Work Text:
The archives had felt hollow without Michael.
Gerry was sure he was far more aware of it than anybody else, considering nobody else in the building spent as much time both in the archives and outside of work with Michael, but after enough time, he had realised it had begun to weigh on all of the archives.
There was no absentminded humming from the breakroom, some almost-familiar tune that had been evidently stuck in Michael’s head that day, no clinks of tea being set on various desks, no colourful patterned sweaters draped over the backs of office chairs, and the air was absent of his slightly rushed explanations of their next assignments to various assistants.
Gerry had noticed it even more than Gertrude’s absence, as Emma and Elias fought for her place as the employee who enjoyed telling Gerry what to do the most.
No, it was far more noticeable when there was no frame hunched over a paper at his side, brow furrowed with focus and brushing stray curls of blonde hair from his face that he could never quite properly tie back. Michael was not there to sit beside him, elbow propping up his chin and occasionally sliding his paper over to tap a long finger beneath a word and ask what it meant, so soft-spoken and listening so intently as Gerry explained.
To call the archives cold without him wouldn’t be wrong, per se, but it didn’t feel quite right to say when he knew Michael was somewhere far colder. That was all he knew of the trip he was taking with Gertrude, that they were headed further North, and he figured it was about as much as Michael himself knew before going. He had helped Michael pack the coats he could only imagine he was wearing now, hopefully protected from the elements of wherever they had ended up.
All the while Gerry was here, sitting bitterly over his work and counting down the hours until he could punch out and lament how much he missed Michael in peace. He wouldn’t be getting much work done either way, slumped in his chair and spinning his pen as opposed to directing any of his attention to the statements in front of him.
It was twenty til five when the door to the bullpen opened and Gerry nearly dropped his pen, chest suddenly clenching tight as he sat up in his seat and turned to stare over his shoulder.
Gertrude was standing in the doorway, two leather suitcases in either hand and chin held high as she stepped inside. A thick fleece-lined coat was draped over her thin arm, wiry grey hair pulled back as neatly as ever.
Gerry slowly rose to his feet as she walked toward her office, about to pass his desk without another glance. He could feel something drop out of the bottom of his stomach, blood running cold beneath his skin as he glanced, again, to the doorway.
“Where’s Michael?” he asked, voice low, with no patience for any other greeting. He felt his fingers curl tighter around the edge of the desk he was clutching as Gertrude’s eerily cold expression flicked over to meet his gaze, face stony.
For one agonisingly long moment, her eyes seemed to ask Gerry to take a guess, too hollow to read and the glint across her glasses so indifferent that he felt a breath catch in his throat.
Then she nudged her glasses up her nose with her knuckle, instead looking down at Gerry’s barely touched paperwork.
“Michael has returned to his flat for the evening. I believe he’s tired from our trip, and has been granted a couple days of leave before he returns to the archive.”
Gerry paused, suspicious, as Gertrude shifted the coat on her arm, and then he nodded slowly, shoulders already beginning to sink with the idea of Michael being alright and resting. He let relief begin to wash over him, as he knew that he would not be outright lied to about whether or not his boyfriend was alive, and let his grip loosen on the edge of the table.
It wasn’t that Gerry always catastrophized about terrible things happening to Michael whenever he left the archive, there just had been something about the trip that hadn’t felt… right.
Everything was dangerous when one was dealing with entities in the first place, but Gertrude had given so little explanation as to where they were going or why they were leaving.
Michael hadn’t seemed to mind, eager to help Getrude pack and honey-brown eyes so agonisingly bright as he reassured Gerry that it would only be for a week, kissing his cheek before waving goodbye to him from through the taxi window, but Gerry had felt his gut twist with something he couldn’t place as the car took off.
“...Good.” He slowly sank back down into his seat, feeling Gertrude’s eyes lingering on him as he picked up his pen again. By the time she had begun walking back to her office, he had already made up his mind to call Michael. Even if there hadn’t been a lingering concern about what had happened on the trip, Gerry still had decided upon at least seeing him again if he was able to.
