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Director Jesse Faden had been deep in conversation with Doctor Pope and Security Chief Arish for the past fifteen minutes. This, of course, made it the perfect time for Dylan Faden to enter her office and drop something heavy on her desk.
Emily and Arish jumped simultaneously. Jesse, now used to her brother’s behavior, was less caught off guard…until she saw what had actually been dropped in front of her. “Dylan,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm, “what the hell is that?”
The other Faden’s expression was inscrutable. On the rare occasion he was spotted around the Oldest House, he tended to have the same mask on his face. It was a bit too neutral to be resting bitch face, but just bitchy enough to discourage interaction. “Meg and Topher,” he said, nodding towards the tangle of limbs and two sets of lifeless eyes staring back up at him.
“Okay. Why are Meg and Topher on my desk?”
“They have names?” Arish whispered to Emily.
She grimaced. “Threshold Kids. Doctor Harrington thought it would be a good way to introduce paranatural concepts to members of the Prime Candidate program.”
“And it’s only the tenth worst thing I saw in here,” Dylan interjected. A spark of mischief entered his eyes as Jesse (with some hesitance) started untangling the two puppets. “These aren't even the worst ones. I didn't see Mr. Bones anywhere…” His eyes slid over to Arish. “Might want to keep an eye out.”
Arish had to admit: he'd had the same thought a second before Dylan had said it out loud. You really never knew in a place like this.
Jesse finally untangled Meg’s arms and held the puppet close enough to examine the details, not so close that it could attack her if it did come alive. “I need to dig through the budget records and see how much money they got for this,” she said. “Are we thinking less or more than five dollars?”
“Six figures and that's the best they could do with it,” Arish said, deadpan. Emily bit back a laugh. “You watched it, Dylan. What do you think?”
“Oh, Casper probably paid for it out of pocket. Only got supplies for it from the dollar store, though.” Dylan had stopped invoking the late (?) Dr. Darling’s name with quite as much vitriol, but the disdain hadn't diminished all that much. “Never thought I'd see these again.”
“Neither did I,” Emily said. “Not that I was involved in the show at all, but people used to hide them around Research to scare anyone new - “
The sentence trailed off as Emily realized her mistake. Jesse froze; Dylan’s eyes slid over to his sister. Arish and Emily froze as well, as if movement would remind the younger Faden that they were there and also viable targets. Slowly, Jesse turned to face her brother.
“Dylan.”
Dylan was suddenly at the door in a burst of paranatural speed. Jesse dropped Meg and started running after him. “Give me th-Dylan!”
The Director’s Office fell silent as the siblings ran down the hall. Arish and Emily slowly looked each other’s way. There was matching fear in their eyes. “Pope,” Arish said solemnly, “I think you fucked up.”
.
Jesse wasn’t sure what pissed her off more: that Dylan managed to hide that stupid puppet so well that she was never able to get it back from him, or that, despite her knowing what he was probably going to do with it, he still managed to get her with it.
Her brother was patient now. That was the problem. Any of the impulsiveness that had thwarted his pranks when they were kids had been replaced by a terrifying level of planning. He waited not just until she’d almost forgotten about the puppet thing, but when she was so wrapped up in some new issue with repairing the Oldest House that the thought of whatever schemes Dylan might be up to wasn’t even in the top 100 of things she was worried about. It was then, and only then, that he snuck Topher into the office coat closet when she wasn’t looking. The second she pulled her jacket off the hook, her mind lost in thoughts of where she was going to get takeout from to make up for how long the day had been, she saw two disturbingly human eyes staring at her from the shadows. Her hands actually flew for the Service Weapon before she registered what she was looking at.
“Fucker!”
