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The head rush is familiar. The circumstances, less so.
It's not exactly in a blink, but it's close enough. One moment, Irving is at home, holding a palette, eyes and ears wide open; the next, wind bites his cheeks and he falls forward against... someone's front door?
He recognizes it immediately. Not the door, not anything actually useful, but the feeling: of blinking one moment and realizing that a second ago was not a second ago, and you went somewhere, away. What he doesn't fucking recognize is where the hell he is, or why the hell he's there, or how the hell he got there, or how any of this is happening at all.
What the fuck.
To make matters worse, the second after he recognizes what happened (itself a second after it did), a hand closes over his mouth from behind and begins dragging him down the steps.
It keeps getting better.
"Are you fucking serious, Bailiff? Shit."
It's hissed into his ear, but even then it takes Irving a bit to figure out what the words mean. Whoever it is is whispering into his bad ear, and his tinnitus is acting up, even though it seems quiet in the otherwise placid neighborhood—at least, from what Irv can see as he's dragged around the side of the house he woke up in front of.
The voice shushes, furtively, and Irv decides to obey for the time being when the front yard is suddenly filled with warm light.
"Hello?" Someone calls out the open door.
The shushing again, quieter. The disorientation has mostly cleared by now, but Irving stays where he is, tucked away behind a corner of the house. His innie, for whatever reason, got out and got him here—shit, that's his car down at the curb, did he drive?—and he'd rather figure out why first before making things more complicated.
Wait and see. That's his motto.
Whoever it is behind him is still and quiet until the light disappears again. They're shorter than him, but strong, and Irv goes when they pull him around the side of the house. His car is still in view.
It's almost funny: he's had a hunch for a while that he was being followed, and yet when he finds out it's actually true, he has no idea where they've followed him to .
"Sorry," is the first thing the voice—the woman, wrapped up in scarves against the cold, says when they're tucked away in the shadows, less visible from the street. "I couldn't let you do that. Lumon— I mean, I don't know if they're watching Burt, but if they found out about this..."
"Who the hell are you?" Irving interrupts. "And why the hell are you manhandling me?"
She said Burt—there was a Burt on that list, one of the few Irv was able to find an address for, though that too was hidden in the false bottom of his dad's trunk. But if his innie managed to find it and brought him here...
The woman pulls the scarf down from over her face with a huff—not annoyed, but still... frustrated, as if at herself. She's young, is the first thing Irv notices, and though everyone seems young to him these days, she really is. She must be in college, if that, and there's eyeliner smeared around her eyes the way edgy young people have been doing since the invention of eyeliner.
But there's— The light isn't great, back here, but Irving can tell that it's not just the eyeliner shadowing under her eyes. As young as she is, there's a heaviness in her gaze; she's lived a fair amount in her comparatively few years.
"I'm April," she says, and it's clearly a lie, but Irving doesn't say anything about it. "We've been watching you for a while. To make sure you don't do anything stupid."
See? It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.
We. He doesn't miss that, but he doesn't say anything. "Stupid how."
"Stupid," April bites back easily, tugging him further from the streetlights and into the shadow between houses, "like banging on the door of one of our operatives. Jesus, just— Come on. Away from the windows."
There's that plural again. It's definitely a stupid idea to follow this girl into the woods, but at the same time he can tell that not only is this his best shot at finding out what's going on in there, but also...
Something's changed. He can feel it. It's not just this girl popping out of the woodwork, or the increasing dreams that have to be from down there, or even the fact that he's popped up, apparently, on a Severed secret agent's doorstep that his innie took him to. It's been— There's been this feeling, the last few months, when he comes home from work: this itch close to the surface that he's never felt before, like he wakes up waiting for something that won't come until he gets back in that elevator the next morning. It's the vague sense that he knows, somehow, that he is getting through to his innie. That something is happening down there his mind doesn't know about but his body does.
Something that, apparently, has his innie popping out and a teenage spy following him.
There's a shed in the neighboring yard that April pulls him behind, and the moon cuts white through the bare tree branches behind them. Breath hangs in the air, so solid Irving expects it to turn into ice, but it does nothing to cloud the sharpness in April's face as she watches him carefully.
Irving's pretty sure she doesn't know what really just happened. He'd like to keep it that way.