So when his shift was finally over, the sound of car engines already revving in the parking lot as other employees began to file out of the building, Gerry packed up the file he had been pretending to cross-check, storing it away with the vague intention of actually making progress with it tomorrow, and reached for the landline sitting on the desk.
His throat was tight as he dialled Michael’s home number and listened to the tones ring out, knowing that it was perfectly plausible that Michael had just decided to take a nap after getting back and wouldn’t answer for a couple hours. It wouldn’t be too comforting for Gerry to rely entirely on Gertrude’s brief reassurance, but it would be reasonable.
A moment later, though, the phone played out the third ring and clicked.
“Hi, this is Michael Shelley, who is this?”
“Gerry. Figured I’d check in,” he offered, slumping back in his seat with the comfort of the familiar voice. It already eased some of his concern to hear Michael there at all, in one piece and able to answer a phone call.
“Oh, Gerry! I’m- I’m at home again, apparently I’ve been given four day’s leave to recover a bit from the, er- the trip.”
The connection wasn’t the best on the archive phones, and yet Gerry could hear that Michael almost sounded… shaken. There was relief in his voice, too, but something about how slightly lost the assistant seemed only made Gerry feel more uneasy.
“I heard. You alright? I can come over to help you unpack if you need or something,”
“Un… oh, gosh, I have to unpack, don’t I? R-right, that would be very helpful,” Michael stuttered with a shaky laugh, shifting audible from the other end. “Sorry, I’m still a bit… mixed up at the moment.”
“You’re alright. It’ll be easier to talk in person, yeah?”
Michael exhaled. “Yeah. You’ll be here soon?”
“‘Course. See you in a few.”
Gerry knocked twice on the door to Michael’s flat, drawstring bag slung over his shoulder and shoes sunk into the welcome mat at the doorstep. It was really only Gerry who visited Michael these days, so it wasn’t worn down much, but Gerry had always thought it nice.
He could hear shuffling from inside the flat, footsteps, and then they fell silent. Gerry could only assume they were just on the other side of the door, but for some reason the sound hesitated, the late afternoon air warm and still before the handle gently clicked.
The door slowly swung open, a pale hand curling over the edge of the wood, and Michael was standing in the frame of it.
An oversized t-shirt, decorated with the faded logo to some band, swamped most of his lanky form, having not even given an attempt to tie his hair back and instead letting it rest in loose curls over his shoulders. A flower-patterned band-aid was plastered over one of his cheeks, mostly covering a light scrape on his face and scrunching when he squinted against the brighter lights in the hall. One of his arms hung limply by his side, a couple more band-aids criss crossing his palm while his other hand still clasped the edge of the door– and Gerry realised his bony knuckles were white over it as he held it in place.
…That wasn’t the only thing that was odd. It had to have been something about the way he was standing, the way his head was tilted, the amber evening light stretching with the shadows of mullions into the hallway, but something seemed strange . He didn’t seem to fit right where he was standing, or at all, like a room where all the furniture had been shifted ever so slightly to the left. It wasn’t quite uncanny , as it was absolutely still Michael, his Michael, standing in the doorway, but it was as if there was something in the scene that was an optical illusion, one that he still couldn’t place.
Then Michael’s eyes met Gerry’s and a gentle smile broke across his face, a light in his eyes that seemed to wash away the odd shift in how he was . He stepped back to let Gerry inside, grip already beginning to relax on the door, and let out a breath.
“Oh, Gerry, I missed you.”
“Missed you too,” Gerry hummed, warmth blooming in his chest as he stepped forward to kiss Michael on the cheek.
Michael, florid-cheeked, gently shut the door again with his right hand, gaze lingering just a moment too long on the lock as Gerry knelt to unlace his boots. “I’m- I’m glad you’re here. Some things… happened on the trip, I- I didn’t really know how well if I could explain it, over the phone, you know how it is,” he stuttered, voice slightly strained. “Would’ve gone to walk home from the archives with you, but still I’m a bit-”
His words caught, eyes glassy as he stared blankly at the floorboards, hand twitching at his side. “Er…”
“Disoriented?” Gerry offered, prying off his other boot and getting to his feet.
