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Despite all the begging and anticipation, Gerry's not ready when the fire eats him.
The stink of burning, the scream locked in his throat, the certainty that this is the end and that it will hurt the entire way there. The agony is blistering, bright and total, a sheet of pain pulled tight over nerves he hasn’t had in years. It is almost worse for that—because the Skin Catalogue was never like this. That had been thin. Two-dimensional. A stretched, flensed awareness pressed between ink and leather.
This is depth. This is heat under fingernails. This is lungs that feel like they’re filling with smoke.
For one long, excruciating second, Gerry thinks the Archivist has made a mistake.
That he’s done it wrong.
That this is the punishment for trusting another Archivist.
Then—
The pain gutters.
Not gone, never gone. But it recedes like a wave pulling back from a cliff face.
Everything is dark.
Not the suffocating blank of the book. Not the hungry velvet of the Dark. Not the buzzing, invasive glare of the Eye.
Just… dark.
He lies there—because he is lying, isn’t he?—and marvels at it.
Darkness with dimension. Darkness that has air in it.
He draws a breath. It hurts. He laughs. It hurts worse.
And then he screams, because he’s just registered it.
He’s still on fire. It is skin-splitting, nerve-flaying, blister-blooming flame.
His scream tears itself out of him raw and animal, nothing like the thin, papery distortion of sound he’d managed from inside the Catalogue. This is full-throated. This is lungs and spit and smoke. This is agony with weight behind it.
Somewhere nearby something crashes violently to the floor. “Shit—! Gerry—?!”
Footsteps scramble and papers scatter. A chair overturns.
Something heavy and rough slams down over him, fabric, thick, scratchy, and hands press frantically over it, patting, smothering.
It makes it worse. The pressure drives the heat against him, traps it close. Every touch is a fresh brand. Gerry chokes on another scream, thrashing instinctively, but there are hands gripping his shoulders now, forcing him still.
“Hold still— hold still, I’ve got you—”
The words are ragged. Panicked.
The fire eats the oxygen from the air. Or maybe that’s just his lungs giving up. He’s burned before. He remembers Molina. He remembers the way pain can narrow the world to a single unbearable point.
But this—
This is everywhere.
There is no edge to it. No center. His entire body is a single screaming nerve. It crawls under his skin, blossoms in his veins. His fingertips feel like sparklers. His chest is a live coal. His limbs—
God. He smells himself. He can feel the bile rising up, but he's in too much pain to register much of anything. He must be going into shock. He thinks dimly that this must be what Hell is after all.
The fabric finally smothers the worst of it. The flames gutter out in coughing little breaths of smoke. But the damage remains. Every nerve continues to burn long after the fire is gone.
Gerry makes a small, broken sound. He feels cold, which he assumes is not ideal after just having been on fire.
“Stay with me,” The Archivist is saying. The Archivist, always a fucking Archivist. “Gerry, stay—”
As if he has any say in that. The world contracts, and he sincerely hopes he's actually died, this time.
Gerry dreams.
He is small. He is small the way all children are small, thin wrists, too-big coat sleeves, knees scabbed from falling in places no one noticed.
The shop smells the same.
Dust and damp and paper that has absorbed a century of hands. Pinhole Books leans inward on itself like it’s embarrassed to be standing. The sign in the window is crooked. The door chime doesn’t ring so much as cough.
His mum is behind the counter. Mary Keay never looks small.
She is all sharp edges and long fingers and tattoos all over her exposed skin in languages Gerard hasn't yet heard of. She has a cigarette burning in an ashtray too close to a stack of unsorted letters. She doesn’t look up when he comes in from the back room.
“Don’t touch anything with a ribbon on it,” she says.
He hasn’t.
He won’t.
There are books on the shelves that do not look like books. Their spines breathe faintly. One of them sits on the counter, leaks something dark and viscous that soaks into the wood and disappears.
Mary smiles at it like it is charming.
