Archive of Our Own ^beta

Elias’s chair was turned to the side, his legs stretched out in front of him. He sat for a moment, the tape recorder playing empty static, and then reached across to switch it off. In the absence of the static the office was stiflingly silent, until Elias emerged from his thoughts long enough to tune back into all the usual background noise: the ticking of the clock, the occasional footsteps from beyond the door, the brief snatch of voices.

Sitting up a little straighter, Elias swivelled the chair back around to face the desk properly, reaching this time for the phone. He picked up the receiver, stretching out his little finger and hitting one of the buttons for the internal lines; by the time he put it to his ear, the line was already being picked up.

“Um, yes? Hello?”

“Martin,” Elias said, smiling. “Would you be so kind as to send Tim my way? Immediately.”

“Oh, right—yes, yeah, I can do that.”

“Thank you. Do be sure to mention that it’s important. I’d rather not wait all day.”

“Yeah, I—uh, I will. Cool. Um, alright. Bye.”

“Goodbye, Martin.”

Elias replaced the phone in its cradle and leaned back in his seat. His eyes fell once again on the tape recorder, and now, with everything set in motion, Elias allowed his features to pull into a slight frown.

After a moment, he reached out, held the replay button for several moments, and then hit play again.

*

[CLICK]

TIM  

Yeah, sure, that’s your answer for everything, just oh, what was I supposed to do—

ARCHIVIST  

What was I supposed to—oh, for God’s sake, Tim—

TIM  

—as though nobody else might have anything worth listening to, no, alright, Jon knows best, Jon knows how we’re all feeling so much better than we do—

ARCHIVIST

I don’t have time to listen to this.

TIM  

Yeah, alright. Of course you don’t.

ARCHIVIST  

What—Why do you—

[SIGH]

I would really appreciate it if you would be more forthcoming with what it is that you want from me, exactly.

TIM

Sure. Because you’ll be so eager to listen, won’t you? You’ll be so eager to take it into account.

ARCHIVIST  

I really don’t see how I can win here. I think you just want—

TIM  

Oh, here we go.

ARCHIVIST  

I think you just want to have somebody to be angry at. I don’t know what—whatever else is going on, or what—I don’t know. But whatever it is, you just want someone to take it out on, when maybe you’d have more luck taking a look at yourself and—

TIM  

Oh, shut up, will you, Jon?

ARCHIVIST  

For God’s sake! What do you want from me?

TIM  

Maybe to stop acting like you’re the only one who recognises how much is at stake here, or like you’re the only one who’s ever been fucked up by those God damn circus freaks, like you alone stand a chance of getting to the bottom of it?

Also, fuck you.

ARCHIVIST  

I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I—what do you mean, the only one who’s ever—

TIM  

Don’t.

ARCHIVIST  

Alright. Alright.

But if you’re not going to tell me what’s wrong, I can hardly—

TIM  

Do not.

ARCHIVIST  

Alright.

TIM  

Don’t bother with that stupid little look.

ARCHIVIST  

What little—stupid?

TIM  

Like you actually give a damn about what I’m going to say, and you’re not just trying to get more answers to feed that creepy little—

ARCHIVIST

For God’s sake. I do not have time for this. Just leave your—

TIM  

Where do you think you’re—

ARCHVIST  

Just leave your follow-up on my desk when you’re done with it.

If you ever get done with it.

TIM  

Where are you—

Jon!

ARCHIVIST  

I’m going back to—ow, get off—

TIM  

No, you listen. You listen right here—

ARCHIVIST  

Tim, get off! You’re—ow, ow—

TIM  

For God’s sake, stop—

[A LOUD CRACK, FOLLOWED BY A PAINED SCREAM]

TIM  

Oh—oh Jesus, fuck, Jon—

[SCREAMING CONTINUES]

TIM  

Shit. Shit. Oh, shit—

[CLICK]

*  

At some point in the day a cup of tea had appeared on the desk next to Tim, and between sips it became lukewarm, then cold, then somehow icy. The whole morning felt as though it were just crawling by, but between blinks the clock would skip forward hours. Repeatedly Tim’s thoughts travelled back to the night before, dredging up more memories of this same sluggishness; how it never seemed to be any closer to sunrise, how he felt his bed calling him but couldn’t make himself answer, knowing that it would only be another end to another day in the cycle that had become his life. Nothing resolved, nothing gained.

Especially nothing resolved.

He wished he could say that he felt good about breaking Jon’s arm, considering he was still of the opinion that Jon more than deserved it. The fact that it hadn’t been intentional didn’t sit right with him, though. Their conversation had been taking the same pattern that it always took, with Jon being frustrating and Tim feeling frustrated, and then both of them had been shouting at one another. Jon had turned away, telling Tim that he could just leave his follow-up on the desk when he was done with it, and for some reason it had been that comment that had really gotten under Tim’s skin. He hadn’t thought about what he was doing when he reached out to grab Jon; hadn’t even realised he’d done it until he felt the sickening snap of the bone under his hand, heard Jon screaming.

Once he would have gone home and weighed up whether it would be a good idea to call Sasha to go over it, but things hadn’t been like this when Sasha was alive. He’d considered calling Martin, but he didn’t think that he could deal with Martin’s closed judgement. At one point it wouldn’t have mattered – he might have actually enjoyed being on the receiving end of the cold look that Martin shot him when he saw what Tim had done to Jon’s arm, now so obvious in the white cast and padded sling Jon was stuck in for the next six to eight weeks. He would have enjoyed the furious gaze on Martin’s face as he’d tried to walk past him that evening, Jon still hunched over and breathing raggedly behind him, Martin’s glare burning into his back as he had turned for the stairs.

He would have enjoyed it, he was sure, but things were different between he and Martin now. They had been since he’d told him about Danny.

More than just disgust, or anger, Tim was sure that Martin was measuring him up, trying to see if what Tim had done made sense against his explanation for why he was here in the first place. If it had just been shock at what Tim had done, or anger, then Tim could have dealt with it. There had been something else, though. Something that Tim couldn’t quite place that was still on Martin’s face now, as he watched him from the doorway.

“What do you want?” Tim asked, without looking at him properly.

“Elias wants to see you,” Martin replied. “He said that it was, uh, important.”

Tim turned his chair around, throwing one arm over the back of it. He couldn’t imagine how he looked right now, only that it was probably terrible. He found he didn’t care. Even just a few months ago he wouldn’t have dreamed of coming into work looking the way he did now, wearing the same shirt that he’d worn the day before, prominent bags under his eyes and the fact that he’d started the morning with something much stronger than coffee abundantly clear. Whatever he felt about himself now was a pale imitation of the pride that he used to have when he’d come into the office, knowing for a damn fact that he looked like he was cut from the same stuff that the city in general was cut from – sharp edges, shiny glass, a certain hardness in his smile. But there was still a certain pride to being here now; a twisted pride. He got a bit of a thrill out of how uncomfortable Martin looked when he saw him; how the others tried to avoid him as a rule.

“Well,” Tim eventually said. “We can all guess what this is about, can’t we?”

“Tim,” Martin said hesitantly.

His voice was too quiet for Tim’s liking, something about it setting his teeth on edge.

“What?”

Martin shifted. He didn’t want to make things even more tense – he could see the aggression in Tim already – but he couldn’t miss the opportunity to ask. “Did you—I mean, did you do it on purpose?”

“What?”

“Is that the—the next step in your big plan to get fired from here?” Martin gave a weak laugh; it sounded too shrill to his ears. “Just—I don’t know, assault Jon and see what happens?”

“I didn’t assault him,” Tim snapped. “And no, I didn’t do it on purpose. It would—it would have been different if I had.”

“Would you have?”

Tim shook his head. “I have better things to do,” he said, “than pick a fight with Jon.”

“Really?” Martin laughed again, this time nervously. “Because it really seems to me that this is all you’ve been doing, actually. And now Elias wants to see you, and..?”

“And what?” Tim asked. “Do you think I’m scared of him?”

Martin stared at him. “Uh, you kinda should be?”

“What’s he going to do?” Tim demanded, finally standing up. “He won’t fire me. He can’t fire us, remember? I already told him that he could kill me, if he really had that much of an issue with me, and he said—”

“That he hoped it didn’t come to that,” Martin finished. “Yes, Tim. I know. Maybe this is—I don’t know. Maybe this is where you cross the line.”

Tim shrugged; Martin gave a frustrated sigh.

“I might as well go and get this over with, then,” Tim said, after a moment of silence.

“You know that he’s dangerous, Tim. You know—”

“Yes, Martin,” Tim said. “I know.”

He said it with a coldness that he didn’t feel, a certainty that he didn’t have – that nothing would come of this. He knew that Elias was dangerous. Elias wasn’t the only dangerous thing in the world, though, and there was something undeniably satisfying about knowing that he’d done something to earn Elias’s irritation.

Even if he hadn’t meant to.

But what did intent matter, when it came to monsters like Elias? Tim was pretty sure that Danny hadn’t meant to die; that Sasha hadn’t meant to be killed, overtaken by that thing. None of it had ever mattered, in the end.

“Well,” Martin eventually said, giving a helpless shrug. “I guess you should go uh, see what he wants?”

“Take care of things down here,” Tim said, kicking the chair roughly back under the desk. “If I don’t come back, you can have my mug.”

Martin gave a short, sharp nod, and then shot the mug a quick, guilty glance. Tim smiled and stepped around him, and then made his way upstairs.

*

When it came to the matter of Tim, Elias had ultimately decided that there was no rush. It was a good thing, really; watching Tim now, speaking with Martin, dragging himself to his feet as slowly as humanly possible, Elias supposed that they were both of the same mind, if inspired by different factors. With things like this, Elias didn’t like to back himself into a corner. He supposed when he was as old as he was now, he had to take his surprises wherever he could get them, and a little-known but highly effective trick – at least in his experience – was to spring decisions on himself at the very last moment. With that in mind he had gone about the first half of his day completely as normal, diligently redirecting his mind every time it tried to shift to what had happened and focusing it instead on the more mundane tasks that took up far too much of his attention these days. With everything he knew and all that he had seen, there was a slight element of the absurd to sitting down at his computer and going through the seemingly endless minutiae required of his position, but at the very least it was simple. Everything had its place; everything could be filed away in neat boxes and coloured spreadsheet cells. There was something almost perversely relaxing about it, which Elias could admit was a little sad. He could hardly blame anyone for the comments he had heard – uncensored, of course, and without the speakers’ knowledge – regarding his love of Excel. He wouldn’t deny any of it. Some people, he remembered, chose to relax by doing something ghastly like meditation. At least he was actually contributing something.

