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Everyone in the world or Marty.
Everyone in the world or Marty.
It’s such a split-second decision that she barely even thinks. Her family, her friends – her professor who, sure he was an asshole but does he deserve to be horribly tortured?
She remembers what it felt like having Marty’s arms around her as she tried to not completely fall apart in the elevator surrounded by nightmare creatures – god was that only hours ago? Then again, just hours ago, she was kissing Holden and look where they are now.
But – everyone in the world or Marty.
The gun recoils in her hand before she even realizes what she’s done, and the sickening thunk of Marty’s body collapsing on the ground is almost what drives her to total insanity.
But there’s no time for that – the Director sees something that Dana can’t because she grabs Dana’s arm and all but shoves Dana down the stairs. Dana doesn’t have time to react because she hears the roaring behind her and the tearing of flesh (oh god, Marty). She’s going to be sick.
As they hurry down the stairs, the rumbling beneath them calms down, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still immediate troubles. The Director (and Dana doesn’t have the time to think of someone directing this madness!) guides Dana out to some secret exit, which doesn’t feel plausible, considering how deep underground they must be.
But as they walk, the world grows calm around them. As they walk, the air is silent and still, which feels insane given how much screaming and shouting and mayhem, and death had surrounded them for so long. As they walk, Dana feels herself shaking slightly, and tries to ignore the rising bile in her throat.
The Director is on her phone, speaking calmly (though if Dana is being honest, it feels like whoever is on the other end is being reprimanded regardless, no matter the tone). It doesn’t matter what she’s saying – Dana can barely hear her.
She killed Marty and left him to be torn apart by a monster. God, what kind of friend was she?? She barely said anything to Jules before she was murdered. She had wished Kurt luck and pinned her hopes on him before he crashed into that invisible wall. She doubted Holden and spun out in a panic as he was trying to calm her down and he was stabbed. She had left them all behind.
And now, Marty is just one more and she is directly responsible for why he’s dead.
They stop at an area of the wall that looks the same as all the others, and the Director turns to face Dana, barely visible in the light. “I have some things to clean up here,” she says.
She hands a piece of paper to Dana, who takes it, her hands shaking.
“My team has been prepped. We’re taking you to another location. This one…” the Director sighs, looks up and up and up the stairs they descended down. “This one has been compromised for now.”
“What do you mean –” Dana starts, but the Director opens the door and all but shoves Dana out.
The sun is just starting to peak above the horizon, and it’s truly the beginning of a gorgeous day. She can faintly hear birds chirping nearby and the rustling of the trees. She bursts into tears.
How can there still be beauty after she had seen? How could it be that shooting Marty could allow for any of this to happen?
The sounds of nature quickly disappear at the flapping of helicopter blades, and she almost feels herself being lifted off her feet. Before she fully can comprehend what is going on, a group of people surround her in tactical gear. She feels herself collapse – both mentally and physically. Why did she believe in the Director who had wanted her dead? She had shot Marty for nothing, didn’t she?
But before she can land on the ground, she feels strong arms grab at her, and keep her upright.
“It’s going to be okay!” one yells. “We got you now.”
Another hands her a bottle of water, which she sucks down greedily as they guide her to the helicopter.
As they raise into the air, she sees the cabin in the woods below, growing smaller and smaller. Insignificant, really, from everything else around it.
She vomits all the water she just drank back up.
--
After a stop at another airfield to switch to a plane (she doesn’t even know where they are anymore, and the way her brain has been screaming at her, she doesn’t have the ability to think about it), they land in ... actually, she’s not sure where. She’s quickly shuffled off the plane and the guards keep close to her, making sure she doesn’t… what? Bolt? Run? Scream? Tear off the faces of everyone around them because they don’t even know what she’s gone through?
A foolish part of her thinks that they’re going to abandon her, and she’ll just be a crazy person lost in the middle of a city she does not know, but she’s quickly brought to back of what looks like a normal building. They usher her inside quickly, but even still, she sees a bit of herself in the flash of one of their helmets as they pass by and suddenly remembers she looks a mess.
She’s still covered in blood and wounds and vomit, and she has no idea how she managed to disassociate entirely. How long have they been traveling? She should’ve asked if she could go home and see her family. She should’ve asked if she could make sure her friend’s bodies were recovered. Can Kurt even be brought up from the crack in the earth?
Her brain is spinning, going a hundred miles a minute, when she’s finally brought into what looks like a typical conference room. She’s left behind, only a few guards standing outside, and a small bottle of water in a language she does not speak or even can pretend to guess in front of her. She has to be staining their gorgeous office chairs with all of her blood and bile.
The door across from her opens and she doesn’t move, just waits … honestly, for her death. At this point, it would be a bit useless to drag her from the hellish cabin in the woods to whatever country this is, but maybe their sacrifice must be the true, cross-country prolonged suffering of the Virgin.