“Yeah-” Michael nodded, snapping out of his daze with a tired laugh. “That’s a good way to put it.”
“That’s alright,” Gerry replied, setting a hand on Michael’s shoulder as he slid off his own bag. “Sounds like it was a lot.”
And again, for a split second, there was something off about where Michael was, as Gerry’s palm looked to rest just fine on his shoulder, but there was a dissonance to what he actually felt. Not very much, not enough for Gerry to even decide to mention it, but he wasn’t stupid– he kept it in mind for whatever Michael ended up telling him.
Gerry sat up onto the armrest of the couch, still thinking of the oddly cold look in Getrude’s eyes before she had returned to her office, the way Michael moved ever so slightly differently as he walked over to the armchair and unzipped the suitcase sitting on it.
He began to explain what the beginning of the trip had been like, mostly getting distracted by details about things he saw while he was at the airport, occasionally mentioning something he bought and rifling through his suitcase for it, or finding some trinket or poster in his suitcase and immediately diverting from the story to give the background for it.
He spoke more quickly than usual, as if he wanted to get it over with, but the story wound and twisted around where he and Gertrude had actually ended up. It was all about the boat trip, the plane ride, the taxis and streets, how it grew colder and colder but never reached a peak. Gerry instead began to pick up that his expression was growing more strained, fingers shaking slightly as he dug through his suitcase- mostly only with one hand.
And whenever he brushed a lock of hair out of his face and behind his ear, Gerry noticed what had been bothering him about it. Michael was left-handed, fingers always folded awkwardly through scissors and fumbling when he was meant to shake people’s hands.
But now, his left arm still hadn’t moved much at all, Michael’s already slightly lanky frame shifting strangely to avoid using it. Not only that, but across the knuckles and fingers of his left hand his skin was discoloured, an odd bruising across them.
“Wait,” Gerry cut Michael off as he mumbled something under his breath while tossing another shirt over the edge of the washbasket beside him, blonde curls bouncing in front of his face as he looked over. “Is something wrong with your arm?”
Michael glanced down at himself as if it would give him an answer, expression blank for a moment before he blinked. “Oh! I- I was- I was trying to get to that, wasn’t I? Er- yes. M-My hand will be fine, j-just a bit swollen, but my shoulder, I- I can’t really move it without it hurting quite a bit, so I assume that yes, something is wrong, it’s just that I think-”
“You can’t move it?” Gerry slid off the arm of the couch, concern already clenching tight in his chest as he realised how much more serious it might’ve been. He should’ve checked that Michael wasn’t injured over the phone, or at the very least when he first walked in, because like hell could he trust Gertrude saying Michael was ‘tired’ to mean that he wasn’t also severely injured. “What did you do, why didn’t-”
“W-well-”
Michael laughed nervously, swallowing and reaching toward his left arm and lifting the edge of his sleeve to reveal that his upper arm and shoulder were bruised and swollen. Gerry felt his throat tighten with alarm, immediately recognising it as likely to be dislocated, considering the way it was bent in a way that shoulders generally weren’t supposed to be, as if one of the bones had been shifted a couple inches down.
He took another step forward to see it for himself, hand on Michael’s as he slid the sleeve back further and felt his brow furrow at the blue bruising that had bloomed over it. He glanced back up at the scrape on Michael’s face, blood still clotting around the edges beneath the band-aid that Gerry could have sworn was patterned differently the last time he looked at it.
“What happened? Where did you go ?” Gerry hissed, brushing his fingers along the bruise, only to lift them when Michael choked on a poorly-concealed gasp of pain.
“S-Sorry, I- I don’t really know, still, it’s a bit- you know, it- well, it’s not really that important, er- I didn’t really bring it up to Miss Robinson because she- it’s a bit hard to say, she was acting strangely and I didn’t want to worry her any more.”
Gerry set his jaw as Michael gestured vaguely with his uninjured hand, gaze drifting back down to the carpet. Gerry pinched the bridge of his nose, letting Michael’s loose sleeve slip back over his shoulder again.