Polaris swirled around her head, a brilliant white spiral of both concern and amusement. “Yeah, yeah, go ahead and laugh.” Jesse pulled the puppet out of her locker and stared at it in disdain. She half expected Dylan to jump out of the shadows with a shit-eating grin on his face, but she guessed he really had left early for the day. (Or…left on time. She really had to start keeping to her office hours before she lost her mind.) “What am I gonna do with you?” she grumbled. Burn it? Bury it so deep in the Panopticon that not even Langston would know where to find it? Or…
On a hunch, Jesse went back to her desk and opened up one of the locked drawers. Meg was still there. She’d shoved it in her desk after Dylan had left it behind and never bothered to move it. Too much going on for her to worry about a creepy-ass puppet. It suddenly occurred to her that Dylan had never tried to swipe both puppets. Sure, it was behind lock and key, but that didn’t stop Dylan from getting into places these days. She was pretty sure he’d even broken into her desk before. (She had no proof, but her hunches about these things had never been wrong.) He’d left it behind…
Because it’s not really a prank war if there’s no risk of retaliation.
The thought kept circling around her head as she shoved Topher in with Meg and re-sealed the drawer. It followed her out of the Oldest House and all the way home. She’d almost dismissed it by the time she reached the apartment. She was a grown adult. She had too much going on right now with all the cleanup after the biggest AWE in the Bureau’s history. There was no time for this.
Her resolve crumbled the second she saw Dylan sprawled out on the couch with his nose in a book. He peered over it with the biggest and most innocent eyes he could manage. “Took you long enough,” he said. “Did you get cornered by Langston or something?”
Nope, she thought. I can’t let this slide.
“Paperwork,” she said, her cheer as forced as his innocence. “Did you get dinner already?”
“There’s pizza in the fridge.” Dylan’s eyes followed Jesse as she pulled off her boots and walked towards the kitchen. “Did I miss anything interesting?”
She wouldn’t react. That was what he wanted. Two could play at the everything is fine game. “Usual Bureau stuff. Nothing you’d be interested in.” Even her nonchalance wasn’t enough to fool him—she could see the triumphant smirk on his face even with the book covering half of it—but that was fine. He could have this win. She would get him back. Not even the fact that he’d gotten half extra cheese like she preferred would stop that.
(She did appreciate it, though.)
.
Dylan probably didn’t have to keep going back to the Oldest House. He could just stay in the apartment, or around the city, and never set foot in that place again. But…something kept drawing him back in. It wasn’t just that Jesse was there and the thought of being too far away from her after everything made him feel sick. It didn’t have anything to do with the Aberrant or the shifting Director portraits in the halls. Definitely not that. He’d refused any kind of real title for as long as he could. Even when they finally made him put something in his personnel file, it wasn’t anything as fancy as Co-Director or even Assistant Director. Just Janitor’s Assistant.
He was still a little peeved that they wouldn’t let him put “the better janitor’s assistant”, but whatever. Ahti knew the score.
Most of the messes he was cleaning up these days could be handled with the Aberrant and a few paranatural powers, but he did occasionally run into tasks that involved good old regular elbow grease. The Mold, for example, had a bad habit of leaving residue that still gave off an eat me smell. Enough people had been caught licking the walls that a request had been sent to please, please ensure thorough cleaning of all areas that had previously had a Mold infestation.
(The full-sized chocolate bar Jesse had sent down with the request had been more of a motivator than the official letter, but they kept that off the record. Couldn’t let the others know that FBC’s director had stooped to bribery.)
That meant busting out a spray bottle of some mixture that smelled weirdly of seaweed and made the Mold residue turn really interesting colors before you wiped it up. Ahti still hadn’t told him what was in it…or maybe he had, and Dylan just hadn’t been able to understand him. I’ve really got to start learning Finnish. There’s apps for that now, right? Apps for fucking everything nowadays –
Something came loose as he pulled a box of rags off the shelf. Flailing limbs reached for his face as a small figure jumped out at him. A strangled noise caught in Dylan’s throat as he barely sidestepped the whatever-it-was. He had it trapped under the rag box before his brain fully registered what he’d seen: long arms and a flash of red and…
Wait.
It was probably overkill to draw the Aberrant in spear form and use that to nudge the box aside from a safe distance, especially when he was pretty damn sure he knew what it was, but he’d rather feel stupid than lose a hand. A few seconds of cautious poking later, and he’d unearthed…Meg.
