to her knees when the gas finally came and saved them. 

The worms had gotten Tim and Martin’s face, neck, and hands, had dug holes into their exposed skin. They had more time with Jon, apparently, and Sasha knew that his worm scars went below what his clothing showed. 

She was mostly lucky. The worms had only gotten her legs. 

They still ached on rainy days. Being Britain, they ached most days. 

Sasha ached. But she was alive and that would have to be enough. She shook herself from the memory and wrapped her hands around her container of curry, let the heat seep in. 

“I think I wouldn’t have lived if I tried to hide in artefact storage. Have you ever been there alone? It feels wrong. It feels very, very, wrong , like something is watching you, like something else is trying to get you alone.”

Martin nodded. Both him and Tim looked vaguely sick. Tim reached across the small space that separated him from Sasha and rested a hand over one of hers, returning her earlier gesture. 

“We don’t need to talk about artefact storage right now,” Sasha said, firmly. I hope we don’t ever talk about it again, she didn’t say, I hope it burns. “Unless we think that something from there got Jon. I think whatever happened to him is more similar to what happened to Michael, though.”

Both him and Martin had concerned looks on their faces. Damn. Maybe they should have had a feelings talk. Another time. 

“Are you suggesting that your friendly monster has a last name?” Tim asked, tapping ‘Micheal Shelley’ with a finger. 

“I was curious,” Sasha said simply. “And the name— Michael— felt familiar. I looked around, found some old personnel stuff, and I was right. There was a Michael Shelley at the Institute, years ago. He worked under Gertrude and looks like the distorted Michael if he was, you know. Distorted.”

“Great,” Tim breathed. “So the Institute’s got a track record of having people become monsters.”

Martin dragged the notepad closer to him. It was eclectic, to say the least. “How does this change anything? So what, the Institute's got monsters. What does this mean for Jon?”

“It means we act carefully,” Sasha said. “It means we have a baseline, something to expect.”

“Expect monstrous behavior?” Tim asked, dubiously. “I doubt something like Michael would act the same as Jon would.” 

Or whatever had taken his brother. But Tim didn’t bring it up, so Sasha wouldn’t. 

She shrugged. “Alright then, it’s not much. Still. It means we need to watch him, see if he’s changing, see how he acts.”

“Should we be a little more involved?” Martin asked. “We already know that something’s wrong. Should we, I don’t know, look for certain behaviors?”

Tim raised his eyebrows. “Little bit risky, then? I’m down. I’d like to be more proactive if Jon is becoming a monster. I’d like to save him. He— no one— deserves this.”

“Fine, then,” Sasha gently shook Tim’s hand off so she could grab a fork and finally start to eat her dinner. It had lost most of its heat while they had talked. She ate it anyway, room temperature as it was. “Let’s be proactive. And hopefully save him, yeah?”

Tim and Martin both nodded. Tim picked up his bottle of beer and held it up, clearly for the others to toast to. 

“For Jon’s soul,” he said. Sasha and Martin clinked their own bottles against it. 

“For Jon’s soul,” they agreed. 

Chapter Text

Andrew from artefact storage continued to be wrong , the kind of wrong that was hard to define, hard to place. Like a pebble in your shoe, or—

“Sand in your eyes,” Gertrude finished, dryly. “All imagery and metaphors must be eye related at the Institute.”

I was getting there , Jon pointedly thought. He was getting so much better at not speaking out loud when he spoke to Gertrude and the Archivist. One day, Jon reasoned, that would fuck him over. It hadn’t happened yet, as far as he knew, but one day. 

Jon watched as Andrew filled out a form, a blue pen in his hand and a frown on his face. His eyebrows were wrinkled like it was a particularly frustrating form, something Jon felt deeply every time Elias made up some new assignment for him. Gertrude certainly didn’t have to put up with that. 

Or maybe Jonah had finally learned what an archive was and was trying to catch up. 

Jon just barely contained his laugh at the thought. He would never learn. Jon’s attention switched away from Elias, back to Andrew, and he froze. 

Because Andrew was looking straight at him. Because of course he was. 

“Do you need anything?” Andrew asked, a pleasant smile on his face, a pleasant lilt to his voice that grated on Jon’s ears. 

Andrew didn’t look any different, didn’t look obviously other , though Jon didn’t exactly know him. He was a new hire, came on after Jon had left research, and generally his assistants dealt with the other departments when necessary. 

Andrew kept smiling at him, his blandly pleasant face acting just as it should, just as someone running the help desk at artefact storage would. 

“Say something,” Gertrude hissed. “He’s asked you if you need anything.”

“I could say it, if you wanted to,” The Archivist said, their voice smoothly absorbing the tail end of Gertrude’s, her speech becoming theirs in the space of a breath. 

“I’m fine,” Jon said quickly. “Just came by to see if there were any developments?” He walked closer to Andrew, getting near enough that it wouldn’t be weird. Getting close enough that the Archivist wouldn’t feel the need to take control the way they had when they confronted Elias, the way they had when they became Catherine and Catherine Became them. 

“Developments on what?” Andrew asked, looking away from Jon long enough to grab a large white binder and open it. The pages of the index inside were protected by a thin layer of plastic that gleamed in the harsh fluorescent of what was essentially the lobby of artefact storage. 

His reflection was normal. Exactly what one would expect.

So not the Spiral, then. Damn. Michael could have actually been helpful for once. 

“Developments on,” shit. There weren’t any actual cases that he really needed developments on. Always have a lie in mind, then. “Any new Leitner’s? There was a statement recently regarding,” damn again. Gerard has already burned the Leitner mentioned in one of the statements Jon had read most recently.  He knew that because, of course, there was a statement about that, too. Jon’s gaze landed on Andrew’s face, locked in on something that was behind his expression, something just barely visibly. “There was a statement regarding clowns. Do we have any Leitner’s regarding clowns?”

“Clowns?” Andrew asked, and he was smiling and it was sickening. “Oh, I’m sure there is. Mind waiting a moment? I can bring up the list.”

“I don’t mind at all,” Jon said. Now he needed to find another clown statement if Andrew needed or wanted proof of anything. The creepy clown doll one would do fine, certainly, but that’s not what mattered. 

What mattered was Andrew’s reaction to ‘clowns’. There was something in his expression like a person laughing at an inside joke, something funny only to them and the universe.  What were clowns again?

The Stranger, Jon thought triumphantly. Right. Andrew is of the Stranger. 

“Lovely,” Gertrude said. She sounded a little proud. Jon would take that. “I think we’ve got statements for this, then.”

“No new clown Leitner’s,” Andrew said, looking up from his computer and the binder. “I could bring up some clown artefacts, if you’d like?”

“That’s not necessary. Thank you for your help,” Jon measured out his words carefully, making sure to not reveal that he knew (and would hopefully soon Know) that Andrew was wrong. 

By the way Andrew acknowledged that, the way he went back to his work, Jon didn’t think that he had succeeded.  

That was fine. That was fine. Jon had a direction, now, something he could work with. Once he knew what Andrew was he could start planning how to kill him. 

“Let me show you something on the way back,” The Archivist said just after Jon left artefact storage. “Shouldn’t take too long. It’s on the way.”

Another memory? Jon kept walking. Couldn’t stop, not so close to Andrew. 

“Yes.”

Will it hurt? I can’t exactly take a nap in the middle of the Institute. 

“It shouldn’t,” the Archivist soothed. “Here, right here. Wasn’t too long, was it?”

Where?

Jon had stopped just in front of the doors to one of the smaller libraries. 

“Look up.”

Jon looked up and there she was. A portrait of Catherine, wearing a black dress and black gloves and—

A golden plate beneath the picture proclaimed her as Catherine Magnus. 

Jon took a sharp breath and felt his eyes glaze over as the Archivist showed him another memory. He had barely enough time to brace himself before it began. 

The Archivist’s dress caught around their feet, the rich black silk tangling around their legs as they swayed hand in hand with Jonah Magnus around the atrium of his new creation, his Institute built on the graves of so many. The dress was a little outdated, but it suited them; a full, voluminous skirt, a tight cut bodice, pleated and beaded and utterly lovely. They wore a black silk veil and black lace gloves embroidered with roses. 

It was truly a stunning dress. James had looked upon it and loved it just as much as they did which made returning him to the Twisting Deceit both much easier and much more difficult. No matter. That had happened, and James was gone, and they were in London. They were in London dancing with Jonah Magnus, and they hated him for what he wanted, and they admired him for what he had done. 

Jonah was aging (slower than most, yes, but aging, as was Catherine) so the dance was sedated as they twirled around the beautiful room, decorated with subtle idols of their god. 

“And I will be bound,” they said, just barely a question. “I won’t be able to roam or to choose my hosts.”

“You won’t,” he agreed. “But you will be sated, which is more than you could say now.”

They frowned. He was right and they hated it. “For how long?”

“However long until we can perform our Watcher’s Crown,” he said, a slick smile on his face. 

They Knew well enough that he had already tried, and he had failed, though he still wore a crown of Knowing around his head and through his eyes. They didn’t comment. “And my life is bound to yours?”

“Your hosts to mine, your being to mine, yes.”

“You’re making it sound like we’re married,” they said, before immediately narrowing their eyes. “Ah. Well, I suppose marrying a woman might yet save your reputation.”

He scoffed. “And you’ve committed to wearing widow’s silk until Catherine dies, haven’t you?”

“I will wed you in this,” they said, smiling a vicious smile, taking their wins where they could. “Any portraits of me will be in my black gowns.”

“At least it will allow you to live here freely,”  he said. A social organizer, he was, and cunning, “Perhaps it will be better if we are wed.”

“Only Catherine,” they warned. Imagining life after life, host after host, married to Jonah made them sick. “Only this once. And it will be loveless.”

“I expect nothing less,” Jonah’s smile was sharp, a predator's eyes behind it. “So? You will be my Archivist? Watch over my collection, protect my Institute?”

“Until the day the Ceaseless Watcher closes its Eyes upon you. Until your favor is lost, until your collection of Fears is held in you and not in your books,” they vowed. They could feel the collection, already growing like one of the Crawling Rot’s fungi, and they wanted nothing more than to read it all, feel every person's Fear run through them, electrifying; to Know every author’s end and every moment not collected in their words. 

“Well then,” Jonah pulled them closer, ending the dance, beginning a new one. “Let us be wed.”

“Disgusting,” Jon said. His face had been turned up to face the portrait of Catherine and he brought it down slowly, thinking over what he had been shown as he did. Jon’s long hair carefully had hidden his glazed eyes as he Watched a memory long since passed. The Archivist took away the final lingering picture, them hating Jonah and still dancing with him, and Jon’s eyes cleared .

“I know,” Gertrude said. She, or whatever her that was left, spoke to him less and less. The Archivist themself spoke to Jon instead, something which no longer gave him headaches or required much effort. It probably should have been more concerning. “The marriage was gossiped about for years, at least, despite Jonah’s attempts.”

“I suppose marrying a widow still in mourning will do that to you,” Jon said. “Were those your wedding vows?” 

“They were. And, if everything goes right, a way to end it.”

“Ah. So we need to—”

“Hush. Don’t you dare say it out loud; he is always watching you. I thought you were getting better at that.”

I am, Jon thought, but the fact that he had forgotten to definitely lessened the bite. 

The painted eyes of Catherine stared down at him, gaze hard. She wore a black silk dress and black lace gloves, just as the Archivist had promised. Their expression was cold, eyes and mouth tight at the edges, something deep and bitter baked in. There were the faint lines of something carved into their forehead, just barely visible. An eye. 

“I had Gerard do that for me,” Gertrude said, sounding satisfied. “Planning that was like planning to rob a bank.”

“The painting’s just about two hundred years old, I’d expect it would be.”

“What did I just say?”

“Just about, yes,” came the voice of one bastard man Elias Bouchard. Jon turned and saw him standing behind him, Elias’s hands crossed delicately in front of him. “Jonah Magnus’s wife.”

Right. Keep it to myself. But what’s his game? Jon wondered. Would he rather be speaking to me or to the Archivist?

“You’re easier to control ,” Gertrude said. “So probably you. Don’t make a scene, there are people around.”

“A lovely painting,” Jon said stiffly. Did Elias Know that he and the Archivist were scheming against him? He must, didn’t he? How could he not? And what was his plan, what did he expect to get out of the whole situation? If the Archivist was to be as volatile as they were definitely planning to be then why keep them around? “Has it always hung here?”

He had moved it after Gerard defiled it, after Gerard completed it. 

“Yes,” Elias said. “The library is named after her, after all. To honor her.”

Do you mind when he does that? Jon thought, directing the question to the spirit that boiled inside of him. Calling you ‘her’?

“No,” they said, in their strange voice more and more like his own. “Pronouns and myself are complicated for obvious reasons. I prefer ‘they’ for myself but I like to respect the host's original pronouns when referring to things that speak solely of them. The distinction can blur, like now. For all of the crimes that Jonah has done against me, misgendering me hasn’t really been one.”

Alright. Hm.

“Did you need me for anything?” Jon asked. He hadn’t bothered to hide that he was communicating with the Archivist and Elias didn’t bother to mention it. 

“Yes, actually— thank you for reminding me. I’ve heard from research that you’ve found several statements with no follow up? When that’s the case, could you send them a copy of the statement? We’d like to be as well rounded as possible and I’m afraid simply recording the statement and filing it won’t allow us to be so. If the statement has truly nothing left to add, which I would expect of most of what the archive has, then just file it.”

Simple and mundane. “Of course,” Jon said, plastering an overly stiff smile onto his face. “I’ll go tell my team.”

“Wonderful,” Elias said, also smiling. Sinister bastard. 

Jon turned and left, stalking away from the portrait with long strides. He would pass on the message, of course, because unfortunately Elias was right. 

“Jon!” Tim called out, catching him as he passed the cafeteria. Jon barely held in a groan. “Boss man! Good to see you! You haven’t been coming for lunch with us lately.”

Jon twisted around Tim’s bulk and saw that yes, Martin and Sasha were there, and yes, they were waving. 

“I’ve generally been working through mine,” Jon said. “You know how it is,” he added. 

“I fully don’t,” Tim responded, just as cheerful as ever. “You should come eat with us! Only thing in the archives is statements and you can’t eat paper.”

“I don’t want to intrude,” Jon tried. He still needed real food, of course, but he was also recording about a statement a day and he was really looking forward to his daily statement. He tried to do them during lunch when he knew his team would be out. Sasha and Martin began approaching, Sasha with her purse in her hands, Martin with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. 

“You wouldn’t! Seriously, boss, we’ve been missing your hot takes. What have you been doing lately? You’re always working when I get here and leave,” Tim said. 

“We can scheme later,”  the Archivist said, a smile in their tone. “Andrew and Jonah don’t need to be addressed this very minute. Go eat with them.”

“Yes, alright, fine,” Jon said. “I’ll come with you.”

Tim fist pumped before turning partially to face Sasha and Martin. “Anything good today?” He gestured back to the cafeteria. 

“Nah,” Sasha said. “Besides, Jon’s eating with us! Let’s go out, get something fun.”

“Sounds good,” Tim said. Martin nodded. 

“There’s a new sandwich place nearby if we wanted to try that,” he suggested. 

“Oh, that might be good. There’s also that Indian place?”

“We could also try that,” Tim began. 

Jon wasn’t listening. He was thinking, he was Knowing. The place Martin mentioned was cheaper than the other options. Martin had passed it on the way into work that morning and got excited, it looked like they had some good stuff, something he could actually afford on the Institute’s pay. 

“Yes, let’s do the sandwich place,” Jon said, likely speaking over someone. He wasn’t quite sure. His thoughts were on how he needed to bully Elias into paying them more if he wasn’t going to let them quit. 