“...Don’t tell me you came all the way back here with a dislocated shoulder and didn’t do anything about it.”
“Well, it was quite cold there, so it got– numb, hard to notice, just–”
“Really?”
“Wait, wait, Gerry, I–”
“God, please don’t act like this isn’t a big deal, you’re supposed to tell people about these things!”
“I know, I-” Michael swallowed, breaths beginning to shake again, and Gerry stared up at him expectantly. He felt his blood run colder as Michael’s eyes swam with fear, fingers of his right hand tentatively lifting to touch the base of his throat. He didn’t try to cut him off again, instead waiting as Michael continued to fumble for words.
“I just think… I think I might have dislocated a bit more than my shoulder.”
Gerry pressed his lips together, hand still resting on the side of Michael’s arm.
“...Yeah?” he prompted carefully, reaching to take Michael’s right hand. Michael squeezed it, the plastic sheen of a band-aid pressing against Gerry’s palm as he nodded again.
“A-and. Not in terms of bones at all, really. Er-”
Michael’s bruised hand twitched, gaze seeming to flit anywhere but Gerry’s face as he continued to stutter. “Oh, god, I’m- this is going to sound…”
“I’ll believe you,” Gerry said, voice steady. “Whatever it is, I won’t think you insane.”
Michael bit the inside of his cheek, nodding gratefully before he inhaled. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, barely above a fearful whisper as he moved to stand closer.
“Something’s wrong w-with me,” he croaked. “I don’t know what it is, but ever since we left– I was so focused on what might have been wrong with my arm, but– I know something else isn’t right. I- I don’t know, I think there was… something there, where Miss Robinson and I went, and Gerry, I-”
Michael looked up again, and Gerry felt his stomach twist as he saw that again, his eyes didn’t look quite right , stretched wide and irises that could only have been one shade different than what they were before. And yet they gleamed with fear, brimming with the beginnings of tears.
“I think a bit of it followed me back.”
Gerry set his jaw.
It made sense. After all, he had been suspicious ever since Gertrude had walked in alone, and had confirmed it the second he had seen Michael standing there, that something had shifted, and as much as worry had begun to clamp tighter in his throat, he knew full well that he was lucky to have had Michael return at all. If he had made it out of the first encounter, there was still an infinitely better chance that he would make it out alive, and Gerry had already decided to do everything in his power to make it happen.
“Okay,” he exhaled slowly. “Well, you happen to be speaking to a paranormal researcher, as well as being one yourself, so hopefully we’ll figure out what that is.” He saw Michael’s face slacken slightly with relief, holding his hand tighter. “But it’ll be easier to do that if you do something about your shoulder first.”
Gerry let go to slip his hands into his pockets, nodding for Michael to sit down on the empty couch. He glanced again at the colour that had blossomed over Michael’s knuckles as he folded his hands shakily in his lap, briefly imagining Michael punching- well, anything, really, before the image became too alien to think about and he turned to walk to the flat’s kitchen.
He knew Michael’s flat well by now, mostly on autopilot as he dug through the freezer for an ice pack, instead directing his attention to the more important matter of what had happened . It would be easier to figure out when Michael was able to tell more of what he had encountered, but Gerry knew full well it was Gertrude who knew exactly what she had done.
He realised his knuckles were paling on the freezer door thinking about it, taking a deep breath and sliding a mushroom-patterned tea towel from off the oven handle to take with the ice pack. The slight uncanniness of how Michael seemed to exist lingered in Gerry’s mind, immediately beginning to drift to the Stranger, but every encounter he had learned of had always been more intense, it never seemed quite enough to change someone only slightly. Either way, as he opened the cabinet above the sink, he couldn’t help but pray it had only been a marking, not something more sinister.
Gerry strode back to the living room, Michael’s suitcase still open and half-unpacked on the armchair, patterned woollen sweaters folded inside. Michael himself was running a finger along the swelling on his left hand, brow pinched with worry and gaze flicking up to meet Gerry’s as he sat down on the edge of the coffee table.