(Which, she has to clarify, she is not.)
But it’s just a tall blond woman, who slips in, wearing a gorgeous crisp white suit as she slides into a chair beside Dana. Dana doesn’t look up from the water bottle she’s attempting to stare down, but she does react when the woman gingerly grabs at Dana’s hands and holds them.
Her hands – her bloodstained, filthy, murderous hands – sit prettily in this woman’s smooth ones. Dana feels sick.
“On behalf of The Organization, we thank you for your service, Dana Polk,” the woman says, a slight accent in her voice. Dana can’t place where the accent is from, but more concerning is how this woman knows her name.
Though, considering the size (even in her head, she hears the capitalization of The Organization), it seems like they knew everything about them all. From Dana’s dating habits, to being able to house unspeakable monsters. So what wouldn’t they know?
“Thanks to you,” the woman continues, “the world has the opportunity to rise again. And because of all your hard work, we wanted to give you a chance to experience it from the other side.”
Dana feels even sicker and moves to yank her hands away, but the other woman’s grip is suddenly tighter than she anticipated.
“Don’t misunderstand,” the woman says, her smile still soft. “We don’t wish for you to see suffering. But we do want you to comprehend why it’s important for the suffering to occur. Of course, we are deeply sympathetic for you and your friends. But the good of the many outweighs the needs of the few, I fear.”
Dana stares down at their hands, still unable to move, to think, to do much beyond blink. Eventually, she looks up. “Where am I?”
Her voice is so much quieter than she thought it would be. Actually, it hurts to speak – all that screaming must have caught up with her.
The woman nods slowly and unclasps her hands from around Dana’s. “We’re at the Stockholm Branch,” she says, leaning back in her chair. “The branch you were at… ah,” she hesitates, glancing back to one of the guards. “Is under a purge and decommission effect.”
Dana blinks. “Decommission?”
Also, in the back of her mind, she clocks that she has always wanted to go to Sweden.
The woman sighs “The Director might have mentioned. But… The other branches failed. And the United States and Japan were the last two. Without at least one success…” her voice drops. “The Ancient Ones rise. But the fact that the American team allowed for so many failures and for the systemwide purge means that the entire site needs to be destroyed and begin anew.” She smiles. “You can’t imagine walking back into that location like it’s a typical workday, no?”
Dana’s mind is already blank but goes to static. She’s never heard so many screams before in her life. She’s never seen so much death. But she looks down at her hands, and she sees the shock in Marty’s expression right before he crumbles.
She still feels the phantom warmth of his arms around her, from their time in the hellish elevator.
“No,” Dana says, her voice a whisper. “I can’t.”
The woman smiles even wider. “Of course. Now – you need to be trained on all the protocol, and the language barrier, ah, shouldn’t be much of an issue. We can teach you, but we also speak English for the majority of your training. And when the United States branch opens back up, you can return to that one, but for now, this might be the better one. If you’re interested in travel, we can have you pop into the other locations as well—”
“Can I…” Dana feels her voice faulter. The chatter of the woman ceases. Dana licks her lips and tries again. “Can I just go home?”
There’s a beat. And a sigh. “Dana. What happened at the cabin is a tragedy. But no.”
Dana doesn’t say anything, but she feels a finger under her chin lifting her face up. The woman, who had been all smiles, still wears a smile on her face but her eyes are steel. If Dana hadn’t looked death in the eye a million times tonight, she might have flinched. Instead, she just stares back.
“You will either learn the behind the scenes, my sweet Dana, or one of my men will shoot you where you sit.” The woman frowns. “And I would hate for that to happen. We’re already going to have to destroy that chair.”
Dana blinks again.
--
In the end, she shadows the woman – her name is Alice – around the facility. Or well – Dana is given a place to sleep and shower and she sobs in the shower so long that Alice and her team eventually break down the door, thinking she hurt herself. But after that, and after days of sobbing, hiding out in the room, and mourning a life she didn’t realize she would lose so fast, she discovers she is curious and follows the woman around the facility.
It's massive. Even from the bit she and Marty ran through, she realizes they barely saw any of it. (She aches still at his name, but when she sees people having a positive encounter, she thinks that it’s because of him, and the ache feels both stronger and lighter, somehow.) But she follows Alice around and finds out the different areas of the Organization.
At the end of the day, this is just a fucking company. There’s a Comms department, a Chem department, Electrical, Engineering, Finance, Maintenance, Kitchen Staff… No one is rude to her, per say, but they all stare at her, just as she stares back at them. They can’t all be like her, all part of failed (or partially) rituals. All people whose suffering and trauma were watched.
She collaspes completely when she visits the Control Room. It’s just a normal room (or well, a highly technical room, with a ton of screens and buttons and panels and things), but they’re prepping a run-through for another session. Dana can see the insane amount of the control they have over the system. That, and thinking of how Marty’s rambling about the puppeteers makes this so… much worse.
