Chapter Text
The door slammed shut behind Sasha as she hurried into Artefact Storage. She scanned the floor quickly and -- okay, no worms. No worms. She was safe, at least for now. With a sigh of relief, she slumped against the door.
As her breathing slowed, the chill of the cavernous room she found herself trapped in began to creep through her thin cardigan. With a shudder, she pulled it tighter around her. God, she'd really managed to strand herself in the one place colder than the Archives, hadn't she? Just one of the reasons she hated the bloody place.
Oh, well. All there was left to do now was hope Elias reached the CO2 system and she somehow didn't die when he triggered it. And hope that Martin didn't die, and Jon, and Tim, and...okay, she was spiraling. She needed a distraction. Luckily, it seemed like the tape recorder she'd carried in with her wasn't completely full yet.
She clicked it on, wandering slowly away from the door. Walking and talking would help. There was certainly enough weird shit in this room to keep her entertained for a bit, and Elias was right -- Jon would want as many supplementary statements as he could get his hands on.
"Okay, Jon," she began, gaze trained on a shelf she'd picked at random. "I know you'll want to know what's been happening, if you're still alive after all this..." She filled him in on her and Elias's plan, and how they got separated. It took a remarkably short time to fill him in, and too soon, Sasha was left with only her own footsteps and the gentle whir of the recorder to fill the massive amount of silence that the storage room was able to hold. She just started rambling about her time in research, about Elias, stuff Jon probably already knew, but it still felt nice to say. But then she came to a more open space in the storage room, and what she saw made her trail off.
It was the creepy fractal table from the Amy Patel statement. Just as Jon described it, with the little hole in the center and all. It really was the weirdest thing. Sasha just couldn't pull her eyes away from the strange lines etched into it, the impossible patterns they seemed to form. To keep herself from falling into it completely, Sasha knew she had to keep talking.
"Hey, I found that table you were talking about--" she started, but was cut off by the sound of an opening door. For the briefest of seconds, her heart soared. Was she safe? Had the system somehow already been triggered? Had Jon or Elias or someone managed to find her? But hope turned to confusion and dread when she looked up to see the pale yellow door standing open before her. It definitely hadn't been there just a moment ago, and neither had the thing that was too tall to be a man standing in its frame.
"I would stay away from that table if I were you," Michael said coolly, regarding her with a lazy smile that seemed to drip down its neck.
"Michael," Sasha breathed, instinctively stepping away from it. "What are...what are you doing here?" It certainly seemed like the type of being that would prey on chaos, in which case a trip to the Institute was the perfect idea for it today, but all the chaos was upstairs. It definitely had better places to observe the destruction from than down here with her.
Michael giggled one of its ear-popping giggles, and then did what was possibly the most baffling thing Sasha could think for it to do. It angled its body to the side and extended one massive, sharp hand beyond its door, as if it were Sasha's neighbor and she was over for a dinner party. "Why, I'm inviting you in, of course."
"Why?" Sasha asked immediately.
Michael shrugged and, as if the floor had shrugged with it, Sasha stumbled. It steadied her, reaching out with its other hand and hooking a deft finger into the back of her cardigan to set her back on her feet. "Perhaps I was feeling generous. Or perhaps jealous. In any case, I didn't feel like watching the Stranger get you first."
It was then that Sasha noticed the figure at the end of the room, in a corner where the light didn't quite reach. If it had features, Sasha couldn't make them out, but she could tell it meant her harm. It took a slow step toward her.
"That thing," she said to Michael, though her gaze didn't leave the figure. "It...it wants to kill me, yeah?"
Michael sighed, and Sasha could feel how its form glitched like a computer screen. "It wants to make you into something new."
"And you?"
"That is also what I would like, though not in quite the same way."
The figure took another step, and Sasha saw the odd way it moved. How it was odd, she could not have said, but it was definitely inhuman. Definitely wrong. Panic flared briefly in her chest.
"So if I go with you, I live? That's the deal?" Sasha asked Michael, inching toward the door. It was a stupid question, she knew that. Naive. But honestly, she needed any shred of hope she could get right now. Any proof that her options weren't just three different flavors of "get killed by something mysterious and horrifying".
"If you go through this doorway, you will remain the closest approximation of Sasha James that is possible in the current circumstances," Michael answered after a much too long moment. The creature coming toward them was two steps closer now. Sasha got the feeling that if not for Michael, it might have reached her much sooner, but it wouldn't stay away for all that much longer.
"Right," Sasha said. "Yeah. I'll come in. Thanks."
"Don't thank me just yet, Sasha James," Michael lilted as she moved closer to the door. "This is going to hurt. For both of us."
Still, he offered her a hand as she crossed the threshold, leaving the Archives behind and entering a long hallway that was at once too dark and too bright. Before her voice fragmented completely, she was able to answer, "Eh. The worms have already hurt me plenty today."