Fucking. Meg.
“Okay, fine. Well played.” Dylan had figured Jesse would get him back for Topher; he just hadn’t expected it to be so soon. Which was probably why she hadn’t waited too long. Blitz attack when they least expect it and all. The Aberrant shrank down in Dylan’s hand as he crouched down to pick up the doll. “You find Topher’s mom yet, Meg?”
Seeing her again still made his stomach twist. There wasn’t much else to watch during the early days of his captivity, so he had most of the damn Threshold Kids episodes memorized. Mr. Bones and his mask, the big chair, Donkeys in Space. (Honestly, some days he would’ve rather watched whatever that was supposed to be.) The puppets were just one of the memories that clung to his bones like Mold residue. No seaweed juice to scrub that shit away.
The memory of Jesse’s squeamish but morbidly fascinated expression when she’d first seen the puppets didn’t take the sting of those memories away. Was enough to cheer him up a bit, though. “Guess we should get you back to him, huh? Can’t break up the band for too long.”
Dylan gathered up Meg, the cleaning supplies he’d need, and started hauling everything up to Maintenance. Mold cleanup wasn’t too mentally demanding. It’d give him plenty of time to cook up something.
.
Her first warning was the fact that Dylan was in an exceptionally good mood, despite the fact that he’d ended the day smelling like low tide. Her second was going back into her office to drop off some paperwork before she left (on time today) and found Meg sitting on her desk. Topher was missing from the conspicuously open desk drawer she’d left him in. “I knew you had a lockpick, you ass,” Jesse muttered to herself. She put Meg in a different locked drawer—he could probably pick that one, too, but at least it’d throw him off a bit—before leaving. Okay, Dylan. What’s your play now?
It took her a few days to find out. Again, it was on another night when the Great War of the Threshold Kids was the furthest thing from her mind; the kind of night where Dylan actually came back to the Oldest House and threatened to drag her out himself. “Reality is not actively falling apart at the seams. Nothing in those papers can be that important,” he said. “And it is too quiet in that apartment without you. I’m going insane.”
“There is no way it’s quiet in there on a Friday night,” Jesse grumbled as she shoved one last file back in her desk. “Not with the way our neighbors are.”
“Jess, it’s Thursday.”
Jesse would have thought he was messing with her if it hadn’t been for the look of legitimate exasperation on his face. “…What time is it?” she asked sheepishly.
“It’s like, 9:30. It’s not even technically Friday.”
“Shit.”
“I swear, if you don’t leave here tomorrow at five exactly, I’m gonna start doing the Hiss chant in the middle of Executive until you leave.”
“Dylan!”
“Smash some windows while I’m at it.”
“And whose job will it be to clean that up?”
“The House will probably take care of it before I get the chance to. Windows don’t really stay broken that long.” Dylan tilted his head when Jesse stared at him skeptically. “What, you never noticed?”
She hadn’t. Jesse almost asked how he knew so much about this place, but quickly bit the question back. He’d been kept here for almost two decades. Between that and how much time he’d spent with Ahti after the janitor had finally come back, he definitely knew the place better than she did.
“Still, don’t do that,” Jesse said instead as she grabbed her winter coat and started pulling it on. “The last thing we need is people thinking you’ve relapsed or – “
Her fingers hit something cold and smooth in her sleeve.
Jesse shrieked and dropped the jacket. Her hand scrambled for the Service Weapon instinctively as Dylan grabbed her free arm and dragged her back. “What?! What?!”
“There’s something in my…”
A thought suddenly occurred to her. The same realization must have hit Dylan; when she looked up at him, his face had gone from worried and protective to blank and a tiny bit guilty. That was confirmation enough on its own, but she still yanked her arm free and stalked forward to grab and shake the jacket. Topher came tumbling out, unfolding from a bundle just small enough to hide in her sleeve without being too obvious. Jesse stared down at the puppet for a long, irritated second before turning to face Dylan. The guilt on his face had grown, accompanied by a sheepish expression. “I…I forgot I put that there,” he admitted.