His assistants looked surprised by the interruption, but pleased. Martin looked slightly relieved. Under at all, however, was an emotion that Jon couldn’t place that crept around the edges of what his assistants were showing him. 

“You could Know,” The Archivist suggested. “It’s what we’re meant to do, after all.”

No, Jon thought, with as much direction that he could. That would be wrong, right?

“Nope!” The Archivist said cheerfully. Tim interrupted before they could say anything more, something Jon was grateful of even if Tim couldn’t yet know why. 

“Great!” He said. “Jon, do you need to get anything before we go?” He sounded particular, like he was aiming for something, like he knew what Jon had forgotten. 

Jon patted the pockets of his pants. “Wallet,” he said, then looked down. “Oh. Shoes.”

Chapter Text

“It’s just a phone call,” Jon reasoned. “I shouldn’t be worried.”

The Archivist’s silence was telling. Jon sighed and carefully relaxed his fingers from where they were clenched around his phone, one digit at a time, one finger at a time. He set his phone down carefully beside him on his couch and groaned, covering his face.  

Things were getting weird. Things could even be interpreted as getting bad. The Archivist was getting louder and louder, a more prominent feature of his life, and the thing that was not Andrew was so grating, and he still didn’t have a clear plan to get out from under Elias’ control, and…

It was overwhelming. He knew someone who was very good at dealing with overwhelming.  

The problem was, of course, that he had broken up with that someone years ago. “Until very recently strained” would probably be the best label for their relationship, but at the very least he and Georgie were talking again— she sent him pictures of the Admiral in all his graying orange splendor, he sent her pictures of strange birds and spooky buildings and, on occasional, tipped her off to possibly interesting ghosts to research. 

Not that he believed in ghosts, of course. 

The laugh startled him, bubbled out of his throat like an old tap, nothing but a screech at first before turning into something violent. Jon covered his mouth with his hands before he realized it, worm-scarred flesh on worm-scarred flesh. 

Stop that, he scolded himself.  Hysterics aren’t helpful. 

“No one’s here,” the Archivist said, softly. “You could scream.”

“The neighbors would hear,” Jon said, voice muffled through his hands, though.  he slowly lowered them back down to rest on the soft fabric of his sweatpants. He moved one hand to run over the textured fabric of his couch and sighed. 

“They wouldn’t care!”

“Great. Love that my neighbors wouldn’t care if I screamed.  Very reassuring, Catherine.”

“I’m not really Catherine,” the Archivist said, tone almost petulant, echoing backwards for eternity. “I’m not Catherine more than I am Gertrude, or you. I’m more you than any of them.”

“Not yet,” Jon said and groaned. Damn it. That was the problem. 

If he let himself become the Archivist then it would be over. He would still exist, in a way, but not in any that mattered— if he was lucky then they wouldn’t do to his friends (he held in another laugh because what friends? ) and loved ones as they did to Catherine’s James. Or would he be lucky if they did? He would still get to see them, wouldn’t he?

The tail end of Jon’s thoughts took on a different tone, something lilting and pleasant and rough and ragged. Get out of my head , he begged. I’m not ready. 

“You’re doing so well,” they soothed, but obliged, and the force that pressed against him lightened a little. 

Jon looked back to his phone. It was a Friday night and his screen was dark. His assistants were out— I don’t want to know Georgie was— this is intrusive Naomi Herne, his very first live statement, was— STOP

“I don’t want to know,” Jon said. 

“You do,” the Archivist replied, softly. He hated that they were right. “If you didn’t want to know, if you weren’t thinking about them even a little bit, then that want to Know wouldn’t have been there. You want to Know. That’s okay. That’s how we’re supposed to be.”

“That makes me feel like I’m not human anymore.”

“You’re not,” they said, just as soft, just as soothing. “Not quite.”

The gentle tone didn’t work a second time. 

“Then let me be not quite a human alone , for Chrissake. Or as alone as I can be.”

“Of course.”

Jon leaned for his laptop. He didn’t have a television and that normally didn’t bother him except he knew that reading wouldn’t be enough to fully tune everything out. He did, however, still have access to Georgie's Netflix. She had said that his ghost tips were payment enough. 

Jon looked back to his phone again. When it got easier he would call her. When it got quieter he would call her. 

Even when the more collected Archivist spoke to him and even when they promised to be quiet there would always be whispers of past archivists, past hosts. They would only be quiet when he joined their ranks, and they would only be quiet because he would stop viewing them as anything but the baseline. 

He pushed away that thought and found something in Georgie’s list, one of the comedies that she swore by, and clicked around until he got to an episode that seemed to be good enough. He paused before turning it on, though. 

The chorus of archivists, or alternatively, the Archivist, was mostly quiet. Waiting. 

“You’re just like him, you know.”

“Fuck off,” they hissed in a voice Jon knew so well. “Don’t you dare say that. You don’t know Jonah yet. You only know him through what I’ve shown you. You don’t get to say that.”  Their voice rolled and boiled and rose and fell and Jon flinched.  

“Sorry,” he said, still tense, once the thunder had stopped. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“You were,” they said, and went silent.  

Jon watched about a season of the comedy, absorbed absolutely nothing, and went to bed feeling far worse than he had when he had woken that morning.  

Things were still stiff between Jon and the Archivist the next morning which was, in Jon’s opinion, wild, because some might say that the Archivist was him. 

“They would be right,” the Archivist said, pointedly. 

“I thought we were done with that.” Jon sipped his tea, mourned that it would never be as good as Martin’s ( and no, Archivist, I don’t want to Know how he does it) and imagined the Archivist sitting in the one other chair at his little dining room table. They would look like Gertrude, he decided, but with more eyes, and Catherine’s hair. 

“I would look more like you with more eyes,” the Archivist supplied. The tone of their voice implied that they thought that they were being helpful. 

“Right back into the one conversation topic I don’t want to talk about! Go us!”

“Yes, go us. We’re doing great. Today I’d like to see if we can get back into the tunnels, maybe see if we can find those statements about Andrew.”

“I thought you were set against that particular adventure?” Jon remembered all too well how long it had taken to convince Gertrude that the trip was even worthwhile. 

“I’ve changed my mind. We can do that, you know. Besides— and don’t repeat his out loud— Jonah can’t see us in the tunnels. Makes him go cross eyed. If we go to the tunnels we might have an easier time of planning Jonah’s destruction.”

“Because I speak out loud so much when I’m talking to you?”

The Archivist laughed. “Exactly. Besides, we might as well Jurgen. He—”

“No,” Jon said, before they could continue. He took a long drink from his mug of tea to keep himself from accidentally saying it out loud, I fucking hate Jurgen Leitner. I never want to meet him.

They laughed again. “Oh, big emotions, hm? That’s fine. It’s not like he knows anything we don’t. So? Institute time?”

Jon sighed, looked down into his mug. Still about half full. “Not until I finish this. It’s a Saturday,” he added, a groan in his voice, “that’s practically the most suspicious day to go to work.”

“Not for retail workers! We have worked retail before,” their voice was bright as they, somewhat unnecessarily, in Jon’s opinion, showed him a collection of memories of working retail from Jon’s own memories ( really? ) to all those before him. “We’ve worked the night shift!”

“Great,” Jon said, downing the rest of his tea. “We’re currently working 9-5 on weekdays, so don’t act surprised when we can’t get in at eight on a Saturday.”

“We can get in,” they said confidently. “It’s our house.”

“If you keep acting like that I’m going to get far too comfortable at work,” Jon said, pulling his coat on over his sweater. The weather was turning a proper cold as autumn really set in. “Everyone saw that I wasn’t wearing shoes yesterday and the only people that said anything about it were the people, not the monsters. You’re a bad influence.”

“Go put on slacks, then,” the Archivist said, their voice airy and uncaring. 

“It’s so strange to me that you cared so much about fashion as Catherine and not at all now.” Jon did go to put on real pants, though, so he supposed that they were right. 

“I’ve matured. I was very young back then.”  

“You’ve been filling my head with thoughts of that dress.” Keys, phone, shoes, underground pass, wallet. Everything he needed for getting into the Institute. Speaking of, “how are we supposed to get in?”

“Jonah will let us.”

“But we hate him.”

“Most of his plans involve us being extremely paranoid. Nothing screams paranoid like going to your workplace in the off hours to research your coworker.”

Lights off, door locked and shut. The air in the stairwell of his apartment was far too warm. His landlord would be pissed when he realized. He wouldn’t for a while, though, considering he was out with his mistress and not taking calls. Ms. Hernandez’ sink was backed up, she called the landlord four times before giving up. 

Huh. Should we… fix that? You know how. 

“Look closer.”

Oh, she had already called her nephew. Nice young man, rising star at his handyman job. He would do a much better job than Jon and his secondhand knowledge would. 

“Very good,” the Archivist said, and Jon preened without immediately realizing. Once he did he shook off the pride and set down his stairs at a brisk pace. Brisk as he could with all his worm hole injuries acting up, of course, cold weather made them worse.  Sasha’s were—

I don’t want to know , he thought firmly, and the Archivist humphed, but didn’t comment further. They’d had that fight, and they would have it again, but it wasn’t the time. 

“Train’s backed up. Maybe get a cab.”

Do you think Elias will comp it?

“No.”

Jon groaned and prepared for a long ride. 

It was misting by the time Jon finally arrived at the Institute. The dark gray of the building had gone almost black from the water, and when combined with the formidable stone pillars and grand entrance, the building looked entirely unwelcoming. Likely by design.  

“Oh, almost certainly.”

The front door was unlocked, and Elias was standing in the lobby when Jon turned around after taking his coat off and hanging it up. Droplets of water dropped gently to the floor. The sound echoed, just a little, in the space. 

This was a bad idea , Jon thought, staring at Elias. Well. Jon supposed he wasn’t Elias, but Jonah, but that felt weird. Elias it was. Him and his creepy eye earring, of fucking course he had one. We’re alone with him. 

“What’s he going to do, shoot us?”

He could! He shot Gertrude!

“Archivist,” Elias began smoothly, a thin smile stretched across his face. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Don’t call me that,” Jon snapped, before a quiet “careful” from the Archivist reigned him in. “That’s not my name.”

Elias raised one delicate eyebrow. “Interesting. I didn’t realize that you were having difficulties with your current host, Archivist.”

“Not everyone can be a set of parasitic old man eyes,” the Archivist said smoothly, briefly taking control of Jon to do so. 

Don’t do that!

“Just for a moment—”

“I’m not a puppet,” Jon said, to the Archivist, to Elias. “I’m still me. Both of you stop your, what is it, decades old divorcee situation?”

Laughing a little, Elias held up one manicured hand to flash an ostentatious ring. “Elias Bouchard has only ever been married to Peter Lukas, Jon , so I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

“That’s an engagement ring,” the Archivist sniped, once again using Jon’s voice, his body, “which marriage will this be?”

With a tilt of his head, Elias answered, “Our fourth. Very exciting.”

“Legally only the third,” they shot back. “Am I invited? Can I give a speech at the reception? This host hasn’t met a Lukas yet. I’m sure it would be an experience. ”

Jon twisted his shoulders and found that they moved of his own accord. The possession was different than the first time, for one, he was completely aware of what was happening, rather than being in a daze for all of it. 

Give me my body back!

“Just a moment. This is important.”

“Mm, we’ll see about an invitation. It’ll be an elite event, of course. I’ll look into an introduction, though— I agree that it would be quite the experience for our Jon here.”

“Interesting.”

This isn’t interesting, this is you two being catty at each other. “That’s enough,” Jon snapped, wresting control back. “I’ll be looking at statements.”

Elias’ smile was sinister. Probably one of the only expressions he could make: sinister and scheming. “Ah, hungry so soon?” 

Unfortunately yes, but Jon would have rather died than admit it. “I don’t see how that’s your business.”

“The Institute is my business.”

“I’d be more likely to believe you if you hadn’t let us get eaten by worms.”

Elias’ smile widened. “Oh, just an unfortunate attack. Happened all the time under Gertrude.”

“Right,” Jon said, “unfortunate.” 

He speed walked away before he could say anything he regretted and before the Archivist could say anything else. 

Jon found himself drawn to certain statements in the archives and let the pull compel him into gathering those statements. Two of them were from the haphazard piles that remained of Gertrude’s terrible sorting system ( “I had a reason for it!” ) and one was from almost the beginning, when Jon first started at the archives. 

“You’ve known this whole time?” He asked, after reading through the statements. Amy Patel and the thing that wasn’t Graham, Lucy Cooper and the thing that wasn’t her mother, and Lawrence Moore and the thing that wasn’t his cousin. “You’ve known that it’s this, what, this Not-Andrew?”

“Not the whole time. It is very good at hiding itself,” the Archivist said, reminding Jon of the whole ‘can change existing photos,’ “and your Eyes aren’t that great yet.”

“My eyes are fine.” Jon closed the statements, one at a time, but didn’t put them away. He would probably need them soon, he reasoned, and so just  stacked them and put them in the corner of his desk. Christ, he needed to clean it. Unfiled statements laid nearly an inch deep in some places. It was getting hard to do normal business. 

“Even if we were just talking about your physical eyes you’d be wrong,” the Archivist said, dryly, and used Jon’s hand to tap on his glasses frame. 

“Don’t do that. But anyway, what are we supposed to do about the Not-Andrew? Do you know how to kill it?”

“As far as I know, or, as far as Gertrude and Adelard knew, there isn’t a way to. Adelard bound it to the table, making it much harder for it to get around. I think we should be cautious around it, certainly, and we should watch it—”

“Of course you’d say that.”

“Because I’m right. It’s probably got a purpose in coming to the Institute, I don’t see any reason for a creature of I-Do-Not-Know you to come here.”

Jon regarded the closed files and then the room itself. Elias was likely watching him but even so, being inside the Institute had a certain weight to it, a certain pressure. Eyes were always on you even if they weren’t always processing what they were seeing. It had been uncomfortable at first, but Jon had grown used to it. A monster of the Stranger, though, would probably never grow comfortable under the pressure. 

“So that’s it, then? We wait until it does something out of the ordinary?”

“Unfortunately yes. There’s nothing else for us.”

Jon opened his mouth to speak before closing it, the snap deliberate. I should tell Martin, Sasha, and Tim what’s happening. They deserve to know, especially if we’re going to have to be dealing with the Not-Andrew’s pressure.

“Then we should investigate the tunnels, see if we can’t still get inside.”

Jon looked over to where the trapdoor was, beyond racks of files and piles of statements. Not today. 

“You’d rather come in tomorrow?”

I think bringing it up with them on Monday is much less suspicious than mentioning that I came in on a Saturday to look for hidden entrances. 

“Fine, then! Tell them on Monday.” The Archivist has no body of their own and still Jon knew that they had thrown up their hands.  “Anything else this weekend, then, if you’re not going to the tunnels? I thought you wanted to find Gertrude’s body.”

Jon shuddered a little. One of his hands strayed from the desk, down to his pocket, where his silent phone waited expectantly. 

“I think I’ll call Georgie,” he said, finally, and his hand clenched around his phone. 

“Oh, good! I was hoping you would! Don’t call her here,”

“I obviously wasn’t,” Jon put his phone back.

“And before you call, there’s something about her you need to Know.”

“I don’t want to,” Jon began, but stopped. “I thought you only know what I know.”

“I can look for what I need without telling you.” Their tone changed, grew a little more serious. “But you should know about an, hm. About an experience Georgie had, before you met her. I think you Knowing it would help inform your actions in a good way.”

Jon sighed, hesitated. But then he leaned back in his chair, got a little more comfortable. “Alright,” he said, “show me.”