For most of the morning, the day had aligned with Elias’s view of things. An ordinary morning, nothing remarkable about it at all – one of the days that would eventually fade into nothing on a long enough timeline, like the thousands that had come before it. Only brief flashes of thought interrupted the surface of it all, and Elias waited patiently for those brief flashes to solidify, begin to insist. He had allowed himself to think, to dwell. He had allowed himself to retrieve the tape, to listen to what had happened in those few minutes before the sudden, intense flash of violence had drawn his attention to the archives, his gaze finding the scene only seconds after it had happened. He had looked, of course, later, after Jon’s injury had been seen to; he knew, but he still wanted to hear what the tape had regarded as so important. It had given him plenty to go on.

Then it had been time to summon Tim.

Elias had listened to the tape once more, and then he spent the remaining few minutes that it would take Tim to drag himself upstairs putting his office in order. He had had no doubt that Tim would take his sweet time over it, turning what was perhaps a minute into three or four, though Elias knew that even Tim would likely not push his luck too far – not at first, anyway. It was always best to arrive under the illusion that one was going to be reasonable. For all Tim didn’t bother to hide his disdain, he was at least inventive when it came to displaying it. After all, it wasn’t Tim who was approaching his office twice weekly with some half-baked attempt to assassinate him. No, Tim was much more insidious about it, and as Elias moved around the room, placing files back into their correct places and tucking loose papers aside, he wondered if he had perhaps underestimated the depth of Tim’s hatred.

Well, no. That was ridiculous. He had never underestimated it; such assumptions never paid off. He supposed, if he had to criticise himself, he was guilty of being a little too confident when it came to where – and towards whom – Tim would direct it. Elias knew that Tim was beyond difficult, of course; he didn’t need to stretch his abilities to see that. Tim was a menace in the archives, when he actually decided to show up – and Elias got the distinct impression that Tim only showed up on his worst days. In fact, he knew it. Whenever he could get away with it, Tim preferred to keep his distance from the place, but on the days when the anger and the hatred were too much? Well. Then everybody would hear about it.

“Being here couldn’t make the day worse, could it?” Elias murmured to himself, his voice a loose imitation of Tim’s usual surly tone, words clipped, always so subtly aggressive.

Elias shut a filing cabinet drawer with a metallic clang and went back to his desk, laughing quietly. Tim told himself the same lie every time, and then as soon as he arrived and got to whatever it was he was going to do that day – usually sitting around drinking, as of late – he would quickly realise that actually, the day could always get worse. Then it was a matter of taking it out on whoever was unlucky enough to cross his path, and that had been where Elias had been guilty of his slight oversight. He had always been sure that if it ever came to real, physical violence – something that with Tim was always a threat, just below the surface and positively looking for an excuse to get out – it would have been directed towards him. In fact, Elias had almost been looking forward to it. That wasn’t to say it would never happen, of course, but Elias had sincerely thought he would be the first. What had happened instead had been an unpleasant surprise, which was not the kind of surprise that Elias was accustomed to having.

Despite the fact the incident had been over and done with by the time Elias made it down to the archives, it hadn’t taken him long to figure it out. He had passed Tim on the stairs, Tim all but barging past him without a word; down in the breakroom, Elias had found Jon ashen-faced and breathing heavily, his arm held out awkwardly in front of him, a nasty lump visible in his forearm as Martin gently rolled his sleeve back and winced. Elias had considered going after Tim there and then, but didn’t quite trust his self-control; Martin had heard yelling, apparently, but hadn’t managed to make anything out before Jon had started screaming.

Jon, of course, insisted that it had been an accident. He hadn’t said much about it, but that had been the dominant theme – just an accident, an argument that had gotten out of hand. Elias could believe that much. He had seen the two of them bickering and even outright shouting at one another often enough – well, Tim shouting at Jon, while Jon adopted that low, haughty little tone of his that only ever made it worse – but it had never come to violence like this. Yes, Tim had shoved Jon a couple of times, but it had always been to get him out of the way so he could storm off – not unlike what he had done to Elias on the stairs. There had never been anything like this before, and perhaps Tim hadn’t meant to break any bones. That was believable enough. As Jon had said, it wasn’t as though Tim had pinned him down and deliberately snapped it out of sheer malice. Strictly speaking it was an accident, but it still took some force to break a bone. Regardless of intent, that anger had been in Tim when he had reached out and grabbed Jon, and it had been directed at Jon. Had the injury not been so immediately drastic, or had Tim been just angry enough to not care, things could have ended much differently.

And that would just not do at all.

*  

Tim was surprised the journey only took as long as it was supposed to. Wasn’t time supposed to pass too quickly or too slowly in situations like this? That had been Tim’s prior experience, anyway, but despite his leisurely pace Rosie was informing him all too soon that he was expected, and that Elias might be in a call, and to knock on the door. None too graciously, Tim ascended the next short flight of stairs to Elias’s office, realising that it had been a few months since he’d last been there, listening along with everyone else as Elias had confessed to killing Gertrude and Leitner. It still surprised Tim how that had been the least shocking thing that had come out that day.

Whenever he could, Tim avoided Elias. It never made much of a difference, of course, knowing that Elias could look in on him whenever he pleased, but at least Tim didn’t have to see him back. With that in mind, he wasn’t thrilled about having to see him now. He wished more than anything that he could just tell himself that this would be another telling off, his nerves misplaced and something to laugh at himself for later, like the moment after leaving a classroom to report to the headteacher – the bravado gone, the solidarity of his classmates absent, leaving him alone in the hallway with the consequences. Back then it would have been nothing more than a detention, but Tim knew now that the risk could not be higher. Elias was a dangerous man, and there was nothing like standing on the other side of his office door, raising his hand to knock, to remind him that he knew it beyond all doubt.

Still, if Elias did bring him in, pull out a gun, shoot him, then there would be a certain satisfaction to be had in that. Everything that he was working for would be for nothing, but it wasn’t like killing anyone would bring Danny back from the dead.

But that’s not true. Getting them is the only thing that you have left, and like hell you’re going to let Elias take that from you.

Inside, Elias sat behind his desk and got comfortable, rearranging some pens and then folding his hands neatly, one on top of the other. There was a small cut at the side of one of his fingers – a nick from a vegetable knife – and it had scabbed over, leaving an unsightly mark that was always in the corner of his vision. He frowned at it, as though sheer disapproval could make it go away, and then quickly arranged himself back into an obviously fake display of personal indifference: Tim was about to knock on the door, and Elias knew he had no intention of waiting after he knocked.

Tim grit his teeth and pounded on the door; he let himself in before hearing an answer. Elias suppressed a smile.

“Hey, boss,” he said, in his most false-cheery tone. “I heard you wanted to see me?”

This was where the talent was, Elias thought, as Tim’s eyes fell on him. It was one thing to fake any kind of indifference; it was another thing entirely to fake it with the intent of letting somebody know it was fake. People always filled in the gaps themselves: more nervous people would assume it was an act to cover up some kind of anger or disapproval, and bolder people would assume it was a threat. Either way, it was always interesting.

Tim’s faux-jovial tone was expected, as was the way it was betrayed by the hard look in his eyes, the tension in his jaw that didn’t align with the neutrality he was aiming for. Had the door not been so heavy, Elias thought Tim might very well have slammed it back into the wall. They watched one another for the long moment it took for the door to swing closed and click shut behind Tim.

“More of a necessity rather than a preference, Tim,” Elias eventually replied, pleasantly enough. “I would offer the usual tea or coffee? spiel, but something tells me you would rather I just get straight to the point.”

As soon as Tim saw Elias he knew that whatever was coming, it wouldn’t be anything good. Elias gave nothing away, but considering this was all coming from the man who had smiled and spoken softly, all neat and precise phrases, while an ex-cop held a gun to his head, Tim couldn’t really say he was surprised to see Elias in a similar state now. Composed. Contrite. Elegant in a way that Tim once found mundane, until he realised that this same boring old man had beaten someone’s head in with a metal pipe. He sat behind his desk now and met Tim’s gaze with a look of composed indifference – just once more task to sort out in between filling out paperwork for his spooky organisation.

It really annoyed Tim, just like how it had annoyed him the last few times Elias had come to talk to him about his attitude or how he’d fucked off to Malaysia without so much as a moment’s notice. He was so professional about the whole thing, cordial and almost apologetic at the need to raise the issue at all – almost like he was pretending that this situation was literally anything other than what it actually was – and that more than anything always drove Tim up the wall. If he hadn’t been so committed to his overall disdain for the place and everything associated with it, he would have done something else. Something better than just pissing off for a few weeks, or standing there staring sullenly as Elias fixed that indifferent little look on him.

Something more like what he’d done to Jon, he supposed. And wouldn’t that have been satisfying?

Elias looked away to pick an almost-invisible piece of lint from his sleeve, and then abruptly fixed Tim with a hard stare to match his own.

“I don’t think I need to tell you why you’re here,” he said, his voice still pleasant, though perhaps a degree cooler. “I don’t ask you to be happy about being here. In fact, I don’t even ask you to be subtle in your hatred of the place – nor of me. I know well how you feel, and I am fully aware of how you’ve been making these feelings known. Your absences, appalling work ethic, day-drinking, and questionable hygiene practises have all been duly noted. It is really none of my concern it you would like to continue to embarrass yourself, so long as other people have the choice to get on with their work if they so desire. However, I have to say that I draw a very firm and indelible mark when it comes to physically assaulting your colleagues.”

The anger was not an act. It was carefully controlled, yes, and as with all instances of strong feeling Elias was careful to keep a tight grip on it; to deploy it only where it would best fit – but it was not an act. The patience that had held him steady through the day had soured; now his irritation had solidified into the kind of cold, personal anger that Elias quite truthfully had rare use for these days. It wasn’t a shock, to feel it settling so deeply within him, but it wasn’t entirely welcome, either.

Tim knew he should say something. There was nothing he wanted to say to Elias, other than to tell him to fuck off again, or maybe that he hadn’t meant to be so rough with Jon, but now that it was all said and done he couldn’t even say that he was sorry about it. He hadn’t really expected Elias to be pleased with him, but still, the depth of his anger surprised Tim. Looking back at all of their previous interactions, it only occurred to Tim now that he was alone in a room with Elias that he’d never seen his boss truly angry. Sure, there had been a few times when Elias had seemed cross, back in the days where Tim had taken this to be nothing more than a regular, if eccentric, job – but when he saw the fixed, hard look on Elias’s face now, all of that just seemed irrelevant. He couldn’t even count it in the same category as whatever this was.

