Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You are trekking through heather-covered cliffs on the cornish coast, the night quickly darkening around you, the ocean a dull roar in your ears. You are holding a child in your arms – your child, you think, distantly, at least she’d once been that, wrapped in a thin woolen scarf, far too thin for the cold January air. She is crying.

You stop. Frozen fern crunches under your boots as you do. Your child is crying in your arms. You hold her like it’s the first time you ever have, like she is something so wondrous and fragile, like the reason you’ve come here, to the small abandoned chapel disappearing into the dark cliffs behind you isn’t something else entirely.

Like you aren’t both covered in her mother’s blood.

A little under a year ago, you actually held her for the first time. She had her mother’s fine, sand-colored hair and your freckles and two bumps on the side of her forehead where you knew antlers would break through her skin, like they had for her mother, like they had for you, marking you both as heralds of- what, exactly, you aren’t sure you can quite conceive of, even now that you’ve played your own part of it to the end.

(Occult Procedure Clockwork Blackchild Havilah.

The end of the world, Francis, though is that really such a bad thing? )

Your own horns were curled in on themselves, like a ram’s. You took to them with a bone saw, and covered the stumps with a hat.

You held her, then, and she cried for the first time, and every light bulb in the room had burst, leaving just the street lamp outside to feebly shine into shabby little bedroom of a shabby little English row house, and the roof had creaked and groaned above you in a way that had made you fear it would collapse and bury you all beneath it. Something grew out of the cracks in the floorboards – grass, flowers? You couldn’t quite tell in the dark – and curled its way up your legs.

Oh, Francis, she’s magnificent.

And Agent Ukulele had found himself thinking just how easy it would be to smash her little head open on the floor, right then and there.

Eden isn’t a place, it’s a state of being.

The Agent Ukulele of the present tucks the small body into the front of his trench coat, and she is warm against him. He had been sent out here to dispose of Threat Entity 9927-Black “The Goddess”. He had done so.

(Not that The Goddess had ever posed a threat to reality in the first place. Agent Ukulele had known this the moment he pointed his standard-issue Winchester repeating rifle at the mother of his child, and in the few seconds of hesitation it took for him to pull the trigger the chamber had rusted in place in his hands, he had known it when he’d reached for his backup knife, not having found use in all of his seven years of employment and he had known it when it did, for the first time.

If he was entirely honest with himself, he’d even known it days earlier when he had returned to that small town English row house, not Francis this time but Agent Ukulele, and it was overgrown with vines and wildflowers and looked to have been abandoned for years.

The Global Occult Coalition however, didn’t.)

The looming end of the world, the small child in your arms, cries. You shush her, clumsily rocking her in your arms, unused to being a father because you haven’t been one for a year. She is bigger now, your arms already tiring from holding her, but still impossibly small in the dark fabric of your coat, impossibly small in the vastness between the night and cliffs and ocean.

You could leave her here, in one of the crevices between the rocks. The January cold would do your job for you.

(It wasn’t like Ukulele hadn’t killed children before, either.)

She’s stopped crying. You look at her. She looks at you, still cold and afraid but tired out. She is covered in her mother’s blood, like the night you first held her. You wrap the sleeve of your coat around your hand and drag it across her face, trying to clean it, to get the blood out of her eyes at least, and her nose scrunches up and eyebrows draw together and another quiet whine begins in her throat, and right then, in a patch of frozen heather on the cornish coast, your heart breaks.

You curl in on yourself, around the baby in your arms, and her little head slots in place in the space between your chin and collarbone, and your whole body shakes as the overwhelming impossibility of you killing this child dawns on you.

You think. Your strike team’s squad van is parked half a mile away, Agent Cembalo in it; He is to call for backup if neither of you report back to him in what can’t be more than half an hour from now. Agents’ Saxophone lays in the dilapidated church, his blood coalescing with that of many others on the stone floor, and Agent Harmonica had been run off the cliff side in a scuffle with a cultist and fallen into the sharp rocks below. If you were clever about it, they would never find either of your bodies.

There’s a town some four miles off to the west, you can see the sphere of light above it in the distance. If you made it there before GOC agents started combing the area, you could steal a car and go- somewhere. Somewhere.

It isn’t until you have taken up your trek again, towards that blessed patch of slightly lighter night sky, still shaking all over and considering the logistics of going on the run with a one-year-old and only the remainder of your last paycheck to tide you over, that you realize that this means that you are deserting. God damn.

Meri is quiet now. The warmth of your own body under the thick coat must have finally seeped into hers and made her sleepy. You are too cautious, still, to let yourself think that you love her just yet, but it does make you feel, her falling asleep in your arms like that.

You walk through heather and fern and cliffs and winter, collar turned up against the wind and useless shotgun still slung over your shoulder. You are deserting. Hidden in the folds of your trench coat, your daughter sleeps.

Chapter Text

It is an open secret among the sisters at the Our Lady of Mercy Convent that the young girl living in a vacant chamber under the roof and helping to take care of the vegetable gardens isn’t ordinary. The ivy growing up the convent walls seems drawn to her window like a singular light source in a dark room, and from underneath her ankle-length skirt, she leaves cloven hoof prints in damp soil.

Until one day she returns, panicked, from gathering mushrooms with the elderly Sister Eleanor at the edge of the woods. The door to the abbess’ office falls out of its metal hinges to let her in, hitting the ground with a loud thud. Eleanor has collapsed, in the midst of a field of poppies on their way back, and by the time an ambulance can arrive at the remote location, she is dead. An autopsy find her newly installed pacemaker decayed in her chest.

Less than a day later, low-level KTE-1453 “The Galway Faunus” is marked for termination by the GOC. Thanks to what will in later documentation be referred to as an anonymous tip, the Foundation gets to her first. SCP-166 is tentatively classified as a low-threat Euclid, mostly due to the difficulties it poses to standard humanoid containment.

There is a singular Foundation employee who recognizes this as the gross misclassification it is. He can never let anyone find out about this.

Chapter Text

You cower underneath an abandoned desk, in an abandoned office, in an abandoned containment wing of Site-19. You are fearing for your life, but you are far more used to it than anyone should be at fifteen years old.

The office is dark, safe for the ominous glow of a small, red square above the door, and there’s a distant blaring of what sounds like an alarm bell somewhere down the corridor outside. You’re not sure how long you’ve been hiding here, exactly, but you barely hear it anymore.

You weren’t even supposed to be at Nineteen in the fist place, you’d only been temporarily recontained here due to a shortage of vacant containment quarters at Site-17 (the foundation’s resources were stretched so thin, apparently, that by the time Dantensen had been caught in his lie, they’d already locked someone else up in your old cell). Under normal circumstances, one of Omega-7s commanders would have taken care of it; But there weren’t exactly any of them left.

You’d spent the last few weeks in an odd sort of limbo state logistically, turning from the Foundation’s golden child into yet another skeleton in their closet. On paper, you’d been reassigned to a Doctor Something Kondraki. He never told you his first name (let alone offer it, the way Dantensen had), but he did tell you that people wanted him dead (which probably constituted a breach of protocol of some sort).

You weren’t stupid. They were throwing two lost causes at each other. After Dantensen, after Omega-7, they were keeping you far away from any staff they were actually intending on keeping around.

(Kondraki calls you Iris, still, but you suspect it’s to piss people off more than anything else. He also, which is something you won’t find out until much later, when they’ll start telling you things again, has just signed his own death warrant by allowing a giant murder lizard to rampage through the Foundation’s second biggest site. The same second biggest site you’re currently loose in, because of course you just had to be on your way back from another interview on Omega 7’s demise when the breach hit, and of course, the guard escorting you told you to wait in one of the empty offices for him while he went to retrieve some researchers from the testing wing, and then not returned. You never did seem to get lucky, did you?)

There’s footfall coming down the hallway outside, and on instinct you reach for the handgun on your belt, the one that isn’t there anymore. You wish you at least had your camera, if not to defend yourself then because the weight of it slung across your shoulder had always felt comforting, even if it was what ultimately doomed you to- well. Everything.

You listen.

The thing about whoever, whatever, is coming down the corridor is that you can’t quite tell whether it’s human or not. It seems to stumble- skitter, almost, across the floor on what sounds like two legs, but the sound of it is odd against the linoleum, hollow, almost, and the rhythm of it doesn’t quite sound like that of a person, either.

You crawl out from under the desk and creep towards the door. While you’re unable to lock it, it swings out and the thing sounds small enough that, putting one foot on the wall next to it and pulling against the handle with your whole body weight, you might just be able to hold it closed if it tries to enter. Tentatively, you put your eye up against the keyhole, but are met with dull blackness. The corridor outside is even darker than the office you’ve sequestered into.

It’s then, crouched over the keyhole, tense and ready to spring into action at any second, that you hear something you’re not quite prepared for. The thing out in the corridor makes a quiet, panicked whimper, and unlike the pitter-patter of it coming down the corridor it sounds entirely too much like a person.

In a split-second decision, more on instinct than anything else (you knew, vaguely, that there were quite a few things in here capable of perfectly mimicking people, and that even if you were dealing with a person, that didn’t necessarily imply they were safe- Able had looked perfectly human, at a glance) you open the door a crack and whisper a hushed “Hey!”

The dim red glow from the alarm light washes out into the corridor, and paints a scrawny shape in what looks like a baggy cardigan into the darkness. The person is barely taller than you, disregarding the pair of massive antlers on their head. Upon hearing you, their whole body jerks in shock, and you breathe a quiet sigh of relief. Things that could kill you weren’t usually startled so easily.

“Get in here”, you hiss, “The corridor’s not safe.”

The shape nods hurriedly, shuffling closer. Their – her, you can tell it’s a girl by the two neat braids falling over her shoulders – eyes wide with terror. You pull her into the room with you, and after a last, pointless (you still can’t see shit) glance into the darkness close the door behind her, as quietly as you’re able to.

The girl practically collapses onto the floor. Her whole body shakes with fear, and it looks so pitiful you have to remind yourself not to let your guard down fully.

“I, um. Thanks”, says the girl.

“First time?”, you say, which, yeah, probably isn’t the most tasteful thing ever, but it does make you sound kind of cool.

“First- What? Does this sort of thing happen often?” Oh shit. That is a prominent british accent, she sounds like something straight out of that Miss Marple show you’d watched with Dad back home. It sounds entirely out of place in the midst of a containment breach of all things. How in the world did this kid get here.

“I wouldn’t say often, but not never”, you point to the red square above the door, “S’what the alarm system’s for. It’s also why all the staff are gone, they evacuate, but they usually just lock the cells down. How come you’re out?”

“My cell’s special”, says the girl, “They can’t use an electric lock cause of my- you know, the thing that I do, and I got worried when Doctor Light didn’t come in for the interview today, so I broke down the door.”

“You what?”

The girl waves her hands in front of her face, like she’d been caught stealing cookies. It looks utterly ridiculous. “I only did it because I thought they were going to notice and stop me, but when they didn’t, I got more worried! I’m sorry!”

“No I- chill out, I don’t work here or anything. You’re, what, my age?” You gesture at the label on the breast pocket of your jumpsuit: SCP-105. “We’re in the same boat.”