Chapter Text

Georige’s apartment was soft and cluttered in a way that was grounding rather than suffocating. A little cramped, a little worn, but cozy. 

Jon sat on her couch with a hand full of the Admiral’s soft orange fur. Of the three of them the Admiral was definitely the most comfortable with the whole situation. 

“Thanks again for having me over,” Jon said, and Georgie nodded, and the Admiral purred, and the Archivist was quiet. 

“You sounded worried on the phone,” she said, and her tone was just as soft as the hand-me-down chair she sat on and just as sharp as the look in her eyes. She played with the knit blue blanket spread across her lap and swept Jon up and down with analyzing eyes. As far as Jon knew, he didn’t look outwardly disheveled. He had done his usual morning routine, maybe a bit more meticulous than normal. A good amount of coconut oil through his hair before he tied it up, a little cologne after shaving the prickly spots of his face, an ironed shirt, and, incredibly, glasses cleaned with an actual cloth instead of the tail of whatever shirt he had on. 

“You look a bit alarmed and distant most of the time,” the Archivist said. “But you don’t look bad!”

Thanks. 

“I’ve had a lot going on to be worried  about,” he admitted. “And I think I need help? And you’re a helpful person.”

Georgie leaned forward, scooped up the Admiral, and gently placed him in Jon’s lap, the ‘damn straight I am’ going unsaid. “So. What’s been happening with you?”

“A lot,” Jon said, pet the Admiral. “I’m sorry,” he said, and began. 

Georgie sat very still for a long moment after Jon had finished. He had told her everything, just like he had said he would, and it was violent and raw. At some point the Admiral had stood from Jon’s lap, stretching old bones and shaking old fur out of the patterns that Jon had worried into it, and gone to Georgie. She sighed, finally, a noise that released none of the tension from Jon’s shoulders.  

“So,” she said. 

“So.”

She raised a hand from the Admiral's fur and ticked off each statement on her fingers, starting again when necessary. “So taking the Magnus Institute archivist job meant more than what you expected, what you expected being a job that both you and your team was severely underprepared for. You read some spooky stuff, reminiscent of your childhood experience,” he had told her about Mr. Spider, feeling at the very least that it was a trade for him Knowing about Alex and the corpse. “And that caused some ancient being to awaken in your head.”

“Yeah,” Jon said. “The Archivist. Capital A.”

“Right. So your weird head feelings started calling for you to be suspicious of Elias, your boss, and calling for you to be protective of your assistants. You started to know things you shouldn’t. Eventually you learned about the capital-A Archivist and your boss’ true crime, being an old body-hopping capitalist.”

The Archivist cackled.

Stop that. 

“It’s just a good description! Not that he wouldn’t take it as a compliment.”

“And now you’re worried about not knowing how to deal with your boss or the monster that replaced a guy in artefact storage. Oh, and you haven’t told any of the people you work with about any of this. Have I got it?”

“I mean, yeah,” Jon shifted uncomfortably. “That’s it, basically. The simple version.”

“What else, then?” Georgie caught his eyes, and for the first time in a while it felt like the gesture went straight to him rather than through the Archivist first. “You said that was the simple version, which, by the way, simple versions are generally fairly short. However. Today is my day off. What’s the complex one?”

Jon hesitated. Should I...

The Archivist sounded amused, maybe. “You said that you would do this. I’m not taking that away from you.”

Fine. 

“I’m not really human anymore,” Jon  admitted, and that was it, wasn’t it. He looked away from Georgie and her kind face, Georgie and her encouraging eyes, Georgie and her sharp expression. There was a reason What the Ghost had as many listeners as it did and that was because Georgie wasn’t just a likeable host, she was a damn good investigator. “I’m Becoming the Archivist, or they’re becoming me, and I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want to be hollow, like Catherine.”

She nodded. He had told her the Catherine stories, both of them, but he did leave out the mention of the Archivist’s vows at their own insistence. Jonah was always watching, after all, even when he wasn’t. Best to play it on the safe side. 

“If my choice is between being like Catherine, hollowed out and nothing , and Gertrude, bold and still herself and ruthless ,” Michael, and all the people she sacrificed to stop rituals, and…

Oh, Christ. Gerard. And he Knew, then, what Gertrude had done to her final assistant. What am I supposed to do about that?

“I didn’t want that,” the Archivist said, loud enough to cut through Jon’s growing panic, quiet enough to still be gentle. “I never wanted her to do that.”

That’s not an answer. 

“I don’t have a choice,” he finished, and clutched his face. “I’ve never had a choice.”

Georgie stood, scooping up the Admiral as she did, and sat next to Jon. She placed the cat on the place where her leg touched Jon’s and pet him until he settled. Then she put an arm around Jon’s shoulders. He stiffened at first before leaning against her side, warm and welcoming. 

“You’ve got choices, Jon. You just can’t see them yet. Maybe I’m not the best person to help you find them, but if you want to try then I will too. I’ll help you try as long as it’s safe for me, okay?”

“Okay. But—”

Georgie hushed him. “You mentioned you hadn’t told your assistants yet. You need to. They’ll know more about your specific brand of spooky,” Jon snorted, she huffed a laugh in response, “than I will. It’s literally their jobs.”

“I don’t know how they’ll react,” he said, looking down at his hand, snared into the Admiral as he dozed, purring like an old car. At least the Admiral hadn’t pulled an “animal in a horror movie” on him and hissed and scratched as soon as Jon entered Georgie’s flat. 

“You could Know,” the Archivist whispered, loud enough to hide whatever Georgie’s response was. “I have a vague idea of their backgrounds, just basic information, but we could—”

“No,” Jon said, sharply and very much out loud, “I don’t want to Know.”

He could feel more than see Georgie’s frown in the way her body stiffened. “Is the Archivist saying something? What don’t you want to know?”

“They want me to Know everything—”

“Most things!”

“ Everything about my assistants. I don’t want to, that sounds… that’s too invasive. I shouldn’t Know their traumas before they see fit to tell me.”

“You’re right,” Georgie said, her tone reminding Jon that that was exactly what he had done about hers. “You shouldn’t. Hell, maybe you should try to distance yourself from them— them as in the Archivist, not as in your assistants, don’t misunderstand me. Boundaries , Jon,” she stressed. “Boundaries are very, very, good. I’ve been working on boundaries a lot since we broke up.”

“Has that been working for you?” Jon tried to joke. Instead the question came out distressingly sincere, embarrassingly sincere. 

“You know what,” Georgie leaned her head against Jon’s. The feeling of her cornrows spilling over Jon’s shoulders and mingling with his hair was both grounding and achingly familiar. “I think they have.”

“I don’t know how much I can separate myself from the Archivist. They keep stressing that we’re the same thing.”

“Because we are!”

“And,” Jon continued, valiantly ignoring the Archivist, “I think it’s too late for me to try distancing myself from the Institute. I’m eating a statement a day and I already know that that won’t be enough soon.”

Georgie squeezed his shoulder. 

“I don’t want to stop being me,” Jon said, desperation slipping through his carefully measured words. “When does the Archivist become me? When are they more me than I am? Where do I stop? When do I stop? I don’t want to stop, Georgie, but I can’t not keep going.”

Compulsion snaked his words, twisting and swirling through them; Jon grabbed it by the throat and pulled it back inside. He would not be forcing Georigie to do anything. 

“Do you mean that you don’t want to stop being you, or that you don’t want to stop drawing on their power?” Georgie asked carefully, running a hand through Jon’s hair as she spoke, comforting even as she weighed a plan out in her head, thought through any options left for them. 

“Both, but I don’t think I can do either. It’s hopeless—”

“If you decide now that everything is hopeless than you have already lost.” Her voice was fierce, her tone sharp, but then it softened.  “You can’t do that yet, okay? Can’t give up yet. I will be here for you until you’re not you anymore, okay?”

The face of Catherine’s James played in Jon’s mind; his blank expression and the stoney serenity that turned to a desperate panic when the Archivist had given him back to one of the Spiral’s doorways.  “When ‘Jon’ is only the Archivist, run, okay?”

“So I don’t get my brain scooped out by endless information?”

“Yeah.”

“I wouldn’t,” the Archivist argued. 

You would, don’t try that with me. You did it to that which once was Catherine’s husband, you’d do it to my— you’d do it to Georgie. 

“Okay,” Georgie said. “If you go full eldritch, I’ll run. But we can do things before that has to happen, okay?” She pulled away and put her hands on Jon’s arms, tilted him until he was looking directly at her. “Tell your assistants— your friends. Tell your friends what you told me, tell your friends that you’re scared.”

Her tone was rejuvenating even when hopelessness clawed into Jon. “And I’ll keep myself from Knowing anything intrusive. I’ll keep telling the Archivist that I don’t want to know.”

“You make me sound like I’m the bad guy,” they complained. 

Dubious. 

“That sounds like a plan,” Georgie said, her smile infectious. Her eyes strayed behind Jon and caught on the cat-shaped clock hanging on her wall. “Let’s get dinner. I’ve missed you, alright. Let’s order in. What are you thinking of?”

“That place near here that does kadhi chawal?” Jon asked. “The one that does the tandoori chicken that you like?”

“Sounds great.” Georgie smiled and stood, reaching for her phone that she had abandoned on the low table next to the chair she had started in. She paused before grabbing it. “If we stop talking about this to do dinner, you promise that you’ll still tell your friends?”

Jon did plan on that, actually, since he had promised. “Of course!”

His indignation must have leaked through into his tone because Georgie laughed. “Okay, okay, just checking. God, I wonder what they think.  I know you and I’ve seen you and you are terrible at hiding the fact that you’re talking to something when you talk to the Archivist.”

“I think I’ve been doing a pretty good job,” Jon said. 

Both the Archivist and Georgie laughed. 

“Sure,” she said, looking up the number for the restaurant. “If you say so. We just don’t want them coming to the wrong conclusion, is all, and you need to tell them before they do so.”

Chapter Text

On reflection, Sasha would say that the mood of the day had been set by walking into the archives at a bright nine in the morning and seeing Jon and Elias arguing. She set her bag on her desk and sipped her coffee, having decided to just watch them for a moment before actually interacting with either of them. 

“It’s not fair, Elias,” Jon said, a strange bite to the word. He ran a hand through his hair, fully come loose from his hair tie, and crossed his arms. “We do all this and for what?”

Elias eyed Sasha over Jon’s shoulder, his own face set into something calm and passive. “I’m sure we don’t need to have this fight now, Jon . Hello, Sasha.”

Both men turned to fully face her. “Hello,” she waved. “What’s all this about?”

“Have you considered unionizing?” Jon asked, cutting off Elias before he could fully begin. “I mean, really considered it?”

“I haven’t,” Sasha said carefully, slowly sitting down. It was a bad leg day (fuck Prentiss and fuck the worms she rode in on) and the painkillers Sasha had taken that morning had yet to kick in. “...are you?”

“No,” Elias said, and the same time that Jon said, “And maybe a strike!”

The two men stopped and stared at each other. Elias’ facade was starting to wear down, from the look of it— annoyance was leaking through. Jon looked a combination of cheerful and exhausted. 

“Archivist,” Elias complained. “Really? Now?”

Something passed over Jon, then, something that Sasha only noticed because her, Tim, and Martin were so convinced that whatever had replaced him had messed up his eyes. When Elias said ‘Archivist,’ the colors in them had expanded outward, forever and not at all, for just a moment. 

Jon’s exhaustion was briefly overwritten by rage. “That’s not my name,” he said, and pointed to the door. “You can leave if you’re just going to come here to stir shit up.”

Sasha gasped, just barely bringing her hand up in time to muffle the sound. What the fuck was happening between her boss and her boss’ boss ?

Elias looked surprised for a moment before shaking his head. He raised his hands up in mock surrender. “Fine, then, I’ll leave. But really, Jon, behavior like that is—”

“Then fire me,” Jon said, face still stony with rage. Sasha expected him to turn on his heel and disappear into his office, but he didn’t, just stayed in the main room, glaring at Elias until he finally left. 

The tension in the room dropped significantly when the door closed behind him. Jon sighed and looked to Sasha, his eyes his own. “I’m sorry you had to be here for that.”

“What was that?” She asked. Damn Tim and Martin for being late; there was no way she could describe what had happened without it sounding made up. 

He leaned against his door and sighed. “An argument that I should have waited to have.”

“Are you actually planning to unionize the Institute?”

Jon laughed. “I mean, if it comes to it, yes, though I don’t know how much that meshes with my plans.”

“Plans for what?” Sasha asked, remembering that the current running theory was that the man calling himself Jon was no longer Jon and thus his plans would be evil ones. Could she outrun him? The stairs were bad, that day, and the thought of going up them sort of wanted to make her cry. Could she keep him out of the elevator for as long as she needed? Maybe?

It took her a moment to realize that Jon was shaking his head slightly, and another moment to finally answer. 

“I’m not sure yet, unfortunately,” he said, and sighed. “Well, I best leave you to it. I’ve got statements to… statement.”

Eyes raised a bit at the suddenness of it, Sasha nodded. “Yeah, alright. Wanna do lunch with us today again?”

“Can’t, unfortunately. Meeting a friend,” he said, and disappeared into his office. 

Sasha half suspected Jon to be lying about meeting a friend, but he really did leave his office at noon exactly with his coat buttoned and his bag slung over his shoulder. 

“Hot date, boss?” Tim asked, faux casually, watching Jon’s face intently. To all of their surprise, Jon laughed. 

“Just about the opposite,” he said, crossing the room. “Meeting with a friend of mine. I should be back by the end of lunch, but if I’m not, feel free to do whatever.”

“Instead of our jobs?” Martin asked, eyes just as focused as Tim’s, question just as quietly pointed. Sasha was surprised that Jon wasn’t bristling under the attention, but then again, that was what the archives felt like all the time. No perceived difference, and all that. 

Jon laughed again. “Go ahead,” he said, and left. 

Sasha, Tim, and Martin waited a full five minutes before bursting into action: Sasha filled them in on what she had seen that morning while the three of them searched Jon’s office. It wasn’t weird if they thought he was a monster, Sasha told herself, quietly defending the action. 

They had to be careful in their search as Jon’s office was messy in the kind of way that a person’s room is messy; the owner knows exactly where everything is, the system of organization well enough ingrained that any disturbances are spotted immediately. 

The statements tucked away in Jon’s office didn’t seem to have any cohesive theme. Some of them had passed through the hands of the assistants, some of them hadn’t. Some were about solid things, like beasts made of meat, while others featured more abstract things like the feeling of being alone. There was one defined pile of statements featuring Gerard Keay, neatly bound together by large binder clips. 

Tim found the most important item about ten minutes into the search, just about half way through their lunch break. Only two statements, but hidden away together in the bottom of Jon’s desk. 

Statement of Amy Patel, regarding the alleged disappearance of her acquaintance Graham Folger. Statement of Lucy Cooper, regarding the replacement of her mother. One statement known, one unknown. 

“He hid the ones talking about people getting replaced,” Sasha took a picture of the first page of Amy Patel’s statement and checked to see if the words were clear. They were, meaning that the spooky bullshit that forced them to deal with tape records would not force them to deal with the ancient scanner. Good. That beast took a half hour to deal with the amount of paper they had to deal with and they just didn’t have that time. Sasha flipped through the file, taking a picture of each page. “He doesn’t want us to have these.”

“He didn’t even show us this one,” Tim said, eyes hard and shoulders drawn up. He picked up the statement of Lucy Cooper and waved it at the other two before pulling out his phone and opening its camera, following Sasha’s lead. “What are we supposed to do about this?”