“You see, Gerard,” she says, voice low and pleased with itself, “the trick isn’t finding them. Anyone can find a Leitner if they’re sufficiently desperate. The trick is understanding them.”
She taps the cover with a lacquered nail. “Controlling them.” She says it like a promise.
He nods. He always nods. She likes it when he nods.
Time slips. He is older. Old enough to know better. Old enough not to care.
The shop smells like copper and something sweetly rotten. Her body is on the floor.
Slumped, bleeding. Half her skin is gone. Not cleanly removed; one side of her glistens wet and red, muscle exposed, edges of inked skin curling like damp paper from a text. Blood has soaked into the carpet, into her clothes, into everything.
Gerry gags. Her eyes snap open.
“Don’t just stand there,” she rasps. “Finish it.”
The book lies near her hand. The Catalogue of the Trapped Dead.
Strips of skin tattooed in Sanskrit, Persian, and Gerard doesn't know what else are laid beside it. Understanding hits him all at once. She did this, of course she did. She's always been building up to this tipping point, in one way or another. For permanence. For control.
“Mum—” His voice breaks.
“Bind it,” she snarls. “You useless little coward. I can’t—”
Her hand slips in her own blood. The pages of the book shiver, as if eager.
He takes one shaking step forward. The heat of it, the smell of it, the reality of her ruined body presses in on him. His stomach twists violently.
“I didn’t ask for this,” he whispers.
“After everything I gave you—”
He bends and vomits onto the floor.
“Gerard!” she screams, fury and something like fear cracking through it. “Don’t you dare leave me like this—”
He wipes his mouth with his sleeve, shaking. For a moment he almost does it. Almost kneels, reaches. Instead, he backs away.
“No,” he says.
He turns and runs. Her screaming follows him down the hall. He doesn’t look back.
Gerry is in a hospital bed at St. Thomas Hospital. He is covered in burns. He killed Molina, at least. At least he stopped the lightless flame.
He returns home to his mother. Her page, at least.
Gerry is in the archives in the Magnus Institute. He's always hated this place, hated his twisted curiousity about it and his desperation to be here, to be usefull, to stand for something his mother loathes.
Gertrude tells him without preamble. “I burned it.”
He doesn’t understand.
“Your mother’s page.”
The words land like stones in water. There is a long silence. “Oh.”
He expects to feel something sharp. Something catastrophic. Something gleeful. Instead there is a hollowing.
Gertrude watches him carefully. “She was already gone,” she says. Not unkindly. “You know that, Gerard.”
He does. He always did. She had always been "gone". Gerry had never known a version of his mother who wasn't "gone". He laughs once, brittle.
“Good riddance,” he mutters.
Gertrude almost smiles.
Then Gerry's on a plane. Then an airport. He helps Gertrude. Of course he does. The institute is a black hole and he has always orbited one.
He drives. He researches. He stands watch outside places that hum wrong under his skin. He burns what needs burning.
He tells himself it is control. He tells himself it is penance. Gertrude never thanks him. He would not know what to do if she did.
He's in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines, no surgery left to save him. “I'm dying,” He is telling Gertrude, because he has never been good at discretion.
“Everything dies, Gerard.”
The dream folds in on itself. The shop returns. The fire. The books.
Mary stands behind the counter, whole and sharp and smiling that private, self-satisfied smile “Well?” she asks him.
He is small again.
Burning. Breathing smoke.
He looks at her and understands, finally, that she was never afraid of being consumed.
Only of being irrelevant. The dream begins to smoke at the edges.
Gerry sniffles. "Mum, I'm scared." his voice is tiny, high pitched and young.
Mary does not move to help him. She never has.
Gerard wakes to darknesss, real darkness.
Not endless, not consuming. Just the absence of light. He's never been a big fan of The Dark, but he's not as affected as others might be. This dark is comforting, compared to the dark of being smoothered and shut and tossed around.
For a long moment he doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe. He doesn’t dare.