“Oh!”, says the girl, and despite the situation you bite back a smile at the way she enunciates it. “Oh. You know a lot.”

“Yeah, it’s, well-”, you say. You don’t want to get into it, “It’s a long story. I was just, um. Surprised you can do that”

“Ah!”, says the girl, and lifts the fabric of her long woolen skirt a little, revealing cloven hooves and cervine legs that look like they’re capable of a terrifyingly powerful kick. Yeah, okay. You weren’t going to be able to hold the door shut against that, anyway. You feel a little stupid.

“That explains the antlers.”

The girl smiles, tight and nervous. “Yeah, ha! I suppose it does!”

“What’s your name?”, you ask, because it occurs to you you haven’t yet, just as it occurs to you that this is the first time you’ve spoken to someone roughly your age since back when you’d been in middle school, and, God. That is a weird feeling.

“It’s Meri”, says the girl with the quiet sort of pride of someone showing you something very precious, “I don’t really know my family one.”

“Can I give you a piece of advice, Meri?”, you ask, already feeling like a bit of an ass for what you’re about to say next.

“Yes, of course!”

“Don’t, uh. Worry about the people that work here. They don’t have your best interest in mind.”

Meri opens her mouth as if to say something, then closes it again, her face pulling into a sheepish sort of grimace. “I- um. I didn’t mean to-”

“I don’t blame you”, you say, “Don’t worry. Just, you would’ve probably been safer staying in your cell is all. And uh, someone ought to tell you.”

There’s a pause. You look away.

“I made the mistake of trusting them once and, well. They don’t see you as a person, not really. You don’t have friends in this place.”

“I’m sorry”, Meri says, very quietly, and despite having heard it from just about everyone who had the clearance to know what happened during the last few weeks, it’s the first time you feel like someone means it. “There’s you? Or, wait-”, she twists her hand into the fabric of her skirt, and, yeah, you do feel kind of bad now, “We’re not really supposed to talk, are we?”

You let out a short laugh. “No. We’re breaking, like, thirty regulations just by being in the same room.”

Meri looks at you for a moment, thinking. “Well”, she says, smile small and hesitant, but sincere, “Let’s make the most of it, I suppose?”

Despite the absurdity of the situation, or maybe because of it, you can’t help but smile, too. “I- Sure, okay. Not like we have much of a choice, either way.” You extend a hand. “Iris, by the way.”

The two of you decide to hide out in the deserted office until the lights come back on. The corridor outside remains quiet, whatever’s out there not seeming to be in this part of the complex, at least, but Meri still shakes incessantly in a way that seems to be frustrating even her. You're sympathetic, the first time you’d been properly in mortal peril still fresh in your mind, but can’t do much about it, because you’re just another terrified teenager in a polyester jumpsuit, arguably even more vulnerable than her. You sort of curl up against her side. It seems to help, if only a little, and there’s a weird warmth in the realization that it does, like on that class trip back home, when Becky’d gotten scared telling ghost stories around the campfire and grabbed your hand- Wait.

You discard that thought as quickly as possible. As soon as the lights came back on, you would be SCP-105 again, and SCP-105 couldn’t afford to be thinking something like that.

Meri, you find out, has been in here for just about a year less than you. She tells you about the convent she grew up in, and about God, and how he is good, which you find a little hard to believe, and about the vague outline of her father, and how he is a murderer, she thinks, which is something you won’t put the pieces together as to until much later. You ask if he’s a murderer, why do you care where he is now? and you think about Adrian sliding you a photograph of a well-dressed man and a gun across a desk and you think about Adrian lying in a puddle of his own blood, a hole in his chest where he got run clean through with a scimitar, and you don’t even notice that Meri has gone oddly quiet.

You don’t tell her any of that. When she prods for you to tell her something, you talk about Phoenix. She ohhs and ahhs at your descriptions of the Desert Sky Mall, where your parents would take you and Tommy on weekends. You realize not only has she never been to a mall, she’s not even been to a convenience store, which, to be fair, you also haven’t in quite a while.

(You want to tell her, hey, maybe it’s not too late, maybe we can go together one day but it feels like a lie, even just thinking it.)

It’s the most normal you’ve felt in three years.

Chapter Text

For ten years, you pray.

There is nothing else for you to do. Morning, daytime, evening. You count the hours in between, you count the rosary beads during. You eat, and sleep, and every other Sunday, you confess.

You think of Iris like a castaway might of a ship she once saw passing on the horizon. Her hand on yours in the darkness, her head in the crook of your neck. It had been the first time someone touched you like this, the sisters back at the convent, in cautious awe of you, had kept their distance.

Two kindred spirits. Two cognate souls.

You build her an altar in your mind, a shameful, heretical altar to someone who you should never have met in the first place. You wish that you hadn’t, sometimes. You wish that she’d been a boy, instead.

Father Davis says that it’s alright to think about girls the way you should of boys, and you tell him that you have never met a boy in your life, and then you return to your cell to keep wrapping Iris, or rather the perverse golden calf you’ve chiseled of her, up in all of your fear and want and doubt. You hope you never see her again. You hope she burns this whole place down and sets you free.

Admittedly, it's kind of pathetic, but worship is all you’ve ever been taught how to do.

You treat your father much the same, except that you decide to hate him, just as often as you decide to love him. It’s an easy thing to do to someone you’ve never met. You find his letter, nay, his confession two years in, and puzzle over it for eight more. In lots of ways, it makes you feel the same way that Iris did, another infinitely brief, fragile thread of human connection that never should have woven its way into the inertia of your existence at all. Except that you had understood Iris, in that innate, very sad way that someone bearing many of the same scars did. You understood nothing about the man who had written you that note.

For God’s sake, how you wish someone would just talk to you.

Instead, you pray. For ten years, there's nothing else for you to do.

Chapter Text

You're in your temporary office at Site-17, the one with a shiny plaque next to the door, bearing your name and the words "Director on Project Resurrection", a title as hefty as it was nebulous. The thing had been custom-engraved, despite your protests. You were hardly there in the first place, you had insisted, this was excessive, but at the Foundation's largest site, appearances mattered a great deal.

A short, heavy-set man, bearing a different name and a wearier features than he did twenty-two years ago looks at you over the tip of his shoe, propped up against the corner of your desk. It's late, and you're just about ready to go home, but he has requested to meet with you, entirely off the record, for reasons he’s quite sure you’re aware of. (You are.)

“So”, he says, keeping his voice dangerously low, “You thought going through Adams to get this approved would keep me from finding out, huh?”

You look at him, unimpressed. “I don’t need to go through either of you to get anything ‘approved’, Clef. Recruitment for Alpha-Nine is left entirely up to my discretion, at least within parameters that SCP-166 fits well within. Tav-666’s role in this is a purely advisory one, and I thought Adams was the better choice to consult in this specific matter.”

Clef smiles coldly, clearly expecting this response. “Hah. ’Cause I’m, what? Biased?”

You are used to this routine, despite it having been a long time since you’ve had to placate Clef like this. It had been an almost monthly occurrence, back when you’d been in charge of research on SCP-166 yourself. Clef had been your distant superior then, more an idea than a flesh and blood man, this rather unusual context the only one you ever interacted with him in. It had been so strange, hearing Troy and Sandy speak in such hushed whispers of someone you knew to be so petulant.

These days, Clef and you were, for all intents and purposes, coworkers, him leading Alpha-9’s sister taskforce Tav-666. Clef made sure, though, that you understood he had never quite forgiven you for it, for how his soft underbelly had been exposed to you back then.

You look at him over the rim of your reading glasses, before taking them off, folding them, and tucking them into the front pocket of your purely ceremonial lab coat. You can feel yourself slip back into the cautious sort of patience you’re used to talking to him in, about this. This would get messy, no doubt, which was exactly why you had tried to avoid involving Clef until it became absolutely necessary.

“I understand”, you say, keeping your tone deliberately level, “That you possess a not inconsequential personal stake in this matter, and while I sympathize-” Clef scoffs audibly. “While I sympathize, Doctor Clef, I cannot afford to let it guide my hand in this matter.”

“C’mooon, Sophia”, Clef drawls, and you don’t tell him that it’s Director Light now, even though you are well within your right to, “What’s she even supposed to do? Grow some pretty flowers that’ll entice whoever you make her fight into takin’ it easy on her?”

“We are planning to deploy her in a raid on an outpost of a radical mekhanite sect. Through her mere presence, SCP-166 could cause catastrophic damage to both the structure, the weaponry and possibly the physiology of her opponents themselves, essentially guaranteeing Alpha-Nines success in this mission if the rest of the team manages to buy her enough time, which, I assure you, they will.”

“And she’ll be better at that than a fucking bomb?”

“Yes”, you say, an edge of genuine exasperation creeping into your voice, despite your best efforts, “A bomb would still require manual activation, as well as being just as capable of dealing damage to our own people as it is opposing agents. SCP-166 really is uniquely suited to this mission, more than anything else in our arsenal.”

“Our arsenal”, Clef mocks through a disbelieving shake of his head, “Weren’t you the one all concerned about the psychological ramifications of treating A9-agents like goddamn weaponry a week or so ago?”

“And I seem to remember you, in turn, being very outspoken about how you, how did you put it? Didn’t really give a shit?”, it comes out much more snide than you intended it to. You lean backwards in your chair, composing yourself. “I’m a commander, Doctor Clef, not a therapist. My concern for the anomalies’ mental states begins where it starts to interfere with the success of our mission, and I see no reason to be concerned here.” You hesitate, but realize that if Clef didn’t find this out from you, he would find it out another way. “SCP-166 has expressed her utmost gratitude to be considered for a spot on the project, and accordingly assured us of her willingness to cooperate with us. Her loyalty has been estimated to be far above the average for sapient humanoids, especially ones that have been in containment for as long as she has.”

Clef’s face falls.

“You bitch.”

You tense. “Doing you the courtesy of keeping this interview out of Foundation records does not mean I will tolerate this kind of-”

“You fucking bitch”, Clef hisses, undeterred, “You did this on purpose, didn’t you? She’s been locked up in there for twelve fucking years, of course she’s gonna agree to any olive branch of bullshit you point her way. This fucking proves it, you guys never get recruitment over with this quickly, you got the go-ahead from Adams and then you made damn sure I’d break her fucking heart if I came in and talked you out of it. You conniving, sanctimonious-”

“Doctor Clef. These wild accusations only prove your utter lack of objectivity in this matter. I am merely doing my job.”

“Doing your job.” Clef chuckles humorlessly. “You’re making a fucking mistake, is what you’re doing.”

“How?”, you say, voice flat to keep it from cracking. You want to go home and cry. Of all people, why did your co-director have to be this notoriously misogynist, chronically childish asshole. “How, pray tell, beyond failing to consider your blatant and utterly disproportionate favoritism regarding this one particular anomaly, am I making a mistake here? I used to work on SCP-166, in case you’ve forgotten, and I might’ve been able to solve her years ago if it hadn’t been for your constant meddling.”