“Find what they have in common,” Martin said, leaning around Tim to read bits and pieces of Lucy Cooper’s statement. “Things keep popping up in the statements— Gerard Keay, the Leitner’s, Hilltop Road. This might be one of them.”

“But we don’t have answers to any of those,” Sasha said, putting her phone away and clipping the Patel statement back up. She held out her hand for the Cooper statement. “None of those have actual, known, reasons for being like they are. I mean, I guess we know that Gerard is dead, but who’s to say that’s not another trick?”

Tim handed the Patel statement back. “We were hired to find answers. This is our job.”

Martin shook his head. “We were hired to be archivists! This archive is more like a research department than anything else.”

Carefully, Sasha placed the two statements back where they had been. The other two judged the placement, thinking it over. Tim nudged the Patel statement slightly to the left, Martin pulled the Cooper statement slightly down. Then they both nodded and Sasha closed the desk drawer. 

“It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t originally our job,” Tim said, leading the way back into the main room of the archive. “It’s become our job. We’ll read those statements, really analyze them, and find a way to kill whatever replaced him.”

The three assistants locked eyes and nodded. And though they didn’t have bottles of beer this time, though they didn’t speak, the “for Jon’s soul” rang out just as strong as it had that night. 

Chapter Text

“Today?” The Archivist asked. 

Jon was trying to pry open the boards of the trapdoor. It was tricky— he had come out from under the only time he had ever used it and so opening it had been as easy as pushing. The way he had taken inside was firmly blocked off, so the trapdoor was the only entrance to the tunnels, which would have been fine, except that Elias had the key, not Jon, and the key was more than just something to open the lock, but also a doorknob. Jon needed to find a way to unlock the door and lift it. 

Yes, today, Jon thought. He could feel Elias’ eyes on him, watching him. It wouldn’t be smart to reveal everything. If I can get this damned door open. 

“We could steal the key,” they said, bringing forward an image of where the key was hidden in Elias’ office. It was in his desk, second drawer on the left, in a folder marked with a large eye, because he was smart, and “N0-J02,” because he thought he was funny. “Wait until he leaves and just take it.”

He’ll know.

“Then we’ll be fast.”

Jon took a second to reflect on that, but looked away from the door when he heard footsteps. Tim stood down the aisle, watching Jon with an intense look on his face that Jon couldn’t decipher and didn’t want to, no thank you. 

“Boring.”

Boundaries, remember?

“Tim! What can I do for you?”

Tim paused just briefly before answering, staring at Jon the whole time. “There’s a woman here for you, she’s got a statement to give.”

“Fucking FINALLY!” 

Tim continued, unaware of the Archivist’s pure glee. They were being a little off putting, Jon thought, but to be fair, it had been a while. 

“I got the basic info; name, contact information, and so on, so that’s done with.” Tim got closer as he spoke, stopping just above Jon. Tim put out his hand to help Jon stand and he took it, dragging himself up and off his knees. “Her name is Helen Richardson and she seems like she’s not been having a good time of it.”

“I’ll be polite, then,” Jon said, and wiped the dirt from the floor off of his hands and knees. Tim was still there, still watching him. “Need anything else?”

“Just Ask him,” the Archivist said, frustration clear in their voice. “We could Know!”

Again, boundaries. 

“No, I think I’m all right,” Tim said, and turned away. 

Helen Richardson absolutely stank of the Spiral. Her fear rolled off her in waves, spiking whenever she would look over her shoulder at the door into Jon’s office, low and intense while she drew her map. It built steadily throughout her statement, as she told her story.

Helen had been selling a house when Michael had crashed the viewing. She had still done her best, which was admirable, and she had escaped, which was incredible, but still . Michael had tried to eat her. 

“So?” She asked, tearful, statement done with. Her map was laid out on the desk but she fidgeted with her pen like she wanted to fix it, or draw a new one. “Do you believe me?”

Normally when Jon zoned out, the Archivist would tell him to pay attention. This time, though, both of them were relaxed and complete and full. 

It took a second for that to sink in, and then Jon’s fear of losing his humanity kicked back in and he jerked back to reality.

“Uh,” he said, taking a moment to gather his thoughts. The Archivist continued to be unhelpful, satisfied and happy to the point of almost being overwhelming. “Yes, Ms. Richardson, I believe you. Me and my team will… we’ll make some inquiries and get back to you. Thank you for your time.”

“Right,” Helen said, standing from her chair. She caught Jon’s eyes, likely to say goodbye, but froze and shook her head. Without another word she turned and ran, throwing open the door with a force that made the hinges scream. 

Jon sat back and sighed. “Stop making me look weird,” he told the Archivist. They didn’t bother to respond. Jon settled back into his chair fully, considered taking a nap, and stopped. 

“Wait,” he said, and stood. “Wait,” Helen had gone left from her chair, she had kicked it slightly in her escape. But that didn’t make sense ; the door was almost directly behind her, to the right if anything. 

Anger cut through the post-statement haze, sharp and grounding and totally his own. “Michael!”

Another door opened, the same door Helen had described, the door Jon had seen many times already. Michael leaned out, form lax, and waved. “Hello, Archivist.”

“What the fuck was that?” Jon asked, gesturing angrily at the place where Helen had disappeared, at the place where Michael had come. “She had gotten out!”

“I had let her out,” Michael corrected, laughing. The sound echoed in a space that echoes died; it sounded like a broken song. “Really, Archivist, I thought you would like this! That was a friend activity! We’ve done this before!”

“What?” Jon asked, disbelief momentarily obscuring anger and fear. 

“You know,” Michael said, gesturing widely, fingers twisted into jumbled and strange shapes. Jon Knew that Michael toned down its whole deal in front of the assistants, but he was fairly sure it was playing everything up in front of him. “Like yesterday. Yesterday you treated your friend—Georgie, yes? With the cat?— to lunch.”

“So?” And when had Michael seen Georgie? When had it seen the Admiral? Was it watching them?

“So,” Michael said, drawing out the word and rolling its hands like the connection it was making was obvious. 

It took Jon a moment, but once he realized he gasped and stood. “I didn’t ask for you to ‘ treat me to lunch ,’” he said, leaning over the desk. 

Michael tilted its head and kept tilting it, “But you looked so sad,” it said. “Friends bring friends lunch when they’re sad.”

“We’re not—” Jon stopped, momentarily stuttering from surprise. “We’re not friends!”

“Careful,” the Archivist warned, their own apprehension rising, finally returning from their nap. “Jon—”

“Let her go! It’s not fair that she thought she had got out, you were just playing with her!”

Michael’s eyebrows rose, and rose, and rose. “Yes? I don’t know if you were expecting a confession, Archivist, that’s exactly what I was doing. I even shared, it’s worse for me to share, you know, but you looked malnourished , so I—”

“Don’t try to get me to agree with you,” Jon snapped. “It-Is-Not-What-It-Is. Twisting Deceit.”  

“Would you like to know about lies, then?” Michael said, a sudden bitter kick to its words. It leaned closer, closer, torso and face and spinning hands twisting, until it loomed over Jon, eight feet tall. “ Everyone is lying to you. Nothing is what it seems. Nowhere is—”

Jon’s head spun with each word, each sentence a bullet straight to the brain. He couldn’t think straight, he couldn’t Know, he couldn’t understand, his hands were moving to his desk drawer without his arms moving them. One of his files was missing, the one with the binding of the Not-Them and he couldn’t comprehend why —

“ Stop ,” the Archivist hissed, and their voice was Jon’s, his actions their own. They slammed the drawer shut and planted their feet and every movement had an aching clarity to it. They were the lighthouse in the mist; Jon was no longer lost at sea. “I know you, Michael,” their words rang from Jon’s mouth. 

They planted their hands on his desk and leaned forward, almost right into the shapeless and painfully-present form that pushed and grated against them. Static coated their words, sharp and bright and clear and all, “ I Know you, Michael. The Distortion. Michael Shelley, once, once— ”

Sharp pain— Michael had reared back when they had started speaking but Naming it threw it into a panic. It blurred out the edges of its form into something incomprehensible, the Archivist pulled it back into full clarity. For a second Michael was just a man, just a tall man with blond hair and a scared face, and then it was lashing out, its hand changing from human to claws of unreality in seconds. Its fingers cut into Jon’s face and shoulder as he threw up his arm to protect himself, and the Archivist’s static sputtered and died, replaced by a shrill keening emanating from somewhere inside of Michael and nowhere at all. 

“ None of that,” Michael hissed, its face a clash of emotions. It threw itself back inside of its yellow door in a tangle of limbs and blood and screaming. 

For a second it was still; Jon dropped back into his chair and pressed his hands against the cuts, blood smeared across his face. Then his actual office door burst open and all of his assistants were there, Tim at the front with one of the extinguishers leading the charge. 

“Jon?” He asked, eyes wide. Sasha  and Martin stepped out from behind him, each checking a different corner of the office. “What the fuck was that?”

“Michael just ate Helen Richardson,” Jon said, and a gasp rippled its way through the three of them. “And then it stabbed me. I need—”

“An ambulance,” Martin said, before Jon could say anything, “Oh my— oh my God .”

“I’m,” Jon nearly said he was fine before he tried to move a little and winced from the shock of it. “Maybe not an ambulance. Definitely stitches. Work’s done for today, team.”

“Let me get my keys,” Tim said, and rushed out. 

Sasha went to help Jon. She grabbed one of his scarves from the peg on his foot as she did. “How much do you care about this?”

It had been a secret Santa gift from one of his years in research. “Not at all.”

Sasha nodded and pressed it against the wound. She looked at Martin over Jon’s head, but he was too spent to try to figure out why. 

“When this is done,” Jon said, “I’m going to sleep for a million years.”

Sasha, Martin, and the Archivist all laughed weakly. Tim came back with his keys and then all of them were off, hurrying to get Jon taken care of. 

And while that wasn’t the end of any of it, it should have been for the night. 

It wasn’t. 

The Archivist was screaming, maybe, or suffocating, had Too-Close-I-Cannot-Breathe gotten them? So soon, they were— they were—

Clawing, writhing, stuck, can’t think, can't breathe, can’t Know—

Story, story, statement, enough? Is it ever enough? Jonah fed them duds, Jonah fed them a sick mockery of what they needed even after he had promised , he had promised —

Raphus cucullatus, the dodo bird, went extinct in 1681. They were eaten until there were no more. 

On the eighth of September, 1917, a woman named Marie Bennet walked into the lake outside of her home and drowned. On the ninth of September, 1917, a being that once was a woman named Marie Bennet walked out of the lake outside the Bennet residence. On the tenth of September, 1917, an avatar of Too-Close-I-Cannot-Breathe decided to keep the name Marie Bennet. On the same day, she kicked open the door to the Bennet residence and proceeded to drown each occupant. 

The American Revolution began on—

“Oh, Archivist,” said the man that called  himself Richard Mendelson, that was Jonah Magnus, their Jonah Magnus, they hated him, despised him. They hated that sometimes they loved him, too, sickly sweet like It-Is-Not-What-It-Is, they loved him like a forest loves slash and burn. “What’s the matter now?”

The man that they had been given was named Henry. He coughed loose the tightness in his throat, fist against his chest, he— they—

“A weak host,” the Archivist said. “Can’t think.” They pushed through, new birth, born screaming, a foal can walk thirty minutes after birth. “Can barely stay together.”

Jonah frowned. In 1824 his friend Barnabas Bennett, of no relation to Marie Bennet, begged for his help. Jonah recovered his bones in 1832. 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jonah said mildly, and he looked sorry, maybe, though his eyes—

The Archivist reached for his eyes. They needed to see. The Archivist reached for his eyes, the human iris has 256 unique characteristics. 

Jonah batted their hand away easily. “Now, now. That’s no way to go about this, is it?”

“I,” that which was Joseph, their host before Henry, tossed his head, that which was Nathaniel, their host before Joseph, wept. Backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards, Catherine shrieked, Mislav wailed, Chidera cried out. 

Clarity. Clarity. Clarity. There had been stronger hosts, once. Nathaniel had been strong enough. He was not their strongest. He was enough. At least as Nathaniel they could think —

In all tellings of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus turns back. In—

“I don’t want this one,” they said, and grabbed Jonah’s hand. He turned his Eyes upon them, Seeing them, and—

Clarity. Blessed clarity. Inhale, exhale, breathe. “You said you would help me. The hosts you chose for me are weak.”

“I really am sorry to hear that, Archivist, but I’m afraid that choosing Henry was not up to me. You must understand the work that goes into running the Institute. Keeping our patrons happy involves some necessary sacrifices, and Henry was one of them.”

“Manufacture an accident,” they pleaded, grabbing onto his arms and sinking to their knees. Jonah was lucky that the room they stood in was empty; the Archivist had no qualms about causing a scene. “I can’t think without your Eyes.”

Jonah quirked an eyebrow, deliberately understating the strain he must have been enduring. Focusing his Eye in such a way was intense , to say the least. “Are you sure? You told me that you were the only one to decide whether or not your hosts lived and died. Can’t you just throw yourself off a cliff again?”

“I can’t think ,” they repeated, and dug their fingers into the flesh of Jonah’s arm. “Henry will not let me breathe. I am drowning, Jonah, and I will drown him with me, but it will take so long. He is starving me, Jonah.”

“What would you prefer for your next host, then? Someone weaker, easier to shape, perhaps, or someone stronger, easier to grow into?”

A trick, a sinister smile in his tone. He would not let them choose. 

“Strong,” they begged. “Nathaniel, Peter, Jacob, Catherine , all of them that I was before this .”

Jonah pried their fingers from his arm. They dropped to the stone of the floor. 

“We’ll see,” he said, and they Knew that he would not. “I trust that you can deal with Henry yourself, Archivist.”

“Wait—!”

Too late. Jonah turned his Eyes away from them— 

Henry pushed himself off of the floor. 

There were sixty three people in the Institute at that moment. Of them, eleven were women. 

Henry got to his feet. 

A man named Johannes died of lead poisoning.

Henry dusted off his jacket. 

There had been a dancing plague in Strasbourg, France, in 1518. 

Henry dusted off his slacks. 

A child of Chase-Find-Kill Hunted one of the Viscera. She tore one of her throats out, but could not find her heart. 

Henry straightened his tie. 

A mouse had gotten trapped between two shelves in the library. It didn't stop squeaking even though no one could hear it. 

The Archivist screamed—

Henry frowned and shook off his headache. He checked his watch and frowned again, it was much later than he expected—

“WAIT—”

Ah, to Hell with it. The pounding in his skull certainly warranted a half day. Maybe he’d even take the next day off, really relax. 

Henry passed Richard in the atrium. He made sure to avoid him, to turn his head away. Richard just had these eyes to him, make you feel like he’s St. Peter at the gates or something, really analyze you, and Henry did not feel up to that. 

Fresh air hit his face and even though it didn’t relieve Henry’s headache it added a bit of a pep to his step. A successful escape! 

Henry grinned and went to go do anything but read. He really needed to get his eyes checked, the strain just about killed him every time he needed to read a statement. 

“Please—”

“I’ll make this into a good day,” Henry said, and set to doing just that. 

Jon woke with his heart in his throat and his hair painted to his skin with sweat. With one hand he pressed his palm against his chest, felt the way his blood pounded; with the other he unstuck his hair from his forehead. “What was that?”

He could feel the Archivist hesitating, shying away from his tentative search of his own head. 

“Backwash,” they said, finally. “Let’s just call that spiritual backwash. A result of our meal and conflict with the Distortion. We don’t need to talk about it.”

“Are you sure? That looked,” bad, he didn’t say, because that was probably insensitive. Probably. Not like they didn’t know what he was thinking already, though. 

“I said that I don’t want to talk about it. We have bigger things to worry about. If you want to be awake we can talk about those.” 