He feels—
Heavy. Wrapped, stiff. A little woozy. Have I been drugged?
There is fabric against every inch of him. Tight around his arms. Across his chest. Up his neck. His fingers are bound together in careful separation, padded and thick. His face feels strange, constricted, like even his cheeks are swaddled.
He tries to swallow. His throat aches. He inhales carefully. It hurts. Just pain. Human pain. He is not on fire. He is not on a page. He is not alone in a leather coffin of other people’s skin.
He shifts slightly, and regrets it immediately. A hiss slips out between his teeth.
Somewhere close by, a chair scrapes sharply against the floor.
“Oh—”
The Archivist. “You’re awake.”
Gerry considers this. His tongue feels too big for his mouth.
“Mm,” he manages. It comes out wrecked, barely there.
There’s a long exhale from the darkness. Not relief exactly. Something tighter than that.
“You've been unconscious,” The Archivist says. “You were—” His voice falters. “You were badly burned.”
He is aware of the cot beneath him now. The thin mattress. The way his body is elevated slightly at the head. The faint antiseptic smell clinging to the air beneath the lingering smoke.
He feels like a mummy. "This is a fashion choice,” he rasps, because he can't bring himself to think, to consider what this means.
There’s a wet, startled huff from the Archivist. Almost a laugh, almost a sob.
Gerry licks at cracked lips and immediately regrets it. His tongue feels like it’s been wrapped in gauze as well. Everything tastes faintly chemical. Antiseptic, plastic.
He tries again anyway.
“What—” It scrapes out of him like something dragged across gravel. His throat seizes. The word collapses into a cough that shudders through his entire body.
He makes a broken noise, more frustration than pain this time. Though the pain is agonizing.
“Don’t,” The Archivist says quickly. His chair legs scrape closer. “You, you shouldn’t strain it. They said there was smoke inhalation,” He swallows audibly.
Gerry shifts his eyes toward the sound of him. The movement makes the room tilt unpleasantly. “Water,” he manages instead.
There’s a sharp scrape of movement. “Yes— yes, of course.”
Fabric rustles, something clicks softly against metal. Gerry hears the faint slosh of liquid.
“Slowly,” The Archivist says, closer now. Very close. A hand slides behind Gerry’s neck. Careful. Hesitant, as if he expects him to shatter. The touch is warm through the bandages. Human. It stings, it aches. Gerry stiffens on instinct, then forces himself to go loose.
The rim of a cup presses lightly to his lower lip.
“Small sips,” The Archivist murmurs.
The water touches his tongue and he nearly groans. It tastes faintly plastic, faintly chemical, but it’s wet, cold and real.
He swallows. Pain flares down his dry throat, rasping and furious. His fingers twitch uselessly in their wrappings.
The Archivist's grip tightens minutely. “Too much?”
Gerry shakes his head and immediately regrets it when the room tilts.
“More,” he croaks.
Another careful tilt. Another swallow. This one goes down easier. He hadn’t realised how dry his mouth was until now. Like he’d been packed with ash.
The Archivist lowers the cup after a moment. The hand at his neck lingers half a second longer than strictly necessary before easing him back against the pillow.
“There,” he says quietly.
Gerry breathes through the lingering burn.
There’s a pause. A small, steadying inhale.
“I brought you to A&E,” The Archivist says. The words are precise, but there’s a tremor underneath them. “You were unconscious by the time the fire was out. I thought—” He cuts himself off and starts again. “They admitted you. You’ve been comatose. You've been here just a bit over a week.”
A week. Comatose. Gerry feels hysterical. Again? Comatose after a fire, again? He lets it settle somewhere distant and unimportant. Time feels theoretical at the moment. His body is a heavy, humming thing, stitched together by ache.
He tries to swallow again. “A week,” he repeats faintly, as if testing the shape of it. He closes his eyes. He's so, so tired.
“Yes.”
Gerry stares into the dark behind his eyelids.
“I—” He stops. Gathers what little breath he has. “Dead?”