You get kind of loud at the end there, but this is something of a sore spot for you. You were Dr. Sophia Light, more explained anomalies under your belt than any other research director at the Foundation, and you had lost years of your career to politicking with Clef about the particular case of SCP-166, him vetoing your every attempt to carry out tests with her. You tried not to get too frustrated, you sympathized, you did, but you knew that there was more to SCP-166 than it seemed, and you knew that Clef knew, too, which he inadvertently confirms to you again when you look back at him and for a split second there’s real, naked fear in his eyes.

He catches himself before you can quite process it, his face a grimace of something like scorn when he says: “ Solve her, huh?”

You sigh, genuinely feeling a bit sorry. “I didn’t mean- I have her best interest in mind, Clef, I do, and getting to the bottom of what’s wrong with her, putting her on Alpha-Nine, those are the best shots she has at ever getting out of that cell. You of all people should be in favor of her recruitment. She isn’t the little kid you dropped off at that convent twenty years ago, she wants to help, if she can.”

Clef tenses, head ducking between his shoulders like a cornered animal. That had been the wrong thing to say. “Don’t talk to me like you know me. You don’t know shit about this whole situation, Sophia.”

Clef is leaning across your desk and into your space now, propped up on both of his arms, a blatant attempt to be threatening, though you’re too familiar with his tantrums by now for it to really work. There’s something, however- You’re not very good at reading people, and Clef is very good at not being read, but you feel like this isn’t just the overblown protectiveness and misplaced guilt you’re used to, that glimpse you got you earlier was of a fear far more abject.

“Clef”, you say, “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

There’s a brief pause, then, in a parody of a game show host: “Bingo! Was hopin’ you’d catch on to that. People smarter than you trust me on shit like this.” He taps his forehead with a finger for emphasis, the place where a third eye was rumored to open up when no one was looking. You know what he means- Clef’s hunches proved true, notoriously so, but even still…

You laugh, short and hollow. “I’m not just going to trust you on something you have this much of a blatant personal stake in. You’re going to have to be a bit more clear. Why do you think I’m making a mistake, exactly?”

“I don’t have to do shit, Director Light”, Clef hisses, finally using your real title only to mock you with it. He is good at getting to you, you give him that. You straighten in your chair, trying not to let it show. You have a feeling it does, despite this,

“What’s wrong, Sophia?”, Clef draws circles around you like a shark in water, “Not used to pushback, are you? Y’know, they say being good at taking criticism is the mark of a good leader.”

“This is hardly criticism, Clef. This is you being petty.”

“Oh, and your refusal to budge on this is all devout professionalism, is it now?”

You want to point out the hypocrisy, Clef calling you emotional when he’d been the one to resort to honest-to-god name-calling earlier, but you realize in time that this is what he’s trying to do. To drag you down to his level, to get you to admit even just implicitly that yes, you were like him, in a way. That the matter of SCP-166 was tied up in a degree of personal investment for you too. You press your lips together, considering for a moment. You didn’t have to play his game.

“My reasons matter less than yours, in the end. I’m the one directing Alpha-9, you’re an advisor at most. This is my shot to call, and frankly, you’re doing a pretty shit job at arguing your case.”

Clef narrows his eyes.

“You’re going to regret this”, he says lowly, “When your precious little project eats shit and up top puts you to death for it the way they do to people who fuck up as thoroughly and spectacularly as you’re gonna, you’ll think, oh woe is me, if only I listened to good old Alto.” He clasps his hand together before his chest at that last part, voice high and mocking and, you note with a guilty sort of satisfaction, concealing building frustration.

You smile icily. You just want him out of your office at this point.

“We’ll see about that, won’t we?”

Chapter Text

The first thing Iris says to you after ten years is “What the fuck were you thinking?”

You’d been expecting something like it, to be fair. You’d be deluding yourself to think she’d clap and cheer for you in deciding something she’d so explicitly advised you against. You remembered what she told you, of course you did, have been replaying her words in your head ever since the way one was bound to, the first and only real truth they’d ever been told.

Don’t worry about the people that work here. They don’t have your best interest in mind.

Still, you’d been sort of hoping Iris would be relieved at least, maybe, to see you again. That she’d let on she’d missed it, that strange sense of kinship you’d both found in that dark room, had missed you, in general, even. You’ve been thinking about this moment for over a decade, so who could blame you for hoping it would turn out a bit less underwhelming. But things never did seem to go your way, did they?

“I wanted out of that room”, you say, plainly. If there was one thing Iris would understand, you suppose, it would be that.

“That room”, Iris says, sternly, “was the best shot you had at being safe. We’re being thrown to the wolves here, Meri, you’ve gotta realize that.”

She runs a nervous hand through her hair. It’s short now, chopped off at the root. She looks like a soldier, right out of one of the faded wartime photographs they’d had back at the convent. It had been sister Eleanor, old enough to have been alive when they would’ve been taken, who’d explained to you what that meant, war. You could have never imagined you’d end up at the front lines of one, one day.

(It looks good on Iris, handsome, but a small, dreadfully selfish part of you wishes she’d kept it long.)

“You’re here, too”, you say quietly. You don’t need to, really, the blatant hypocrisy of the situation is staring the both of you right in the face.

“It’s different, I’m not-”, she bites her lip. “I know what I’m getting into. I’d rather it be me than someone else.”

You look at her. She’s a good few inches shorter than you, now, awfully scrawny in her jumper and sweatpants. Hardly the stuff taskforce commanders were made out of. Finally standing before her the way you are now, you find her so much smaller than the version of her you’d imagined all these years, but also real, firm, speckled with small imperfections. There’s a dusting of freckles on the bridge of her nose. Because she’s been outside, you think, in the sun. On missions, and whatever else they were about so send you on, too.

(You’d rather it be you than her. You want to reach out, take her firm, real, imperfect hand and some of the weight off her shoulders along with it. You’d happily let yourself get thrown to the wolves, if it meant she got to be just a little more safe in turn.

You also want to be back in your cell. To hide out in the routine you’d built for yourself over the better part of your entire life, until this went away, until you stopped wanting it.

You feel like either would be awfully selfish of you, somehow.)

“I’m here”, you say instead, “Not much to be done about it now.”

She sighs, clearly averse to the idea still. It’s both noble and petty at once – you find yourself thinking it’s awfully romantic, her, the lone captain of a forlorn hope, who still refused to take anyone with her to the front lines. You understood why Alpha-9 had chosen her as their poster girl. It had worked on you.

“Shit”, she says, some resolve in her breaking, and all at once she’s herself, a twenty-something year old woman in a baggy prison uniform. Not a hero, not a martyr, not a symbol for much of anything except the fact the Foundation should really start furnishing a few more sizes of standard containment uniform. “I’m happy to see you too, okay? I-”, she clears her throat, eyes darting away from you nervously, “It’s good. To know you’re, still, well, y’know, around.”

You smile, looking away. There it was. I missed you too, you think, feeling guilty.

“I-”, Iris begins again, looking right into your eyes as she says it, making you feel sick to your stomach, until, after a long, thoughtful moment of staring at you, mouth hanging half-open in a way that’s somehow effortlessly charming to you, she shakes her head, closing her eyes against whatever it was she’d meant to say. “I actually came here to talk logistics with you. Someone must’ve thought putting me in charge of briefings was a good idea, but then again, it’s not like I’m doing a very good job of deterring you, either”. 

She downright mutters that last part, arms wrapped around herself in something like petulance. She really, really isn’t.

“Ah”, you say, brain finally catching up with the sudden shift in the weight of the conversation. It had felt an awful lot like Iris was going to say something else, there. You had wanted her to say something else. “No. I’m sorry”, and then, feeling bolder, “I hope you’ll let me be your friend, still.”

Iris snorts, curtly, sardonically. “No such thing as friends in this place. I told you that already, but-” she sighs, face resolutely turned away from you, “I don’t have the heart to be a jerk to you about this either. Being mean to you’s like kicking a puppy, Jesus Christ. Just know I think it’s a bad idea.”

You can’t help but giggle, warmth blooming in your chest at the dubious compliment. You’d missed her too. You really, really had.

“Well”, Iris says, and when she meets your eyes you can see she’s fighting to keep down a small smile, too, “Here I am, I suppose, canon fodder senior. I’ll give you the rundown, and then you can let me know if you have any further questions, yeah?”

In the next room over, Senior Special Agent Andrea Adams turns to her boss, the only other member on Tav-666, puzzled. “Huh. Sounds an awful lot like they know each other. Do we we know what’s up with that?”

“Eh. Think there was something about some containment breach or other in 2006 in a file somewhere.” The man in question is reclined in his office chair, feet up on the table and ratty hat tilted down and over his face, the perfect picture of disinterest, to anyone but himself, when, in actuality, finding SCP-166’s containment cell empty in the wake of said breach had been one of the single most terrifying moments of his life. “Wouldn’t worry about it too much. S’ prolly good for that ‘morale’ thing you keep jabbering on about, if anything.”

“’Morale’ thi-”, Adams repeats, then shakes her head, “Sir, c’mon. Tell me you’re seeing what I’m seeing.”

Clef tilts his hat out of his face, peering at the small monitor on the desk before them. “I’m seeing SCP-105 conduct the routine briefing interview we agreed to have her do this morning. I’m not sure what you’re on about, Adams.”

Adams raises an eyebrow at him, in that long-suffering way of hers that meant she thought he was being obtuse on purpose. “Iris is awkward, yeah, but I feel like I’m watching a high schooler trying to pretend she doesn’t actually care about the boy she likes,” her voice lowers into something downright conspiratorial, “I think our SCP-105 might have herself a little crush.”

In the ensuing few seconds, something quite unprecedented happens to Adam’s boss. She watches his face pull into a sort of grimace- though she isn’t quite able to divine the exact emotion expressed- and then, alarmingly quickly, he’s fully awake and leaning over the monitor next to her, peering down at the two girls in the adjacent room with grave skepticism.

“Agent”, he says, in a tone unusually stern for him, “Might I remind you that you work for the SCP Foundation, not”, he makes a dismissive gesture with his hand, “Speed dating for the super-powered. Be mature.”

Adams looks at the monitor, then back at him. “I wouldn’t have thought you of all people would be such a prude about this. It’s been a long few years in those cells for both of them, so it’d make perfect sense if-”

“Adams”, Clef says, something in his tone letting her know she really shouldn’t press the matter further. She does, anyway. 

“I had a feeling since that bar crawl last year. Poor kid, dating other women’s hard enough when you’re not locked up for life, no wonder she’s so-”

“No one is going to be dating anyone, Adams.”, Clef says sharply. “Your job is to make sure those two don’t go rogue, not to set them up with each other.”

Adams falters, feeling, despite herself, a little like a kid caught with one hand down the cookie jar. While it was true that maybe, just maybe, she was a tad more charmed by the two girls and the fumbling sort of earnesty between them, she really couldn’t see how her observation was anything but astute.

“I’m keeping track of the interpersonal dynamics within Alpha-9! Light’s been saying a healthy rapport between the members might prove crucial to-”

“I could not care less what Doctor Sophia Light has to say about any of this”, Clef hisses, articulating each word much more sharply than the languid drawl she's used to from him, “You’re here to put a bullet into both of their heads if it becomes necessary. Don’t forget that.” 