“Ordinarily,” Elias continued, “you would be looking at some rather serious charges. Assault, at the very least; as it happens the police don’t like to deal with us, which is lucky for you, and I’m quite sure that even if they did, Jonathan would decline to press charges against you. If the situation were different you would most certainly get your wish and find yourself without a job, but as I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, that is not an avenue available to us.”

Elias paused, watching Tim for a moment, and then he gave a thin, acidic smile.

“This is not, however, the kind of thing I can let slide,” he said quietly. “So. What to do?”

Tim didn’t answer right away. He held his tongue, not wanting to say the wrong thing. He was unable to look away from Elias’s tight, vicious smile as he finally spoke.

“What can I say?” he offered, giving a disinterested half-shrug. “I can promise you that it won’t happen again, if that’s what you want.”

He stared hard at Elias, trying to keep his face even. Everything that Elias said was laced through with venom, and Tim got the distinct impression that he would strike at the slightest slip. It wasn’t a secret that Elias was dangerous – he’d confessed to a murder that Tim had seen the gruesome aftermath of, and he’d heard through Daisy about what it was that Elias had done to Melanie, or at the very least threatened to do. Daisy hadn’t been entirely clear which option it had been, and although Tim had meant to ask Martin for the details that he hadn’t dared ask Daisy about, he hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Either way, it hadn’t sounded nice, and the nagging possibility that a threat had been enough to reduce Melanie to the state she was currently in was enough to make Tim want to tread carefully.

He wasn’t surprised to know that Elias was evil, just like the rest of this place. Being on the receiving end of this particular attention, though, unsettled him more than he was comfortable admitting, and he wasn’t able to deny it to himself.

“Clearly,” Tim said cautiously, “you have something in mind, if you’ve finally called me up here to see you about what happened. If you aren’t going to wait to drag Jon into this and ask him what it is that he wants to do, then I assume you’ve already thought long and hard about it and know exactly what it’s going to be. So why drag it out? Do your worst, and then if I’m still alive at the end of it I’ll fuck off back to the archives and do whatever it is that I was doing before Martin came to get me.”

Drinking tea, essentially – or not drinking it, now that he thought of it. Tim snorted, but kept his gaze fixed on Elias. He still remembered the state of Jurgen Leitner’s head when he and Martin had walked in on that, and while Tim had the advantage of not being as old as Leitner, and from looks alone wagering that on account of not being a senior citizen he was physically stronger than Elias, too, those facts alone weren’t enough to comfort him. Metal pipe or no, the look Elias gave him settled upon his shoulders like a physical weight.

Tim didn’t want to die here, in this office, at this moment – but he wouldn’t pretend that this was anything other than what it was. Watching him, Elias had to fight the urge to roll his eyes. It was all as he had expected it would be, right down to the insinuation that he had dragged Tim up here to kill him. Not that Elias could blame Tim for the assumption, of course – there was certainly precedent there, and god knows Elias thought about how satisfying it would be often enough.

But Tim didn’t want to die. That much was clear to Elias. Whatever was driving Tim, that innate drive to get even and pay the world back? It did not want to die, and for all Tim’s blasé attitude Elias knew he was scared enough of that possibility. He didn’t need to threaten or hint. He didn’t need to mention the possibility at all. There was no further he could push that fear, and anyway, fear was not what he was looking for here. Fear – and pain, for that matter – was something to be endured until one could make it back to a safe location to lick their wounds. If Elias wanted actual progress here, if he wanted to ensure Tim’s cooperation, no matter how grudging it might be, he was going to have to do something that was not so temporary. Something that was not so marred by Tim’s own selfish motivations.

Elias didn’t want Tim scared. He wanted him sorry.

Tim had been right when he had guessed Elias had something in mind, even if he had been completely incorrect when it came to what it might be. Elias supposed Tim expected him to even the score, maybe break Tim’s arm with something heavy and blunt. Elias wouldn’t lie to himself and say the thought wasn’t a tempting one, but it was also wholly off the mark. A physical injury like that would only serve as a constant reminder for Tim to be angry at him, and quite possibly Jon, too. Not to mention the fact that this was not a tit-for-tat exchange. Tim might see what he had done to Jon as nothing more than surface level, a broken limb that would heal, but it was Elias alone who could see the bigger picture; see how badly things could have gone, see the true depth of the inconvenience of it all. It wasn’t pleasant, to feel so close to losing something valuable, to deal with the fact that it had been so damaged. Jon’s position was dangerous enough, especially now. He didn’t need the added threat of a drunken, antsy manchild on top of everything else.

Elias felt his smile sharpen slightly, but he continued to say nothing. There was nothing else he needed to say. Some things were far better left shown. Tim’s gaze was still fixed on him, steadily enough, but with a sense of urgency to it now the silence was stretching on. Elias kept his face impassive, perhaps slightly thoughtful, like he was maybe weighing up his words or that there was still a chance this conversation would progress normally. All to buy himself a little time, of course, but it wasn’t as though he needed much. Tim kept himself tightly coiled, forcing himself under impeccable amounts of pressure in order to get through the day without exploding too terribly, and for anybody else it would work. Yes, people would notice there was something wrong, and they would probably be able to sense that pleasant company was not something to be found in abundance with Tim, but so long as they left him alone and Tim kept his distance in turn, things would be manageable. Nothing more than ripples on the surface, really.

Needless to say, Elias wasn’t just anybody else. He did not need to press against Tim’s mind too harshly to see where he needed to look, and he didn’t particularly have to strain himself to see it. It was tempting, in that moment, with the anger still tight in his chest and warming his skin, to throw everything at Tim with its full weight – not just the sensation of what Elias knew, not even just the knowledge itself, but the whole damn thing, the lived experienced, beginning to end. Two facts stopped Elias from giving into temptation: the first was the fact that Tim would almost certainly be rendered immediately nonsensical, a state from which he was unlikely to ever recover, and that would be counterproductive to the rest of this meeting; the second was the simple fact that rushing things was no fun.

And the leverage, I suppose, Elias added, as an afterthought. No doubt I’ll be needing it with this one.

So Elias fed the information to Tim slowly, nothing solid, nothing graphic. Little flickers here and there, things that could be mistaken for memory, and then – no, something that Tim was sure he didn’t remember, couldn’t know. Elias watched Tim’s face closely as he did so, keeping his own unreadable, as if nothing was out of the ordinary in the slightest.

“All this talk about killing you,” Elias eventually said, keeping his voice low, almost soothing. “Why do you do it? I’m not inclined to wish to make things more difficult for myself, which would be inevitable if there was a third murder at the Institute and anybody caught wind of it. I’m sure there are plenty of your colleagues who would like to use your death to make things more complicated for me, even if I can’t say they would miss your sulking too much. Not to mention you don’t want to die, do you? Not until you’ve had a chance to avenge this.”

A glimmer, then, of something undeniable; something to ensure that yes, this was what Elias was talking about, that yes, he knew. Elias wouldn’t put it past Tim to try to play stupid even now, stubborn as he was.

“You don’t want me to do my worst, Tim,” Elias said quietly. “That is why you’re going to cooperate with me now.”

The words came to Tim slowly; he felt suddenly unsteady, a strange movement in his head like the outline of a headache’s pressure. At first Elias’s silence had almost been in a step in the right direction, and had Tim not known better, and had it not been for the inexplicable flickers of unease and confusion running through him from somewhere outside himself, he might have seen it as such. Too quickly he realised that this wasn’t because Elias didn’t have anything to say, or that Tim had made any kind of good argument. It wasn’t even a display of frustration, or of being too good to get down on Tim’s level and argue with him. That would have been fine, had it been the case. If Elias wanted to call him up to his office to stare menacingly across the desk, he was more than welcome to do it. Tim had almost said something of the sort, and then that feeling had hit him.

Everything about Elias was off – more than unsettling, it had quickly become downright creepy. If Tim were more skittish, like Martin, then he’d probably start making his excuses now, but instead he tried to remain steady. He stared back at Elias, one hand on his hip, nails digging slightly too hard into his side. He managed to meet Elias’s steady stare with a glare of his own, doing his best to stay motionless as the room seemed to recede and return around him; trying to remain as motionless as he had been that day under the Royal Opera House, when he’d stared out across all the stone-carved seats to the stage below, where Danny had been waiting for him.

The memory washed over him, intense and sudden as a freak wave, heavier than it had any right to be. Tim had already lived it, after all. He had nightmares about it frequently enough that the reminder alone wasn’t anything special – the moment where he’d realised that something was truly, inconceivably wrong, before he’d even considered that he should do something about it but ultimately didn’t. Right now, though, it burrowed its way under his skin with the same lightning nerves that had first travelled through him the moment it had actually been happening – not a memory of the event, but the living of it itself.

And yet he was still standing across from Elias. His breath had quickened, but he swallowed hard before it became too noticeable. No doubt Elias was already aware, but what Elias did or didn’t know wasn’t a good enough reason to stop caring about how he held himself; how much he gave over to Elias willingly.

“What are y—”

Tim bit down on his lip, cutting himself off. Still, the question repeated itself in his head, over and over, a panicked ricochet. What are you doing? What are you doing? He couldn’t stop thinking about it. Everything was coming back to him now, all of it quick bursts, almost too sudden to truly grasp hold of. It was totally ridiculous that he would even be thinking about this now – none of it was relevant. It wasn’t the time to think about how Danny had looked that night, when Tim woke up and saw his baby brother sitting in his room, quietly muttering to himself. He didn’t think that he could remember what it was that Danny had been saying – it had been too quiet for Tim to make out – but he could remember it now. He could hear Danny now.

Hearing the words in Danny’s voice, the helpless questions, he felt the same dreaded fear crawling through his limbs. He felt how Danny had shuddered at the thought of going back to his own life, now that he knew what was out there. How could he go back to the way that things were before? He couldn’t. It wouldn’t be the same. Or he wouldn’t be the same. What he’d seen that first night had shaken his belief in a world that he once belonged to completely, and Danny could think of nothing else to do except to go back and see for himself what had happened.

This had to be some kind of misunderstanding. Right?

His brother’s small voice, as Tim had thrown the blanket over him on that last night; Danny’s last night alive. Tim forced his hand into a fist now, his breathing shortening once more. At the time he’d thought he was doing the right thing, laying Danny on the sofa so he could rest. He’d assumed that Danny would still be there in the morning, and that they could just talk about it. Of course, if he’d known that Danny was going to go back, he would never have let his younger brother out of his sight, but—they would have worked something out. Or Tim would have believed they could, then. He knew better now.