It’s a ridiculous question. An obvious one.
“No,” The Archivist says at last. Very quietly. “You aren’t.”
There’s something wrong with the way he says it. Not relief. Not certainty. Just statement of fact. Gerry lets out something that might be a laugh. It rasps painfully against his throat and dissolves halfway through.
“Right,” he whispers.
Because he remembers. He remembers the fire taking him whole. The way the pain had swallowed everything. He remembers thinking this was it. He was finally going to be able to rest. Gerry just wants to rest.
He flexes his fingers experimentally. Or tries to; they don’t move much. There’s resistance. Padding, tape.
But he feels the attempt, the weight of his own hand. Gravity. It makes something sharp and unfamiliar twist in his chest.
The Archivist shifts again. Cloth rustles. “The doctors…” He trails off.
Gerry waits.
“They said the burns were severe. Full-thickness in places. You should have—” His voice falters. He corrects himself stiffly. “You shouldn’t have stabilised as quickly as you did.”
Gerry turns that over carefully. Each thought feels like wading through syrup.
“Should’ve,” he echoes faintly.
“Yes.”
Gerry’s mind drifts, sluggish and loose around the edges.
He wets his lips again. Winces.
“Mum,” he croaks.
The Archivist goes very still.
“When Gertrude—” Gerry swallows with effort. “Her page.”
“Mary died,” The Archivist says. It’s barely audible.
“Yeah.”
A machine somewhere gives a soft, rhythmic beep. Gerry latches onto it. Counts two beats. Three.
Gerry thinks. He thinks, considers, and loathes. “She didn’t,” he continues, words splintering apart between breaths. “Wait.”
The Archivist doesn’t follow. “I’m sorry?”
Gerry forces his eyes open again, even though it doesn’t change anything. The dark remains politely ordinary. “Gertrude,” he whispers.
The Archivist inhales slowly.
“Maybe she didn’t,” Gerry says. Each word costs him. “Didn’t… wait for me to die.”
The Archivist's, when it comes, is strained. “You think she—?”
“Used it,” Gerry rasps. “Early.”
The memory is hazy. Not a moment, not a knife in the dark. Just a creeping sense of wrongness from years ago. A thinning, a stretching.
“I remember,” he murmurs, frowning faintly. “Feeling… flat. Before.” Flat doesn't even begin to explain it. He can't think of anything to explain it. He doesn't think anyone in the world could possibly understand. He doesn't know why it's any different, either; mum—Mary— had been alive when she'd skinned herself, and she was still… dead, she'd still died, hadn't she? Why him? Why Gerry? Why could he never just rest? What had he done that was befitting of this existence of seemingly endless pain?
The Archivist's chair creaks. He’s leaning forward now. Listening, hungry for information the way Archivists always are.
Gerry lets out a breath that shudders on the way out. “I trusted her,” he mutters. It’s too soft to carry much bite, but the sentiment is there. Gertrude had always been a liar.
The Archivist frowns, brow furrowing as he turns the thought over. “That seems… unlikely,” he says slowly. “It doesn’t make much sense.”
Gerry lets out a weak, humorless huff. “Does any of this make sense?”
The Archivist considers that for a second. “…Point.”
“Maybe it’s something else,” Gerry says eventually.
“Maybe.”
Gerry’s eyes shift toward him. “What did you burn me with?”
The Archivist blinks. “Uh. My lighter.”
“Do you have it on you?”
“…Yeah.”
There’s a rustle of fabric as The Archivist digs in his pocket. He pulls the lighter out and holds it up uncertainly between two fingers.
“This one.”
Gerry squints at it. His vision swims a little, but the details are still there—tiny etched lines along the metal casing.
“Where’d you get it?”
“Oh. It just… showed up.”
Gerry stares at him. “And you kept it.”
The Archivist shrugs, faintly defensive. “I suppose.”
Gerry huffs a quiet breath through his nose. “It has spiderwebs on it. Maybe it’s from the Mother,” he says.