Jesse should have been pissed. Instead, she found Dylan’s expression was the funniest thing she’d ever seen in her life. Maybe she had been staring at too much paperwork, or dealing with too much in general, but next thing she knew, Jesse was sitting on the floor, giggling hysterically. Dylan was laughing too. “I’m sorry,” he said in between giggles as he sat down next to her.
“You’re gonna be, now that I have to get you back.”
“You can get me back twice.”
“No. I don’t want your stupid sympathy freebie.” Jesse thumped him lightly on the chest. “That’s not fun.”
He shoved her lightly in retaliation. “Fine, I take it back.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
They mock glared at each other before cracking again. Dylan was the first to stand up. “Okay, yeah, we’ve got to get home.” He hauled Jesse up to her feet. “We’re losing it.”
“We’ve already lost it.”
“We’re losing it even more.” Dylan stopped to pick up Topher and put him back on Jesse’s desk. “See you later, you little freak.”
Oh, you definitely will. When you least expect it. Jesse’s stomach growled. Just. Once I’ve had something to eat.
.
It went on like that for a while. Any place Dylan or Jesse frequented in the Oldest House became a part of the battle. Collateral damage was kept to a minimum, though given the nature of Jesse’s job, others were sometimes caught up in the jump scare. This was considered an improvement, as there was certainly a time when Dylan would have deliberately targeted the entire Research branch, at minimum, out of spite. Forgiveness may not have been granted, but they would settle for being left out of this.
Jesse’s most elaborate retaliation involved staging Meg as if she’d stolen Dylan’s lunch. Dylan’s involved a haunted house spring mechanism that he improvised using office supplies. It was impressive, but undeniably an escalation.
Unfortunately for Dylan, enough problems had been cleared off Jesse’s plate for her to plan a more involved response than before. .
.
He was trying to go more places on his own. The library was usually a safe bet: within walking distance, quiet, full of people who minded their own business. He might have put off catching up on pop culture due to how much of it there was now, but Fred would not shut up about Alan Wake’s books, so Dylan had to see what all the fuss was about. Especially after hearing about what had gone down while the Oldest House was on lockdown. Us paranatural freaks should support each other, I guess.
Jesse had actually stuck to her day off and was sitting on the couch when he returned, watching some trashy dating reality show. “Did the rain stop?” she asked without looking away from the screen.
“Yeah, finally.” It had been dreary for days. It sucked going from the windowless interior of the Oldest House to an equally gray but worse-lit city outside. “Have Dave and Sarah broken up yet?”
“No.”
Dylan rolled his eyes as he walked towards his room. “Well, let me know if they finally do. I want to see that fallout.”
“You got it.”
The plan was to kick up his feet and start reading right away. He didn’t have any obligations until it was time to scrounge up dinner, and if there wasn’t going to be any interesting dating show drama, whatever Alan Wake had glimpsed in another timeline was probably the better option. Dylan shut the door (not all the way, just enough for basic privacy), went to open up the window, caught a glimpse of something in the corner…
What the fuck.
Dylan turned slowly. He took in the general shape of the body, the just too human eyes, the pale skin. Panic and confusion set in. There hadn’t been any rules to this whole thing, but some things just felt…unspoken. Had Jesse breached those unspoken rules, or had the thing somehow followed them out? There’s no way they didn’t notice something was wrong with it before…wait.
More details started to sink in. The sweater wasn’t the right color. The molding of the face wasn’t quite the same. The hair was the biggest giveaway. It wasn’t the bright red wig strands he remembered; instead, it looked like unraveled yarn made slightly more stiff by glue.
Are you fucking kidding me.
Dylan yanked the doll down from its spot in the corner and stalked out into the living room. “When the hell,” he said flatly, holding up Fake Meg, “did you do this?” They were practically attached at the hip most of the time, and he hadn’t caught wind of this at all.