Michael didn’t seem to fit right on the couch, still looking slightly crooked as Gerry unfolded the tea towel, but that wasn’t anything new. Michael had always been a bit like that, so Gerry didn’t prevent himself from thinking of it fondly as wrapped the ice pack. He turned his attention back to Michael’s shoulder, chewing on the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. It still looked like it definitely hadn’t been moved back into place, and Gerry winced to think that he’d have to do it himself.
He sighed, setting the ice pack down beside him. “Alright. Can you lie down for a moment?”
“Oh- sure, what for?” Michael’s gaze was quizzical as he sank to lie down on his back, letting Gerry carefully take his wrist and place the other hand on his shoulder, doing his best not to press down on the bruising. Gerry glanced up.
“You sure you want to know?”
Michael paled, silent for a moment before he swallowed, turning his head back toward the ceiling. “No, actually.”
“Good choice. Take a deep breath.”
One cry of pain and very unsettling pop later, there were tears in Michael's eyes again, breaths unsteady as his uninjured hand shook and reached for Gerry’s as he slowly sat back up.
“Oh- Oh, I didn’t like that,” he croaked, a tremble in his voice as he weakly took Gerry’s hand, touching his shoulder tenderly with the other. Gerry couldn’t help but feel guilt pierce his chest, even knowing full well that it would have hurt Michael plenty more to leave his arm as it had been.
“Over now, though. Figured I shouldn’t say, ‘hey lie down for a sec, just got to pop your shoulder back into its socket.’ Didn’t sound like it’d be much better for you,” Gerry exhaled as he set the ice pack into Michael’s other hand and directed it toward his shoulder. “Keep that there, yeah?”
Michael nodded gratefully, taking another deep breath as Gerry unscrewed the cap from the painkillers and handed a couple over. “Thank you,” he rasped, and there was a kind of defeat in his voice that made Gerry’s heart sink. He shifted to sit on the couch beside Michael and pressed a kiss to his cheek, folding his own hands in lap after capping the painkillers.
Michael’s smile was soft and appreciative, but weak, and his eyes began to glaze again as he stared at the carpet beneath him. Gerry reached over, setting his hand on Michael’s wrist.
“You’ll be okay. You know that, don’t you? Whatever happened, we’ll sort it out, and it won’t change anything.”
Drawing in another breath, Michael’s soft lips parted, eyes still fixed on the ground in front of him.
“...Think you can tell me what happened?”
Finally, Michael sniffled, sat up straighter, and nodded.
Michael Shelley did not feel good. He hadn’t been feeling good for quite a while now, he realised, save picking up the phone to hear Gerry’s voice and seeing him again at the door, but other than that, Michael’s attempt at optimism had been faltering. Everything hurt from his fall all the way back in- in wherever it was, and the painkillers were still not kicking in enough for his arm to not feel like a knife had been stuck directly down the socket of his shoulder. His fingers were unpleasant shades of pink and blue and too swollen to properly hold anything other than Gerry’s hand, and even that required him to be careful not to hurt himself.
He hadn’t noticed the pain much, at first, as most of the time the air was frigid and plenty helpful for numbing a very bruised shoulder, but here, on a summer afternoon in London, he had been given no such mercy. He had discovered far more injuries than he had initially assumed, forced to figure out something to do about them as more and more of him continued to sting and ache and twist and make him want to sink onto his painfully familiar bed and wake up only when he felt like moving again. He hadn’t even managed to do that after arriving back home, only sitting on his couch and doing his very best not to break down, debating whether or not to call Gerry while he was still working.
Overall, he was having a difficult day, and now he had to explain what had happened to him without bursting into tears again. He had to explain that everything he saw was slightly fuzzy around the edges, buzzing with the barest chromatic aberration along with that awful, constant ringing in the back of his skull. It had been nearly insufferable when he and Miss Robinson were journeying home, and though he was too shaken to bring it up, it still hadn’t ceased.