He clenched his fist harder, still trying to hold Elias’s gaze, wondering if it was somehow making this worse but unable to lose face. His skin crawled along the back of his neck; time and time again he had to resist the temptation to turn and check if somebody was watching him. Something was, at any rate, and Tim felt a flicker of anger.

None of this was new. He shouldn’t be going to pieces like this; he’d been through the whole self-blame thing after it had happened, trying to figure out what he could have done differently before realising that there had been nothing. He hadn’t known. If he could just get some answers about what had happened, then maybe he could do something about it now, even if it didn’t change anything – but he hadn’t known. He couldn’t have known. Tim had settled this particular issue with himself and then found a new job at the Magnus Institute; he had set about working as a researcher, he had started trying to undo what little damage he could. He had felt good about it, too; like he was finally filling in the miniscule gaps in his knowledge wherever he could, inching closer to something that might shape up to be revenge, but he had made the same mistake as before. He still hadn’t known.

He’d had no idea of the rest of the terrors that were out there, and those were the things he had ended up obsessing over most of the time. The Circus had been a distraction from that; a direction between all those interlocking statements. The details of what he’d seen had rarely been at the front of his mind, lost as they were under worm attacks and Jon losing his mind in the tunnels under the Institute or following him home to see if he fancied admitting to Gertrude’s murder yet; even his earlier prevailing thoughts of just how dangerous it was to be alone with Elias had now faded compared to the ones of Danny.

(The way that Danny had looked that night, curled on his side on the sofa. How he’d come too late in the evening, looking helplessly around Tim’s living room like he no longer recognised it, already so set in his decision. So sure that there was nothing worse than what he’d already seen – that it would be easier, the second time.)

Tim made a quickly stifled noise in the back of his throat.

(Himself, through Danny’s eyes, he knew it. Himself, staring down at him, and that horrible prevailing thought, Danny’s: You cannot help me.)

“Alright.”

Tim managed a laugh – or an attempt at one. So, this was Elias’s game.

“Alright. You aren’t showing me anything that hasn’t already happened to me. If that’s what you want to talk about, forget it. I’ve already lived it once. Then I ended up here.” He reached behind him, grasping for the door handle. “Tell me what you want. Quit wasting my time.”

His hand was shaking. He really wished it wasn’t, but there was nothing he could do about it now. Elias didn’t move his gaze from Tim’s face, but he saw Tim’s hand all the same, reaching blindly, unsteadily. Just the slightest tremble at first, but growing all the more pronounced when his fingers brushed against the handle without gripping. Coincidence, or the sinking sense of entrapment? Either way, Elias thought it was all enjoyable enough.

“Do not presume you can leave, Tim,” Elias said, quite pleasantly. “You do not have to be in my direct line of sight for me to be able to do this to you – not to mention it’s rather rude to leave without being dismissed.”

Tim’s thoughts were frantic now, coming several at a time, entwining, losing threads. Elias leaned into them, but only slightly; enough still floated to the surface that they were easy enough to follow along with.

“Yes, this has nothing to do with Jon,” he continued, in answer to one of Tim’s many unasked questioned. “This is merely a punishment, Tim. I suppose you were thinking it would be something a little more heavy-handed? I’m not sure what you could have possibly imagined, aside from the usual. I’m not in the habit of bringing my employees to my office with the intent of beating them senseless, and as much as you dislike me, I do hope you credit me with more intelligence than that. Of course, I can’t fire you, as much as I would love to, and I can’t kill you either – which at times I do feel is most unfortunate.” He gave a slight, almost apologetic shrug. “I’m afraid that leaves us with few other options.”

It occurred to Elias then that he could hear Tim’s breathing over the rhythmic sound of the clock ticking in the corner, and he realised that he hadn’t heard it previously. Tim was doing a fairly decent job at holding himself together, but Elias knew how thin Tim’s control really was. Tim was not an idiot, despite his best efforts to seem like one sometimes. He was well aware of what was going on here; of what Elias was doing to him, and of how much worse it could get. With that in mind, Elias had to wonder if what Tim had just said was a mistake – some desperate attempt to say something, as though the situation were still under his control. Or perhaps he just hadn’t thought at all.

“You’re right,” Elias said, leaning back in his chair and making a show of getting comfortable. “This is nothing you haven’t seen before. These are – mostly – all your memories, all things you’ve lived. Rest assured I’m not here to talk about it, Tim. I already know. A terrible occurrence for you, of course, and a very tragic loss, but in the grand scheme of things it’s nothing important at all. Certainly it doesn’t interest me past the deal it could encourage between the two of us going forward. You dislike your memories, but you’re not afraid of them. That much is admirable, and I suppose it makes you feel like you still have some solid ground under your feet. But, as I’m sure you can guess, there’s much more to this than just memories.”

He glanced away from Tim just briefly, reaching out to straighten a pen, and then looked back at him again. Fresh eyes were always interesting; in the split second when he had been unobserved, it seemed Tim had allowed himself to go several shades paler.

“Do you know what it is that I do, Tim?” Elias asked conversationally. “I know. Not just what you know, or what you’ve seen. I know it all. I know what happened, from every angle. I know how it happened. I know what it felt like. Perhaps most relevant to our current situation, I know what Danny saw. Both the first time – before he came hurrying back to you, lost, unsure what to do or where to go, seeking out the one person he associated with order and safety and normality, hoping – yes, this is true, it isn’t just your sense of misplaced guilt – hoping that you could somehow protect him. I know what he saw then, and I know what he saw the second time, before he met what I can assure you was a fate much worse than even your darkest imaginings. You were in publishing, weren’t you? You read, you know tropes. Think an omniscient narrator, Tim. That is what I am. You haven’t lived it once at all. You’ve lived one angle of a very large picture, and there is absolutely nothing stopping me from filling you in on the rest of it.”

Carefully, well aware of how such things could get ahead of themselves, Elias allowed some of the perspective to change. More concentration was required now; he was no longer pulling from inside Tim’s head but pushing something in, as gently as one could manage such a thing, ensuring a trickle rather than a torrent. Again, he held himself away from anything too graphic – no sense playing all his cards at once – but it wasn’t as though there was nothing to draw on outside those horrific final moments.

“I wouldn’t just tell you,” Elias continued, his voice low again, level, distant to his own ears as he fed the images into Tim’s mind. “I can make you know, see? Interesting, isn’t it? The whole time he was walking down there, Danny knew he didn’t want to be there. He didn’t want to be anywhere near the place, but something about it compelled him to go back, to be absolutely sure of what he’d seen. Even as every part of him cried out for him to turn and run, to go back to you, where he might be safe, he kept going. I think, had things been different, he might have made a decent fit here. Don’t you think?” He laughed. “Strange, how these things work, isn’t it? Now. I am trying to have a productive conversation with you. What is it, do you think, that I might want from you?”

Tim could barely breathe. He had heard what it was that Elias had done to Melanie, or threatened to do at least – or a second-hand account of it, anyway, and he had certainly seen the state of Melanie after the fact. Still, it barely registered as something he was thinking about now, despite his terror. His thoughts were difficult to keep hold of, pushed aside as the disjointed, too-real memories began to shift and change. It was the strangest sense of déjà vu, like realising halfway through a conversation that he’d had the exact same one before, repeating lines he’d already said but couldn’t predict, like something else had wrenched control and he was helplessly along for the ride.

Tim knew what it was that he was seeing with a horrible familiarity, the clarity of his own worst memories. He wanted to think about something else, anything else, but it was impossible; he could only think of what it was that Danny had seen. He didn’t even know how to describe it, even to himself, and he knew that Danny had felt the exact same way: hopelessly confused, and lost, staring at the shifting, moving colours changing right in front of him. It wasn’t anything like what he’d felt the day he’d followed Danny back, flush with his own certainty that if he could just see what Danny saw then he would be able to do something about it.

No, this was completely different. He knew that Danny wanted to look away because he himself wanted to look away, but instead Danny had stared on and now Tim stared hopelessly too, Danny almost betrayed by what he was seeing and Tim betrayed along with him. Up until this point Danny had trusted that the world was a certain way, and now he realised – painfully, horribly – that it wasn’t. This same betrayal had followed him out onto the streets, and all the way back to Tim’s house; it had followed him back under the earth again, the knowledge that going back wouldn’t help acknowledged but ignored.

Even within the memories, Tim found he could look back. He was in Danny’s mind; he was Danny, stumbling back to Tim’s place, where his big brother should have been able to put things in order for him. Tim remembered the night so clearly, and looking back through his own memories he had never been able to make sense of it. Danny hadn’t been acting like himself; he’d been distant, nonresponsive. Now Tim felt a wretched stab of loneliness as he looked out at that same memory through Danny’s eyes – how he wanted to say something to Tim, but didn’t have the words for it because the words for it didn’t exist.

Tim could hear his ragged breathing, loud over the clock, the loudest thing in the room. He no longer cared.

Really, there was nothing that Danny could have done except to go back. Tim knew this now. It was little comfort to confirm that Danny had made the exact same journey back to the Royal Opera House that Tim would make the next day, not wanting to go but pressing ahead anyway. Tim had no real recollection of what he’d been thinking then; it hadn’t been a decision that he’d made so much as the only thing he could think to do, like following in Danny’s footsteps would explain what had happened and give him the answers he needed in order to set things right.

In a way, he supposed it had. He at least knew how hopeless the situation was.

Danny hadn’t wanted to go. He didn’t know what he’d find there, but he hadn’t found the answer at home. The realisation of the weight that Danny had carried as he’d followed his footsteps from the day before practically choked Tim; he heard a strange sound leave his throat, too quickly for him to stop. Knowing that Danny had gone was bad enough, but the realisation that at any point Tim could have stopped him and Danny would have been grateful for it; that he had been hoping for it? It was too much.

“You’ve made your point,” Tim growled, trying to push all thoughts of his brother away from the front of his mind. The dread that Danny had felt was finding a home for itself in Tim’s stomach, a helplessness that moved from one brother to the next. It was wrong to think that Danny, of all people, had ever felt this way – but Tim couldn’t shake the feeling. He knew. Even as he glared at Elias, squeezing the door handle tightly enough that the metal of it bit into his palm, even as he hated Elias with every inch of himself, he could do nothing to shake the certainty that this was what it had been like. A new grief ran through him, even deeper than what he’d felt after the terror of what he saw that night faded. Somehow, Tim had forgotten just how much the loss had hurt; that there was a reason for his hatred that wasn’t just defiance against something that was so impossibly, offensively wrong; something that should never be.

