Work Text:
Statement of Timothy Stoker, Recorded by The Archivist, in Situ. Statement never given.
Statement begins.
I really loved my brother, you know.
Danny meant a lot to me. He always had. I know a lot of people dislike their younger siblings, but he was everything I had for a long time. From his third birthday to the time I graduated college, we were practically inseparable. And then he died, and then I met you and Martin and Sasha and my life got better and then it got much, much worse.
You don't need me to tell you all that, though. You know everything now, don't you?
Still, I find it hard to believe that you could ever possibly understand the feeling of everything you love being ripped away from you so quickly. I'll be the first to admit I'm jealous of you for that. When things got bad, you stuck your head in the sand and threw yourself into your statements. I didn't mind, at first. I thought you were just coping with all of the Prentiss shit.
If I had known then you were already turning into a monster, I'm not sure if I could have done anything to change that. Knowing how I felt then, I don't even know if I would've if I could.
You were the first to know Sasha was dead – or wrong , at the least. For some reason, I can't seem to shake from my mind that you could have done something about it. Anything at all. Even though I know you wouldn't have done anything to hurt her, I still feel like you had some responsibility for how it all turned out, you know? Even if you didn't know exactly what was happening, it was entirely possible that you could have warned her. Told her about any of the stuff you knew before the rest of us did.
I'm sorry. That's not fair of me to say. I'm still angry.
Not-Sasha – if that's what we're calling that thing now – ruined me. It hurt so differently than anything I had been through before; I'd take being hole-punched by a hundred evil worms over the mental torture that thing put me through any day. I thought it was over when I watched Danny be ripped apart, but what it did was painful on a much different level.
I think what scares me the most is the fact that it had the ability to pull me apart with terrifying precision if it wanted to. When it took Sasha, it took her memories too, and that's the horrifying part of it all. That thing knew me, because Sasha knew me, and it wasn't her and I didn't notice.
I should have noticed; it even crossed a line once. It made a joke about Danny dying – some offhand comment that I really don't remember – and when it registered the appalled expression on my face I could have sworn there was a smile in its eyes. I don't know why I didn't start thinking something was wrong then.
I know some of it's my fault, too. Maybe all of it. I keep thinking about what would have happened if I had been taken instead of Sasha. The Unknowing would have gone better, for sure, but I don't know what else would have really been different. When I think about it like that, maybe Sasha was the lucky one.
She was spared from everything early on. All that lied ahead from the first attack was just more suffering until the rest of us found a way out – through death or otherwise – and she didn't have to live through all of that. If she had gotten that Archivist position like she was meant to, she would have run the same route as you, and ended up a monster. I didn't want that for her, and I didn't for you either, Jon.
I say that like there's absolutely nothing any of us could have done. I'm sure that if we had made a couple less mistakes, things would have turned out just a little better; but I still think that this was going to happen either way. Elias was always going to be an evil murderer, you were always going to be too paranoid, and I was always going to be angry in the end. I think I'm just glad I didn't end up a monster, too.
I don't think I regret what I did. I know that sounds bad, but I needed a way out, and it wasn't like any of you guys died in the long run. I went out avenging my brother and my best friend, and I don't think that I was going to find a better way to die than that. I've done what I meant to do since the day I started working at the institute, and I found my answer. I guess I just wasn't prepared for what that answer actually was, or that it wasn't done taking the people I loved.
I did love Sasha, I think. The first one. Thinking about her is difficult, and all the remaining memories of her I have are destroyed by a monster's face. In a perfect world, I'd have more time to grieve my brother and we'd figure our shit out and everything would be at least somewhat okay, but that's not what happened. She died , Jon. She died, and none of us noticed, and I can't express how much that hurts . I don't even recognize her real face.
I couldn't save Danny, and I couldn't save Sasha, so I blew myself up to stop the thing that killed them both. I would love to say that I miss when things were simpler, but they never were, really. We were all running from something from the start. Maybe in another life, or some parallel universe, we're all just working at some shitty office job and everything is a little dull, but we're safe and happy and that's really all we could ask for.
I sound like Martin. Christ.
Good luck with the apocalypse, Jon. I'll always be sorry that things turned out this way.
Statement ends.