At first, she avoids the control room, moving as to never even be in the same side of the facility as it. But time passes, and she’s curious. How does someone control all aspects of the different areas from across the company to tell such an elegant (horrifying) story?
Granted, her friends suffering and torture hadn’t been elegant and hadn’t been a fucking story, but there is something poetically beautiful when she looks at the controls and sees one for additional chemical filtration (she remembers Kurt and his sudden changing of mind of them splitting up), or one for engineering (she remembers the way the cellar door slammed opened, scaring them all half to death).
It's… fascinating.
Alice watches over her like a hawk as Dana goes from group to group to learn everything about the rituals and the systems and the world. She even (slowly) begins to pick up Swedish – it’s hard not to, the way everyone talks behind her back and suddenly switches back to English when she walks by.
She learns.
She goes through a few cycles of the Rituals and she throws up during the first ones she’s engaged with but eventually… she acclimates. She learns the specific ways the Rituals are different in each country, from Sweden’s being a focus of natural disasters and the Argentinian Ritual focusing a lot more on giant monsters.
There are binders of past Rituals, both failures and successes, and in her sick horror, she dives into them. She’s not bored, she doesn’t miss school, but there is something that she has missed about learning and understanding and wanting to be good at something. So, she researches.
The American Ritual is the most intriguing to her and not just because of her suffering.
There are so many options. The other countries have ways for those being sacrificed to choose their suffering, but in a true American apple pie way, they have more monsters than any other country on hand. No other country’s facilities hosts that many creatures. And the majority of the killings in America were due to the Zombie Redneck Torture Family.
(She looks at the photos of them, traces her finger over their faces. She will never forget the monster who flung her down a pier, and who Marty saved her from. It’s weird to see it typed up in a document and filed away like it’s not her fucking life.)
But because of the sheer number of monsters, it means that the facility is enormous and houses a massive staff. But most of the youth aren’t going for Mermen, Unicorns, or… honestly, some of the things on the list, Dana shutters to think.
So in between Rituals, she starts analyzing and thinking and planning. Not that she would have survived it again, but she keeps checking the area of the cabin. And keeps trying to figure out a way to make the whole system tighter. Stronger.
She throws up less at the thought.
And she can’t remember what Marty’s arms felt like anymore. She barely remembers Jules’s face, honestly. What Holden’s lips felt like. And what did Kurt study again?
--
Time passes. One day, Dana is chatting it up alongside Maintanence. She truly loves everyone who works at this facility, from Noah, whose second kid is just about the enter college. And Agnes, who, after tonight’s success (no matter where in the globe), is going to propose to her girlfriend.
The red phone rings, and everyone freezes. But Dana rolls her eyes and picks it up.
She speaks fluent Swedish now, along with Spanish, and conversational Japanese. “Director Alice, hi.”
The director calls her back into that conference room from so many years ago. Dana sits, her own suit not as crisp or as white as Alice’s, but she barely can remember the girl who sat here so mutely, so scared, so… bloody. It feels like it was a lifetime ago. It was.
Alice huffs, looking annoying for once in her life. “The Americans loved your plan and have been implementing it for the last two Rituals,” she says in Swedish. She hadn’t pushed Dana to pick the language up, but it was obvious she had been pleased. “And they want you to take over as Director.”
The American facility reopened four years ago, which means she’s been in Sweden for almost … ten years. She doesn’t remember what Marty sounds like anymore.
“Amazing they finally got it back off the ground,” Dana says. “But I didn’t think the Director would retire so willingly.”
Alice smirks. “She didn’t.”
Dana nods, a hundred thousand calculations running through her head. The efficiency of all of the Rituals. The cost of refitting the entire facility of staff and machines, and hell, monsters. But with a focus of having significantly less – the overabundance of monsters from when she had gone through it was wasteful, and seen as a relic of an older system. This streamlined method meant that the killings were finished much, much quicker, and they could spend more money on researching the best candidates, instead of retrofitting people into their assumed roles.
(“Me? Virgin?
“We work with what we have.”)
Dana looks up to Alice, wondering if she would see anger in the woman’s face. She knows she’s being promoted faster than Alice is – the woman has said as much. But there’s something akin to pride behind her eyes, and something else that Dana can’t place just at this moment.
“Sounds good – I’ll get my bags packed immediately.”
As she leaves the conference room, already planning her email to say goodbye to the people in this facility, she finally realizes what the look in Alice’s eyes had been.
Pity.
--
She flies back to the United States for the first time in a decade and wonders if it’s just her who has changed, or has it all. Running the whole operation would be exciting, but she’s grown used to living in Sweden and being back feels like being splashed with a bucket of ice water. But she can handle it.