“No,” Elias said pleasantly. He stood, taking his time stretching. “I haven’t made my point, actually, Tim.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Tim said, but then before Elias could find something else to show him, threw in, “You want me to stop picking fights with your little Archivist? Fine. I’ll leave him alone. No one will even know that I’m here. Just—Just leave my brother out of this, would you?”

He needed a door between himself and Elias. He didn’t know what he would do if he got away now, and he knew that a door was useless, but he needed it all the same.

Elias ambled almost leisurely out from behind his desk and over to where Tim still stood by the door, and something about the way he did it filled Tim with such uncompromising dread that whatever thoughts he had about leaving the office quickly began to vanish. His back was pressed against the door now, but his hand was still gripping the handle; interestingly, Elias noticed he hadn’t yet attempted to actually open the thing. He was clinging to it like a drowning man clinging to a sinking raft, both in terms of desperation and in terms of knowing how hopeless it was. Elias could see the turmoil clear on his face now, the flickers of grief that ran across the more traitorous parts of the body: the slight downturn of the lips, the bright shine to the eyes. This close, Tim’s breathing was distinctly ragged, and Elias allowed himself to enjoy it as he reached behind Tim and, surprisingly gently, pulled his hand away from the door handle.

“None of that,” he said. “If you really wish to go out there, I suppose I can’t stop you, but I did rather think you would prefer to have this discussion in private.”

He took a neat step back, careful to leave at least an arm’s length between the two of them. Tim was distracted, yes, and violence was no longer at the forefront of his mind, but it never paid to be presumptuous when it came to how people dealt with such situations. Elias had seen horror and grief turn people to sobbing wrecks, but just as often he had seen it turn them into wild animals. He didn’t fancy the inconvenience of a broken arm of his own.

“You were the one who brought your brother into this, Tim,” Elias said patiently. “I would have been quite happy to let you continue to drink away your hours down there, because it’s really no concern of mine. So long as you don’t cause trouble, I have far better things to worry about. Do you think you’re the only person in your position to have decided to waste your hours in that way?” He shook his head. “No. I’m used to that. I’m used to most things that happen down there, but I cannot allow this kind of carrying on. You’re correct. I do want you to leave Jonathan alone. In fact, I would go as far as to say that even thinking about laying a finger on him again will be the last thing that any recognisable version of yourself would ever do. I think I’ve made myself very clear on that fact, and yes, I do think you understand.”

He paused for a moment, gathering the threads, following Danny from his unease through to his fear, feeding it flicker by flicker to where Tim still stood pressed against the door, his mind unprotected, confused, open. Elias sighed, giving a smile that might have been sympathetic if it wasn’t for how obviously elated he was; how he knew it would be clear to read on his face.

“Poor Danny,” he said, tutting. “Poor, poor Danny. There’s always a moment, isn’t there? When you realise you’ve gone too far; that you’ve crossed some kind of invisible line between the point where you could theoretically go back, and the point where you realise it would be no use to you now. Can you feel that, Tim? I would have thought that moment would come the first time Danny was down there, wouldn’t you? No, it wasn’t then. It was the second time, the time he knew he was pushing his luck to begin with. Do you want to know how it feels to die blaming yourself, Tim? I doubt you do, but I can show you all the same.”

Elias allowed them to track Danny right up until the split-second moment, that lurch in the gut, that sudden hot-cold rush of a terrible, terrible mistake – and then he froze it, held the moment, suspending Tim in the horrible second between imagining and knowing.

“You can say whatever you want to me, Tim,” Elias said coolly. “I know you’ll agree to anything, so long as you think it will get you out of here unscathed. I am not an idiot. What I want from you is not your word, but your assurance. These two things are very, very different. How can I be sure that when I let you leave this office, you will remain interested in cooperating with me? I’m afraid I’m going to need you to be a little more persuasive than just a surly half-assurance that ends with you still trying to make demands. You are not in any position to argue with me.”

He let the moment loose again, a blink, half a heartbeat; enough for the terror to somehow still rise, the first flicker of an impossibly drawn out agony – and then he stopped it again, almost breathless with the effort of reeling it back, holding it still.

“So,” he said, when he was sure he could keep his voice steady. “What is it going to be? Are you going to be a little more convincing, or do I have to render you into a state where you are psychologically incapable of causing me any further problems?”

I hate you, Tim thought, quite clearly. He could still feel where Elias had touched his hand, the skin prickling like he had been out in the sun for too long. There was nothing he wanted less than to have to stand here in the room with Elias, forced to listen to everything he said, forced to see everything he showed him; in any other workplace, an assault charge would be a serious thing to face, but Tim found himself sincerely wishing something so normal and so inconsequential was all he had to worry about.

“If I had a choice?” Tim said. “I’d rather not be having this discussion at all.”

He was well aware that there was no point trying to save face in front of Elias. He could feel the way the man looked right through him, the way he’d settled his attention squarely on him with such weight, determined not to let him go. Elias remained in front of him, too close but still just a step out of the way, and Tim did not like it. He wanted Elias to move, to shut up; nothing that he was saying was anything that Tim wanted to hear, but he couldn’t force himself to form the words that would tell Elias to just shut up. Something else had crept through him while Elias had been speaking, chasing out the remainder of control Tim had over his thoughts – the new grief giving way to something else, something that was somehow worse.

It was a familiar feeling. Discomfort and unease; not entirely unlike what he’d felt a moment before, when he had been standing there knowing that something was horribly, horribly wrong but still not knowing exactly what it was. The intensity of the feeling all but took Tim’s breath away – he actually heard his laboured breathing hitch, an entire breath skipping as the force of it hit him, the realisation with it. This what was Danny had felt on that final morning that he was alive. Tim knew it; he didn’t need Elias to talk him through what was happening. There was no room for doubt as he realised that he knew exactly what it had been like for Danny to go back to that theatre for a second time, some part of him knowing that there was nothing worth finding; the rest of him too afraid to do anything but know. There is no way, Danny had thought – Tim could hear the words in his own head now, his brother’s voice, there is no way that it would be worse not knowing. And hadn’t that always been his little brother’s attitude towards things? Better to try and fail than never to try at all. Better to know the truth, even if what you found was disappointed—even if it hurt.

There was a difference, though, between how Danny had said those things when he had been alive and whole, and what it actually meant when the truth could rip a person open.

Danny realised that, Tim supposed. A moment after knowing it would have done him no good. Although really, he’d been doomed long before that, and Tim knew that as well. He prayed that Danny had never had to figure that out, but when he looked at Elias, something clearing in his vision, a sudden clarity washed over him as he remembered who it was that he stood in the room with. Tim knew that whatever the truth was, it was far worse than anything he had learned so far.

He could only stare at Elias. There was no more of that infuriating pleasantry and faux-politeness in his boss now, that Tim had come to hate so much. This was worse. It was all cold; everything about Elias was cold, inhuman. This, then, was a monster. Tim thought he had known their faces before; he had known Elias was evil before now, of course he had, but – still. This was different. Tim could still barely breathe. That final surge of fear that Elias had forced on him, that breathless pain and horror – it was threatening to overwhelm him, drag him under so deeply that he would never resurface from that terrible knowledge. Tim wished he was so far gone that he could just black out right now, but he was painfully aware of every inch of himself, every inch of the room.

The brief strength that had allowed him to respond only moments ago had deserted him. It was a long time before he was finally able to say anything else, to stop reeling from the force of that fear and make himself stand up a little straighter. He wished that he could think about anything other than what his brother had felt, a fear so expansive and explosive that the magnitude of it alone had all but smothered the simmering, constant hatred that Tim felt churning over somewhere within himself. It was difficult to think, to form words; his mouth tasted of acid. He saw how Elias looked at him, though, and he knew that Elias was not going to give him the time he needed. The terror that overtook him at the thought of that – of what Elias would do if he didn’t say something soon – was all his own. There was nothing of Danny printed on that.

“OK,” Tim said, forcing himself to swallow. “OK. I understand. I won’t do anything that’ll get in the way of your Archivist—of Jon. I’ll stay out of his way. I’ll behave. Just don’t—”

Tim cut himself off, remembering Elias’s annoyance. He couldn’t make demands here. He couldn’t bargain. He could barely make himself speak, knowing all too well that he stood on the edge of something he didn’t want to know, something that would change him in a way that he did not want to be changed. The glint in Elias’s eyes told Tim that Elias was aware of it, too.

“You don’t need to worry about that,” Tim finished lamely. It didn’t seem like enough. “I swear by it.”

“Hm,” Elias said. “No, I don’t think that will do.”

At the very least, Tim seemed to have woken up to the severity of his threat, and Elias could appreciate that. It certainly wasn’t enough, of course – what would be? – but it was encouraging to know that the man’s arrogance had some limits. Elias recognised the look on Tim’s face all too well: that distant, harrowed look, the eyes staring at nothing in particular even as they continued to move around the room, as though desperately trying to find something that wasn’t there. Whether it was what the person was seeing deep in their own minds, or some kind assurance that it wasn’t real, well. That all depended on the person. The look was always the same, however – Elias had seen it not so long ago on Melanie’s face, and he wouldn’t lie to himself and try to say that seeing it on Tim’s face wasn’t immensely satisfying.

He held steady, pretending to consider for a moment, keeping Tim in the horrible uncertainty that still pulsed through him. It was abundantly clear that Tim was aware of the precipice he was standing on; that he appreciated just how far he could fall. He thought he could imagine it, Elias supposed. He thought he had some idea of what it would feel like to know such a thing; he thought he had words for what that would do to a person. He didn’t, of course. However terrible Tim imagined it to be, Elias knew from experience that the reality was much, much worse.

It was almost tempting to do it anyway. He quite liked the idea of seeing Tim as an incoherent mess, incapable of anything other than being utterly consumed by that moment, shrinking down until it was all he was. It would certainly be satisfying, considering the constant dull headache that Tim had become. Never doing anything major – at least not until the incident with Jon – but skulking around just enough that Elias could never quite relax. There was something about Tim that often seemed beyond control: too reckless; too angry. Elias was not a fan of unpredictable variables – doing this to Tim now would certainly solve everything both quickly and efficiently.