He couldn’t have been more grateful that Gerry had arrived, as not only did it involve having somebody point out that his shoulder was very much, definitely dislocated, but it was nice to have another person in the room at all, to hold his hand, keeping him in one spot in reality and remind him that he was not going insane. Or at least that if he was, there was someone in his life who wasn’t.
“O-Okay. I’m- it’s hard to find a place to start. Or continue, or end, or any of it, really,” he sighed, doing his best to keep himself together. He had already rambled about the trip, all the parts he could think back on without feeling violently ill, and now he just had to explain… the rest of it. “Y-You already know about how we got there, of course, but we had… barely begun to unpack when she- she explained that we were going up the mountain. To… look for something.”
He shifted and immediately wished that he hadn’t, as pain fired across his shoulder and he fought back a wince. “I- I was already a bit worried. She was acting so strange and I was… concerned for her, it was so cold out there, I didn’t really want to be out in the snow and I certainly didn’t want her to be out there, but she- she insisted.”
The numbing of the ice pack against Michael’s shoulder was familiar, though concentrated, an echo of the biting weather of the north. He could remember the wind howling in his ears, stinging against his cheeks as he held out an arm to help Gertrude up a steeper cluster of snow-sheeted rocks. His head had been pounding from exertion, the frost having sunken deep into his already aching bones. It had made all the sounds around him whistle through what was left of the trees, shrill as it reverberated in his skull.
“It- took a while to get up there. I couldn’t make it up very fast, and it had gotten so- so cold, and I didn’t want to ask how much farther we had to go. I- I figured I’d know when we got there.”
That hadn’t been true. He had recognised just fine that they were not meant to be anywhere else when they had finally stopped, but he hadn’t really known anything. They hadn’t been anywhere, there had been nothing to know, only the stinging cold air and all the ways it shouldn’t have been moving. All the bends and twists in its path, the nauseating way it wound and folded into itself, bouncing and sliding in pitch until he could hear it laughing at him, through him, and the hills they approached seemed to tower too high to be real.
Michael knew something was wrong, but there wasn’t anything to be wrong, as it was too wrong to even exist, but too real for him to be imagining it all, and it could not have been anything in between.
“I guess I just- lost it,” he stuttered with a trembling laugh. It hadn’t made any sense . “It wasn’t cold anymore, it wasn’t a-anything anymore, but it was something, and it was forever, and it was in- in my head, and too loud, and everything and nothing and not enough and too much–” Michael’s breath hitched and he blinked harshly, throat closing up. He was getting so frustrated trying to explain it, when it was just making him sound even more like he had completely lost his mind. And he almost wanted it, to be able to sink back into the comfort of being told he had imagined the entire thing.
“You’re okay,” Gerry cut in, voice low. Michael looked over, feeling his vision blurring again, but through it he could see how serious Gerry remained. “Doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you should try too hard to describe.”
It took Michael a moment to process that Gerry believed him, that he hadn’t taken everything Michael had haphazardly tried to explain as a lie, as the insane ramblings of somebody who hit their head a bit too hard and fabricated an entire trip north that couldn’t have been . He knew it was probably infinitely worse to think any of it could have been real, but some of the tension began to slip from his shoulders as he realised he didn’t have to be fighting to have it make sense.
“Y-Yeah,” he exhaled. “I… I couldn't- really think about anything, I don’t know if I was thinking or not, I don’t even remember breathing, but Miss Robinson was still there, she was still real, and she… wasn’t seeing what I could. I- I know it, because she wasn’t- she was still- she still made sense , and so when the door–” His breath hitched and he swallowed again, fighting to just keep talking, to get it over with, to hope that maybe if he could vomit back up whatever that place-that-wasn’t had done to him, it would be over and he could begin to repair.
“She told me to go inside.”
He realised he was clenching his left hand tightly, the bruising across his knuckles blooming over with pain.
“I went inside.”
Michael could suddenly feel it again, the buzzing of something just inside his skull, housing a mind that functioned only through leftover static and corpselike twitches. Instead, it had been taken over by something else that slammed the door shut with a movement that was so manic, so forceful for something that couldn’t have been alive. His hand was crushed and twisted between the wood and the frame, and he had been so desperate to wretch it out that he hadn’t thought to try to throw the door open again, to escape before he had to turn and face the hall .