She strolls into the facility and the conversation dies. She almost laughs – it reminds her of the first walk through in Sweden. She ignores the stares as she moves swiftly to the director’s office (they mimicked the United States facility to be more like Sweden, after some of Dana’s plans, so she knows where it is), and approaches, pausing when she’s outside.
The Director from all those years ago, the woman with the reddish hair, now gone grey. She stands inside the office, looking at piles of paperwork, as though studying them and deciding if they’re worth being burned or tossed.
Dana watches her from the doorway, not wanting to interrupt.
Eventually, the Director looks up, her expression not changing. “Your plans are good.”
Dana continues watching her, waiting for the shoe to drop. The insult. The accusation. Something.
In the end, the Director leaves the paperwork on her desk and walks up to Dana, who does not flinch. She’s not that young college kid anymore (legally, that person is long dead), and if this had been a decade ago, she might have. But they’re long past that and it’s funny if the Director thinks she can scare Dana like that.
“It’s always good, having someone who has gone through the system, who understands the other side, be the one who leads it.”
Dana’s brow furrows. She wants to ask something. She wants to know – but she’s not going to give the Director the satisfaction.
The Director smiles, her face aged from the last time Dana saw her. From the joy in her expression, it seems Dana has passed some sort of test.
“I’ll be out of here soon, but you should go down to see the Ancient Ones. And ah – commune with them? You’re going to be the one who understands them the most at this facility – and it’s something they can’t train you for.”
There’s something in her voice, Dana can’t place. It’s not annoyance, or rage or pity or fear. It’s…
Dana frowns even more.
“That is part of my job, thank you. If you have anything you think will be helpful, feel free to leave those notes and I’ll check them out once you leave.”
The Director nods. Dana turns to leave.
“Ah…”
Dana pauses, her hand on the door frame.
The Director has her hand out, slowly pulling it back. “It will shock you. Don’t let it derail you.” She pauses for a moment. “I wish you luck with what you’re taking on.”
With that, she turns back to the papers on her desk.
Dana walks away, barely listening to the guide who had been brought to help her out, because her brain is spinning, piecing things together.
Someone who understands it from the other side? She refuses to give the Director her questions but god it burns. Had the Director been in the same situation she had?
She shakes her head and keeps walking. She does not have the time or the energy to deal with this. But the look on the Director’s face… bothers her. She knows this facility, knows the blueprint of how it was redesigned, and tells the guide that she will commune with the Ancient Ones now, ahead of schedule.
The guide says something, probably to dissuade her, but Dana has continued walking, moving out of earshot.
Had the Director been just like her? Had she been trying to warn Dana or scare her? Or had it just been an old woman, afraid of losing her job and being left in the dust of a facility that she should’ve been fired from when Dana’s Ritual damn near failed?
Dana all but flies down the steps, pausing as she gets to the platform that a decade ago, she had shot Marty on. Something prickles in the back of her mind, but she keeps going, moving down the second set of stairs she had gone down so long ago to escape. But she makes a turn, another stairwell, that originally, she hadn’t known about, but now she’s all too familiar with.
Or would be – she knows the layout and the design, but she’s never been allowed down to see the sleep of the Ancient Ones. That is something only for the Directors… and. Well. Now she is.
She sees them, in the distance, massive, and horrifying and all powerful. She can’t see them clearly, their shapes are amorphous ginormous and destructive and oozing of strength and power and things nightmares come from. It looks as though there's a barrier between her and them, that's gently playing tricks in the light so she can't see them properly, or maybe her human eyes can't comprehend such horrors. But there is one, much closer to her. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, maybe it’s something odd about it all, but it seems significantly smaller.
She slips out of her shoes (the heels wouldn’t awaken them but she finds she’s a bit more paranoid, now that they’re right here) and approaches it. Maybe it’s further back and huge and she will realize she’s being foolish (maybe it's forced perspective?). But no – it’s actually much closer than she anticipates, and she finds herself stopping short as she walks up to it.
It’s way larger than a human, but nowhere near the size of one of the other Ancient Ones that tower like buildings up ahead. But this one… it’s maybe twenty or thirty feet. It’s difficult to know as it’s curled up so tightly in a ball beside the barrier that separates her from such evils. Even in it's curled up state, something about this one seems familiar. And seems like it had been dragged from somewhere.
Dana hasn’t felt fear in a long, long time. But a cold trickle of sweat goes down her back as she looks, really looks at the Ancient One, curled up in a ball beside the barrier.
This has to be a joke. A cruel trick being played on her. Because there’s no way this is possible. What was the Director not telling her? What does that damn woman know??
Dana feels herself launched back a decade ago, the feeling of the gun recoiling in her hands. She feels the scream bubbling up and forces it down, down, down as best as she can. But the tears that come to her eyes are unbidden, and she can't get them to stop.
The Ancient One curled beside her looks just like Marty.