Adams stares at him, brow furrowed with something like realization. For just a moment Clef wonders if he’d gone too far, or worse, perhaps revealed something he hadn’t meant to. A cold dread had settled into him at his own words there, although he believed himself apt at hiding that sort of thing, these days.

“Sir”, Adams finally says, straightening indignantly in her chair, eyes darting back and forth accusingly between him and the screen, “You’re not actually gonna be fucking homophobic about this, are you?”

There’s a pause. Clef looks back at her, perhaps caught off guard, if that were at all possible for a man like him. Then, very suddenly, he bursts out laughing. 

“Sir”, Adams says loudly, “This isn’t funny. The Foundation has a strict anti-discrimination policy, and you’d really do well to to catch up, if you’re gonna-”

“Is this about the fucking ‘Bisexual Stripper Assasin’-thing, still?”, Clef wheezes, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye, “Jesus, Adams, I was trying to be funny. I’m sorry it didn’t land, okay, I am, really. I’m very happy for you and Cindy.”

She looks at him from beneath a skeptically raised eyebrow. Clef finds himself thinking, as he does with concerning frequency these days, that he really does like her quite a bit. 

“Look. Regardless of any bigoted beliefs I may or may not hold, will neither confirm nor deny, I was tryin’ to give you a genuine piece of advice here, okay? Cut me some slack.” He sighs, rubbing his eyes to escape the weight of Adams’ gaze on him. He quite hated this part of being her boss, the position of authority over the woman being something he otherwise delighted in. Still, Adams needed to be reeled in at times, and he'd promised take care of her, back when she’d first started working under him. “Those two might look like people, hell, they may well be people, but you’d do best not to consider that part. It’ll make what you may or may not have to do to ‘em one day a whole lot harder.”

Adams sighs, turning halfway away from him, arms firmly crossed over her chest. She disliked this part as much as he did, he could tell. It was, in fact, why he’d asked for her help with Tav-666 over anyone else’s. 

“Fine. Fine, okay, you’re right, it’s not like anything’s ever gonna come of it, anyway”, and then, a taunting edge creeping back into her voice, “Sorry for trying to lighten the mood a little on the murder contingency taskforce.”

“Appreciate the attempt”, Clef says, a wry smile creeping onto his own face.

“Tell you what”, says Adams, uncrossing her arms and getting up and out of her chair, “I’ll get us both a coffee, and when I get back, we’ll just pretend none of this happened, okay?”

“Getting me a coffee? Shit, you really feel bad about this, don’t you?”

“Don’t get used to it”, Adams quips and lets the door to the small seminar room click shut behind her, leaving Clef alone with an empty room.

A few seconds pass, during which Clef, slowly and deliberately, places his first his left, then his right foot back on the table, crossing them over each other, carefully reassembling the air of nonchalance he’d been so rudely startled out of. He folds his hands over his stomach, and finally tilts himself back in his chair to stare blankly at the ceiling. The monitor’s speaker chatters indistinctly as SCP-105 rattles off training schedules. A few seconds pass.

“Shit, Crow”, Clef mumbles to no one, which is very much the point, “Should’ve just made her a robot.”

Chapter Text

You’re making your way down one of Site-17s many overlong corridors, down to the modified containment quarters they’d set up for the duration of SCP-166’s training under you, here at Alpha-9s effective headquarters.Meri, you called her when the two of you were alone, the inherent silliness of the designation very blatant to you in the face of the ephemerality of your own – you had only only been SCP-073 for an infinitesimally small fraction of your life, though you quite preferred it to a number of other titles you had been branded with over the years.

In your arms you’re awkwardly carrying a carton holding an old computer monitor, salvaged from Site-17’s very own trash compactor, bright yellow garden gloves that go up to your elbows protecting the material from crumbling into dust beneath your fingers. You’re a curious man, always have been. One had to be, when they’d for lived as long as you had. Things would get dreadfully boring otherwise.

Today, once again, you have a hypothesis you’d like to test.

When you pick her up at her cell, Meri greets you, all chipper – too chipper, you think, she had this nervous sort of friendliness about her that made it so painfully aware just how unused she was to speaking with anyone at all. Still, if anything, this endeared her to you. You could tell she had a good heart, and for someone as desperately in need of friends as her, you were willing to be one.

(You'll never forget first being introduced to her. When she’d been told who you were and you’d watched the gears turn in her head as she recognized you from the scriptures she’d so devoted herself to, realized exactly what this meant, she had been surprised, of course, but then gone quiet for a long few seconds, and told you, very earnestly and seriously, that you must be in a lot of pain, and that she was so sorry that you were. You’d gotten this very strange feeling just then, one you couldn’t quite place, when you’d gotten so used to being able to place most anything about yourself and the world, and you had decided to take her into your heart, then and there.)

“What’s this for?”, Meri asks, in that too-quiet, polite tone of hers when you place the carton down on the concrete floor of the little courtyard you’ve taken her to, encircled by Foundation warehouses on each side. This was where you always came for what they called “training”, but what was really a form of crosstesting – the Foundation, as always, watching the both of you from a small watchtower built into the side of it. Out of sight to put the two of you at ease, Alpha-9 came with being extended a modicum of trust, or at least the pretense of it, but you could tell they were watching Meri in particular very keenly. You’d heard talk of planning to deploy her in the field soon. You, admittedly, were in it more to sate your own curiosity. And because you liked her, of course.

“This, my dear girl”, you say, opening up the flaps on top of the carton to let her peek inside, “Is fodder for a little test I’d like for us to do today. There’s something I’ve been dreadfully curious about, you see.”

You and Meri have been conducting little tests for just about a month now. Sophia had been the one to suggest it, figuring the two of you were similar enough – the both of you surrounded by an area of effect of sorts, except where you made everything whither, she made it thrive. This initial hypothesis soon proved itself quite moot however; The more you experimented, the better Meri seemed to understand herself, and let herself willingly tap into her so-designated anomaly, rather than trying to suppress it altogether, the more obvious it became that she actually exerted a degree of control over them far greater than anything that could be said about your curse. The bit about the area of effect, in fact, had been one of the first things you’d crossed out of her file – you’d found her to be able to mitigate it almost entirely, until it hardly affected even the things she touched, and also both broaden and significantly amplify it, until the whole world around her, in a radius much larger than the measly 15 meters her file specified, erupted into fresh, germinating life.

You’d been so charmed by it, her grinning shyly while she coaxed spring flowers out of a clump of earth in her hands. You agreed, on principle, with the Foundation’s methods – there certainly were things out there that the world needed protecting from, you’d seen yourself the harm someone like him could do, but it was in moments like these that you found yourself wondering if it wasn’t perhaps unjust, someone so young and thoroughly well-meaning as her coming to resent herself for something that was, in itself, really quite beautiful.

This line of thought was what had brought you here, to what you are meeting with her about. If you were entirely honest, it had been something you’d wondered about for a while, ever since Sophia had initially pitched the idea to you. It was hard not to, really, when as a precaution, whenever the two of you tested the extent of her powers, you’d always diligently stepped the respective distance away that meant you couldn’t possibly interfere.

Your curse was something divine, something absolute, something which had been an unimpeachable truth of your existence for about six thousand years now. Despite how remarkably fast her progress had been, it didn’t seem at all plausible that she would just be able to-

And yet, you couldn’t help wondering.

You have her stand exactly twenty meters away from you, just on the edge of that invisible circle of decay at whose center you stood at all times, monitor held closely against your chest with now bare metal hands.

“Alright then”, you say, more to yourself than her, and then, shouting across the courtyard: “I’d like for you to destroy the device I’m holding.”

Meri stares at you silently for a second, her brow furrowed in confusion. Then, something like understanding dawns on her face, her eyes flicking to the metal joints of your elbows, then back at your face.

“Are you sure? I wouldn’t wanna break, um, anything else.”

“I’d be very impressed if you did, Meri. But don’t worry”, you smile affably, gesturing down to your torso with your chin, “The important bits are all flesh and blood. Still”, your tone gets less jovial, “I hardly think this counts as harming me, but please do be careful. If you notice any pain, or anything odd at all, stop immediately.”

She nods silently, failing, even from this distance, to conceal her eagerness. She liked these little training sessions of yours as much as you did, you could tell, getting bolder with every little revelation she came to about herself. It was really so charming, so entirely unbefitting of a place like this one. It reminded you of older, gentler times, long before structures like the Foundation, back when magic and all things like it had been allowed to exist out in the open.

You give a signal up towards the watchtower, then nod at Meri to begin.

She closes her eyes in concentration. Slowly, deliberately, she stretches out both arms, as if attempting to touch something with just the tips of her fingers, as if reaching out this way helped her reach out her influence, too, prodding, now, tentatively at the edge of yours. Not that you can feel it – you see it, rather, thick strands of flowering moss that blooms radially out from where she stands on the concrete, until it stops, neatly at the edge the 20 meter-radius surrounding you. That was another difference between you and her, that you couldn’t feel anything. Your curse wasn’t a part of you, intrinsically, rather just something that clung to your person. You loathed to feel envious, not after what envy had made you do, but you wondered, sometimes, what it was like, to shape the world beneath your fingertips because you wanted to, not because you couldn’t help it. But then again, all you did was kill things. You weren’t exactly keen to find out what that felt like.

From across the courtyard, you hear Meri make a little noise of frustration, and then, very slowly, you see the concrete begin to crack, inwards from the invisible border you cut into the moss. You watch, astonished, as the cracks widen, quicker and quicker, now unmistakably all making their way towards you, and when you finally perk up out of your reverie, you barely have time to begin saying something like careful, now, when, like a dam breaking, the ground splits open, vines and thick roots shooting out and towards you and then you’re somewhere else entirely, Meri’s surprised shout impossibly far away.

You are very small, and very mortal, and hot wind is blowing sand into your eyes as you hold onto your father’s hand for dear life. And Able (oh, God, Able) is pressed up against you, underneath a thick woolen cloak that’s wrapped loosely around you both, smaller and shorter than you, the way he always used to be but hasn’t been in so long, and you watch his step for him, to steady him if he falls, the way an older brother is supposed to.

He wants to show you something, your father. He’s decided, by some arbitrary metric, that you and your brother are finally big enough, old enough, to know where he, and by extension you had come from. To know of his great sin, which will so very soon, at least in heinousness, become thoroughly dwarfed by your own.

“There”, your father says, stopping the three of you on the crest of a dune. His scarf billows behind him in the wind. “There, my loves, look. Out on the horizon.”

And it’s then, squinting against the white desert sun and the sand and the wind, that you see it too.

From this distance, the gate is little more than a looming shape against the sky, hardly visible at all if you didn’t know what you were looking for. Still, its immense in its proportions, the four-winged, flaming figure kneeling before it (that will so much later have been cataloged and classified, like so many things that were once holy) barely a gleaming speck in its shadow.