"What are you doing here?" She opens.
"What are you doing here?" Irv counters. "How long have you been watching me?"
"'You' me, or 'you'...?"
"Plural."
"Since your PI buddy paid an intern to print you off the list of Severed employees." Her eyes are shrewd even in the half dark. "You're lucky we were the ones who found out, by the way."
Okay. So there are a few things Irving knows: nine years ago, he took a Severed job; three and a half years ago, the dreams started; one year ago, he came out of the elevator at eight o'clock to raw eyes, a raw throat, and a note on his windshield saying he had stayed late to reach a quarterly deadline. And he got home, and he turned on the news, and he started to think. Started to wonder.
He knows something strange is happening at Lumon. He's pretty sure it's fucked up, whatever it is. He knows that people have disappeared. That people have died. Car accidents, heart attacks.
He knows that today, he drove home from work like every other day. He took Radar for his walk and then went home to start another book over dinner. He started painting. And then it was dark and cold and his hands were beating someone's door: his innie, somehow out.
And then this girl's hands were on him.
Looking now, he sees what it is about her that makes her not register as a threat. It's how her eyes keep dipping to the side, away from him. The stiff way she said "operative" earlier. How her hands shake a bit more than her fingerless gloves can explain. When she had one of them over his mouth earlier, he felt her body vibrating, on edge. She's not a threat. She's a kid.
"You're not the intern, are you?"
She snorts, ungainly and definitely unthreatening. "What? No."
"Then who are you?"
Again, April has a worse poker face than her appearance suggests (which makes him feel a little better that her leather jacket is cooler than his). She doesn't want to answer, not really. There's something there.
"I work with the people who are trying to help your office's Severed halves. Some of us are on the inside, some aren't. And some, I guess, are both. You know." She bops forward on her toes. "People like you."
"Right."
The list. He has it memorized by now—actually, when he first got it, that's what he did for his sleep deprivation for a while, studying it until his eyes couldn't stay open any longer. Back when staving off sleep was about keeping the nightmares at bay, not stretching himself to his limits to get through to his inner self. He knows every name, every address, every factoid he could find.
Which is why he knows Goodman, Burt, 3329 Gull Harbor Rd, Kier, PE, 07453. As, apparently, does this April. Better than him, for sure.
"Is that why you're following me?"
April— Well, she grimaces, actually.
"They only put me on you because you're low priority," she admits.
"Oh. Thanks." He tries not to be offended.
"I'm pretty sure if they knew I followed you here and didn't call, they'd kill me."
Irving's face must do something, because she adds, "Figuratively."
"Right."
"Speaking of..."
April crunches her way to peer around the corner of the shed. The houses are all quiet again—have been for a while, Irv realizes belatedly—their voices and cloudy breathing the only sounds. The woods are quiet behind them, and Irving finds himself looking instinctively for the moon.
The moon stares back, beautiful and silent. No answers. But it's light is bright and clear in the cold night.
"Alright." April returns with another crunch. "Hey. I'll keep answering questions, but we should go somewhere not here. Hopefully with heating."
She starts off into the woods before Irv grabs her sleeve.
"Hey. What?"
"What?" April parrots impatiently, boot-deep in the snow.
"It— I'm not trudging through the woods," Irving insists. "At the very least, I can't leave my car here. It's pretty distinctive."
"Fair." She changes tack back to the street, just as determined. "I'll come with you."
That's better, at least. He thinks of the map in his trunk. "There should be a diner, once we get out of the neighborhood. You can follow me."
"Yeah, I don't trust that either," April says, taking the lead. "I'm coming with."
"Aren't you supposed to distrust getting into cars with strange men," he remarks as he follows, "not the other way around?"
"Part of the job." She just shrugs and smirks. "Besides, you're not strange. Not to me."
Like that isn't comically ominous. "Fine. But I'm driving."
"Would've been too much to ask, huh?" April shoots back.
His innie left the driver side unlocked, and Irv manages to slip in and slide the papers in the passenger seat up into his jacket before she can see any of them. In the half second of half light, he recognizes the map from his trunk. That part makes sense, at least. And when April gets in and he turns on the engine, the radio is already quiet. None of it exactly helps.