Jesse looked up and smirked. “During the budget meetings,” she said cheerfully.
…damn it. She’d really thought this through. Dylan usually only went to meetings to bother Jesse, and the budget meetings were so boring that he didn’t even show up to do that. It was the perfect time to put together a Meg doppleganger.
“Well played,” Dylan admitted. He set Fake Meg at the dining table and started right back towards his room. Before shutting the door, he called, “Watch your back, though!”
He had revenge to plot. Alan Wake was going to have to wait.
.
Jesse was a little embarrassed by how long it took her to notice. In her defense, Dylan really committed to starting small. Pictures that were out of her line of sight. Condiments more towards the middle or back of the fridge. They crept out from there until she reached for a box of pancake mix one day and realized the mascot on the box had been replaced with carefully, meticulously drawn picture of Topher. That realization opened the flood gates, and suddenly everywhere she turned, she saw hand-drawn pictures of those damn puppets taped over other faces. She spent a good hour collecting as many of them as she could find, and she wasn’t sure that she got them all. Dylan probably had forgotten where he’d put them all.
She almost texted him, but switched over to a phone call. Making a phone call on her day off felt wrong, but Dylan was still getting the hang of texting, so she had to compromise. “Does Ahti know you’ve been goofing off on the clock?” she said without preamble.
Dylan let out an ugly snort-laugh. “Hey, I’ve cleared the clog more times than you have. He’s giving me a promotion. Senior Janitor’s Assistant. I can draw as much as I want.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, Ahti likes you best, whatever.” Jesse’s head tilted slightly as she registered the background noise on Dylan’s end. “Are you at the deli without me!?”
“Relax, I’m bringing you back a sandwich.”
“I forgive you for defacing Mrs. Butterworth’s like that.”
“Yeah, I love you, too. See you in twenty.”
“Love you.”
Twenty minutes, huh? She could work with that.
It was a slapdash job, and probably disrespectful to the amount of effort Dylan had put into drawing all those faces. But by the time he walked through the door, she had managed to tape them all on an old takeout menu in a collage and set it up with her false Meg on Dylan’s desk. She lit the only candle they had in the house (lavender scented with a “Calm the Fuck Down” label, Arish’s housewarming gift to Dylan) and set it next to the display. It wasn’t exactly the creepy horror movie nightmare altar she’d imagined, but it would have to do. She just managed to get out of Dylan’s room and back into the common areas by the time he walked in the door. “Can it just start snowing already?” he grumbled as he dropped the takeout bag on the table and started struggling out of his coat. “This rain is bullshit. Be cold or rain, don’t do both.”
“Agreed. But you could learn to drive, you know.”
“Then I’d be in traffic while it’s cold and raining. I…” Dylan froze. Jesse watched as he took a deep breath, registered the smell, and immediately started speed-walking for his room. Seconds later, she heard him start laughing. “Fuck, Jess, are you trying to will this thing to become an OoP?”
“I don’t think that’s how that works.”
“I’m not risking it.” He walked back into the common areas with the collage. “I’m keeping this, though.”
“That’s a bit egotistcal of you.”
“I’m considering it a group project with my sister. Like that…macaroni monstrosity we made for mom when I was five.”
Jesse wasn’t sure what surprised her more: that Dylan remembered that, or that she remembered, too. “Who let us near the red paint!?” she said, laughing as she retrieved her sandwich and sat down. “It looked like a murder scene.”
“We should’ve made more like it. Really left something for Darling and those field agents to chew on.” Jesse saw something in Dylan’s eyes for just a second—that look he got when he was considering making a dark joke that was only half a joke. He shook it off just as quickly and sat down across from her. “You have Arish’s address, right?”
“We are not anonymously mailing Fake Meg to him.”
“When did you stop being fun?”
“We do have an HR department. You know that, right?”
“You mean the people who want paperwork for inter-department hookups but not the child labor law violations?”
Okay, yeah. Fair. Jesse didn’t have a rebuttal to that one.
.