Still, even from so far away, you can feel it. It sprouts, thrives, decays, the sheer sensation of it being alive so intense it brings tears to your eyes. You can hear Able gasp beside you, holding onto the hem of your tunic, and you take his his hand and squeeze it, trying to ground him as best as you can against the enormity of just so impossibly small you both were in the face of what lay before you. How something like this could exist out here, in the desert, separated by several days and nights of travel from all other life, you couldn’t begin to comprehend.

“It’s alright”, your father says. His voice sounds hoarse, and without looking up at his face you know he must be crying too. He’s never cried in front of you before. “Feel it, children. Know that this is what we lost.”

He does not tell you its name, your father (and he won’t have told you by the time you leave to be exiled). He only tells you it used to bigger, That once there wasn’t a wasteland around it at all, that what is now locked behind the gates used to be everything there was, or at least everything he knew of – and that he suspected, in his more bitter and self-absorbed moments, that this last remnant of it had only been kept around to taunt him and your mother, to remind them, and everyone who was to come, of just what they’d squandered.

This idea is quite incomprehensible to you, of it being any more than it already is, when it’s already so very much. (Even now, millennia later, having seen and survived so much else, still being the most thoroughly sacred thing you’ve ever interacted with.) You’re not sure, yourself, how it is that in centuries of scripture to come humanity will know, as if intrinsically, by what name to call it. Perhaps the idea of it somehow existed altogether separate from people, even when but a speck of the real thing remained:

Eden.

You gasp sharply, blinking mist from your eyes. When you raise a trembling hand to your face to wipe at it, you notice vines wrapped around your arm, and moss between the metal joints of your fingers.

There is moss between the metal joints of your fingers.

Dimly, through the ringing in your ears, you’re aware of Meri calling out to you from across the courtyard, Cain, sir, are you alright?, but all you can do is laugh, with relief and terror and childlike elation as you realize what exactly all of this means.

Excerpt from SCP-073’s file, revised 06/12/16:

SCP-073's presence is inimical to any and all life grown in soil, causing death to any such life within a twenty (20) meter radius. Any land SCP-073 has walked on (and any within the twenty [20] meter radius) becomes barren as all anaerobic bacteria dies, rendering the soil incapable of supporting life until new bacteria are introduced. Anything that is derived from soil-grown life, such as wood and paper, immediately rots and disintegrates upon touch of SCP-073. Further affected derivatives include anything hydroponically grown. As of cross-test T-98372-073/166, subject no longer exhibits any anomalous effect on plant life or plant-derived material. Due to retaining its inability to be harmed, and possibly (as is yet unable to be determined) retaining its supposed immortality, it can’t be said that a full neutralization has been achieved, though a reclassification from Euclid to Safe is pending. See related documentation for further details.

“She could’ve gotten hurt, you know”, Iris tells you through a mouthful of mashed potatoes the week after, the two of you sit ting together in one of Site-17 s several canteens . Despite the fact of both of your SCP designations, Alpha-9 had granted you both the status of being, effectively, employees, which came bearing certain benefits, getting to take your meals in good company being one of them .

You were particularly excited, given the recent change in your condition, to sample every last vegetable they offered , mushy and too salty as they were. Little white ceramic bowls of various salads and other greens clutter the plastic tray in front of you.

It had been a good while since you’d gotten to meet with Iris like this, Alpha-9 and all its associated responsibilities keeping the both of you on your toes, her more than you . There was a certain acrimony with which she was throwing herself at the project, which you weren’t sure if it was spite, or anger, or unease, but at any rate, you worried about her.

Much like Meri, you considered her a ward of sorts, though she had been that for far longer, ever since they’d put her, then a fourteen-year-old, on that dreadful taskforce with your brother. She’d grown much over the last nine years, but she’d hardly aged. Had kept her childish petulance, but her stubborn concern for others, too. She had a strong head, and you admired that about her, having yourself grown dreadfully pliable over the years.

“No, she could not ”, you say, smiling serenely. There was a certain weightlessness that one was overcome with when they'd been given a sign the way you had , “Don't worry. Granted, I didn't know this, not then, but your friend was never in any real danger. There is something she has yet to do. ”

“What?”, Iris says, flatly, “Cain, she has no fucking clue what she’s getting herself into, of course she’s in danger. You of all people should know, you were there for what happened to Omega-7.”

“I'm not talking about Alpha-9”, you say, well aware of how cryptic you're being. To think that I could be forgiven after all, you think, staring down into your three bean salad, To think there may be salvation left in the world for us all. Still, this wasn’t your matter to intervene in. You hadn’t yet told Sophia about your discovery, and you weren't planning to do so anytime soon. This was humanities trial to undergo, and you weren’t considered human, not by the Foundation, not by yourself. You’d learned the hard way what tampering with divinity got you, and you weren’t about to squander the absolution you’d just been granted.

“Have some faith, Iris”, is what you settle on, “She’s a lot stronger than you think.”

Iris huffs, shaking her head, and returns to her own meal. The double meaning of the word faith is, of course, lost on her.

Chapter Text

On Thursday, the 28th of June 2016, Clef is late to work. 

This isn’t anything unusual by any means, of course. Being late was something he took pleasure, even pride in doing, expertly timing his arrival so he’d always make whoever he was meeting with waste just enough time waiting to really get on their nerves. 

On June 28th, however, he’s not meeting with anyone, so he’s settled for coming in a comfortable forty-something minutes later than he’s supposed, disposable cup of drip coffee in one, paper bag from the on-site cafeteria in the other hand. Of the three desks in the office, only one is occupied; Agent Aleksander Foxx perking up from his computer when he hears the door slam open.

“Good morning, sir”, he greets, polite as ever.

Clef just grunts in return, plopping into his swivel chair (creaky leather and imposingly large, far too much so for a man as short as himself, one of the first purchased he’d spent some of Lambda-2s budget on), sipping at his paper cup as he looks through a small stack of files and envelopes left on his desk for him since last night. The office is quiet, and Clef is a lot more acutely aware of the absence of some snarky greeting, some backhanded comment about his bad mood or something, than he’d really like to be.

“Adams slacking off or something?”, he asks Foxx, nodding towards the empty office chair next to him, “I expect the two of you to be here before me, you know.”

“Ah, no”, Foxx says, looking back up from his screen, “Didn’t you see the notice, sir? She’s accompanying Alpha-9 on the raid today.”

Clef pauses his leafing through the letters, furrowing his brow. Some strange, anticipatory feeling of dread settles in his stomach,

“What do you mean?”, he says, “There isn’t any raid Alpha-9 is meant to be doing today.”

“Of course there is, sir.” Clef hears a very slight edge of annoyance creep into Foxx’s voice. Under any other circumstances, he’d be proud of himself, except that he isn’t playing up his own lack of professionalism. He genuinely has no idea what Foxx is talking about.  “Doctor Light sent out the notice for it to Adams and I the week prior, so I assume she must’ve discussed it with you. They’re going to deploy SCP-166 in the field for the first time to test the extent of her capabilities, and, per protocol, they wanted someone from Lambda-2 to accompany them. Adams was chosen since we anticipated my implants might react poorly to her anomaly.”

Clef stares at him uncomprehendingly for a moment, then curses sharply, jumping out of his chair and very nearly knocking his coffee over in the process.

“I’m going to fucking kill Sophia Light”, he mutters, more to himself than to Foxx, running a hand up and under his hat to tug at what’s left of his hair. “Agent. We need to stop that fucking mission from taking place. Where’s Light?”

Foxx shifts in his chair, uncomfortable. There’s an urgency in Clef’s tone that feels alien, coming from his boss. “You just said you were going to kill her”, he says, unhelpfully. 

“That’s not- Listen, Foxx”, Clef makes his way over to his desk, turning his monitor to the side so the Agent has no choice but to look at him, “I know I seem like I don’t give a shit, but I would not have missed a notice about sending 166 out into the field, okay? This is something she must’ve deliberately hidden from me, which is a fucking shame because I would have told her how bad of a fucking idea it was. Light is lucky if the Foundation doesn’t kill her, if she keeps pulling stunts like that.”

He sounds almost frantic, now. Foxx thinks he sees his hand shake where it’s propped up on the monitor, but he can’t quite tell whether it’s with rage. “Sir-”, he tries, feebly.

“Foxx”, Clef says, empathically. There’s a gravity to his tone that chills Foxx to the bone. Somewhere in the back of his mind he had been expecting, of course, that given the degree of responsibility he was granted within the Foundation, Clef was ultimately capable of taking things seriously, should it become necessary, but seeing it in practice did make him feel horribly out of his depth.

“Sir”, he finally manages, “What the fuck is going on?”

“Okey-dokey”, Agent Andrea Adams says, tightening the last few straps on the back of your right wrist guard, “That should be everything, for real this time. Sorry for making you go over this what, thrice? I’d just rather be safe than sorry, you know, since it’s your first mission and all.”

You nod, admittedly somewhat relieved. You were pretty sure you’d retained everything by the second time, at least, but you still appreciated the gesture.“I don’t mind at all, Agent Adams. Thank you very much for the help and all.”

“It’s my job, kid, and please, call me Andrea. What, I don’t look that old, do I?”, Adams quips, casting a sly glance back into the squad car behind her, from where Iris is giving her a miffed look, “Geez, Iris, will you lighten up a bit? It’s not everyday someone has her first mission.”

“Can you stop saying it like it’s a fucking occasion or something?”, Iris says, flatly, “Like, wow, you finally get to throw yourself into the Foundation meat grinder alongside the rest of us. Congrats, I guess.”

“Y’hear that, Meri?”, Adams says, turning back towards you, “She said congrats. Do you feel special yet?”

You can’t help but giggle at the way Iris rolls her eyes, loosening the knot of nerves in your stomach just a little. Adams watches you with no small degree of smugness, when suddenly she winces, squeezing her eyes shut.

“You alright?”, Iris asks, concern bleeding into her voice despite her gruff tone.

“Yeah, yeah, m’fine”, Adams replies through a shake of her head, massaging her temples with two fingers, “Pickaxe headache. Must’ve pulled something. It’s gone already.”

“That’s karma for you”, Iris says, turning back to the little stack of Polaroid photographs she’s taping up onto the inside of the car trunk like a makeshift security system. She pauses for a second, presumably watching a few of the MTF members that would be accompanying you inside a few minutes finish putting on their own Gear, before turning back around towards the two of you, unzipping the big blue case hanging at her side.

“Meri”, she says, pulling out her camera and training it on you, “Could you look over here for a second? I still need a picture of you.”

You startle, a veritable deer in the headlights, but catch yourself, giving her as earnest of a smile as you can (not that it really mattered, since, from how you understood Iris’ abilities, the picture was going to be looking different for her, anyway). Iris adjusts a small dial on the top of her camera, then there’s a shuttering sound, and then a little whirring noise as the camera prints out the photo. Iris carefully peels off the film covering it, and places it face down on the seat next to her.

“This’ll need a sec to develop.” She smiles wryly, “Make it back in one piece and I’ll show you the finished picture.“

You open your mouth, wanting to reply something, but only let out a startled yelp when Adams, amicably but quite forcefully, claps you on the back.