Irving looks back up at the house for a moment, making sure there's no one at the window but also wondering... Why here? Why now? And how?
Then he shifts out of park and rolls a few feet before starting the engine.
There really is a diner nearby, thankfully. He'd hate to let the girl think he really was kidnapping her, although it would serve her right for, yes, getting in a car with a perfect stranger. She's not as young as he originally thought, but she's still plenty young, and he has more than a few questions for whoever recruited her for their secret network. There better be a good reason.
Now that he's recovered himself a little bit, Irving has the wherewithal to dig. "You must know someone on the inside, then. Who works at Lumon, or was..."
To be honest, Irv doesn't like the word that much. He's gotten this far without having to use it for himself by sheer virtue of not having anyone to tell, but he's never liked it. Even when it was exactly what he wanted, the word was just... So finite. Like the sound of the clean cut of a knife on a cutting board. Severed.
"My dad was." She says it flatly, then: "He died."
"Ah." Irving can see the long scope of it now: the sudden life change, the hardness in her eyes sometimes. The sadness too. She's not used to life like this, but she has drive. Now he knows why.
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry." It was definitely recent, judging by the looks of it.
There was a man a couple months ago from the list, Kilmer. He had a daughter, didn't he?
"You worked with him, actually." She says it without looking at him, aiming for disinterest as she stares out the window. "Not that that means anything to you."
It would have to the man that she followed out here. Irv doesn't mention that, still trying to remember the daughter's name. She was mentioned in the obit.
"June."
That's it, he thinks. Meanwhile in the passenger seat, she whips her head around.
"How did you—" There's something in her face, like fear but maybe hope. "What?"
Irving realizes how it could sound and explains, "I saw about your dad in the news. I actually thought about going to the funeral, but I didn't want to risk it."
She huffs—maybe a little in disbelief, but not entirely—and settles back in her seat. She somehow seems both older and younger than ever, jaded in some ways but so very not in others. Hard but smooth, not yet worn down.
"Good call. Your creepy boss showed up, which I only learned about afterwards. And another guy you work with."
The list runs through his mind again. Any one of them. Burley, Ian. Griffin, Dylan. It could be any of them. Any of them could be the people he spends all day with and has for who knows how long. And he'd never even know it if he passed them at a wake. If they were laid out in the coffin.
He's glad he didn't go to that funeral.
"Is Burt one of them? My coworkers, I mean."
June squints at him. "You don't know?"
Right. She doesn't know why—how—they got out here. She thinks he just briefly lost his mind or something.
"How could I?" He makes a convenient left, just for the distraction. "He's on my list."
June takes that as answer enough and goes back to staring out the windshield. "Fair. He was in a different department, I think. He retired about a week ago—really sudden. We're trying to figure out why."
Irv can't help but wonder if it has anything to do with however his innie got out just now, though he doesn't mention this either. As much as he trusts this June (which is to say: only somewhat, situationally), there's still whatever apparatus behind her to contend with. He thinks about the other list, the one only in his head, of all the current and ex-employees who have disappeared, died strangely, or just died, the last entry on which is June's father. His coworker, apparently. Who retired and had a brain hemorrhage two weeks later.
So he says nothing. But he still has to ask...
"Why are you doing this? This whole—" He gestures a circle around them both, to indicate the conversation, the car, the world. "Harry Lime routine."
"I... don't know what that means," June admits. "What?"
He mourns for the youth of America.
"Why were you tailing me in the middle of the night?" Irving says flatly, in lieu of any other answer. He suddenly wonders what would have happened if she wasn't there. Would someone have still opened the door? What would he do then?
"Because they put this thing in my dad's head and it killed him," June says, flat and deliberate, like it's the first time she's said the words but far from the first time she's thought them. The eyeliner smudged around her eyes to hide real rings. "And I want to know why. I want everyone to know why."
It's an answer to one question of hundreds, but it's enough to carry them the rest of the drive in thoughtful silence. There'll be more answers (and questions, definitely) when they sit down to talk, and even they won't be enough, but the one is enough for now. It's something where there'd otherwise be nothing. That'll have to be enough for Irving—for both of them, because apparently he's bonded to this kid now, if it gets him answers. Answers that are enough.
For now, at least.