“The Mother?”
“The Web.”
The Archivist visibly shivers. “I fucking hate spiders.”
Gerry lets out a quiet, rasping laugh that immediately turns into a cough.
“Maybe that’s why I’m alive. The Mother has her plans. Hooray.”
After a long moment, the Archivist says, “I didn’t know.”
Gerry turns his head a fraction toward him. The motion sends sparks of pain down his neck.
“I know,” he says. And he does. That’s the worst part.
The Archivist had looked so certain when he struck the match. So desperate to do the right thing. And he had, hadn't he? He'd been the first person in Gerry's life who'd ever wanted to help him. Who'd just… done as he'd asked, despite what it meant. The first person who tried to make the pain go away, and he wasn't even much of a person anymore.
Gerry feels exhaustion creeping up again, thick and inevitable. His body is a battlefield. Every inch aches with the stubborn proof of existence.
“Jon,” he says, before sleep can drag him under.
“Yes?” after a beat, the Archivist adds hesitantly, "Gerry?"
His heart sings. That's right. He'd asked Jon to call him that, Gerry. His first friend. He's always wanted to hear it in someone else's voice, someone who cared.
Not Gerard Keay from the Leitner statement. Not the man who killed his mum. Not the sacrifice. Just Gerry.
“Thank you,” he rasps. “For…”
Jon lets out a brittle breath. “Burning you? Killing you? Attempting to, at any rate.”
Gerry’s hand twitches under the bandages. It hurts. Everything hurts.
“I asked you to,” he murmurs. “So. Yeah. Thank you.”
“Even if it all sort of spectacularly backfired. Burning my page was the worst idea I’ve ever had, which is impressive, considering my track record. I regret ever suggesting it.” His breath shudders. “But you did it.”
Jon goes quiet.
“You listened,” he finishes.
Jon exhales, a heavy, exhausted thing, but smiles at him grimly. "It's nice to meet you properly, Gerry."
"Likewise, Archivist."
A faint huff. "Jon, please."
"Jon," he agrees.
They fade into silence.
The machines murmur. Somewhere down the corridor, a trolley rattles past. The world continues, indifferent.
Gerry stares into the dark and tries not to think about what he looks like.
Full-thickness, Jon had said. It's been a week, but he knows what that means. He's been here before.
Skin split and blackened. Patches of slick red where there isn’t skin at all. Blisters collapsed into weeping craters. Stitches like ugly railway tracks. He imagines himself swollen, uneven. Something half-finished. Something wrong.
He wonders if the nurses have to fight the urge to recoil. If Jon did.
The antiseptic smell makes him think of rot. Infection. Sepsis creeping in under grafts and bandages. His body rejecting itself. His body failing properly this time.
He swallows carefully.
His hair. That hurts in a different way.
He’d grown it long out of spite at first. Out of defiance. He'd dyed it black with cheap box-dye. Mum had hated it. Said it made him look unkempt. Unserious, weak.
He’d kept it anyway. It had been heavy down his back. Tangled in the mornings. A nuisance in the wind. It had been his. He tries to move his head slightly against the pillow, searching for the familiar drag of it against his neck.
There’s nothing.
Or maybe there is and he just can’t feel it through the bandages. He doesn’t know. That’s worse. He imagines it burned away in handfuls. Singed to ash. Melted into the smoke that nearly took him with it.
He hadn’t thought he was sentimental about it. Turns out he is.
Gerry drifts in the loss for a while, half-sunk in the ache of his own body, counting the distant beeps like they’re proof of something. Of rhythm, continuation.
Then, because he has never been good at letting things lie, he says, “The Unknowing.”
Jon goes still again. Gerry can’t see it, but he hears the way Jon's breath catches.
“Yes,” Jon says carefully.
“You were planning on stopping it.” Not a question. His voice is still wrecked, thin as torn paper.
“Yes.”