“We’ve got you in our sights now”, she says, “Anything go wrong, anything at all, you just give us a sign and Iris and I will be right there, okay? The point of this is just to test how far you can get on your own, so there’s no shame in throwing in the towel if you need to.”

“Yes”, you say, patiently, “I know.”

“Gosh, sorry, kid.” Adams scratches the back of her head.“I don’t mean to baby really you, really. I’m sure you’ll manage fine on your own.”

“Well, here’s hoping.” You chuckle, in a vain attempt to loosen the knot in your stomach back up. “Still, though, that’s- I’m glad to know that. You’re very kind, Miss- Andrea.”

“Aw, shucks.” The older woman grins.”It’s no trouble, really. This is a regular old Tuesday for Iris here and I, you’re not gonna end up in any real danger with us around.” She throws an arm over the shorter woman’s shoulders at that, Iris, for her part, entirely stone-faced as she is jostled.

“Y’know what, girls”, Adams says, jumping down from where she’s sitting in the open trunk of the squad car, “I’ve got some last check-ups to run. I’ll leave the two of you to it. Say your goodbyes, and good lucks, and whatever else you wanna say-”, from the corner of your eye, you think you see her wink at Iris, “Break a leg, Meri! See you on the other side!”

“Yes! You too”, you reply, but you doubt Adams registers it, already making her way around the truck and towards the quickly gathering MTF agents.

“See you on the other side”, Iris mutters, playing with the controls of her camera, “Jesus, she gets cornier every day.”

“I like her”, you say, “I think it’s sweet, how the two of you are so close.”

“We’re not close.” Iris finally shuts the camera off, moving to tuck it back into its case, “Just, I don’t know, used to each other, I guess. She’s just really intent on, like, team spirit or whatever, and I can’t exactly get her out of my hair.”

“Of course”, you say, smiling very slightly, “You don’t need any friends. How foolish of me.”

“Wait”, says Iris, “Hold on. Are you making fun of me?”

“I- Yes? I’m sorry, did I go too far?”

“No, no, it’s fine”, Iris waves her hands in front of her face, looking, if you had to put a word to it, almost flustered. “I just hadn’t, uh, taken you as the type. S’not like anyone else around here respects me anyway, so go ahead if you want to, I guess.”

“I respect you”, you say, not meeting her eyes, “You’re the bravest person I know.”

“Okay”, says Iris, with the surprised reluctance of someone thrown headlong into a conversation they didn’t want to have, “Thanks. Whatever.”

There’s a pregnant pause. Finally, Iris sighs.

“Seriously, though. Do be careful. I, like, trust you, but Adams and I can only be there so fast. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Of course not-”, you assure her, but before you can say anything else, Iris has lurched forward, wrapped her arms around your shoulders and pulled you into a hug.

For a second or two you’re too stunned to react, but then, very carefully, as if trying not to disrupt some delicate equilibrium, you bring your arms up behind her to cradle her shoulders in your hands. She’s soft underneath your fingers, not nearly as bony as she looks, and there’s a firmness to her, the texture of her army jacket, the tickle of short hairs on the nape of her neck where it’s pressed against your cheeks, the way her own face is buried into your shoulder. A shudder goes up your back, from the base of your spine up to your scalp, and you can barely keep your body from curling in on itself in some effort to protect you from the sensation. Iris’ grip on you is tight, surprisingly so. You haven’t been this close to anyone in- well, ever, as far as you can remember.

“Um”, you say, uselessly.

“Sorry, I’m sorry”, Iris lets you go, and it takes every ounce of restraint within you not to chase after her, to gather her right back up into your arms. Some incoherent, hopelessly romantic part of you finds itself thinking that the two of you had slotted together so neatly. “That was- I should’ve asked before, probably, ha, but you know me, I’m not- I just-”, she wipes at her face with a hand, “I really wanted to do that. In case anything goes wrong, after all.”

“It’s alright”, you whisper, sounding almost reverent to your own ears. There’s a lump of something in your throat, making you feel like you want to cry. “I’m glad you did.”

You think about kissing Iris, then, selfish as it may be. For a moment, you’re sure Iris would let you too, despite the terrible timing, despite the very audacity of the act in the face of everything else that was true about the two of you. You don’t, in the end, of course not. Just dig your fingernails into the palms of your hands and give her as comforting a smile as you can.

“Be safe”, Iris says, not looking at you, “Won’t you?”

“Of course”, you say. You feel entirely helpless, small and awkward, unsure what to do in the face of the enormity of feeling inside of you. You take one of her hands in yours, giving it a small squeeze. For the moment, it’s all you can do. “You too.”

Professor Kain Pathos Crow is rolled onto his back, staring up at the undercarriage some great mechanical contraption, piloting a remote controlled robot arm in tightening a few last screws. This machine was one of his leisure projects, his work on it purely recreational – hardly on par with the type of work he’d done for the Foundation in the past, practically pioneering the entire field of anomalous engineering all by himself. This machine, of course, was entirely non-anomalous. The Foundation was more strict about that sort of thing, these days. Even just getting access to a particular anomaly was a hassle all of its own, with him having to procure a formal recommendation from the research team assigned to the object in question, and then having to spend weeks or even months trying to find someone with sufficient authority to sign the necessary forms. And even then, he was denied it more often than not. He’d gotten old, scatterbrained, which was really just a kinder way of saying senile, the only reason he hadn’t retired yet being that he couldn’t really, having very little left in life outside of building robots. And, really, what else was he supposed to do? Join a chess club? Grow a garden? He was a goddamn talking golden retriever.

Crow sighs, moving to steer the little remote-controlled creeper he’s laying on a little to the right, when he hears someone burst into his workshop.

“Professor?”, Researcher Chelsea Elliot asks, “Where are you?”

“Right here, Chelsea”, he shouts back, absentmindedly, somewhat unhappy about being distracted from his work when he was so close to being done anyway, “Can it wait?”

“I don’t think so.” Chelsea’s crouches down next to the machine, peering at him through the gap between undercarriage and floor. She’s holding their workshop phone, covering the speaker with one hand, “I’ve got Doctor Clef on the line for you here. Seems pretty urgent, he, um, called me some pretty nasty things when I told him you were busy.”

“Sorry about that, Chelsea”, Crow sighs, very within the habit of making excuses for Clef much to his own chagrin, “I better talk to him, then, don’t I?”

He presses a small button on the console next to him, and the creeper starts pulling him out. Once he’s emerged, he gives a short nod to Chelsea, who very cautiously, as if releasing a spider from a cup, lifts her hand from the speaker.

“What fucking part of the word urgent do you not understand, you incompetent little twat, you better put me through to Kain right fucking now or the next time I drop by that workshop I swear I will-”

“Alto”, Crow says, firmly, quite miffed at his sensitive dog ears being subjected to such an onslaught, “Calm down. I’m quite fond of my assistant, and I will not tolerate you talking to my assistant that way.”

“Kain”, Clef says, the sheer relief in his voice utterly disquieting to someone who’s known him as long as Crow has, “Kain thank fuck, I need to talk to you.”

“...Did something happen?”, Crow asks, tentatively.

“Not yet”, Clef says, grimly, “But if we don’t do something right fucking now, it might. I need your help.”

“Right”, says Crow, then, more firmly: “Right. What do you need?”

“Your backing, more than anything else. Doctor Sophia Light is about to make the biggest fucking mistake of her career yet, and l'll need some help convincing her to let me take over.”

Andrea Adams plops back down into the trunk of the squad car with a contented sigh.

“Y’know Iris”, she says, grinning slyly at the woman in question, currently busying herself with putting away equipment, “Our dear friend SCP-166 seemed awfully jittery when I saw her off just now. A veritable spring in her step, one might say.”

“Okay”, Iris simply replies, dryly.

“...Anything happen between the two of you? Anything I should know about, in an official or unofficial capacity?”

“Can you stop doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“Pretending like we’re friends, Adams. Like it fucking matters how I feel, alright? About you, or about-”, she makes a vague gesture with both hands, “Anyone. Anyone else. Nothing is ever fucking coming of it, okay, it won’t fucking matter how I feel when you, or I, or her die horribly when they finally decide to throw us at some shit that’s too big for us.”

There’s a pause. Adams chews on her lip, feeling kind of stupid.

“I mean, I don’t think so?”, she finally tries, “Everyone feels things, Iris. There’s no use pretending you don’t.”

Iris lets out a laugh, short and bitter. “Don’t get fucking sappy with me now. I know I’m not a person to you people, I know, okay? You’re just being fucking cruel by treating me like one.”

Not to me, Adams wants to say, all the while thinking you’d do best not to consider that part, and it’ll make what you’ll have to do one day a whole lot harder.

“You have a point”, she concedes, looking away, “But, Iris, I didn’t mean to- I like you, genuinely. I don’t want to be all curt and professional with you. I’m-”, she laughs, halfheartedly, “I’ll try my best if you ask me to, but, fair warning, I’m pretty bad at it.”

“I know”, Iris says, “I didn’t think- I mean I suppose I’d- I’d want to be your friend too, if things were different. I know you’re trying to be nice. It just- it makes it hurt more. Pretending like this is something we’re allowed to have in the first place.”

“Well, who knows?”, shifting back into some mock imitation of cheerful, “Maybe everything will work out fine, and we’ll save the world, or something, and the Foundation awards us all a bunch of medals and then leaves us alone forever.”

“Sure”, Iris says, a bitter sort of half-smile on her face, “And then me and the former SCP-166 will have a fucking summer wedding or something.”

“...She does really like you, you know. It’s, um. Adorably obvious.”

“I know.” Iris runs a hand over her face, digging her fingers into her cheek. “I really wish she didn’t.”

“...I won’t bring it up anymore, yeah?” Adams concedes. Iris gives her a relieved nod

The agent sighs, and, trying to shift back into some sense of normalcy, crosses both of her arms behind her head and lets herself fall backwards onto the floor, lightly rocking the whole truck with her, “Guess we’ll have to find something else to talk about, then. It’s gonna be a long few hours, otherwise.”

“For you”, Iris says, gesturing to the wall of photographs, “I have a job to do, remember? Shit, that reminds me, actually-”

She takes the face down Polaroid from the seat next to her, already reaching for a bit of tape to stick it to the wall with, when a glance at it gives her pause.

“Adams”, she says, turning the small square of paper to face the agent, “This look odd to you?”

Adams, upside down from laying on her back, glances at the photograph, narrows her eyes at it, and then quickly pulls herself up, shuffling closer to Iris.

The picture looks mostly normal, the gray boggy heath in the background, Meri’s custom leather riot gear, her tight braids, Adams’ own elbow peeking into frame - except for her face, which is obscured by what looks to her layman’s eye like the head of a North American grizzly bear. It looks utterly silly, like a sticker, or a poorly done computer manipulation, neither of which is, of course, possible, because she watched Iris take the picture literal minutes prior.

“Yeah, actually, that’s- that is odd.”

