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Gertrude Robinson thinks of nothing as she sneaks into the tunnels below the Magnus Institute on a late afternoon of early March, 2015. She keeps her mind carefully blank as she walks the winding, dark path towards the trapdoor that would lead her into the building, grabbing the trash bags with the gasoline containers (carefully stashed days ago, in preparation) that would see the brick and the wood of the Institute go up in flames. She pointedly doesn’t look at the office desks of the Archive when she walks past them, doesn’t let her eyes linger on the pens and documents and paper clips scattered over them that no one ever bothered to clean up.
Gertrude opens one of the gasoline containers and begins pouring it over the old wooden floors of the Archive. She walks among the endless shelves, and something catches her eye, half tucked away behind a drawer. She picks it up.
An old lighter. Not a zippo, just a cheap, purple, plastic thing, the liquid inside almost ran out. A memory flashes through her mind.
“Look, if you have somewhere better to burn these books, then—“
Gertrude quickly leaves the lighter where she found it, but her mind, inevitably, wanders. Gerard Keay died as a shadow of himself. He layed in bed, pale, shaking and half conscious, his face already resembling a skull in the violent white of the hospital lights. There was barely a trace of the man who had assisted her in her travels and schemes. Gertrude had willed herself to look at him as life fled from his eyes like a candle flickering out. It had almost felt like an insult not to. She had brought him to this point, after all. She had known about the cancer, and there might have been a chance to save him if she had done something about it sooner, but she thought it would be a mercy, in the end, to let him die of illness rather than sacrificing him to stop a ritual, especially with the Unknowing fast approaching. Whether it was a mercy to him or herself, she wasn’t sure, but tried not to think about it.
Her and Gerard hadn’t been close, they had both made sure of that. Attachments never did end well in a world like theirs, and even if they hadn’t kept each other at arm's length, Gertrude thought she might still not have been able to care for him in the way he might have needed her to. She had told Eric a long time ago that she wouldn’t be a good mother figure, and she stands by that. Whatever could have happened if their lives had turned out different isn’t hers to know or worry about. The Eye doesn’t deal in hypotheticals, after all.
But still, as Gertrude carries on with her task, and despite all of the years she has spent perfecting her ability to not care, hypotheticals are all she seems to think about.
Because the rituals failed. Every single time they failed, not because of her efforts, not because of her sacrifice, but because they were always meant to. The Dark’s ritual is happening at this very moment, and it will amount to nothing in the end, through no intervention of her own. The container runs out of gasoline, so Gertrude discards it, picks up a new one, and carries on.
That is all she ever seems to do. She carries on. She watched as Michael walked through a door that was never there in a land that never existed. She saw the door close behind his back, and carried on. She got rid of Emma Harvey after she uncovered her spiderweb schemes that had gotten Fiona and Sarah killed while Gertrude was too busy looking elsewhere for rituals to derail, and carried on. She read Adelard Dekker’s statement, with which the life of the closest thing she ever had to a friend ended as nothing more than nourishment for Beholding and Filth, and carried on. She Knew about Gerard and the illness that would take him and said nothing, knowing that letting him die that way would be better than having to sacrifice him to the Fears. She watched him fade, and then bound him to life in the most corrupt way, knowing he would hate her for it but needing the knowledge he had to survive, and carried on, never looking back and keeping herself upright with the knowledge of one unshakable truth: none of the people she left behind to rot were worth a damn thing when compared to the whole world.
But it seems as though her one principle, the one she had lived by for decades, had been nothing but smoke and mirrors. Gertrude knows better than to dwell on things she can’t change. She knows that, in the end, it doesn’t matter, not when all she’s ever done has amounted to this moment. She will end Jonah Magnus and his Institute for good, and humanity will continue to live its blissfully unaware life. But even in the safe haven of that knowledge, the emptiness of the desks around her feels oppressive, the absence of something morphing into a kind of twisted presence, its existence so strong it warps the reality around it. A ghost, or a void, or a haunting.
Gertrude supposes that, of all the wretched endings the people involved in the world of the Fears could face, three bullets to the chest wasn’t the worst of them all. Jonah Magnus looms over her like a vulture as she lies on the floor, bleeding out, and a kind of cold terror washes over her. Not of him, she has spent fifty years facing horrors beyond human comprehension and she will be damned if she dies afraid of Jonah Magnus, of all people. No, this fear is something deeper. She failed. Even with all that she has done in her life, this final act would be the closest thing to redemption she could ever hope to achieve, but it slips through her fingers like the blood pouring from her chest, each labored breath rattling in her lungs and interrupting the silence of the Archive with a wet, horrible sound.
She thinks, for a moment and half hysterically, of Agnes Montague. They only met once, when Gertrude discovered the truth about Emma and needed someone she could trust to get rid of her. Agnes hadn’t smiled at her, hadn’t bothered with pleasantries or reassurances, and Gertrude wondered at the time if she resented her for robbing her of her one true purpose, or if, on the contrary, she felt relieved at being freed from the fate that had been set out of her. Agnes had always stood out to her in that way. She was the only Avatar who never made the choice to accept the Fears, the only one who never had the chance to. Gertrude feels one last thread of connection to her, one final thing binding them together, before she lets go of the thought.
Jonah never takes his eyes away from her (the ones she had seen previously in the face of James Wright, the ones that had inhabited so many before him), he watches and watches and watches and doesn’t say anything as the life seeps out of her, and Gertrude makes an effort to swallow her fear and let none of it show as she watches back. She hopes, as her eyes finally become too heavy to keep them open, that whoever takes her place gets to be the one to kill him. She hopes the doomed person that replaces her gets to watch Jonah Magnus die in fear. She hopes they relish in it.
Gertrude Robinson exhales her last breath, and ends.