But it would be no punishment. Not in the way that Elias wanted it. It was no good putting somebody in their place if they weren’t coherent enough to fully appreciate how far they had fallen. Elias wanted to force Tim outside of his nature. He did not want to construct him a new one.

“We have already established that you will be leaving Jonathan well alone,” Elias eventually said. “You certainly will be staying out of his way. But that’s not all, is it, Tim? This has been the culmination of a very poor performance period for you. I think, if you’re going to cooperate with me, there’s a lot more that can be done outside of leaving alone a man towards whom you have no particularly pleasant feelings in the first place.” He laughed. “I’m not exactly asking you to sacrifice much with that, am I? There is no friendship lost here. Please refrain from breaking your colleagues’ bones is not exactly a satisfactory conclusion to all of this.”

Elias lifted a hand, running a finger along the edge of his thumbnail and frowning at it as he brushed his nails against the lapel of his jacket. He rolled his shoulders, as though simply taking a brief moment away from his desk to stretch, and then sighed.

“You always wondered about that moment, didn’t you?” he asked quietly. “Or that series of moments, I should say. What it was like for Danny to walk all that distance, every step taking him further from the place he should have found safety. You wondered how that would feel; what he might have been thinking. You worried, didn’t you? You worried that he blamed you, or that he cried out for you in those last moments. Then you worried that it was selfish to worry about such a thing, because there was your brother, dying in such an… unimaginably horrific way, and you were worried about what he thought about you. Well, understandable, I suppose. It must be a weight to live with, to know you couldn’t protect him.” Elias looked back at Tim. “He did think of you, of course. Do you want to know what he was thinking?”

It was easy to let it bleed through, tied as it was to the very moment that Elias held Tim suspended over now – those last moments of clarity that always seemed to preface death, and that in turn linked to everything else before them. The moment right before death was useful for that, Elias found; being linked as it was to a person’s whole life, the way they recalled anything and everything that their panicking, dying brain grasped at for comfort or meaning in those final moments. Elias was practised enough in this art now that he could sort through those scattering thoughts almost leisurely, separating the ones that mattered, illuminating the narrative. Danny’s thoughts when he first saw Tim in that changed world; Danny’s thoughts when he left Tim for the final time, realising too late that it was he who had changed rather than the world – that the world had always been that way, and until that moment he had been living in a blissful ignorance that he could never rejoin.

Then the thoughts as Danny had returned, walked too far, seen too much. Danny, an adult now, about to face a terrible death, still somehow the toddler who had stumbled on the garden path and instinctively stuck a hand out to his big brother, trusting Tim would be there to take it.

Not that time, of course.

The world fell away from Danny, and Danny fell away from the world.

“And this is nowhere near the worst of it,” Elias added, watching Tim closely. He paused for a moment, and then smiled. “Consider this a performance review of sorts. You’ve failed it miserably, but in a moment of generosity I’m going to offer you a chance to fix it. I’d like you to tell me how you plan on doing that. Make some more assurances, Tim. Something a little more day-to-day than promising not to break my Archivist’s other arm. Something I can better hold you accountable for. Things that will have to prove your good faith day after day, perhaps. That way, I will always know that you’re sticking by your word, and I won’t have to show you how your brother died.”

Tim had known from the beginning that Elias wasn’t going to take his concession seriously; his silence had been too long, the look in his eyes too sharp. Tim had wanted to take Elias’s shoulders and shake him, felt the nerves in his hands demanding that he curl them into fists, but of course he’d done none of it. He couldn’t move from where he stood, his back still cruelly against the door like he might spontaneously find the strength to leave. Thoughts flickered through his mind and the urge to run briefly spiked – he knew what was coming – but what was the point? Elias was more than capable of reaching Tim anywhere, forcing him to see more of what Danny had experienced and so briefly lived through in his horrible, helpless final moments.

Tim felt similarly helpless now, despite knowing Elias would never let him go so easily. He didn’t think he should be surprised, because whatever this was about, it was so much more than just breaking Jon’s arm or his general, flagrant disrespect for anyone’s authority here. Elias didn’t seem to give a damn about disrespect; if that was what this was about, he would have said something a long time before now. He’d not been that pressed the last time he’d tried to speak to Tim, and Tim had told him to fuck off.

But now Tim had proved to be a loose cannon, and oh no – Elias wouldn’t let that go unpunished. There would be nothing that happened in the Institute that Elias didn’t hold in the palm of his hand, where he couldn’t threaten to crush everyone in his fist.

If Tim didn’t know better, he’d even say it was about revenge. Tim had hurt Elias’s favourite employee, and now Elias wanted to step in. Tim didn’t believe it, though. As much as Elias hated him, there was something far deeper to this that was dizzying to think about, even during the momentary respite where Tim had been able to wrap his thoughts around anything other than the fear that had lanced through Danny like a wound.

It hadn’t lasted long, of course, and now Tim was wondering how much more he could take. His breath hitched again, and the wound that bled through Danny only seemed to grow. Elias didn’t impress the culmination of all of his brother’s terror onto Tim’s mind, a mind that felt too raw, too open, too vulnerable; the fear bled out around that moment, framing Danny’s dreadful realisation with a desperation that Tim felt himself begin to mirror. A thought from Elias, and it would all be filled in – the horrible details within the horrible edges. He could see it all now; knew it all: how Danny had wanted him in that moment, just as he had the night previously, at Tim’s flat, content to just be with his brother because if Tim was there then there was at least one thing in the world that made sense. It hadn’t been enough, but in the end Danny would have taken it. Even if it didn’t make anything about what he’d just witnessed any better, at least his big brother would have been there. How bad could it be, if Tim was there at his side, holding his hand, telling him that everything would be alright?

There was no comfort to be found in those final thoughts; nothing that Danny could conjure of Tim had helped him in those moments. The pain that bled through Danny – all grief and regret, the loss of his whole world and the axis that it spun around – hadn’t even begun to dissipate before Tim realised that Elias demanded more answers from him. He barely followed what Elias meant, only catching up a moment too late. Elias watched him steadily, a touch impatiently, and Tim knew he was reading every single thought that crossed his face.

He was so wretchedly exposed. He was an open wound.

“I don’t know what you want,” Tim said numbly. His voice sounded distant; his tongue felt far too big for his mouth. He racked his brains for something to say, but couldn’t think of anything. What was he supposed to promise here? “I’ll… I’ll do my job. I’ll do what I’m told, whatever it is that you need.” It was too vague, too open ended. He could see on Elias’s face that nothing he was saying seemed to matter, and why should it? “Christ. I don’t know! What do you want?”

There was a desperate edge to Tim’s voice that he couldn’t shake, like fishtailing a car while driving at speed and every effort to make things better only doing the opposite. He could barely keep his thoughts in order, unable to get over the horrible fact that Danny had needed him and how he hadn’t been there; how useless he would have been even if he had.

How Danny, his gifted baby brother, the one Tim should have envied but adored instead, who had never seemed shaken or afraid of anything in his life, had died terrified and in pain and alone.

Tim hadn’t had the nerve to do anything when he had been in the theatre, instead just standing there and watching. Now he was just as afraid, more afraid, of having to know about it.

“Do you want me to stop drinking on the job?” he asked, the desperation in his voice somehow worsening. “Is that it? Fine—it’s done. I’ll be exactly what you expect. Following up on whatever statement is in the works, sober, looking smart – the fucking model employee. You’ll be able to put me on brochures, if you can stand the sight of it.”

“Certainly a good start.” Elias smiled. “All areas that need vast improvement, as I’m sure you already know. I do remember a time where you were one of the employees I could count on to always make unexpected headway. You always seemed to know the right person to speak to and the right place to look. I have to admit, I do think this place had suffered for your lack of diligence recently. Who knows what you might have achieved, had you worked with Jonathan rather than against him? You hate him so much, but you refuse to accept that he is your best bet when it comes to avenging your brother. That is what this is about, isn’t it? Why you’re here in this position in the first place. Why, despite your arrogance and your flippancy, you are frightened of the fact that I could kill you. You don’t want to die before you’ve done whatever you can to settle the score, do you?”

Tim would not be going anywhere; Elias moved back over to the desk, turning to lean against it, legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles like he was having a pleasant, casual conversation with Rosie before she headed home at the end of the day. Tim watched him, helpless in the knowledge that Elias was right. Things would have been a lot easier if he’d worked with Jon, and the rest of the team, for that matter. He’d gone off at Martin about not letting him know that there was another statement regarding the Circus, but how could Martin have known? How could anyone? From the beginning Tim had held that secret close to his heart, not wanting anyone to know the real reason why he was here. He had a lot of reasonable worries for why he’d not wanted it to be common knowledge that his reasons for being here were singular, and that they were personal. It would have been so easy for somebody to decide that he was too emotionally invested in the investigation, for a start. That he was a liability. All the things that people thought about him now, anyway, without ever having known the truth about what any of this really meant to him.

There were things worse than dying. Tim knew that, had always known that, especially after he saw what had become of Danny. Especially after today; after the last several minutes. He was still struggling to catch his breath and reel himself in, all while some desperate part of him was straining to either make a run for it or to fight back against Elias – something he knew was useless.

Tim wasn’t afraid to die. He didn’t know when he’d accepted that his death was inevitable if he pursued this path. He just knew that he’d conceded to that point a long time before the reality of how awful this situation was ever actually crossed his mind. Death didn’t scare him, but dying before he could hurt the creatures that took his brother from him did. Every time that he let himself address the magnitude of the feat that he’d chosen to take on, the only thing that brought him any peace or level-headed clarity was the fact that he was still alive. There was still more that he could do. His death would mean something, and it wouldn’t just be a symbolic cumulation of all the pain and fear that he’d gone through.

The Circus would not outlive him. And if they did, they’d carry on bearing the scars.

“So, tell me something, Tim,” Elias said, almost conversational, the thoughts flickering through Tim’s head as clear as though they were written in front of him. “If you’re so hell-bent on getting revenge; if you’re so focused on destroying whatever did that to Danny at all costs, why does it bother you so much that you’re stuck here? No, don’t tell me, actually. I already know, as I’m sure you’re unsurprised to hear. I suppose while you’re here you’re at least still reasonably doing something, right? You’re still looking into things; you’re still making your own inquiries. A little more difficult now you hoard your secrets and keep them close, but you were always good at it, weren’t you? As I said, I almost miss it sometimes. It was always you who could do the impossible, get people to talk, to give up their own secrets. Tell me this, then: did it feel cheap, doing what you did? Despite your assurances that you were enjoying yourself, deceiving them, playing the game by your rules – did it feel cheap to know you were essentially selling yourself for this end? Did you ever wonder what Danny would think of you, fumbling around in the dark with strangers, letting them use you however they pleased, just on the slim chance you might hear something useful? And not even necessarily about this, either! All to look good, to be that model employee, to keep your job.” Elias laughed. “It must be humiliating, to know it was all for nothing. That you would have remained here nonetheless.”