They didn’t end up mailing Fake Meg to Arish.
He still ended up involved.
“No one’s necessarily blaming him, but you know, you two have been kind of…” Arish paused, trying to think of the best way to phrase it. “Uh, giving each other drive by heart attacks with creepy puppets. So.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it.” Jesse rubbed her face. It wasn’t even lunch yet, and the day already felt too damn long. “I should probably talk to him first. You know he still gets defensive about…”
“What the hell do they think I did now?”
Jesse and Arish looked up simultaneously. Dylan hovered near one of the light fixtures on the high ceiling, reaching…a bit deeper into it than seemed reasonable for the fixture. It looked like his arm was being eaten by the wall. “Are, uh, you okay up there?” Arish asked warily.
“Yeah, just dealing with some impacted light bulbs.”
“…wh-“
“Don’t worry about it. What do they think I did?”
So much for not making Dylan defensive. Jesse sighed and carefully pushed herself off the ground to hover next to her brother. “Impacted light bulbs?” she whispered.
“Yeah, like with teeth? Stuff doesn’t get put back right after house shifts, and then the lights get all fucked up…” Dylan shifted his position so his feet were braced against the wall, ready to start pulling on whatever he’d gotten a grip on. “…and I swear I’m gonna go on strike this time.”
“Dylan.”
“I’m doing it for real.”
“Did you find Mr. Bones?”
Dylan froze. The sheer panic in his eyes was answer enough; Jesse readily believed him when he said (quietly, as if the puppet could hear him), “No. Did you?”
“Someone found him in one of the safe rooms in executive. And he wasn’t there yesterday.”
Dylan seemed more frightened by that than by the fact that he was up to his elbow in the Oldest House. “We should, uh…” He cleared his throat. “Probably get the security footage. I’ll be right down.”
Jesse nodded numbly and lowered herself down. “It wasn’t him?” Arish asked upon seeing her face.
“No. He has no idea, either.”
“Oh.” Arish considered that, then nodded. “Yep, that’s worse. That’s much worse.”
The lights flickered and settled to normal. When Dylan landed, he was holding what looked like two light bulbs that had been mashed together in a misshapen, useless blob of glass and metal, lightly coated in concrete dust. He looked at it with disgust. “Turning into an ojasta allikkoon kind of day,” he said, pocketing the bulb. “Fucking great.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“No idea. Boss man just says it whenever things are going tits up.” He reached to wipe his hand on Jesse’s suit jacket, but she dodged him in time. “Might as well get this over with.”
(He made three more attempts at using Jesse’s jacket as a wipe before settling on getting Arish. The security chief decided he had enough battles on his hands and chose not to comment.)
Footage was pulled from both outside the safe room in question and inside. Fast-forwarding through the night before showed no signs of Mr. Bones during regular business hours. The closest Dylan came to the room was when he walked past it on his way out at 4:59 p.m., shoving an exasperated looking Jesse in front of him. Hours passed as the night shift took over, all the usual activity, until...
4:32 a.m. Footage both in the exterior and interior of the safe room cut out. After about two minutes, it returned. The exterior footage showed no changes to the Safe Room door. Inside, Mr. Bones sat in the center of the room.
Silence settled over the trio. It was broken by a slight clinking as Dylan unhooked and hefted the Aberrant. “Maybe I can turn this into a flamethrower,” he said. “Worth a shot.”
No one could think of a good reason for him not to try.
.
In the end, the Great War of the Threshold Kids ended with one new resident in the Panopticon and two more objects under close surveillance. Fake Meg was allowed to stay in the apartment, but she was on thin ice. The rest of the FBC could breathe a little easier knowing the risk of being caught up in the (definitely not Board-approved) sibling antics had been reduced significantly. A covert betting pool still started up as to when the next round of antics would occur.
Those who put money on “less than one month” were treated to a decent payout, courtesy of every single Director’s portrait in the Executive branch being defaced with macaroni and red paint. When asked, the Fadens had a unified response.
Inside joke. Don’t worry about it.