Iris squints down at the picture. “I mean, it works and all, that’s not the issue. I can see her move, the Agent next to her looks normal, too, it’s just that her head is, well-”

Iris crosses her arms over her chest. She’s seen this before, this particular quirk all too familiar to her, especially given how oddly specific it was. She thinks back to SCP-166s file, skimmed alongside Foxx over coffee and pastries right after she’d first been added to Alpha-9, Clef suspiciously absent, as he tended to be when it came to matters concerning SCP-166. Doctor Light taking her aside and asking her in confidence not to bring Clef’s attention to the very mission they were on right now, if it could be helped. She had been so flattered then, too – Light trusting her with something like this over her boss, but now-

Several things start falling into place in her head. She needs to talk to Clef when she gets back, but for now, there wasn’t much to be done about it.

“Nothing worth calling off the mission over, then”, she says, “Still, interesting. That warrants looking into.”

EXPLORATION AUDIO LOG, ALPHA-9-093, 06/28/2016:

Mission Parameters: Infiltrate previously identified outpost of GOI-0959 through use of SCP-166’s anomalous effect, capture or neutralize any entities encountered within.

Personnel: Mobile Task Force Beta-5 “Babysitters”, SCP-166 (MTF Alpha-9 “Last Hope”)

Additional Information: Since the activation of SCP-166’s anomalous effect also prevent any electronic form of telecommunication, the anomaly of fellow Alpha-9 member SCP-105 will be utilized to supervise the proceeding agents, and deploy reinforcements if deemed necessary. She, alongside Senior Special Agent Andrea S. Adams (Lambda-2 "NO NAME ENTERED") will remain on standby and in contact with supervising Foundation personnel at the nearest Foundation checkpoint.

[LOG BEGINS]

00:00:03 Light: Test, test? Can you hear me, Agent Adams?

00:00:07 Adams: I can, Doctor. Everything seems to be working fine on our end. You?

00:00:12 Light: I can hear you, Agent. Is everybody in position?

00:00:16 SCP-105: Have been for a bit now.

00:00:19 Adams: Everyone’s ready, ma’am. We’re just waiting for your go-ahead.

00:00:24 Light: Thank you, Adams. You have it. Please proceed.

00:00:29 Adams: You heard her, Iris.

A shuffling sound is heard as SCP-105 reaches into one of the photographs to give a signal to the squad commander.

00:00:52 SCP-105: Alright, they’re going in. (More quietly, as if to herself:) They’re off.

“Doctor Sophia Light.” Clef practically kicks down the door to Light’s office on his way in. “You’re about to be out of a fucking job. What the fuck did I-”

He stops mid-sentence. The woman in question is nowhere to be seen. Instead, a wispy little man in a sweater vest stares back at him from behind her desk, a large golden retriever curled up by his feet.

“Doctor Light’s, uh, not in today”, he says, tentatively, “...Can I take a message?”

"Sure you can”, Clef glances down at the name tag affixed to the front of his lab coat, “Researcher Charles Vaux. Tell her if I’m not able to get in contact her in the next sixty seconds, I’m about to bash someone’s fucking head in, and buddy, it’s not looking good for you.”

“Right”, Vaux says, unsure of what to reply instead directing his attention at Agent Foxx, shuffling into the office behind his superior and looking, if anything, a bit sheepish “Could you tell me what’s going on? I’ll see what I can do.”

Foxx makes a helpless gesture back towards Clef, who’s dug a grimy, cracked phone out of the pocket of his lab coat, and is now wordlessly holding it out to him. He takes it, very gingerly raising it up to his ear.

“Yes?”, he says into the silent phone line.

“Sophia? Is that you?”, asks a voice that Vaux recognizes from hours upon hours of prerecorded anomalous science lectures back when he’d been a Level 2. There was something quite distinctive about the way a dog’s maw articulated human speech, “It’s Kain. We need to talk.”

Sophia Light sits, in actuality, some five thousand miles away, in a small Foundation comms office at a small Site in Russia. She’s close, she’s so close, she’s almost won. She will not admit to thinking of it like this, of course, not under threat of death, but she is about to make Alto fucking Clef eat his words.

She taps a ballpoint pen against the surface of the desk in front of her, nervous little tock tock tocks, listening intently to the tense silence on the other side of the line, when-

00:03:19 SCP-105: Wait, something’s wrong.

00:03:21 Adams: Huh?

00:03:22 SCP-105: It’s not working. Adams, it’s not working anymore.

00:03:26 Light : What do you mean? What’s not working?

00:03:30 SCP-105: Meri- SCP-166, I mean. She was fine until just now, but she’s just- stopped doing anything. Shit, Andrea, what’s going on?

00:03:40 Light: Can you see SCP-166? Is she conscious?

00:03:44 SCP-105: She’s fine, Doctor Light, her- her thing, her ability, it’s just shut off, it looks like. She seems just as confused by the whole thing as we are. Do you know what could be causing this?

00:03:57 Light: …I have no idea, truthfully, SCP-166’s anomaly has proven remarkably consistent up until now- But, either way, we’re prepared for this. This is exactly why we’ve kept the two of you on standby. It’s going to be alright, Iris, we have the situation under control.

(SCP-105 sighs, anxiously)

00:04:18 Adams: Light? Just spitballing here, but do you think they might be using an SRA?

00:04:24 Light: …That doesn’t sound entirely unlikely from what we’ve heard, Adams. SCP-166’s anomalous effect is, when it comes down to it, a form of reality bending, we’ve used SRAs when transporting her before- Still, it’s strange. Reality Anchors are Foundation technology, their mechanical makeup is highy classified-

00:04:46 Adams: I mean, Agent Foxx has told me they can go for quite a lot on the black market. SRAs go missing all the time, it’d be naive to assume we’re the only ones who have them.

00:04:55 SCP-105: Doctor Light-

00:04:57 Light: Still, an attack like this isn’t exactly commonplace- It’s an odd thing to splurge on for this small of an organization, unless they were somehow expecting to have to fend off a reality bender- But, no matter. There’s no time to lose. You hereby have my formal permission to deploy backup.

00:05:16 SCP-105: Doctor Light?

00:05:17 Light: Yes?

00:05:18 SCP-105: That’s- not gonna be enough. You’ve equipped these guys with crossbows and riot shields made from wood, they’re gonna get fucking slaughtered in there. You need me and Adams. If Adams is right about the SRA, we should be able to use both her suit and my camera just fine.

00:05:33 Light: Are you certain, Iris? The easiest way to turn the tide back in our favor would be to locate the hypothetical reality anchor and destroy it, allowing SCP-166 uninhibited use of her anomaly, breaking your equipment and leaving you vulnerable to-

00:05:48 SCP-105: God, will you just fucking trust me on this? I’m the one who can see them, and it’s looking bad, okay? We’ve been outplayed, Light, admit it. The best we can do now is damage control.

00:06:02 Light: (A long, tense pause, then a sigh) Understood. Adams?

00:06:04 Adams: Ma’am?

00:06:05 Light: Permission granted. Get in there as fast as you can. Just, stay in contact, alright?

Light exhales, slouching into her chair, rubbing at her temples. This was not a risk she was all too keen to take, there was always a sort of background thrum of anxiety whenever she was forced to deploy 105 for anything that wasn’t simple reconnaissance. But then again, what use was she as Alpha-9s flagship agent when she never really hit the field, even if her powers didn’t really suit it. And she most certainly was not going to let anything happen to SCP-166. Because Clef would be heartbroken, of course, and worse yet, he’d be in the right, and she was not about to feel sorry for him. Alto Clef would not have any sort of emotional leverage over her.

Light blinks, startled at her own train of thought. It was her job to keep her agents safe, regardless of Clef’s, or anyone’s feelings on the matter. Which was what she was doing. Everything was going according to plan. It would be fine. It would be fine.

A small, green window pops up on her monitor, startling her out of her thoughts.

Call incoming: Charles Vaux

This was… odd, to say the least. She’d told Vaux repeatedly not to contact her today, except, of course, should there be an acute emergency, and she’d never known her assistant to go against her wishes. She chews on her lower lip, thinking for a second, before accepting the call.

“Yes?”, she says, “Vaux, what is it?”

“Light”, thunders Doctor Alto Clef. Light winces, holding the receiver a good distance away from her ear, “Light, you fucking snake. You need to call off that mission. Now.”

“Clef”, Light says, unhappily, considering hanging up the phone right then and there. There was really no one she wanted to talk to any less right now. “What do you want?”

“What do I want?”, Clef hisses, in that high, mocking tone of his that she despises, that means he’s close to hysterical, “What do I want, Light? I want to tear your fucking head off. Do you have any idea of just how deep the shit that you’ve just ridden yourself into is?”

“I have everything under control”, Light says, coldly, “How did you obtain this number? Is Vaux with you?”

“You have everything- Light, you have nothing under control, and if you think you do, that’s because you have no idea what you’re dealing with.”

“I’m not talking to you”, Light says, stubbornly, “Put Vaux on the phone.”

Clef makes a noise like an angry dog. It’s fucking petulant, Light thinks, it would be fine, it was going to be fine, yes, she might have failed to consider a certain few factors, but that was to be expected, she was sufficiently prepared to deal with the situation. There was no need to admit any personal failing on her part to Clef, she was not going to let him of all people lecture her about this, not when he’d been nothing but a nuisance to her up to this point-

The comms crackle.

00:08:00 Adams: Light? Light, come in. We’re inside the structure. All clear, for now.

“Ada-” Clef begins, but Light quickly taps the mute button on her computer, cutting him off.

00:08:06 Light: Thank you, Agent. Please keep me posted, should anything else come up.

She sits in silence for a few seconds, tapping her pen against the desk. Tock tock tock. She knows, rationally, that unmuting her computer is the professional thing to do, on the odd chance Clef may have some sort of point, that Vaux may have put him through to her for a reason. She sighs, long-sufferingly. Alpha-9 demanded sacrifices of all of them, she supposes.

There’s silence on the other end of the line when she taps the button again. It’s almost eerie, after having braced herself for more shouting.

“Hello?”, she says to the computer screen in front of her.

“Light?”, Vaux says, gently, “It’s me.”

He sounds cautious, deliberately non-threatening, like calming a cornered animal, the same tone he uses when he finds her disassociating. It tugs at Light’s pride, despite knowing he means well. She’s not been backed into a corner. She does not need to calm down.

“Why would you put Clef on the phone with me?” She hears her voice shake just a bit, despite her best efforts.

“He didn’t exactly give me a choice”, Vaux says, apologetically. Then, taking on a firmer tone: “Light. You told to contact you in case of an emergency, and I’m, well, I’m not entirely clear on the details, but I’m pretty sure this constitutes one. I know you don’t- don’t like Clef-”, his tone becomes hushed at that, she can vividly picture him glance nervously at the man in question, “But I think he might have a point, here. Plus, he’s got Professor Crow vouching for him.”

“Crow? What’s he got to do with-”

“I don’t know”, Vaux says, urgently, “I don’t know, Light, but this seems really, really serious. I hate to say it, but there’s a possibility you’re in over your head here. I’m- I’m saying this because I care about you. You need to tell Clef what’s going on.”

The comms crackle again.

00:09:04 SCP-105: They should be right down that corridor, I think. We need to hurry, Andrea, they’re barely holding the line-

00:09:09 Adams: Doctor Light? We’re almost to where the previous squad should be at. Permission to engage?