A pause. Gerry licks at the corner of his mouth, winces. “Soon?”
Another beat. “Very soon.”
Gerry lets that settle. He pictures it: wax and music and a stage set for something obscene. He remembers the mannequins. He remembers the dread that had clung to them like perfume. He remembers what Gertrude had intended to do, to stop it.
“Then,” he rasps, “why are you here?”
It comes out harsher than he means it to. His throat is not built for nuance at the moment. Jon doesn’t answer immediately.
Gerry shifts, the movement microscopic but enough to tug at bandages. Pain flares. He breathes through it. “You should be—” He swallows. “Planning. Researching. Do you have any idea what to do?” He waits for Jon to ask for his help, to make him help, to tell him what he knows, what Gertrude was going to do. It never comes.
A chair creaks. A hand brushes the edge of the mattress, not quite touching him.
“I am,” Jon says. "I'm trying."
“Mm.”
“I’ve been doing both.”
Gerry frowns faintly. It pulls unpleasantly at the skin of his cheeks. “Both.”
“Yes.” There’s something brittle in Jon’s voice now. Gerry waits him out.
“I couldn’t just leave you alone,” Jon says at last.
The words are simple. Gerry’s mind stalls on them.
Alone.
He remembers the inside of the Catalogue. The endless dark that wasn’t dark so much as absence. He remembers being tossed, stored, forgotten in bags and left open in agony.
He remembers begging to be burned. Begging Gertrude, then Julia and Trevor, and finally Jon.
There’s a slow, creeping thought sliding up his spine, colder than the hospital air.
“I might,” he begins, and stops to cough. Jon makes a small, distressed sound, but Gerry shakes his head minutely and pushes on. “I might have… had a tumour.”
The word tastes strange.
“I died of it,” Gerry continues, voice barely audible. “Last time.”
The mattress dips suddenly as Jon shifts closer. “No,” he says, somewhat dreamlike.
Gerry blinks behind his closed eyelids. “No?”
“You don’t.”
The certainty in it is almost startling.
Gerry’s brow furrows. “How do you—”
He stops. Oh. Right. A breath leaves him in something that might be a laugh if it didn’t scrape so painfully on the way out.
“You just know,” he mutters.
Jon doesn’t respond.
Gerry swallows carefully. “I get it.” His voice is thin but steadier now. “Gertrude was like that. She just 'knew' stuff.” Somehow she didn't know I was on death's door before Pittsburgh, he bitterly muses. Gertrude had always operated half a step ahead of everyone else, guided by instincts that weren’t instincts at all. Maybe she didn't know about his cancer because she wasn't looking. Maybe she wanted him like that; helpless, intangible, bent to any will. Or maybe she just didn't care.
The silence stretches long enough to turn awkward.
The machines murmur. The corridor hums. Somewhere far away, someone laughs, bright and oblivious. Jon shifts in his chair. The fabric of his sleeve whispers against itself.
“Are you alright?” Jon asks finally.
They both know what a nothing question that is.
Gerry’s lips twitch anyway. It pulls unpleasantly at the tight skin of his cheeks. He breathes in carefully through his nose, antiseptic and smoke still lingering faintly at the back of his throat.
“Not really,” he says.
“Yeah,” Jon replies, dry and soft. “I figured.”
Gerry swallows. His throat protests. “You should go, Jon.”
The name still feels new in his mouth. Strange. Good.
Jon doesn’t answer immediately. The chair creaks as he shifts closer instead of farther away.
“What about you?” he asks.
Gerry frowns faintly. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve been dead for years,” Jon says carefully, like he’s placing each word somewhere fragile. “You don’t have anywhere to go.”
Gerry exhales slowly through his nose. He stares into the darkness behind his eyelids, at the faint flicker of afterimages that might just be his imagination trying to fill the void.
“I’ll figure it out,” he says, aiming for breezy and landing somewhere near brittle. “Don’t you worry.”