Jon hesitated, analyzing the memory even as the Archivist tried to wave it away. It made them feel weak, he realized. They hated that. He could relate. 

“He went back on his promise,” Jon said carefully. “Jonah said that you said that only you can—”

“Enough,” they snapped. They settled their tone back down quickly, and added, “you get to tell me not to talk about things. This is one of them for me. Georgie said boundaries. Go back to bed.”

Jon didn’t need to look at his alarm clock to know that it was far too early in the morning. 4:36 AM, his brain supplied, Knowing. He had to get up for work soonish, less than two hours.  “If you’re sure—”

“I’m sure. Rest, Jon.”

“We’ll,” he began, before stopping himself. We’ll tell them tomorrow. The assistants. They’re all clever— they’ll help us find out how to kill Elias. 

They had been so confused. It had hurt , viscerally hurt , how confused they had been. Jonah had taken them and broken them and expected Jon to be the host of whatever new torment he had in mind, whatever grand plan he had created from the blood and pain of others. 

We’ll kill him, Jon thought. We’ll make sure he suffers from what he did to us. 

“Okay,” they said, but they sounded so tired. 

I promise you that I’ll tell the assistants. We’ll go to the tunnels. We’ll do this. 

There was no response. 

Chapter Text

The Archivist was still quiet the next morning. 

Today , Jon thought, looking for a response. Today we’ll get to— today we’ll tell them. 

They didn’t reply until later in Jon’s morning routine, when he was sitting in front of his bathroom mirror. Jon was braiding his hair, a familiar weight twisted back into soft rope.

Hm. There was a splatter of toothpaste across the mirror. Gross. He needed to deal with that. He needed to buy more glass cleaner, there was about three milliliters left. 

“It’s been so long,” the Archivist said, apropos of nothing. “Since we’ve been right.”

Not even as Gertrude?

“She was closer. She was clear. Don’t misunderstand me— Gertrude was magnificent. She was strong. She collected us when we were near shattered. But she kept too much space between what she thought of as her and what is rightfully us.”

She didn’t like using your power. She wanted to burn the archives , Jon recalled. He shuddered a bit at the thought. And she did terrible things to her assistants. Michael… Gerard.

“Gerard.”

Isn’t that what I said? Gerard?

“You’re saying Jared. I thought you would eventually realize, or Know, but you didn’t.”

Jon scoffed. That’s basically what I’ve been saying. Anyway. It was time to be serious. What do we do about Gerard?

“Go to America?” The Archivist asked, a bit of a sarcastic tilt to their tone. They brought up the image of the hospital that Gertrude had left the book in. Gerard’s book. 

And how will we do that? Jon finished his braid and secured it with two hair ties. He put his brush down on the bathroom countertop and pushed himself off of the wooden chair he had dragged from the kitchen. It was more useful where it was now, considering that Jon never had enough people over to justify more than two chairs at the dinner table. 

“They have planes, now,” the Archivist showed him far too much information about how planes worked. Jon batted it away with an idle stop that . “And if we weren’t fighting with Michael, we could ask it to make us a door.”

But we’re fighting with Michael , Jon touched the bandage on his face, his shoulder. His face hadn’t needed stitches but his shoulder certainly did . In a normal, less terrible workplace, Jon would probably have been granted the day off. Do you think we could get Elias arrested for this?

The Archivist laughed. “Jonah would not have lasted this long if we could just ‘get him arrested.’ It’s a fool's errand, not worth the risk.”

That didn’t sound quite right but Jon didn’t know enough to say why.  Because of his connections?

“Because of his connections. Let’s wear the green sweater today. Let’s be fancy.”

I was planning on that one anyway, Jon said, and so the two of them (or, by the Archivist’s definition, the one of them) continued. 

Jon had decided to let himself sleep in a little, and so by the time he arrived at the Institute, most of the other employees were already in. He waved to Rosie on the way down and shrugged off her questions about the new bandage on his face. 

Martin, Sasha, and Tim were also in already, a fact that surprised Jon at first before he realized that no, they were on time, he was just later than he had ever been. 

“Morning,” he called. 

Apparently his presence surprised them too. Sasha and Tim were bent over a copy of something (at least Jon hoped it was a copy— Sasha had a red pen in her hand and ink on her fingers) and Martin was staring and occasionally typing something on his computer. When Jon spoke all three of them startled and stared at him like a deer caught in headlights. 

“Jon!” Martin said, the first to act. “I thought you would take today off?”

“Because of…?”

Martin looked genuinely puzzled by his response. “Michael stabbing you?” 

“Michael won’t stop me from coming to work,” Jon said, doing his best to sound determined. 

A pause, silence filled only by the sound of the ancient dehumidifier kicking on. 

“Lovely,” Sasha said. “Well. Any assignments for today?”

“I’d like to see if we can arrange a trip to the tunnels.” See? I promised today. “So if you all could pull up any resources we have that focus on the tunnels, Old Millbank Prison, and so on. Tim, I believe you’ve done quite a bit of research into this already?”

“I have,” Tim said, his expression an indecipherable combination of surprise and tension. Jon didn’t understand why, and would not, thank you. 

“I didn’t say anything,” the Archivist complained. “Though, really, we should be looking. This has happened enough to be a frankly worrying pattern. You’re lying if you say you aren’t tempted.”

I’m not saying I’m not. I’m saying that morally, we shouldn’t, so we won’t. 

“Are we really,” Martin began, thought through, and began again. His fingers were frozen at awkward angles over his keyboard but his face was just calmly interested. “Are we really going to the tunnels? What for?”

To recover Gertrude’s body and give it the burial she deserved. To find a place to talk, give the assistants the explanation that Jon had been dancing around for far too long. To really, truly, begin plotting Jonah’s demise. 

“I think it’d be interesting,” Jon said. “I passed a lot of doorways and rooms when I was running from Prentiss.”

Sasha caught his eyes, “And we’re doing this today?”

Jon shrugged, a small rise and fall in his shoulders, in his nice green sweater. “If possible, yes.”

Another pregnant pause; another complaint from the Archivist. 

“Sounds lovely,” Martin said, staring at Tim and Sasha, away from Jon. 

“An incredible adventure,” Tim added. 

“With great historical importance,” Sasha agreed. 

“Great,” Jon said, and smiled. “Well, if that’s everything—”

A voice behind the door rang out in time with the knocks. “Knock knock!”

It wasn’t Jonah, which Jon would have expected, considering how blatantly he and the Archivist were trying to get the assistants somewhere where he could freely talk to them.  No, the voice was fully unfamiliar, jarringly so. 

The interruption was clearly unexpected to the assistants, too; they frowned to each other and to themselves, before Tim lit up in recognition. 

“Andrew! Come in!” He called out. “I’ve been going back and forth to artefact storage lately. I know him, it just took a second.”

So that’s why Jon didn’t place the voice— stranger fuckery. Sasha and Martin seemed appeased by Tim’s explanation, and lost some of their visible anxiety. The very opposite response than Jon’s. Once the wrongness was made apparent, he couldn’t stop noticing it. 

The door swung open and there he was, the creature pretending to be Andrew. He carried his binder in his arms, something that at first glance was entirely reasonable, and at a second thought extremely bewildering. Why would he take the reference from the reference desk?

“Archivist!” He said, bland smile wide. “I didn’t realize you’d be here today. Word up in storage was that you got stabbed by something freaky?”

What is he doing here? “I’m alright,” Jon answered, trying to keep his expression and tone just as bland as Not-Andrew’s. “You?”

“This visit is a threat,” the Archivist said, and, almost as if he had heard them, Not-Andrew stepped further into the archives.  

“Just fine,” Not-Andrew said. His gaze swept between all four of the archival staff before landing again on Jon. “Thought I’d pay you all a visit, see if there wasn’t anything I could do. Anything needed from artefact storage?”

The stranger fuckery must have extended to making that sound like a perfectly rational explanation, because the assistants all gave their various ‘thanks but no’s.’

It would hurt him if we did that thing we did to Michael, wouldn’t it?

“It would,” the Archivist said, tone pleased. “It would also be immediately obvious that you weren’t human. But I’m glad you’re considering it.”

Yeah, Jon thought, and watched as Not-Andrew stepped further into the archives.  His presence wasn’t as grating as Michael’s but much more nauseating. When he brushed past Jon, Jon felt physically sick— Not-Andrew’s skin was wrong, wrong, wrong. 

“Get out,” Jon said, doing his best to stare without Staring, to gaze without Gazing; to make Not-Andrew feel just as uncomfortable as he did without showing his assistants what he was.

It must have worked, because even as Jon’s assistants asked what he was doing, Not-Andrew shuddered and stepped back. 

“I’m just—”

“Get. Out.”

Not-Andrew shuddered again and left. Jon’s satisfaction lasted only a moment.

“What was that?” Sasha exclaimed, mouth wide. 

Jon paused. Okay, so it did look like Jon had just made a totally normal coworker leave for no reason. “Uh.”

“Do you have something against Andrew, too?” Tim asked. 

“No!” Jon said, crossing his arms. “Get— get back to work,” he said, and fled into his office. 

Jon didn’t remember the missing file until he was sitting at his desk. There was some blood, still, from the day before, turned brown from exposure to air and spattered all across the top layer of paper on his desk and the smooth brown wood. 

Jon sighed, turned down to get a disinfectant wipe from one of his drawers, and stopped. There was the drawer that the Archivist had slammed the day before. Looking at it forced Jon to remember opening it that day, seeing a file missing, and not understanding why. 

Cautiously, Jon slid the drawer open. He lifted up the layer of garbage statements that were only useful as a distraction, or historical context, at best, to his stash of Not-Them statements. All three were present: Patel, Cooper, and Moore. The Moore statement was possibly the most important, though Patel’s provided an important connection.  

“I thought one was missing?” Jon asked, keeping his voice low, mindful of the relatively thin walls. Not-Andrew’s visit had him on edge. 

A frown clear in the Archivist’s voice, they said, “Yes, the Moore statement was missing.”

“...why?”

“We’d have to Know to really know,” the Archivist said, their frown still present, but a different tone to it, the beginnings of a grin, maybe. “No other way.”

Jon looked down at his stack of three very important statements, and nodded. 

The Archivist waited. 

“Yes,” Jon said, finally. “I want to Know,” and as he was saying it, he was doing it. 

Jon Knew, then, just as he knew that he was nearly out of tumeric, just as he knew that his hair was falling from his braid, just as he knew that Lawrence had been deeply afraid when he gave his statement, Jon Knew that Jonah had taken the Moore statement. 

Jonah had slipped into Jon’s office two days ago while Jon was in the bathroom, just before his lunch. His assistants hadn't noticed; if they had, they didn’t think it was out of the ordinary. Jonah had taken the Moore statement to his own office. Jonah had waited until after Michael had stabbed Jon, when all of the archival staff had fled, to return the statement. 

“Okay,” Jon said, a bit lightheaded with the Knowing. If he hadn’t already been sitting he would have sat. He leaned back. Why did Jonah do that?

“Why do you think?” The Archivist asked. Their voice was annoyed, but Jon could tell that they were proud of him. He had done well. 

To… Jon began, but stopped himself. Jonah didn’t even read the statement, he just took it. Why would he need it if he again wasn’t going to read it? To, Jon began again, but stopped, because something felt wrong in the Archives. 

Sand in his eyes, and related metaphors. Michael had opened a door in the aisles, early 2000s. Sasha was getting something, the statement of Harold Silvana, regarding discoveries made during the renovation of the Reform Club, Pall Mall. She was retrieving it because of its Smirke connection, and she had already been frowning when Michael had appeared. 

That’s enough, Jon thought 

“That wasn’t just ‘me,’” the Archivist said. “Besides. Michael could only be here to sow lies and betrayal. We need to Know what its—”

Too soon, the moment passed— the Spiral-related discomfort disappeared, and Jon was the only monster in the archives. 

“Something’s not right,” Jon whispered, dread weighing heavy in his stomach. “It doesn’t— it doesn’t feel right. There are Lies.”

“There are always lies,” the Archivist soothed. “Let’s resolve them. Let’s get the key.”

Still, Jon shifted with discomfort. “Right,” he said, the Archivist’s words ringing hollowly inside him. 

It was just barely the end of the workday; Jonah wasn’t in his office, at some meeting or another, and all of the assistants were out, likely doing their assigned research in the library.  

Well, Jon thought. Now or never, right? I’ll take the key, then find them and say that it’s time for the tunnel trip. 

“Yes, yes,”  the Archivist said, their own excitement urging Jon onward. This was a step towards finally killing Jonah, finally getting to win. 

The Institute only became more empty as Jon got closer to Jonah’s office, people passing Jon in the other direction, excited to leave. Jon nodded and said his goodbyes but kept moving. 

There was a large portrait of Jonah to the left of his own office, wearing an expensive coat, framed in gold. 

Pretentious bastard. 

“We’ll have his eyes.”

Jon could feel the weight of Jonah watching him. That wasn’t great; he had assumed that Jonah’s meeting would be enough of a distraction, still, Jonah was physically far from him. Jon had time. 

The door was locked, which Jon had been expecting. He pulled bobby-pins from his hair as the Archivist showed him how to pick a lock. The first attempt was clumsy and it was a very good thing that they were doing this at the end of the day, because if there were people there would be questions. 

Second try— click. Jon set all the pins inside the lock and felt the pressure shift. When he swung open the door it moved without resistance.

Jon sped into the room, flung open the drawer that he Knew the tunnel key to be hidden in, and grabbed it. Jonah was watching him so there was no need to make it look like nothing had happened. Jon stuck the pins back into his hair, the key into his pocket, and kept moving. 

Where are they? He thought, and Knew that his assistants were in the hallway just outside artefact storage. 

I don’t like that , Jon thought, and the dread from before returned with a vengeance. 

“Keep going,” the Archivist said, all the cheer and excitement from earlier gone. 

Jon nearly made it to artefact storage. Nearly. 

He was just outside the double doors, hand on the doorknob, when a shrill noise pierced the otherwise quiet Institute. 

It wasn’t someone screaming— it went deeper than that, cutting through walls to cover the whole building, high pitched and many toned. 

It was wrong, it wasn’t right, it wasn’t clear— Jon staggered back from the door and grabbed his head, grabbed for his Eyes. 

The noise cut off suddenly. There was a beat of silence, barely enough to breathe in. 

From far away, a familiarly wrong voice called out, the noise distorted and twisted. “Archivist,” it sang, joyful, menacing. “Archivist!”

It was closer. It was coming closer. 

The Not-Them was unbound. 

“Run,” the Archivist hissed, and he ran. 

Chapter Text

I can’t go much longer, Jon turned corner after corner, around and around the damned Institute. The Not-Them was coming for him, that was certain— he could feel it around the corners of his senses, scraping and screaming and clawing. It’ll find me. It’ll replace me.

“Stop that,” the Archivist said, a desperate edge to their voice. They expressed to Jon that he needed to turn right without wasting the words to say it, and Jon followed their instructions as naturally as he would his own thoughts. “You can’t die now,”  they continued, but the strained tone conveyed more of a ‘oh god, not yet’ instead of a reassuring ‘you have progressed beyond death.’

I will if I can’t—

“Archivist!” The Not-Them called, closer and closer. “Archivist! Would you rather I take your host’s skin, or one of the assistants?” Its tone curled, viper bright and sickening. 

Shit— will it?

“It will,” the Archivist guided him down another turn. Back towards the archives, Jon thought, but a different path than normal. “We just need to hope we can get away fast enough.”

“No!” Jon said, before clapping a hand over his mouth to stifle the noise and frantically looking over his shoulder. We can’t leave them to die!

