Chapter Text

Like Real People Do

Tim was so overworked, he was starting to run out of jokes. This was serious.

"So... what do you call a fancy fish?"

"What."

"Sofishticated!!!"

Tim grinned, sweating and stressed, as he tried to keep the next statement giver entertained while his boss, Sasha, did whatever she was doing to make him take on most of the work that was supposed to be shared between the two of them. He really missed when it was just him and the other two, before they were apparently "lost in the line of duty" and Sasha from artefact storage was sent to make up for their loss.

He missed Jon and Martin. They were good people. Even though Jon was grumpy, he was fun to tease, and at least he did his job well. Martin was sweet, although definitely unqualified for his job. Despite their flaws, Tim couldn't help but admit that he missed them. Martin laughed at his jokes and Jon was the butt of them. They made a good team, up until the day the both of them disappeared. Jon had gone down to artefact storage to investigate a Leitner, something about digging. Martin was at home, incredibly distressed over the presence of some sort of bug infestation and refusing to come out of his flat. The next day neither of them showed up for work, and Elias introduced Tim to his new boss.

He shifted in his seat, and stared at the equally uncomfortable guest across the desk from him. Screw it, Sasha could finish whatever she was doing later. He was willing to end his career over this.

Sasha groaned, rubbing her temples in frustration. In between dealing with the fallout of finding Timothy Hodge and Tim claiming to have found small silver worms lurking around his flat, and trying to appease her absolutely awful boss, she was exhausted.

Yet another statement from Birch Green, with some village kid coming in to babble at the tape recorder for an hour about the terrifying man from their village who was surrounded by bees. Normally, she would call them idiots who had never seen a beekeeper if it wasn't for the disquieting facts that kept tugging at the back of her mind.

First, the closest apiary,a place where bees are kept, the fact supplied helpfully by the Eye, was miles away from Birch Green. Second, none of those statements could be recorded digitally, unless she used the tapes or wrote it down. It was clear that the poor village had some sort of infestation of the Corruption, and she would be content to send in some sort of supernatural pest control or whatever bullshit Elias could make up to keep her in the Archives, if it wasn't for-

"Sasha, we've got another statement about the dirt boy!!!" Crowed Tim, who burst into Sasha's office dragging a very confused looking young woman, most likely from Birch Green.

Sasha sighed. She could be content leaving this one fairly unknown, if it wasn't for the fact that two entity phenomena had settled into one village. And she'd be damned if she wasn't absolutely itching to see how the not-beekeeper and the spooky gravedigger interacted. They seemed to behave incredibly differently in the Statements given, with the man surrounded by bees acting somewhat friendly, and a little bit gentle, with all of the statement givers, who were more put off by his appearance than anything.

They remarked that he seemed soft and kind, offering them free jars of honey while the drone of bees overlapped with his voice. In some of the other statements, he had offered to show them the hives where he kept his bees, beckoning passer-byes toward a small path that led into the forest.

Seemingly the complete opposite, the gravedigger, affectionately named "dirt boy" by Tim, acted paranoid and snappish sometimes outright hostile to those more bold than the average person. Once, during a funeral service for one of the statement givers parents, he had dug a pit for the body that went so deep the mourners had all wondered how he would be able to climb back out. But he did. He had dragged himself out of the dark pit that smelled of rot and wet earth, even though nothing had been buried there for a long, long time. Once, a statement described a group of young men that had gone to confront him about his odd behavior, toting bats and large branches as a means of intimidation. Only one of the men had made it back home, hair caked in dirt with fingers worn through to the bone, as if he had spent months using them to dig.

She had wondered how the two local oddities would interact. Would they be hostile, upset at each other for taking up valuable fear? Would they be allies, working together to drain as much fear as possible out of one poor town before moving on and parting ways? While the Buried and the Corruption seemed as far from each other as the Eye and the Dark, Sasha supposed that the tunnels and patterns of a beehive could be appealing to a God that fed on the feeling of being crushed. It did seem fond of tunnels, after all.

Perhaps it was time for her and Tim to take a little employee outing. She'd just have to get Elias to agree first. She looked at the young woman, a small thing with brown hair and clearly frightened eyes, asked for her name, and before the woman hurriedly described mailboxes filling with rotten honeycombs and dirt, said those two words that seemed to be the start of everything that had gone wrong since she joined this God forsaken institute.

Statement Begins