00:09:14 Light: Permission granted, Adams. Report back to me as soon as you can.

00:09:19 SCP-105: Good. Good, let’s go-

A quiet whirring, a click. A short pause.

“You sounded very sure of yourself there”, Vaux finally says.

“Thanks”, says Light, “Feeling less and less like it, though.”

“Will you talk to Clef?”

Light takes a deep breath. “Yes. Yes, put him through to me.”

There are a few muffled shuffling sounds. Then, in tone much calmer than Light had expected:

“Alright. What’s the situation?”

Light hesitates for a moment. Clef sighs.

“What’s the situation, Light, please. I promise I’m not gonna hold any of it over you this time, alright? I want them to get back safely, too.”

“Fine.” She shakes her head, composing herself. “Fine. Alright. I’ve deployed SCP-166 in a raid on a Mekhanite terrorist outpost, I think I’ve mentioned planning something like this to you-”

“You have.”

“Good. For as of yet unclear reasons – Adams postulated a Reality Anchor – SCP-166 suddenly found herself unable to exert her anomalous effect, starting a few minutes ago. Since we hadn’t anticipated something like this, the MTF accompanying her is, admittedly, under-equipped to handle the situation. But”, she adds quickly before Clef can interject, “I’ve already sent in Agent Adams and SCP-105, alongside properly armed reinforcements. Last I heard from them, they were about to reunite with the squad accompanying 166.”

“Right”, says Clef. Light finds herself thinking that he sounds oddly relieved, for how protective he usually was of his daughter. “Right, okay. Light, I need you to listen to me-”

The comms crackle again. Then, at last:

00:10:46 Adams: All clear. We made quick work of ‘em, heh. Found SCP-166, as well of what’s left of the others. There’s been quite a few casualties, but luckily, we responded quickly enough to prevent anything too bad. Iris made the right call.

00:10:59 Light: (audibly relieved) Good. Good, thank you, Agent. What’s the-

00:11:02 Clef: Adams? Adams, can you hear me?

00:11:04 Adams: …Sir?

00:11:05 Clef: Adams. Don’t let it get to your head, but Jesus fucking Christ, am I glad to hear you.

00:11:11 Adams: Sir, why are you- You’re supposed to be in Michigan. I was told not to let you know this mission was going ahead in the first place-

00:11:17 Clef: Yes. Yes, I figured as much. You should have, by the way. (laughs) Shit, Adams. I’m well into the age where you’re prone to heart attacks, you know.

00:11:27 Adams: …Clef?

00:11:30 Clef: Yeah?

00:11:31 Adams: Sir, is this about- Iris took a picture of SCP-166 earlier, and I couldn’t help but think- The interview log, in her file, is that…?

00:11:39 Light: Yes, Agent Adams. Yes, it is. It’s also why I implored you to keep this mission a secret. And I imagine it’s also why your superior here felt it necessary to intervene despite everything, evidently-

00:11:52 Clef: Suck a fucking dick, Light, that’s not-

00:11:54 Light: (talking louder in an attempt to drown him out) Being very much under control.

00:11:56 Clef: Will you let me explain myself for one fucking second? This is not about 166, okay, I know I’ve made my stance on that clear to the point of being, admittedly, kind of an ass in the past, but-

00:12:08 Light: Hear, hear.

00:12:09 Adams: Shit, what the fuck were either of you thinking-

00:12:12 Clef: Adams , for your own sake , will you please listen to me?

00:12:17 Adams: My… own sake, sir?

00:12:19 Clef: Adams. You really, really shouldn’t be on this mission in the first place. There’s something Light doesn’t know, the reason any and all of your missions need to go through me – shit, Light, you better fucking appreciate that I got here in time – and something that, in retrospect, I should’ve probably told you about a long time ago.

00:12:35 Adams: (laughs) What, are you about to fess up to being my dad, too?

00:12:38 Clef: (chuckles) Careful, Agent, I’m not that old. Listen to me, Adams. You’re in pretty grave danger right now, by which I mean you, in particular. You’re- Under no circumstances can you be exposed to 166’s anomalous effect, we- I don’t know what’s going to happen to you, alright?

00:12:54 Adams: That’s- that doesn’t make any sense, sir. 166’s anomaly only affects man-made things, and as far as I’m aware, I’m not-

00:13:03 Clef: As far as you’re aware.

00:13:06 Adams: … What?

00:13:07 Light: What? What do you mean by this, Clef? Why didn’t anyone think to- You can’t just- Clef , I need to know something like this. When I extended you the courtesy of letting you nominate your second-in-command, we didn’t think you were going to-

00:13:19 Clef: Yeah? And when I extended you the courtesy of letting you recruit some more skips onto Alpha-9, I didn’t think you were gonna pick my fucking daughter, so-

00:13:26 Adams: Sir, what the fuck do you mean, I’m not- I was conscripted in 2006, and before that I was-

00:13:32 Clef: I’ll- shit, Adams, I promise, I promise I’ll explain everything when you get back, but for now you need to get out of there, alright? That SRA is pretty much your only lifeline right now, you need to keep 166 from doing anything if you can-

00:13:45 Light: You can’t just- Clef, this is my mission, you’re in no position to call it off-

Adams is about to interject, but then there’s a the sound of an explosion further down the corridor, and then a very familiar voice yells something, and something behind her eyes goes click.

00:13:53 Adams: Clef, I need to go, we’re under fire. I’ll be back as soon as I can, yeah?

00:13:58 Clef: Adams-

00:14:00 Adams: I’ll keep her safe, sir. I’ll bring her back to you. And then, you’re going to have a shit ton to explain.

The comms whir, then go quiet. A few seconds pass.

“...Take care, Agent”, says Light’s tinny little computer speaker, but Adams, of course, can’t hear him.

“I did a pretty bad job, huh”, you say, letting Iris fuss over a cut on your cheek.

“Well, duh”, Iris mutters, “I told you I had a bad feeling, but no one ever listens to me, do they? Had your fill, yet? Tired of the field?”

Your hands are shaking where they’re held in Iris’ own. There’s blood all over them, you’re getting it all over her sleeves. It’s not yours. You’ve just seen someone die in front of you, for the second time in your life (the third, counting those you don’t remember. For the third time, it’s your fault, too). And even still, you’re quite sure you’ll never forget it: The flash of her camera illuminating the dim half-light of the bunker, the chaos and screaming and death around you, heralding her arrival as she came for you, you who were useless on your own, to keep you safe, to guide you back out into the sun, kevlar worn like a suit of armor.

“Iris”, you say, and you’re close to tears (Pathetic, useless, whiny-)

“I’m sorry”, Iris says, quickly, “I’m sorry, Meri, I shouldn’t have said that. You did really well for a bit, there-”

And her praise, however hollow (or maybe because it is) is about to tip you over the edge, to make you break down sobbing, when there’s a very loud noise, so loud you can feel it press your eardrums inward, and then a wave of white hot heat, and then, through the ringing in your ears, a flash of something silver and man-shaped that rushes you from the darkness.

You yelp, covering your head with your forearms as best as you can, kicking wildly in the direction of your attacker, hoping your hooves will hit something, anything. There’s a sharp pain in your calf, and then your leg is pulled to one side by- oh God, by whatever’s pierced through it and it hurts, it hurts, and you try to curl in on yourself but there’s cold metal around your throat and you might die here, you might die like this, and you will never get to make up for having failed the first people in the world to put any sort of trust in you-

Iris’ camera flashes again. Spots swim in front of your vision, whoever was pushing you to the floor loosening their grip, startled, and you’re able to get a clean hit into where, on a person, there would be a stomach, and then Iris is wrapping an arm around their throat from behind and pulling them off you, but then they bring one hand up to a little clasp on their neck, and you watch their head come clean off, their body twirling around on its own to deliver a blow directly to Iris’ face, bones in her nose cracking horribly as she lets out a breathless little grunt.

You need to protect her, you think, you need to keep her safe. And it’s the last coherent thought you have before something much larger, much older than yourself takes hold of you. Then, a very bright light.

Iris comes to on a bed of thick moss and ivy. Spots of light dance around her, like the sun shining through a canopy of leaves which isn't be possible, of course, they’re supposed to be tens of feet underground.

She knows, rationally, that she needs to move, to inspect the damage, to find Meri, Andrea, everyone else, but despite being in active enemy territory, she finds herself strangely at peace. For a moment, she just lets herself lay there. It has been so, so long since she could just let herself lay somewhere.

A shadow falls over her. A hand touches her face.

“Iris?”, asks Meri. Her voice is small. “Iris, can you hear me? Are you alright?”

“Face hurts”, Iris says. She can taste blood from her broken nose.

Meri laughs lightly, relieved, but with a strained, breathless tightness to it, like someone who was about to burst into tears.

“That’s good”, she says. Her voice is high and nervous. “You’re alright. Everything is going to be alright.”

Iris is fully awake in a second.

“Hey”, she says, trying to push herself up and off the ground, despite the way it makes every single bone in her body ache, “Hey, Meri, what’s wrong?”

“No, no, no”, Meri’s hands find her shoulders, gently but firmly guiding her back down, and, oh, Iris thinks, she’s crying now. “Please just stay here. You don’t have to do anything. We can both just stay here and everything is going to be alright.”

Something is horribly, categorically wrong. Iris pries Meri off of her, sitting up. The whole room is covered in moss, vines, and flowers. She thinks she can even see a few young trees sprout up from cracks in the ground.

“Meri”, she says, breathless, confused, “Meri, look. You did it. You saved us. You’re- God, you’re beautiful-”

Meri sits next to her, sunken in on herself as if she just sort of let herself fall to the floor. A small puddle of blood pools around her from the stab wound in her leg. She limply shakes her head, not meeting her eyes.

“Something went wrong”, she whispers, “Iris, I did it all wrong.”

Iris looks up, behind her. It’s so bright, despite the light having nowhere to realistically come from, like they’re outside on a sunny day. In the middle of an especially dense patch flowers, a few men and women in leather and rotting kevlar are gathered around a small, dark shape in the grass.

“Commander?”, someone says.

Iris feels her blood run cold.

“No”, she whispers, “No, no, oh God.”

She staggers to her feet, forgetting about Meri entirely. She stumbles towards the small group, taking quicker and quicker steps, her body seeming to move on its own, the picture before her, cruelly, only becoming sharper and sharper the closer she gets;

Adrian Andrews lies in a puddle of his own blood, a large hole in his chest where a scimitar had been stuck just a moment ago. Beatrix Maddox, in some parody of romance, lies right next to him, her head another ten feet away.

Andrea Adam’s body covered in flowers, sprouting from her flesh through bloody little holes they’ve torn into her skin. There’s an oily, black substance covering the lower half of her face, her shirt, the ground around her. Her left eye is shattered on the floor like glass, a single white daisy sprouting from the socket.

SCP-076-2 sleeps (if some vile, corpse-like perversion of sleep could even be called such) in an ornate stone cube, buried two hundred meters beneath the sea.

Behind her, SCP-166 lets out a single, quiet sob.