Just as joyful, just as wrong, “Archivist, do you really care for them?”

“This way,” the Archivist said, guided Jon past a set of doors to a narrow hallway with an even narrower set of stairs. 

No railings, Jon noted, half hysterically. The stairs were old stone, part of a system of now mostly unused maintenance hallways. Jonah had them put in to complete his dream of architecture that guaranteed that the help be out of sight at all times, the bastard. I’m going to fall to my death. 

“I’ll catch you.”

Where are we going? If they were descending stairs that meant that the Archivist had decided there was no hope of leaving through one of the main entrances. If the goal was the archives and the rest of the basement, that was, well, something , though escape would mean scrambling out a rescue window. Would Jonah have kept the building up to code, with properly sized windows that would open fully?

“He didn’t,” the Archivist said, crushing that dream, “we’ll go to the tunnels.”

But—

“Archivist, how about a trade? I get your host and I’ll leave your assistants alone! Everyone deserves a new face!”

“Go!”

Jon turned away from the sound of the Not-Them and back to the fucked up staircase. He stumbled down the first few steps before he felt the fuzzy feeling in his arms and legs that meant the Archivist was stepping in. Despite the pain that reared up almost as soon as they started to walk, body sideways and steps precise, the Archivist didn’t falter. 

This will hurt tomorrow, won’t it?

“We’ll deal with that tomorrow,” they said, and forced his aching limbs onwards. 

Well. The Archivist taking control of his body was as good a time as any to find out how the rest of them were doing. Even Georgie would agree with this use of Looking— there was sufficient mortal peril. Where are my assistants, Jon Asked, and Knew. 

Sasha was running. She lagged behind Tim and Martin, just a bit, but she would keep up. She had to keep up. If she didn’t then she would die, she would finally meet the fate that Michael had warned her of, so long ago. 

Why had it told her to stay away from artefact storage if it was just going to let her die anyway?

“Michael,” she began, stumbled, caught herself on the back of Tim’s jacket, and began again, “Michael tricked us.”

“I know,” Tim said, threw a look over his shoulder. He put out a hand for Sasha to take and she ignored it; they always called her stubborn, her year one teacher wrote it in the margins of her report card, stubborn, stubborn, stubborn.

“Archivist,” the Not-Them called, in the exact middle of the space between Jon and Sasha and the rest of them. The sound of a door breaking covered up the rest of their words. 

“Christ,” Martin said, stumbled, and caught himself more easily than Sasha had. “We need to— it’s chasing the real Jon!”

“Has there ever been a real Jon?” Tim asked, leading them around a sharp turn that left scuff marks on the marble from their shoes. 

It looked like they were going for the exit. They couldn’t make it, though, the Not-Them would snatch one of their identities up and tear through the rest of them with claws that weren’t claws and teeth that weren’t teeth. 

They needed to go somewhere else, they needed to—

Sasha’s stumbled over her feet again. Her legs crossed, her knees gave out, and she fell with a scream. 

The Archivist reached the bottom of the stairs just as Sasha fell. Her scream was enough noise to divert the Not-Them. 

“Fine, then,” it said, “Archivist, your choice has been made for you.”

No! Jon turned back, thought about shouting, thought about running back and fighting the Not-Them himself. 

“We can’t, Jon!” The Archivist pulled him onward. The maintenance stairs had opened out into, as expected, a narrow maintenance hallway. It was dark and full of cobwebs that the Archivist ducked and dodged as they ran. “We’re almost to the archives. If you die, Jon, then it’s over for me! Jonah will not let me have a host like you again!” 

“They’re going to die!” Jon gasped, throat tight with exertion and fear. “I thought we weren’t sacrificing assistants this time!”

“I had hoped we wouldn’t have to!”

“The Not-Them will tear them apart!” Suddenly, vivid as anything, Jon could see it, his mind's eye playing possibilities like memories or movies; it would rip Martin in half first, it would wait until Tim had flung himself at it before it would break him too, it would leave Sasha for last. It would walk out of a murder scene with a face that was not Sasha’s and an identity that was and—

“That’s not helping! That hasn’t happened yet! They can still—”

A distant scream, a distant roar. They wouldn’t make it outside. They would have to go further down. But could they find a path all on their own? Tim had been preparing for this, Jon Realized; he might have been able to lead them out if they had the time but they lost everything as soon as the Web table had broken.

“Shit, shit, shit— MICHAEL! MICHAEL!”

“It won’t save them, Jon!” The Archivist hissed. “And you need to calm down!”

“What?” The Archivist stumbled around a corner. Their momentum sent them straight into a wall, old musty brick, and they had to push themself up before running again. Jon spat out a string of saliva and cobwebs. “Why?”

“Too much to explain now, you just can’t be feeding I-Do-Not-Know-You. Keep your fear, but change it.”

“Into what?” They were still so far from the tunnels. Would the Archivist be able to overpower Jon’s shaking hands to unlock the trapdoor? If Michael opened a door, would it help his assistants or would it simply devour them itself instead? Or would it never even arrive, and leave his assistants to be taken by the Stranger?

“Just something different . Be afraid of this pain being watched, being devoured. Be afraid that this experience will twist your mind into something you can never can decipher. Fear that you are being puppeted down a track you never wanted to. Just change it, I’ll explain why later!”

“Easy for you to say. How much farther?”

“Soon,” they said, and showed a quick image of the track they were on. Jon turned as directed though his legs screamed.

I can feel the holes, Jon thought, for no particular reason other than that the pain was nearly overwhelming and the maintenance tunnel was reminiscent of the tunnels the worms had chased him through. Jon could feel the Archivist latching on to that. 

“Fear the worms,” they whispered, “fear the way they crawl and twist, the way they make you run.”

In that moment, just that moment, Jon wasn’t running from a laughing and distorted Andrew, but a calling and singing Jane Prentiss. Jon could smell the foul earthy odor in the air and hear the worms behind him. He ran, half his mind shrieking from a deeply ingrained fear of the worms, half Looking to see if his assistants had yet been slaughtered. 

Tim had to stop running to turn back and scoop Sasha into his arms, bridal style. Martin waited for the both of them even though he desperately wanted to run, even though Tim desperately wanted at least one of them to get out safe. 

“My legs,” Sasha said. With one hand she gripped Tim’s shoulder and with the other she tried to get her kneecaps back into place. They had shifted when she had fallen and it was excruciating. 

“It’s okay,” Tim said, because the situation really wasn’t but him holding her was, because they were still alive. Tim wasn’t sure if it was because he had been the one to shatter the table, the table they thought had been the cause of everything, or if it was because some creature that might have been Jon but also looked a hell of a lot like Andrew from artefact storage, but his hearing aid was acting up. It beeped, shrilly, sharply, and Tim staggered and looked all around him.

Every malfunction sounded like the something that was coming to get them was already there. Every malfunction tripped him up and every stumble meant that he might fall and damn them further. 

“We can’t get out from here,” Martin said, desperate, looking all around them as he ran. 

“The tunnels,” Tim said, and guided them around another corner. “We can get back down there, hide somewhere.”

Sasha slid one kneecap back into place and bit back a scream. “Where— where can we get access? We can’t make it back to the archives, unless—”

A roar erupted behind them, layered and full of static. “ There you are,” the Not-Them purred, and ran for them, it’s claws on the tile sounding like a fucked up pack of dogs. 

And ahead of them, a familiarly wrong noise; a long, slow, layered, creak. Michael’s door sat open ahead of them, Michael itself leaning out of the door.

Another garbled noise came from Tim’s hearing aid, something almost like Prentiss’ worms. He stumbled and nearly fell, nearly dropped Sasha, but Martin grabbed his arm at the last minute and steadied him. As one, Tim, Martin, and Sasha crossed over Michael’s doorstep. 

The door slammed shut behind them, and they were gone. 

“Is that— is that good?” Jon was back in the archives. The desks of his assistants were like ancient flies stuck in amber; perfectly preserved in the moment that they had been experiencing just before everything went sideways. 

“They won’t be taken by the Not-Them,” the Archivist said. It was quiet, at least for the moment, and Jon wanted to stay in that quiet forever, but the Archivist pushed him onwards. Above them the Not-Them roared and audibly changed directions. It would still try to get Jon, then, or his assistants. They weren’t done. “I think Michael would give them a more honorable death than the Not-Them.”

“That’s,” not not better, Jon realized, and so he didn’t say anything, just went as the Archivist guided. Back, into the stacks, back, to the trapdoor. 

The Archivist steadied his hands and turned the key. At the last minute Jon feared that they had been tricked yet again, that the key was a false one, but it turned just as sweet as any key in it’s true lock. Jon used the keys grip to pull open the door, revealing another set of narrow, old, stone stairs, just as he remembered. 

The Not-Them roared again, much closer, and Jon descended, locking the door behind him. 

It was quiet in the tunnels, quiet and cool. The air was musty and old. No one had been in the tunnels since the ECDC people cleared out as many of the worms as they could. 

“We won’t be able to See as well down here,” the Archivist said, and their voice was much quieter than Jon had expected. A pang of fear ripped through Jon, one that he hadn't considered. “Jonah won’t see us, but neither can we see him. Be careful.”

“Where,” Jon began, and stopped. The tunnels felt like something holy, something menacing; an ancient cathedral where every person in the place was watching you, ready to smack you if you spoke out of turn, ready to scorn you at coffee hour if you bowed at the wrong time. Where are they? Where’s Tim, Martin, and Sasha?

“We can’t Know,” The Archivist said. 

Shit. Let’s just… let’s find Gertrude, and work from there. 

“Alright,” the Archivist said, and Jon moved onward, ever deeper. The chase wasn’t done, but at the moment Jon was in the lead, and that would have to be enough.

Chapter Text

Michael’s hallways could be described in one word: mindfuck. It was so warm in there, absolutely suffocating, but Sasha couldn’t stop shivering. The corridors stretched out endlessly before her, Tim, and Martin, only the slightest of turns keeping them from seeing the end, though Sasha was sure if there was a straight hallway it would simply continue on into endless nothing. 

“I thought the carpet was blue,” Martin said nervously from Sasha’s left. She had gotten her knees back into place so that she could walk on her own but she still needed to loop her arms around Martin and Tim’s necks for support. That was good, though; Sasha has a feeling that they’d all still be holding hands if they didn’t need to physically help her. Dread sat heavy in her stomach, sick and relentless. 

Why had Michael warned her about Prentiss? Was it always planning on killing her? And where was  it?

“It still is,” Tim said, briefly looking down at the faded floral patterned carpet. “It was red, and now it’s blue.”

“It’s green,” Martin pointed to the carpet with his free hand. 

It looked orange to Sasha, ugly, burnt, orange. “That’s the point. It wants us confused.”

“It has us confused,” Tim spat, then looked all around them. “Where are you! Show yourself!”

Martin frantically shushed him. “I don’t want to see it! We just need to— Christ, what did Helen's statement say?”

Jon had transcribed it from a blood spattered recorder as he sat in his hospital bed. Was that Jon? Had it ever been?

Michael had told her to break the strange table. It said that everything would be clear if she and Tim and Martin took an axe to the table, and honestly, they would have even if Michael hadn’t given that last little push . 

It was a self proclaimed being of pure deceit, why did they trust it?

Tim spoke and snapped Sasha out of her thoughts, as twisting and jumbled as the corridors they staggered through. “She found a painting, mirror, whatever, that didn’t have Michael in it, and she jumped through. So we just need to find that,” Tim said, his confidence trailing off as they all looked around them.  

Row after row of strange paintings and mirrors surrounded them, each one a reflection of the hallway.

Oh, Sasha thought. The carpet had changed again. It was a nice shade of blue, very calming. Unless it had always been that color?

“We’re going to die here,” Martin whispered, voice desolate. “And Jon’s going to actually get his face stolen.”

“And we’ll never know why he was so weird,” Sasha whispered back. Her throat was suddenly dry, so dry. How long had it been since that last sip of water on the way to artefact storage? How long had they been walking? She understood, in that moment, why Helen had spent so long crumpled and crying. Her knees began to bend. 

“Stop that,” Tim said, cross and desperate and bright. He reached around Sasha to get a grip on Martin’s shoulder and brought them both into a group hug. The warmth from their bodies was so much kinder than the humid heat of the hallway. “We’ll get out because we have to. We can’t stop here. Come on, let’s… let’s keep going.”

“Very sweet,” a voice crooned, layered with jagged static. Sasha squeezed Tim and Martin before pulling out of the hug and turning to face Michael. 

It was different in the hallways, longer and narrower and grotesquely stretched. Its hands were bloated, though they still formed strangely sharp angles, and its arms hung limply. Every time Sasha blinked it shuddered and shifted slightly, just enough to not notice immediately. 

“Did you bring us here to kill us?” Tim asked, and carefully stepped in front of Sasha and Martin. Michael laughed at that, and Sasha’s ears began to bleed. 

“If I had,” it said, still laughing, “then I wouldn’t have let you stay together.”

Martin tightened his grip on Sasha’s shoulder. “Then why?”

“I was doing the Archivist a favor,” it said, laughter slightly subsiding. What was so funny? “It will be so much more interesting if you all are alive for just a bit longer.”

“Why would you do Jon a favor?” Sasha leaned forward, swept her eyes up and down Michael. The fingers that damn near touched the floor, if it could be called a floor, were the same that cut Jon so recently. “Don’t you hate him?”

The laughter that shrieked out of Michael was deafening. Sasha fought the urge to drop Tim and Martin’s hands and clasp her own over her ears by drawing her shoulders up as high as she could and slamming her head down onto them sideways. In front of her Tim staggered back and fished his hearing aid from his ear with his free hand. He chucked it down the hallway, near Michael, and pushed his head onto Sasha to protect himself. Martin wrapped his free arm around his entire head. 

Sasha barely noticed when the laughter subsided. Her skin felt like it was on fire and when she turned her head back up to look at Micheal she stumbled, off balance. 

“This will be so much more fun,” Michael said, its voice coming from behind them. “Can’t wait to see what you do next!”

The floor beneath them was suddenly spongy, with a surprising amount of give. Sasha looked down— it was a painting. Frantically she tightened her grip on Tim and Martin and looked up. Paintings and mirrors and old-fashioned lanterns above them. And on either side, ugly, yellow, floral carpet. 

“Wait,” Tim shouted, twisted to see Micheal—

It threw out one of its sharp, wrong, hands and the canvas of the painting beneath them tore with a crackle and a snap. Sasha had enough time to start to scream, and then she was falling. 

There was everything, then nothing, then something in the middle, and then stone, rough, cold, stone. Sasha groaned and pushed herself up, untangling her arms from Tim and Martin and her glasses from her braids. It was a miracle they weren’t broken, she thought, and a miracle none of them had broken anything when they landed. 

Michael had dropped them from the ceiling, because of course it had, but after looking up, Sasha realized that the ceiling wasn’t actually that far away. 

“Where are we?” She asked, brushing cobwebs and dust off her face and hands. The stone of the ceiling was only four feet above her and the walls were very close on either side. The stone in front of her opened up on one end into what looked like a similarly shaped room, but it was too dark to tell. Maybe a hallway? Not one of Michael’s, certainly, it didn’t feel the same. “An… alcove?”

Tim shook his head, a grim expression on his face. He leaned out of the little enclosed space and groaned before crawling out into the larger room. “The tunnels. We should find a way out, see if we can get back into the archives.”

Carefully looking both ways, Martin followed. “Unless that… that thing is still out there.” Once he was sitting in the main hallway he stuck out a hand for Sasha, a silent offering. Not very helpful for crawling, but she appreciated the gesture and used his hand to help her stand. 