It would have been satisfying to punch Elias in the face just to shut him up, but Tim knew it was useless – he’d only hurt himself more, ruin himself. Already Tim was exhausted, swamped under the horror of what he now knew of Danny’s fate. Some hysterical part of him knew that he was numb, the full weight of what it actually meant for Danny still not settling in completely, and that alone was enough to keep Tim frozen; keep him listening to everything else Elias said, every word part of a truth that wasn’t a secret to Tim but still hurt to hear out in the open, from this monster’s mouth.

What was it that he was worried people thought of him? That he was a liability, that he was too reckless to be trusted. Too personally invested. Yet the extent of what he’d been willing to do slipped past everyone’s attention, the shameless schmoozing and bribery, the sex – every moment that he’d let the invisible barrier close between what he was willing to do in order to get the information that he needed and what he did for his own purposes. All while knowing that the chances of anything actually manifesting was slim to none, but it was still better than the alternative. There was making the best of a bad situation, and then there was this: being so helpless before what his need to do something to get back at them that he’d let himself be used in all kinds of ways because he would never forgive himself if he let the chance to get even slip through his hands because he wouldn’t put out.

It was the least he could do.

“You know the answer to all those questions,” Tim said, careful to try to control his voice. He didn’t know if he wanted to shout, or if the edge of his voice would break and render him silent. He wished that he could say that he’d never felt disgust like what he was feeling now, but it wasn’t true. This was just the first time that someone else had seen it. “You know that I would’ve— that I will do anything for this.”

He wanted to say more, but he forced himself to remain quiet. There was a lot more he could have said, but he didn’t want Elias kicking up dirt about what Danny would think of his older brother, getting himself in this situation all for his sake. Christ, Danny was too nice, too live-and-let-live – he’d probably hate this whole revenge thing, anyway.

“Indeed you will,” Elias said, with a thin smile. “I don’t doubt it for a moment. I don’t think even you would want to ruin this opportunity for yourself, though I daresay sometimes your behaviour makes that difficult to believe. No, I think this might have realigned your priorities, Tim. Remember what we discussed, and remember what will happen if you later decide that cooperating no longer appeals to you. You knew better than to assume things can never get worse.”

Despite his amusement, it was beginning to grow tiring. There was a deep ache settling behind Elias’s eyes now, spreading up to his forehead, that threat of unbearable pressure. Still, Elias knew his limits; he wasn’t ready to let go just yet. Tim was a dangerous one to mess around with, and Elias had seen recklessness like his before. It was possible to put such people in their place, but it took a delicate hand. Too much at once and they would bounce back from it angrier than ever, no longer caring about the costs. Too little, and they would respect the warning only so much in that it would make them sneaky. There was only so much sneaking around that Tim could do, of course, but Elias would prefer to no longer have to worry about him. There were far more pressing things to turn his attention to, and Elias still wasn’t entirely unconvinced that Tim might just try his luck with killing him if he wasn’t careful.

He was delightfully desperate now, though, an edge to his voice that Elias had truly never heard before, and he knew that at least in this moment, Tim was being sincere. The trick was to ensure that he stayed that way; that he remembered what he had promised and that the reminder of the consequences was in every single thing he did from thereon out.

“So,” Elias said, drumming his fingers against where they rested on the desk. “No more drinking on the job; I think that’s a good start. Back to your previous standard of hygiene – that, too. I might also suggest showing up on time and leaving at a reasonable hour, as well as just generally showing up when you should in the first place, of course. No more vanishing for days at a time; no more sitting around doing nothing when you are here. Oh, and it would be just wonderful if you could be more cooperative with everyone, and perhaps lose some of the attitude? Yes, it will raise some questions, I’m sure, but I’m absolutely positive you’re contrite enough to be honest with them should they ask about your sudden change of heart. I’m sure it will be no problem at all. Obviously I can’t fire you if you fail to do so, but any discrepancies that occur without due explanation can be dealt with in another way, can’t they?”

Tim let him talk, forcing himself to focus on the words. It was all normal stuff. Tim had worked for the man for a few years now, and he was familiar with the way that Elias ended briefings. A quick review of what was discussed, summarising the plan of attack – all things that a good manager would know to do, and Elias ran the Institute very, very well.

Despite everything, Tim felt a flicker of hope. It would be over soon. It had felt impossible, but it would be.

He almost laughed, but his good humour – what brief glimpse of it there had been – had faded by the time Elias had finished talking. “Dealt with in another way.” He swallowed, hating the way the heat rose up his neck, to his face. But he nodded. “Fine. Here I thought you’d be telling me that there’s no need to tell the others what we talked about, but what do I know about what you want? But yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll let them know we had a talk about this.” He wanted to claw his skin off, he wanted to be anywhere but here, with Elias, who knew exactly what it was that Tim wanted. “Is that everything, then? Am I free to go and—and turn over a new leaf?”

It was a little strange, to see Tim being so sincere; Elias had grown used to the man’s snide comments, the dripping sarcasm, the aggression in everything he said and did. Nothing was without threat or outright hatred, and if it hadn’t been so enjoyable to see Tim suddenly stripped of all of it, Elias would have said it was unnerving. He seemed smaller somehow, standing there and ensuring Elias he would behave, the panic still dropping from every word he spoke. His urge to get away was evident in his body language, in the tense way he held himself – but still he didn’t dare to leave without permission. That, more than anything, convinced Elias of his sincerity.

It was a job well done, but Elias was not above indulging every now and then.

He paused for a moment, considering. There was a flicker of hope still lingering in Tim, even if his expression didn’t change. The conversation had come to its natural end, after all, and there was nothing else to say. The only other avenue now was for Elias to dismiss him, and despite the threat hanging over his head Tim would no doubt appreciate there being some distance between the two of them. Elias allowed him to believe it for a moment, even sighed and gave Tim a brief nod, as if to concede he was free to go – and then in the split second between Tim deciding to move and actually doing so, Elias lifted a hand.

Tim froze, cutting off a retreat that had barely begun.

“Wait,” Elias said, smiling. “There’s just one more thing. I do apologise. I’m sure you’re sick of me by now, but it is very important.”

Elias remained casual as he approached Tim again, clearing the few steps so he was once more standing just outside of Tim’s reach. He regarded him for a moment, as though trying to find the correct words, and then he abruptly dropped the ruse; dropped whatever presence of politeness he had so briefly cultivated.

“While this answers the question of where we go from here, I can’t say I’m entirely satisfied,” Elias said coldly. “I would love to have you cooperating fully and hating every moment of it, but I will not lie and say you haven’t angered me deeply. There is certainly a not-insignificant amount of temptation present here. After all, if I did show you those last moments – if I drove them into your head so deeply that it was all you became – wouldn’t that solve the problem? And wouldn’t it cost you so much more?”

Wouldn’t it cost you as much as you almost cost me?

The thought came to Elias suddenly, clearly; for a moment he almost shook with rage. If Tim had gone even a step further, been unable to control himself, grabbed Jon by the throat rather than the arm – what could have happened? What could he have ruined? All of Elias’s planning, all of the careful balance he was trying to maintain, destroyed in a split second of impulsive hatred. It seemed fair, in that moment, to bring the full weight of Danny’s death down on Tim; it seemed appropriate to destroy him, to render him useless, to ensure that whatever spark of him that remained would always know he had ruined everything for himself. It seemed right, to rob him of the one thing he desired most in the world, to leave him alive but incapable, knowing who he had to blame. The appeal of it was almost dizzying, but Elias had learned too many harsh lessons in regards to letting emotion rule planning. He would have to take his satisfaction where he could get it.

“You have nothing that would make me miss you,” Elias continued quietly. “Nothing that I couldn’t replace, and thanks to your behaviour recently, I doubt you would have anyone in the archives who would be particularly upset to realise they no longer had to worry about you. Your parents are dead. Your brother is worse than dead. There is nobody here to miss you, or to avenge you, or to carry this anger for you. You are a nonentity, and you have pushed your luck far enough. There is no reason for me to let you walk out of here.”

He paused, watching Tim for a moment, bringing that fear forward again and pressing it against Tim with all the force he dared.

“So persuade me,” he eventually said. “Convince me not to ruin you. Convince me not to show you this.” He smiled. “Beg.”

All at once Tim realised that everything before this moment was just the product of Elias’s carefully measured control. He didn’t need Elias to tell him that, to show him what it was that he really felt. The passable amicability had fallen away so abruptly, with the same ease that Danny’s skin had been ripped away from that figure on the stage – again Tim thought of it without wanting to, connected the dots without thinking – except that this time Tim didn’t even have the right to be surprised. This whole time, he had known what Elias really felt about him. Elias wasn’t some prick sat up in his office looking for one of his underlings to take his frustrations out on, as was the case with most bad management stories; Tim couldn’t even say that this was entirely a matter of control, even if he was sure that played a not-insignificant role as to what had finally put Elias over the edge.

No, what Tim saw on Elias’s face now was something so base and ordinary that it looked unbecoming on someone like him. Tim had the sense that Elias didn’t even hate him; just that he wanted him gone, further than he could disappear if he just went back down to the archives.

Elias was too close again, every muscle in Tim’s body tense and screaming at him to run. Tim couldn’t make himself move. He couldn’t make himself stop listening, stop thinking; he knew the real depth of what it all meant on some level far deeper than could be reached with words. The threat was real, and he felt that terror building again. In that moment he swore that he saw a shadow of a flicker of Danny at the corner of this thoughts, just in his blind spot, and the reality of how little it would take for Elias to show him that in agonising detail more extensive than anything that Tim would have understood had he saw it happen right in front of him? It was too much to bear.

No, this wasn’t about creating a better working environment or any of that stupid veneer that Elias had put on it at the beginning. The shame and the horror at his shame that Tim already felt multiplied as he realised that it had never just been about keeping him in line, putting him on a leash. Elias had always meant to hurt him, and had every intention of doing that right now. There was no reason why he shouldn’t.

“No,” Tim croaked. The word was barely audible. It was difficult to hear himself think over the roaring of the blood in his ears; difficult to force words through the tightness of his own throat. “I’ll do what you want. I said that I would. What would you get from ruining me?”