His mouth is dry again. He shifts minutely against the pillow, feeling the pull of bandages, the weight of his own body. He wants water again.
“You worry about those colours that hate you.”
There’s the faintest huff of breath from Jon at that. Not quite amusement.
“No.”
Gerry’s brow creases. “What?”
“No,” Jon repeats, more firmly now. “I won’t. Come with me.”
Gerry blinks into the dark. “…What?”
“To stop the Unknowing,” Jon says, as though this is obvious. As though he’s suggesting they pick up milk on the way home.
Gerry lets out a thin, incredulous breath that scrapes on the way out. “You’re joking.” He's not even sure if he wants to. The last thing he wants is to get tangled up with the institute, again, after he's apparently been granted a second chance at life.
“I’m not.”
“You absolutely are.”
“I’m not.”
Gerry tries to laugh. It comes out broken and painful. “Jon, I can’t feel my own ears properly. I’m wrapped like a particularly tragic Christmas ham. I was on fire a week ago.”
“Over a week,” Jon says automatically.
“Point stands,” Gerry rasps. “I am not exactly combat ready.”
“I don’t need you combat ready.”
“Oh good,” Gerry mutters. “That’s reassuring.”
Jon inhales slowly. Holds it and lets it out. “I need you there,” he says.
“You have information,” Jon continues, and it sounds like an afterthought. Gerry's heart sinks. Of course, of course that's it. It always boils down to what other people want from him, what he can give and what they can take. “You know more than me what Gertrude was planning. You understand the rituals better than I do. And…” Jon trails off. Gerry isn't paying attention anymore.
“And it's none of that, really. I just, I trust you, Gerry. You're… one of the few people I trust right now.”
Gerry feels something strange and sharp twist low in his chest. He presses it down before it can become anything recognizable. "I'd like some more water," he says quietly.
“Of—of course,” Jon mutters, breath catching on the edge of the word.
There’s the scrape of the chair, the soft slosh of water being poured. Jon comes back close. Very close.
A hand slips behind Gerry’s neck again, warm through layers of gauze and bandage. “Slowly,” Jon murmurs.
The rim of the cup presses to Gerry’s lower lip. He parts them with effort. The first sip is agony and relief in equal measure. He exhales shakily. He takes another sip.
“You don’t have to help stop the Unknowing, Gerry,” Jon says, words tumbling out like he’s been holding them in too long. “I just—I just want you to have somewhere to go when you leave the hospital. Which is… well.” He swallows audibly. “I haven’t been back to my flat since I was being investigated for murder. But… I’ve been staying at the Institute, and—”
“No.” It comes out sharper than Gerry intends. The cup wobbles slightly against Gerry’s lip before Jon steadies it.
“That’s fine!” Jon says quickly, the words tripping over one another. “That’s fine, I was going to say we can figure something out. Something else. Please? Gerry.”
The plea lands strangely in Gerry’s chest. He swallows water and something heavier. Jon lowers the cup at last, but he doesn’t move away. His hand lingers at Gerry’s neck a fraction too long before easing him back against the pillow.
Gerry can feel the shape of everything Jon has just offered sitting between them, somewhere to go, somewhere that isn’t nowhere, and he has absolutely no idea how to hold it without dropping it. So he does what he’s always done when something is too big and sidesteps.
“Have you,” he starts, voice thin but steadier now, “been coming in to see me all week?” (It’s meant to sound casual. It does not.)
“Well, I.” Jon clears his throat. “I don’t leave that much.”
Gerry’s brow creases faintly. "You barely know me."
“It doesn't feel that way," Jon says somewhat wryly. "Since the very beginning, since I became the Archivist, you've popped up in so many statements that it feels like we've been doing this together. And I get worried about…” He trails off, as though the rest of the sentence has too many sharp edges. “I mean, I can do my planning and research here just as well. It’s quiet enough.”
“You’re not in any hospital systems,” Jon continues, words gathering momentum now that they’re factual. Safer. “You know, since you’ve been kinda dead. So they haven’t been able to locate next of kin.”