“Helen was in the corridors for three days, wasn’t she?” Even while she spoke Sasha looked around the tunnels with interest. It was… very dark. Just enough light to see by, and just barely. It felt foreboding, to say the least; the breath of a giant held in, an unsettling quiet. The air was very cold. 

“That didn’t feel like three days,” Tim said, and fished in his pocket for his phone. When he turned on its flashlight the hallway didn’t look any warmer, just brighter. The shadows crept in on either side of the bright white beam, a stark contrast. 

Sasha went for her phone, then Martin, and soon three lights cut the darkness. Sasha looked to the other two. “So. How did you get out when Prentiss was attacking?”

“We wandered around until we found the trapdoor,” Tim said, and he looked all around them. “I don’t… we could be anywhere. Shit. We could be anywhere. We don’t know if Michael actually put us in the tunnels.”

No, they were. Sasha knew, with a certainty that actually gave some comfort, that they were in the tunnels. Something about the air, even if she had never been there before. She said as much. Tim frowned at the news, but Martin was already frowning, eyes locked on his phone, eyebrows raised. 

“Guys,” he said, and with a slightly shaking hand held out his phone. There was no service, which was unfortunate but expected, but that wasn’t what he was pointing at. “It’s still— we can’t have spent more then ten minutes in Michael’s corridors.”

Sasha grabbed his phone and stared at the white illuminated time. It was not only the same day, but Martin was right— it was less than half an hour since they had broken the table. 

“Christ,” Tim said. “That means that thing is still out there.”

“What do we do, then?” Sasha took her place back in the middle of them and slung her arms around their shoulders. It seemed like they would be walking more, likely running more, and her legs were fucked . And she was cold, and they were warm, and Sasha really needed that. “Try to hide?”

Steeling himself, Tim shook his head. “We have to find a way out before our flashlights die. I think we just… hope for the best. My phone can take the first shift.”

After a moment, Sasha and Martin both nodded and turned off their phones. The tunnel was so much darker, Sasha realized, now that she knew what she was missing.

“Here’s to hoping,” Martin said. Tim pulled the three of them into another hug.

“Any strong directional opinions?”

“That way,” Sasha said, randomly pointing down one part of the tunnel. “That feels… fine.”

“Let’s get fine, then,” Tim said, and they began. 

“Stop ,” Sasha hissed, her voice a whisper. She could hear something down the hallway, steps echoing on the stone. Tim quickly put down his flashlight and the three of them huddled close together. “Someone’s coming.”

Sasha's breath caught in her throat. The— something, it wasn’t necessarily a person, given everything that had happened that day — was getting closer. 

Tim flicked his flashlight back up for just a second, just to see, and even as Sasha and Martin pushed at his hand, the light caught on something above the ground, something reflective. 

Eyes. Flashing eyes, a bit over five feet off the ground. 

“Holy fuck ,” Tim whispered. Sasha couldn’t disagree even as her heart raced. She silently hushed Tim. 

The eyes paused, and titled, and then the figure spoke. “Tim?”

They sounded like Jon. They sounded a lot like Jon, but then again, the creature that had started this all sounded a lot like Andrew. 

“Tim?” The figure said, and stepped closer. 

Martin leaned around Sasha to grab Tim’s phone and point the light at the figure. He was fast enough that Sasha couldn’t stop him and soon enough the hallway was illuminated again by a narrow beam of light, highlighting Jon, who stood alone in its center. 

He brought a hand up to shade his eyes. His worm scarred brown skin was familiar, he looked— 

He looked like Jon. Tired, shaking, Jon, he trembled slightly with every step he took to get closer to Sasha and the others. “I’m so glad to see you,” he said, and he sounded genuine. 

Tim lowered the light so that it wasn’t shining directly in Jon’s eyes. “Where did you come from? We heard that thing saying that it would eat you.” 

How did you get away so cleanly, Tim didn’t quite say. His hand was clenched slightly in the shoulder of Sasha’s shirt. She put an arm around his waist. 

“I went through some maintenance tunnels and then through the trapdoor in the archives. Really, I’m so glad to see you all,  I was so worried. I have so much to tell you.” Jon looked so sincere, so genuine…

If he was an imposter then they would deal with that when they got to it, Sasha decided. “How do we get out of here?”

Something that might have been disappointment flashed across his face, and, okay, that was worrying. “I think I know the way,” he said. 

“I thought you’ve only been here once?” Martin asked, carefully.

Jon paused. “I’ve been looking at maps,” he said, the winced. “Okay. Follow me, we can—”

From somewhere down the way Jon had come came the sounds of shattering wood and laughter. Not Michael, something different. Layered differently. 

“ Archivist, ” it crooned. The monster from before. The sound of something smacking against stone rang out, and it spoke again, slightly closer, “Archivist!”

Eyes wide, Jon turned to the rest of the group. “Run,” he hissed, and once again they ran.

Jon led them around tight corners and passed closed doors through gestures and spoken directions. Both him and Sasha were lagging behind Tim and Martin and every step Sasha took felt like it was the last before her legs would shatter. 

“Archivist,” the thing sang, drawing out the word, closer and closer, “Archivist, don’t you trust me? Don’t you remember Andrew?”

“No!” Jon shouted, before immediately covering his mouth. Eyes wide, he looked to Sasha, and just as their gaze met he stumbled and fell. 

“Jon!” Sasha gasped, turning around on weak legs to grab at his arm and pull him back up to his feet. He was Jon, he had to be Jon, the risk had to be worth it—

Tim grabbed Jon around the waist and scooped him up into his arms in a quick motion. Martin took Sasha’s hand and threw her arm over his shoulder and they were moving again, slower than they had when they had begun. 

“Not much farther,” Jon panted, the tail end of his sentence covered by the sounds of the beast getting closer, closer— 

“Here!” Jon hissed, and tumbled out of Tim’s arms. He had stopped them at a door, a simple, wooden, door, like the couple other doors they had passed. Quickly he grabbed the handle and pushed the door open, gesturing for the others to follow. 

Things happened very quickly after that. 

Just as Martin and Sasha entered the room, Martin shutting the door behind them, they all noticed that the room wasn’t some empty ancient cellar. In one end of the room was dusty cardboard boxes, and on the other was—

Was Gertrude, slumped over in a chair. Old blood stained her stomach and her head and hands hung limply. 

Sasha was going to vomit. Gasping, she covered her mouth, and tried to get as far away from the body as possible without getting any closer to the door. “Oh my God,” she said. 

“Fuck,” Tim said, eyes wide and locked on the body. Because they were in a room with a body! They had been chased into a room with the actual rotting body of a woman that Sasha had actually met, a woman who had worked in the building above them. 

Martin gasped and covered his mouth. “Christ,” he said, the word trailing off, expression frozen in one of shock and horror. 

Jon looked at the body, tilted his head slightly, and said, “Oh no ,” in a tone that was simultaneously flatter than it should have been and more exaggerated then it could have been. A second after the words had left his mouth, words that hung weakly in the air, Tim leapt forward and tackled what looked like Jon. 

Sasha and Martin both shouted, more in surprise by the suddenness of the action than in disagreement. 

“Tim!” ‘Jon’ said, voice more a gasp than anything. He struggled against the arms that Tim had wrapped around his middle, pushing and kicking, “I can explain!”

“What are you?” Tim twisted so that his arms were more firmly gripping Jon and held on tight.

“I’m—” ‘Jon’ began, still kicking against the stone that they laid against, only five or so feet away from the chair where Gertrude sat dead, and in that moment the door exploded. 

Sasha screamed and fell backwards, pulling Martin down as she did. They landed near where Tim had grappled Jon but only she and Martin were covered in the shards of wood that erupted from the door, now broken into tiny pieces on the floor. 

The monster was there , tall and stretched and wretched, and maybe, maybe resembling Andrew. “Archivist,” it said, slow like a smile. It’s frame filled the entire door. They were trapped. 

“No,” Jon whispered, and maybe it was him, maybe it wasn’t. His eyes were wide with terror either way. “No!” He shouted, and the monster got closer. 

“Archivist,” it said, with something that might have been a smile, “Archivist, I can't wait to tear your host from your soul. It will-”

“I see you!” Jon interrupted, frantic. He started to push at Tim, not to get away from him, but from the monster. Tim sat up, pulling Jon with him, and kicked off the floor until they were both backed into the far corner of the room. “I See you,” he repeated, a strange emphasis on the word. 

The edges of static filled the room, quiet enough to be unnoticeable. Jon was trying something. 

And it wasn’t working. 

“I See you, I See you, I See you!” Jon shouted, again and again, and the monster just laughed and got closer. 

“Michael!” Sasha called, desperation clear in her voice. No door opened, and the monster didn’t turn from Jon. 

It loomed over Jon and Tim, only a few feet away. “I See you,” Jon tried, and then the ground erupted. 

This time everyone screamed, even the monster, as chunks of stone and earth rose from the floor and descended from the ceiling much faster than stone had any right to move. In the space of a breath the monster was trapped, though Sasha could still faintly hear it. 

Tim must have released Jon, because they crawled around opposite sides of the stone tube to get away. Tim pushed himself shakily to his feet and pointed to Jon who sat, slumped, against the stone, body so limp he could have been the corpse that was still so near. 

“What the fuck was that,” Tim gasped, pointing at Jon but gesturing to the stone tube. 

“I don’t,” Jon began, but was interrupted by a new voice. 

“That was me,” the voice said. 

Sasha turned to face it and saw that there was an old man standing in the doorway, his faded, wrinkled, hands clutching a book. 

“It is very good to see you again, Archivist.”

“What the fuck ,” Sasha whispered. 

Jon began to laugh, slowly, at first, before it dissolved into something hysterical. “Well,” he said, between breaths, “I said I’d give you answers, didn’t I? Martin, Sasha, Tim, meet Jurgen Leitner.”

Chapter Text

The confusion was practically audible. Leitner just stood there, cursed book clutched in his hands, as Martin, Sasha, and Tim looked from Leitner, to Jon, to the stone encased Not-Them, to each other, and back to Leitner. 

You said it would work . Jon’s heart still beat like a jackrabbit, bloodrush a scream in his ears. You said I could See it. You said it would work. The stone he leaned against was frustratingly cold, like it had always been that way. The sounds of the Not-Them were far, far, away, so Leitner must have dropped the ground out beneath it. Not like Jon knew for sure because apparently his Archivist abilities, or whatever they were, just didn’t work in the tunnels. 

“I thought it would,” the Archivist said, almost an apology. “We can work on that later. Right now we can finally explain things. Starting with—”

“No,” Sasha said, unknowingly interrupting them. “No, I’m sorry, no. This can’t— you can’t be Jurgen Leitner .”

Leitner shuffled awkwardly.  “I can and I am.”

“Weren’t you dead?” Tim asked, eyes still flicking wildly around the room, shoulders set like he was prepared for a fight but not happy about it. “Went down with your library?”

“I escaped,” Leitner answered simply, before turning to face Jon. “Archivist— Gertrude?”

“Jon,” Jon said, firmly shaking his head. “I’m different.”

Leitner hummed at the same time as Martin pointed to Gertrude’s corpse and sputtered, “How could he be Gertrude when her body is right there?”

“Because they’re the same,” Leitner answered, before Jon could stop him. 

Crossly, he interrupted the confused uproar. “We’re not the same.”

“I mean,”

Stop. “This is why I wanted to come to the tunnels. I wanted to explain that I’m still me, I’ve just been,” Jon hesitated. What could he say that would make it make sense? He’d had so much time to come up with an explanation, to rework what he’d told Georgie into something a little more applicable, and yet there he was with nothing to say and three faces full of horror and rage and confusion. “You could say I’ve been possessed?” Jon tried. 

“By what?” Tim asked. Involuntarily Jon looked at Gertrude’s corpse. “No,” Tim gasped. “ Gertrude ?”

“How?” 

“Gertrude didn’t possess me,” Jon started, stopped. “You could say she was just the one that got possessed before me? Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute isn’t just a job. It’s also a role, a being.”

“And you’re possessed by it?” Sasha asked, forehead creased. 

“Not possessed ,” Jon said, and looked for the word that could explain it. 

“Sharing?” The Archivist suggested. Jon wasn’t sure whether or not their voice was quiet because of the effect of the tunnels or if they just knew it was a bad suggestion.  

“Gertrude was the host of the Archivist before me. When I took the job I became the next host, but things didn’t get weird until I started reading statements. Things… progressed from there. The Archivist possesses me, sometimes, but I’m still me. I’m still me,” Jon repeated, more to himself than anything. “But we’re working together. And whenever the lines between me and the Archivist blur, things get… weird.”

At that, Sasha scoffed a little, but overall Jon’s assistants just looked concerned and confused. And, Jon supposed, based on the tightness in their posture, the way they stared at him and the body and Jurgen, unconvinced. 

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Tim asked, the anger in his voice not quite enough to cover the hurt. “I thought we were friends. Why didn’t you say something?”

Gesturing to Gertrude’s body, Jon said, “Because I was scared, Tim.” He pushed down feelings that rose as hot and as heavy as bile, something sick and long awaited. “Because suddenly there was something that I couldn’t define— something that made no sense even accounting for the world that I know that we live in.” Jon pushed himself off the floor, using the stone tube Not-Andrew was trapped in to support himself. He didn’t cross the room, not yet, but he wanted to, and with a bite in his voice he pointed to Gertrude again. “Does it look to you like she died of old age?”

Tim broke eye contact to look down again. “No,” he said, “it looks like she was shot.”

“Who?” Sasha asked.  She was covered in old wood shavings and dust from when the Not-Them had broken in, and as she spoke she wiped grit from the edges of her mouth and eyes. “Who killed Gertrude?”

The Archivist almost screamed, then, a long building shriek of delight and fury and relief. “Do you remember that day in the archives?” Jon began, slowly easing them into it even as the Archivist hissed to “tell them, tell them, tell them.”  

He spoke over the Archivist. “It was a little after we all went back to work after Prentiss. He convinced you that I had had an encounter with an artefact.”

Jon could see the wheels turning in the heads of his assistants as they recalled the memory. Sasha was the first to react. 

“No,” she whispered, face paling. “You’re saying Elias killed Gertrude?”

“Yes,” Jon started, and the Archivist finished, “Jonah Magnus killed me.”

Tim threw his hands up. When he spoke his voice was, if possible, even more ragged than before. “Nope! No. Not happening.”

“The— the founder of the Institute, Jonah Magnus? That Jonah Magnus?” Martin’s eyes were wide with disbelief. “But also Elias? How? Why ?”

“Is Elias also possessed?” Sasha asked. “Like you are, does he somehow have the spirit of fucking Jonah Magnus in him?”

“Not like,” Jon began, and paused. Not like me, not like us, or not like them? He wished they could be out of the damned tunnels, back on the surface, where the Archivist’s voice was resounding and his eyes were clear. “Not like me and the Archivist,” he settled.

What’s the distinction, again? Other than that we hate him. 

“Funny,” the Archivist responded flatly, then spoke through him. “Jonah is what you could call a body hopper, or, if you wanted, a bastard and a thief.”

Martin snorted in spite of himself. His eyes flicked between Jon, stood against the tomb of a monster, Gertrude’s very dead body, and Jurgen Leitner, and the gravity of the situation settled on him once again. 

Leitner seemed surprised. Interesting— he truly didn’t know. That, Jon supposed, was predictable. Only viewing the powers as items without agenda or direction was, after all, his original downfall. Sure, they themselves didn’t have any grand plans, but their empowered followers definitely did. 

“Jonah can pick who he chooses,” the Archivist continued, “the process kills the host in the process. He picks someone, he settles things so his new host can be the next head of the Institute, and he moves on before jos body gets too old. Through possession, Jonah has kept his control over this Institute and all of its inhabitants.”