The hall that was ringing and ringing and ringing in his skull and wouldn’t stop, just an endless twisting corridor that split into too many fragments of itself, of Michael to begin to count. It had shattered him with it, he could feel it now, all the puzzle pieces of his being distorted ever so slightly and impossible to quite fit back into his original place. Breaths took wrong turns entering his lungs, vision pulling apart like fibres of sickeningly coloured cotton candy, and the entire world felt like the square hole grating the sawdust edges of a round-peg mind, and he was losing it -
“Hey, stay with me.” Gerry’s hand was squeezing his again and Michael choked on a breath, forcing himself to focus back on the patient, dark eyes that were the only thing keeping him grounded.
Gerry’s hand lifted to brush a thumb across his cheek and Michael realised he was crying, chest shuddering with broken inhales and face burning with tears.
Michael nodded tearily, pressing his eyes shut and trying to remember what happened next without losing himself again.
“...There was a hall. It wasn’t right,” he managed. “I- I had- a map, though, and when I finally reached the end of it, I- I started to feel… happy. I thought it was just another part of being- being completely gone, but it wasn’t- the right kind of happy. It was so… manic, desperate, hungry- I didn’t- I didn’t know what was happening, and then- something must have gone wrong, o-or gone right, because I suddenly realised that I was still scared, I remembered that I still wanted to be scared. I didn’t want whatever was going on, I- I thought of you here, I knew that if I ever made it back to you I wouldn’t want to be tangled into that awful laugh, because I was already unravelling and I could feel something else winding through it all, waiting for me to crack enough that it could find its way to me–
“So I- I tore up the map and ran. I didn’t even know if I was anything that could run anymore, and knew that there was nowhere to run to and nothing to from, but I told myself there was. I lied and lied and it kept lying back until I f- found the first door that would open, threw it open, and- then… I was in the snow again. I fell on all these rocks, my arm was numb, I was real again, and I could… hear it laughing behind me.”
He looked over at Gerry again, blinking through tears again, and sniffled.
“I still can.”
Michael felt sick as his throat closed up again, knowing he had no more words he could spit back up, and Gerry, too, was quiet. His expression was difficult to read, but after a moment, he turned back to Michael, opening his arms and letting Michael slump against him, wrapped in a hug.
Michael rested his chin on Gerry’s shoulder, careful of his injuries but so heavy with exhaustion and defeat and a constant churning fear that had worn him so thin. He was tired , he realised, the weight of not knowing how to explain what had happened now beginning to lift. The shifting, distant laughter was still faint in the back of his mind, but there was a drained kind of relief to having told somebody he loved, and he was happy he had.
Gerry rested a hand against the back of his head and Michael drew in another deep breath, letting his earlier words reverberate– the reassurance that he would be okay, that he wasn’t another lost cause, to be confined to a decaying memory like the statements all packed into the archives. He would be able to stay here, and be safe, no matter how taunting the laughter seemed to ring.
“...Still think I’ll be alright?” Michael asked shakily once he had recovered slightly, the clamour of his mind beginning to recede again.
“Yeah,” Gerry exhaled with hesitation, pulling away and resting a hand on Michael’s uninjured shoulder. Michael felt more relief unfold in his chest, setting his bruised hand in his lap. “I’ll look into more when I go into work tomorrow. God knows Gertrude won’t be telling me much, but we’ll find out what it did to you. Got that?”
Michael nodded shakily and Gerry smiled, only briefly before he leaned forward to adjust the ice pack again, but Michael felt something in his chest melt, so much of the agony and strain of the entire week dissolving away as he pieced back together his optimism.
The spiralling laughter was still there, of course, but Michael found it easier to ignore as he felt Gerry brush a lock of hair from his shoulder.
After all, Gerry’s hums of approval and low mumbles about his arm already looking better was a much more pleasant thing to have ringing in his mind instead.