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It’s enough that Michael has to live here, tethered to the Institute and the Archives in particular. He refuses to do any of their work. But he does have to live here, until he finds another way to live - he will find another way - so, in the mean time, he has to bear witness to the way this Archival team works together. Or doesn’t.
By the time he wakes up on any given day, aching from the head down to the ankles from the stress of being embodied again, Jon and his assistants are usually already at work. They take statements in one of the several interview rooms, they busy themselves with research and planning, and, most of all, they snipe at each other. The place is always thick with resentment and fear, which both eventually ferment into anger. It’s useless, how they bare their claws at each other or else turn away from each other entirely, but Michael supposes they know that, and have no energy or desire or time to find another way.
It’s so familiar that it usually drives Michael back into his room. For the first month in the Archives, he can’t leave his bed without seeing double, two Archives overlaid each other in the clashing blue and red of 3D glasses: assistants doing their work and coming to fear and hate it, the Archivist and the Institute Head locked in a conflict the assistants will never be allowed to understand. It does something to his sense of time. He could swear that, sometimes, the clocks run backwards when he looks at them and, in their glossy reflective faces, he sees Emma behind him instead of Melanie.
Eventually, though, the sensation of it - not pain, not anger, definitively not grief, but something akin to a full-body static, overwhelming and too indefinable to be fought against - becomes familiar enough to manage, and he creeps out into the Archives again.
He watches the two detectives move in and out, simultaneously repulsed and intrigued by the one with the blood-scent that follows her every move. It’s a simple possession, straightforward and animalistic. No one would ever guess she was shadowed by something so much greater than her own worst impulses, because her worst impulses are all it needs to possess her. She makes Jon very nervous; he gets sharper and smaller when she’s around. Michael can’t bring himself to feel amused or vindicated by this.
In general, this version of the Archives is bloodier than his own. Everyone has their fangs bared and ready to bite. But the atmosphere of suspicion is the same. Uneasiness. Every day someone will sigh, or growl to themselves, or mutter a curse or a labored, What am I doing here, and Michael will remember when Eric made the same faint noise or when Sarah asked the same question.
Nothing changes, he thinks, more and more often. After everything we did - all the stupid ways we died and the cruel things we died for - they’re still here, right where we used to be. They aren’t exact matches for the past, but there are similarities, echoes. Emma and Tim, undercurrented with a darkness too embedded to extricate or ease without killing them. Eric and Martin, dim by comparison, fading out as time goes by like poorly-preserved paper; despair or bitterness will be all they leave behind.
Sarah and Sasha. He knows exactly how Sasha died and sometimes wishes he didn’t. He’s afraid to find out how Sarah went. She was always kind to Michael Shelley. To him, to him, to him. He is Michael Shelley again. He has to remember that.
But there is, he has to admit, one very different thing about the Archives now, as opposed to the Archives of his time.
“Get out of my seat,” Tim says.
Michael pushes his headphones down around his neck, then lowers his legs from his curled position in Tim’s desk chair. “Sorry,” he says. “I thought you’d be longer. You usually are.” He’d taken this spot while Tim was busy in the Archivist’s office, growling at Jon again about… something. Who could keep track of every instance of Tim growling at Jon about, really.
“What does—“ Tim shakes his head. “Just move.”
Obeying and hating himself for it, Michael stands and shifts away from the desk. “You’re very cruel to him.”
Tim snorts and keeps a suspicious eye on him as he takes his seat, but doesn’t otherwise speak.
“You could have it much worse,” Michael says.
“Oh, could I? That’s so helpful to know. Goodbye.”
“It’s not just him, you know,” Michael continues. “The Eye is a poison but you’re no antidote.”
The keyboard’s keys crash as Tim brings his hands down flat across them, ruining, presumably, whatever he’s working on. “What are you still doing here?”
“Waiting for the door to unlock,” Michael says. “Soon, I hope.”
“At least we see eye-to-eye on that.”
Michael turns away, a lopsided headache throbbing up the left side of his neck and straight across his temple.
“He should have killed you,” Tim adds. “Just in case you’re still part of… it. But he’s always been weak.”
It doesn’t hurt. It isn’t pleasant, but Michael has known for a while that Tim sees monsters in everything now, and that he isn’t always wrong about it.
Michael turns back. “You want him to be Robinson.”
After studying him a moment, Tim nods. “He might get more things done if he were.”
“Remind me,” Michael says. “That - that silly saying about the definition of insanity.” Tim’s face hardens, and he opens his mouth to reply, but Michael cuts him off. “If he were like Robinson, you’d be dead by now. You would never have gotten close to knowing what took your brother. You’d still be fumbling in the dark, afraid of every corner, and you’d be led like a donkey with a carrot on a string, thinking he’d give you answers if only you proved yourself enough, trusted him enough. And you’d die ashamed of your own weakness. You should thank whatever gods you own that you’ve got a weak Archivist instead of a strong one. She’d kill you sooner than the Circus would. With him, you might have a shot at getting what you want.”
Then, like the coward he’s always been, he flees back to his room.
The rest of the day passes in its fits and starts. His tirade at Tim is the longest he’s spoken to anyone in the past month, and the most unguarded he’s left himself. It makes him feel sick and unsure, old shame and new fear conspiring to remind him of how exposed he was. He sequesters in the corner of his room and listens for hours to a heavy metal band he once heard Melanie mention.
It’s very late in the evening when he somehow hears it over the music: the hiss of paper against flooring. He sits up in the cot and checks that, yes, there’s a white scrap just poking out from underneath the door. It must be Jon. They determined early on that knocking to get Michael’s attention would be a non-starter, and so, as juvenile as it is, they’ve settled on note-passing.
He retrieves the note. It’s folded over once; when he flips it open, there are only two neatly penned words.
Thank you.
He considers writing a reply. He even considers opening the door. But it’s still too unsettling. Too many warring instincts. As old as he feels at times, at other times he’s twenty again and hanging onto coattails, letting himself slowly come to depend on an Archivist for survival and sanity and protection. He doesn’t want to let himself become his own echo.
Still… he tucks the note under his pillow that night, and imagines he sleeps a little better than usual, for the closeness of a kind word.