When they didn’t follow that with a spat “and me,” Jon frowned. Are you alright?

“It’s harder to think down here. I’d like to conserve my energy.”

“‘All of its inhabitants,’” Sasha quoted, the frown already present on her face stretching further downward. “Does that mean us?”

“It includes us, yes,” Jon said. “The hold is tighter over me because of the Archivist. None of us can quit, unless,” he hesitated. 

“Unless?” Tim asked. “What kind of hold?”

A confused look on his face, Martin said, “But Jessica from the library retired three weeks ago. There was a party,” he added, as if he needed to. 

Jon didn’t think he had been invited.  “People in other departments can leave, just not anyone in the archives. I think it might be an extension of the Archivist’s bindings. The only people who’ve left the archives are the ones who died, or the one who,” Jon hesitated, wondering if there was a delicate way to phrase it. Leitner was staring at him. All of them were staring at him. “Who destroyed his eyes.”

“Fascinating,” Leitner murmured, as Sasha said “I knew there was an eye thing!” and Tim shouted “Oh fuck no.”

“Do we need to destroy our eyes?” Martin asked, horrified. “Jon, did you bring us here to destroy our eyes?”

“No,” Jon said, vehement. “No, I would never.”

“I’d imagine that it’s antithetical to everything that he’s become,” Leitner mused. 

It was, but Jon wasn’t going to let Leitner have that kind of win. “I wanted to bring you here so that I could tell you all this. We can’t speak about anything upstairs,  Jonah is always watching.”

“Always?” Tim asked, horrified, “like— like a ‘he knows when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake’ kind of situation?”

The impossible hilarity of what Tim was suggesting shocked a laugh out of Sasha and Martin. 

“He’s not evil Santa, Tim,” Sasha said, though the tilt to her words suggested she wasn’t fully sure Jonah wasn’t. 

“Jonah can see through any eyes, that’s part of— oh.” Jon cut himself off. Right. He had skipped over the part he had meant to say first. Or maybe second? Admittedly his plan wasn’t as concrete as it should have been. 

“Oh?” Martin asked, tone edging on hysterical, “ Oh?”

“I forgot to explain the powers,” Jon said. “I had imagined that this would be more orderly than it turned out being. We can do that later. The point is that Jonah can see through any eyes anywhere we could safely go except for here. And even when we’re not in the tunnels, he can’t watch everything, he’s still got limits, but most of the time he’s watching me because he knows I’m scheming. In the tunnels it’s safe for me to tell you more than he thinks you ought to know, and it’s safe to plan what we’ll do.”

“Jon,” Martin began, hesitant, careful. “What are we going to do?”

Jon grinned. The Archivist grinned. As one, or maybe as the Archivist through Jon with his whole support, they said, “Oh, we’re going to kill him.”

Chapter Text

There wasn’t quite a confused uproar in response to Jon’s proposed murder plan. He had somehow convinced them that Jonah truly did deserve to die. 

The Archivist was so proud. They pushed through the edges of his mind a bit, coating all of Jon’s plans for what to say next with an excited murmur that settled in his teeth, static-sharp. 

Stop that, Jon thought, waving them away from his mind idly even as he swelled with satisfaction and resisted the urge to smile. You can’t just follow up a murder declaration with a big grin, that would come off wrong. It’s hard enough already to think down here.

Unrepentantly, they spoke, layered with the voices that they once used, the hosts before him,  “It’s not a crime to be excited.”

Tim cut in before Jon could think of a smart response. “Okay, murder? We’re doing a murder? That’s— that’s a lot, Jon.” He rubbed his hand across his forehead, swiping off some of the tunnel grime as he did. 

The look on Sasha’s face was not quite indescribable. Complex, Jon decided, was a better word— her eyebrows were tightly drawn with anxiety and probably pain from all of the running from monsters, but her mouth was set. “If Elias— or Jonah, or whoever — really killed Gertrude then we need to do something. We can’t just let him keep this power he has, and we can’t stay trapped here. I don’t want to work at the goddamned Magnus Institute for the rest of my life!” At that a laugh bubbled out of her, raw and bitter and scared.

“So, what,” Martin began, eyes shooting between Jon, Leitner, and Gertrude’s body. “We just charge up there and, and kill him? We’ll be arrested!”

“No,” Jon said, as soothingly as possible. He tried channeling the Archivist for this, which was easy but probably not the best idea as despite all the soothing they did they weren’t the best at it. “We can’t kill Jonah right away, we’ll die. We need to remove him from his seat of power first.”

“Oh!” Martin said, his voice high pitched with anxiety? Fear? Indignation? It had been and continued to be a long day and Jon was already not that great at identifying emotions. “Oh, so if he dies then we die? That’s just it then?”

Simultaneously Tim threw up his hands. “What the fuck, Jon?”

“‘Remove him from his place of power,’” Sasha repeated, forehead, if possibly, even more creased. “What, fire him? From his own Institute? How ?”

Right, Jon thought. How?

“Easy,” the Archivist said, still riding the high of releasing a long held secret. “Let me say.”

Warily, Jon let the Archivist take front and center, and boldly say, “Oh, we just have to reverse my vows! Unbinding me will take enough of his power from him that we can act. The Ceaseless Watcher favors me over Jonah.”

Jon immediately took control back, picturing himself and the Archivist (a nebulous person that looked in turns like Jon, Gertrude, and Catherine, and sometimes some combination of the three of them) standing at a podium in front of a large crowd. The Jon in his mind’s eye wrestled the microphone back from the Archivist as a new uproar went up, this time including Leitner.

“Vows?” Tim asked, a hundred question marks audible in his tone. 

“Ceaseless Watcher?” Martin asked, possibly two hundred question marks in his. 

Sasha just exclaimed something wordless and confused. 

Leitner, who apparently had been holding in his desire to be ‘helpful’ (look smart), decided after a bit of his own half verbalized questions that now was the time to assist. “I assume,” he began, gripping his cursed books with some form of scholarly excitement, “that you’re referring to the marriage vows between Jonah and the first head archivist? Catherine?”

A pause, and then—

“What the fuck!”

Jon decided that he was totally right in hating Leitner. Not just because of his foolish, selfish, hubris, though that was a major part of it, but because Leitner seemed unable to not start shit. Was it because his social skills had atrophied after years spent living in the tunnels beneath the Institute or because he had only had Gertrude for company? 

Time would not tell. Once Jon and his assistants had a plan they would be leaving the stinking rooms and the cold brick of the farther corners of the tunnels far, far, behind. Sure, they’d all still need to come down occasionally to prepare their next moves, but Leitner would not be invited. That was decided. 

Laughing slightly, the Archivist asked over the continuing exclamations, “Did you think they wouldn’t put any of this together? Jon, you are me and Gertrude and Catherine, and all that came between and before them, there’s no shame in that.” When he didn’t respond, still vacantly listening to the explosive questions of his assistants, the Archivist gently added, “there’s no shame in admitting that we were trapped. Tricked. And I will not let anyone think that we went gleefully or contentedly into a marriage with Jonah.”

Jon nodded slightly at the sharp tone the Archivist took at the end of their statement. You’re right. I’m sorry. Only Jonah is to blame. 

Jon felt them nod. “Only Jonah is to blame. They have questions. Let’s answer them.”

Their questions were predictable. 

Yes, a past host of the Archivist had been married to Jonah Magnus. Yes, Catherine was the Archivist by the time they were wed. No, Jon was not at that level of being the Archivist. 

“Yet.”

Hush. 

Yes, Catherine was the woman whose portrait hung over that library. Yes, their vows were slightly vague and fairly menacing. Yes, they did use the same vows at Jonah’s fancy church wedding.

How did they plan to close the eyes of the Ceaseless Watcher on Jonah? They were… not sure yet. Come back to that one. 

Who was the Ceaseless Watcher? Oh, shit, right, the powers. Jon gave his assistants an abbreviated tour of Smirke’s Fourteen, and then, when they had more questions, a slightly less abbreviated tour. 

Leitner did, in fact, come in handy. He was very excited to tell them all about his “anthill invasion” metaphor, which Jon begrudgingly admitted was helpful. 

Back to the murder plan. How were they going to make Jonah lose favor in the Ceaseless Watcher’s (“Beholding,” Leitner interrupted, “or the Eye,”) sight? Simple, they just had to unbind the Archivist. 

“But isn’t going back on your vows how we unbind you?” Sasha asked. She was settling in nicely to her new knowledge of terrible things, but, as Jon supposed, not all of it was new. Michael seemed to like her, something that was deeply concerning, and she had worked in artefact storage when she first started at the Institute.  “How are we supposed to use the vows to unbind you if we need to use them to kill him first?”

Oh. That stopped both Jon and the Archivist. Jon lowered the arms that he had been using to gesture, and asked the Archivist, what was your plan for that?

They didn’t say anything for a moment, before finally they admitted, “We may have gotten ahead of ourselves.”

Tim watched carefully as Jon sat, silent and still. “Talking to them? The Archivist?”

Tim had accepted the existence of the powers fairly quickly, just as Jon had expected. Tim gritted his teeth and clenched his fists and walked in restless circles and asked “why,” but he accepted it. 

“Uh, yes. They say that we may have gotten ahead of ourselves.”

“So there’s no plan?” Tim asked. “No artfully thought out murder scheme?”

“...Not yet.”

Tim covered his face with his hands. Quickly, Jon said, “I’m sure we’ll think of something! And we can always come back to the tunnels to plan more later.”

“I never want to come here again,” Tim said, voice muffled by his hands. Sasha wrapped an arm around him. 

“If we’re trying to make Elias— Jonah?—  lose favor with the, uh, Eye,” Martin began, careful and a bit hesitant. He had clearly been planning what he would say while Tim was speaking. “What if we get him fired? Or removed in some non-lethal way that takes some of his power away?”

A pause. Martin has accepted the existence of the powers with some sputtering and denial and then spent the rest of the explanations asking about various encounters. Yes, the Not-Them— yes , that’s what it’s called— is of the Stranger. Yes, Jane Prentis was of the Corruption. No, the Bone Turner’s Tale was the Flesh, not the Slaughter.

“Martin,” Sasha said, half a gasp in her voice. “Martin you’re incredible,” she shook Tim a bit with the hand she had wrapped around his shoulders until he looked up. 

“What?” 

“We’re going to get Elias arrested,” she said, a touch of a grin to her face.  

“Oh, nice.”

“That won’t work,” the Archivist said, through Jon. 

Martin frowned a bit, his smile from Sasha’s encouragement twisting down. “Why?”

“Jonah won’t let himself be arrested. He can’t be surprised like that, he’d only go if it suited him.”

Martin refused to let the Archivist bring down the mood. “So we make him think it suits him!” At Jon’s dubious expression,  Martin asked, “If Jonah was no longer the acting head of the Institute, would that take away some of his power?”

Would it? Jon asked, privately. And if it doesn’t, does that mean that we have no options?

They hesitated, before speaking through Jon’s mouth. “I think it would. But what would we get him arrested for?”

Wordlessly, Tim gestured at Gertrude’s corpse. 

“Also,” Sasha added, after that obvious point had been appreciated and acknowledged, “he seems like the kind of guy to commit tax fraud. If we find a way to get him arrested, can you think of a reason why he’d go along with it?”

The three of them looked so… hopeful. Jon could feel it too, a swelling, rising, glowing feeling, warm and bright. It wasn’t just him, it was the Archivist, too, Jon felt the echoes of past hosts and experiences twist and stare and whisper and hope. 

Can we?

Out loud, they answered, “I think so.” 

Rather than cheering, Jon’s assistants sagged in relief. No amount of teamwork could erase the day they’d been having. 

“Are you going to call the police?” Leitner cut in. “I need to hide now if you are.”

Jon shook his head, cutting off the various but-why’s that Martin, Sasha, and Tim asked. “If the police start investigating Gertrude’s murder too soon Jonah will have time to prepare his defenses. Besides, quite a few of the cops that they’d send here are affiliated with the Hunt and I’m not ready for that.”

“So we just… leave?” Tim asked, dubiously looking across the room to Gertrude’s corpse. “That feels wrong.”

“How do we know something won’t eat her?” Martin added, gesturing to the dark tunnels just past the gap where a door very recently was.

“I don’t think something will eat her now,” Sasha mused, “if she outlasted the worms I bet she’ll be fine.”

“There’s a tape with her murder on it somewhere,” Jon said. “That might be enough evidence for the Gertrude murder aspect of this plan.”

At that, Tim scoffed, Sasha laughed, and Martin snorted, each expression tinged with something bitter and something hysterical. 

They were coming along great. 

“So we just leave her?” Martin asked, after a moment. “Jon, are you sure?”

It’s not like she’s gone, Jon thought. He looked at her body. And it’s not like we can take her. Christ. Do you Jonah would have brought me here to kill me? Start a ‘misbehaving Archivist’ body dump?

“I don’t know,” the Archivist said, quietly. 

It was mostly rhetorical. Jon turned away from the body, and stopped as his eyes caught over the prison of stone Leitner had summoned to enclose the Not-Them in. 

“Leitner,” he called, interrupting the hushed conversation that Martin, Sasha, and Tim were having behind him, eyes still locked on the stone. “How accurate can you be with the Seven Lamps?”

“Fairly,” Leitner said, slowly. “Archivist, what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking we bury her. I think we give her a stone coffin and we leave this place.”

“Oh,” the Archivist said, delighted. For the first time in a long while their voice took on Gertrude’s tone. “Very respectful.”

Leitner looked between his book and Jon before nodding and carefully opening it again. “Step back,” he said, and so Jon walked on shaky legs over to his assistants. Tim was busy helping Sasha stand, so Jon leaned into the wall next to Martin. 

“Are we doing a funeral?” Martin asked, looking between Leitner and Jon. 

Laughing slightly, Jon shook his head and gestured vaguely at his eyes. “No need. She’s gone, but not gone .”

With pursed lips Martin nodded, and the four of them watched Leitner read and call the stone. It rose much slower, carefully bringing smooth brick from the ground and the wall to entomb Gertrude’s corpse and the chair she sat on. Leitner didn’t make the ‘casket’ connect with the ceiling like he had for the Not-Them and so it was only about four feet tall and maybe three wide. 

Leitner carefully closed his book when he was done. He nodded to Jon, who nodded back and gestured to the empty door frame. 

“Go,” Jon said simply, and Leitner did. 

“What was that for?” Sasha asked. “Can’t he help us?”

“Once we’re out of the tunnels I should be able to Know any information we might need, so he won’t be helpful. The only thing he might be useful for would be finding cursed artifacts but I’d really rather we stayed well away from those.”

Sasha paused, frowning, and Tim spoke. “So we’re just going to let the evil book man continue to live below our workplace?”

Jon laughed a little. “Leitner is a hubristic  coward. He did…” What could Jon say? What had Leitner done, in the end? Collected cursed books? Allowed them to be released in swarms due to negligence, ignorance, and pride? “He sent his assistants to their deaths so that he could know and he gathered nearly a thousand evil books and now he lives, scared and in hiding, beneath the Institute, and I don’t care if he lives or dies. Come on, let’s get out of here. I need a shower and possibly a million painkillers.”

In almost complete silence, Martin, Sasha, and Tim followed. Martin moved to help Jon because he had truly fucked up his legs through the various mad dashes he had had to run that day. Tim waited to assist Sasha, and stood behind her as she stumbled to Gertrude’s grave and gently placed a hand across the stone, fingers spread flat. When she was done she looped an arm over Tim’s shoulders, and off they were, into the darkness of the tunnels and the distant night.