But that was the wrong question for Tim to ask, and he knew it better than anyone. There was a lot to be achieved from something as pointless and desolate as revenge, even if it was only the joy of being the one to inflict it.

Elias didn’t dignify Tim’s question with an answer. He didn’t need to. Both of them could hear the redundancy in the words; both of them knew it had been a pathetic attempt to stall for time, to try and make sense of a situation that presented no out that wasn’t horrific. Tim knew beyond all doubt that Elias was serious, and Elias of course knew he knew that in turn. When Tim spoke his voice had been so distant, unsteady, quieter than Elias had ever heard him speak. He was a shadow of himself in this moment, his mind trying to simultaneously focus on those brief flickers of Danny and push them away. The way people always did such a thing never failed to fascinate Elias. When they sensed something just out of their reach, something they knew they didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know – rare was it that somebody looked away and continued to do so. It was human nature, to be drawn towards the incomprehensible, the hurtful, the terrible. One only had to yell “Don’t look!” as somebody passed a nasty car wreck or grotesque piece of roadkill to see humanity’s true nature reveal itself.

But Tim resisted. He took a step closer to Elias now, wanting to grab his shoulders to stop him from showing him anything else, as if he could hold Elias back just by taking hold of his body; as though there was anything that he could do to stop Elias from following through on the threat right at this moment.

Tim had never had room to bargain, never mind anything about negotiating. He realised that now. But Elias had made it very clear what he wanted to hear, and that at least saved Tim the grief of finding the right thing to say when there was no answer that would be enough to persuade Elias on merit alone.

“Elias, please.” It was like losing a fight as soon as the word slipped past his lips. “You know that I can’t live with that. There isn’t anything that I can offer you that you don’t already know about, but I have to have this. It’s the only thing I have left.”

Elias watched, taking in Tim’s jerky, uncoordinated steps. He was like a drunk; a man who could barely feel his body, and Elias supposed it wasn’t far from the truth. The only thing that Tim was focused on now was the man standing in front of him and the images still threatening from within him; his body was an afterthought. Elias had felt the flicker of Tim’s urge to grab him, felt it dismissed. He had felt the moment Tim gave up, saw it in all its undeniable clarity, and it finally loosened some of the anger held tight in his chest.

Tim’s sincerity was a pleasant surprise. Elias had had people beg him not to hurt them before, and usually it was fairly straightforward. The focus was always upon avoiding the unpleasant action, the please don’t hurt me or the please don’t do this; rarely did a person elaborate on why he shouldn’t do it. Of course, Elias could simply look for those reasons, drink them in that way, but there was something immensely satisfying about a person willingly giving up those reasons of their own free will. Elias didn’t think he had ever heard Tim admit that anything meant anything to him before, and rarely had he seen somebody with this level of desperation.

Tim dropped to his knees, the movement jerky and unnatural. The impact was softened by the rug, but he was still aware of it even if he didn’t consciously feel it. He looked up at Elias, forcing himself to maintain eye contact with this man; this thing. The hatred burned through him like acid, but for the first time in Tim’s life, it wasn’t enough.

It was a challenge to speak, but he knew that he wasn’t done yet. He had seen it on Elias’s face: he hadn’t convinced him of anything. Every word that he ground out of his mouth, he hated. He forced himself to say it anyway, to offer up the last thing he could find.

“If I can kill them and if I live, then you can do whatever you want to me. I don’t care. But let me have this.”

The sincerity had been a surprise, but Elias had to admit that this was a complete shock. Not a bad one, no; quite the opposite, in fact. Elias had to fight to keep himself from smiling. He could have laughed, standing there with Tim quite literally on his knees begging, pleading with him in a way that Elias couldn’t remember ever being pleaded with before. It was beyond what he could have hoped for, and if it hadn’t been for everything that had come before it, Elias would have been suspicious that Tim was simply being sarcastic again.

There was no doubt about it, though. Gone was the contempt that always dripped from Tim’s voice when he was giving exaggerated pleasantries or indulging in some malicious compliance. This was all real, sincere, and it occurred to Elias that nobody had ever, ever seen Tim in this state before. It was, to put it mildly, rather exhilarating.

It was also, finally, enough.

“Goodness,” Elias said mildly. “You actually mean that, don’t you?”

He took a half-step closer, reaching down and hooking a finger under Tim’s chin, tilting his head that little further back. He could see Tim’s pulse fluttering at his throat.

“I will be generous today, Tim,” Elias said, his voice back to its usual professional politeness. “I do think you finally understand your current position, and I’m confident you can adequately assess the benefits of your cooperation going forward. Do remember everything we discussed beforehand, yes? That absolutely still stands, as do my previous warnings.” He smiled. “In regards to your offer, it is certainly something I will keep in mind.”

He stepped back, and then did something he would not have risked doing even just a few minutes before, when Tim had first entered to office. Leaving Tim still hunched on his knees on his office floor, Elias turned his back on him and went back to his desk.

“You are dismissed,” he said, not even bothering to direct the words over his shoulder.

Even once Elias had stepped away, Tim could feel the burn of his touch, just as he had earlier. This gesture had been blunt, impersonal, no reason behind it other than to show he could; it carried weight, and Tim felt all the more vulnerable for it. His throat only inches away from Elias’s hand; that cold, expressionless stare. Leitner’s last image? Gertrude’s? Tim didn’t think he should have survived witnessing it.

He wanted to look away, to see anything other than the man walking away from him, but it was no good. His limbs were leaden and heavy, and he didn’t trust that Elias had said all he was going to say. The dismissal hadn’t gone unnoticed, but Tim was paying less attention to what Elias had said and more to his body language, expecting some final strike.

It didn’t come. Tim staggered to his feet, unsteady like a drunk, and left without another word.

*  

Having the door between himself and Elias didn’t help in any significant way, but it still felt good to not be in the same room. Walking down the stairs and past Rosie’s desk felt like floating, and Tim did it unconsciously. She raised her head when she saw him, creasing her brows slightly, and Tim acknowledged this with a stiff nod but said nothing to her.

He’d expected to feel some kind of relief, whether just from being away from Elias or – more significantly – because Elias had ultimately decided not to hurt him. There was some nasty, cynical part of Tim that insisted that Elias had never really meant to ruin him, and that it was all just a ploy to get Tim begging on his knees because he knew that it would hurt him. Tim knew better. Only moments had passed since he had been kneeling before Elias, since he was forced to know what it was that Danny felt at the end – at what Tim could only hope was Danny’s end, although he knew better than to hope for anything anymore. It would have been a luxury to tell himself that Elias had just wanted to bring him down a peg – bring me down to my knees, Christ – and that he hadn’t meant any of those threats, but Elias had meant every word.

Tim didn’t know whether this was knowledge that Elias had placed in his head, or whether it was just so obvious that even while he’d been going through that, unable to think of anything except for that, he’d still known down in the core of himself that Elias was not fucking around. He intended to utterly break Tim if he put a toe out of line, and he’d enjoy having the chance to do it. And now, he expected Tim’s complete obedience.

Which he would get.

Tim finally reached the stairs leading to the archives, descending into the basement and finding it was something of a relief to be there. He hated himself for that, too.

Nothing looked like it had changed – of course it hadn’t. The door to Jon’s office was closed; the door to his own was left slightly ajar, and Tim couldn’t remember if he’d left it that way or if it meant that Martin had gone in to clear out all of the glasses and mugs that had found their way in there from the breakroom. Tim didn’t know, but it exhausted him to think about. He’d been gone for less than half an hour.

The light in the breakroom was on, and a moment later the door opened. Martin stepped out, a cup of tea in his hand. He was looking intently at some file that Tim didn’t recognise – he didn’t even know what it was that Martin was working on now, he realised, which was honestly so embarrassing for him. That was the sort of thing that he should know. Once, he would have been able to balance his own workload while still playing back-up for the others; that was the standard that Elias had grown used to, and that he now expected to see Tim return to.

Martin looked up then, and Tim realised he had been staring.

“That was quick,” Martin said, taking in Tim’s appearance: pale, shell-shocked, his eyes slightly unfocused. A deep dread crawled into the pit of his stomach, but he forced himself to give a weak smile. “I take it that you’re not going to be arrested…?”

It took a moment for Tim to catch up with what it was that Martin meant, but then he nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m on a tight leash now.”

He nodded again. Martin frowned.

“Did he say anything about… about Jon?”

Martin figured Elias probably had; that was what this whole thing was obviously about, after all. Still, looking at the state of Tim now, Martin couldn’t imagine what Elias had said. He’d expected Tim to return looking annoyed, maybe a little contrite. He hadn’t expected to see Tim returning looking like a man back from war.

“Well, I’m not allowed to go break his other arm,” Tim said, his voice catching at the back of his throat. He noticed Martin’s face twist into something like sympathy, and he stood up straighter. He wanted to snarl at Martin to get away, but that was no use.

Martin watched the strange flicker pass over Tim’s features: the brief attempt at humour, and then the anger, and then the blankness again.

“Are you… I mean, what happened?” Martin asked. “…Tim?”

Tim couldn’t bear to keep looking at Martin, but he especially couldn’t stand the way that Martin was looking at him.

“We had a talk,” he said, wanting to keep it vague but remembering Elias’s other instructions all too clearly. At one point he would have been satisfied that this was enough, but now a spike of fear went through him because he knew that Elias would still be watching him now, expecting something of him. He could feel it.

“He had a lot to say,” Tim continued. “About my brother. There’s a lot more that he could show me, apparently, if I don’t wise up and stop pulling this kind of crap.”

Martin felt his stomach drop. “Oh, Tim…”

“Just shut up, Martin,” Tim snapped.

Martin blinked.

“Or—whatever,” Tim muttered. “Sorry.”

He was crying. He knew that he was crying, felt it, even. He probably would have said more if his throat wasn’t so tight. Martin watched helplessly, struggling to accept what he was seeing. Tim, crying? It seemed alien; frightening in how wrong it was. He took a step closer, and then stopped.

“Tim?”

“What?”

“Do you—um. Do you want me to get you some tea?” Martin inwardly cringed as he said it, but what else could he possibly offer? “We can… we can go back to your office, and figure something out. Yes, we’ll… we’ll work something out.”

Tim shook his head, but it was useless. He was really crying now, and in any other circumstances he would have considered it a luxury that he hadn’t just collapsed to the ground. He was so weak and exhausted that it was all he could do to remain upright, but right now it didn’t feel like much of a victory, seeing as he couldn’t make himself move at all.