“I, uh.” He swallows. “I told them you were a close friend. And that your toaster blew up. And set your flat on fire.”
There is a long, delicate silence. Gerry stares into the dark and then, despite the way his face protests, he smiles. “A toaster,” he repeats faintly.
“It was plausible,” Jon says quickly. “Statistically, kitchen appliances are—”
“I was immolated by breakfast.”
“It was either that or an electrical fault in the wiring, and I didn’t know enough about your hypothetical flat’s layout to make that convincing.”
Gerry huffs a breath that almost becomes a laugh and dissolves halfway through into a rasp. It hurts. It’s worth it. “You’re terrible at lying,” he says.
“I’m aware.”
“You really told them it was a toaster,” Gerry says again, unable to help himself.
“Yes.”
“Exploding toast.”
“It happens.” Gerry smiles again, small and aching. It's been so long since he's genuinely smiled. “You sat here all week,” he says. He still can't quite wrap his mind around it. Someone he barely knows, stayed, for him.
“I slept,” Jon says defensively. “Occasionally.”
“In that chair.”
There’s a faint creak, as if to confirm it. “It’s adequate.”
“You’re going to ruin your spine.”
“I’ve survived worse.”
Gerry considers that. “You didn’t have to,” he says.
Jon’s reply comes faster than expected. “I did.” It lingers. “Well,” he adds, awkwardly precise, “it was… rather my fault. That you were on fire in the first place.”
Gerry’s brows knit. “Jon—”
“I’m the toaster,” Jon finishes, with the solemnity of a man delivering a verdict. Gerry snorts. "Well, I'm the idiot who had the brilliant idea of dropping you in the bath, then."
Jon half-smiles. "Toasters don't have enough emotional regulation to process that."
“Well, you're a very responsible toaster,” Gerry says gravely.
Jon inclines his head. “Even toasters need to face the consequences of their actions.”
“Indubitably.”
The word settles with a quiet, ridiculous dignity. Gerry’s mouth twitches. It still hurts to smile, but it feels less like glass in his mouth and more like something cautiously alive.
Gerry shoos Jon away eventually, griping about how Jon needs rest and to plan for the Unknowing and the nurses are probably on rotation, mate, best leave before one of them recognizes you and realizes you've been hiding out and refusing to leave my room for a week.
Jon pauses at the door, hand on the handle. He turns back. “I’ll check in first thing in the morning. Okay?”
“Mm,” Gerry murmurs. He wants to say something, something about thanks, something about… everything, but the words feel too sharp, too human, too alive in his burnt throat.
Jon lingers another heartbeat. “Try to sleep. Rest.”
“Mm,” again.
The door clicks shut. The dark swells around him immediately. Gerry exhales, a long, shuddering thing. He doesn’t want sleep. He doesn’t want to lie still while someone else decides what happens to him, what shape his body takes, what memory he will carry next. Not again.
He thinks of Molina, of the last time fire had claimed him. Of the hospital, sterile and bright, and of his mother. He had been discharged into her care. Into her control again.
His chest tightens at the memory, irrational but unshakable. The idea of being returned to someone else’s orbit, someone whose claim over him was absolute and inescapable… he shivers. Even dead, even burned, even stitched together from a week of agony, he doesn’t want that.
Gerry’s eyes drift over the room, over the dim glow of the machines, over the narrow bed and the frayed curtain against the wall. His stomach twists, and he imagines Jon asleep in that chair, fragile, trusting, assuming he’s safe now.
Safe.
The word feels like a lie.
So he moves. He slides the edge of the bed, a careful roll onto his side, testing the weight of his bandaged limbs. Each movement flares pain, lances through nerves that don’t remember stillness. He swallows, stiff, taste of antiseptic and blood still lingering faintly.
One hand, bandaged, padded, useless and fumbling, seeks the edge of the bed. He shifts his legs, swings them over. Pain blooms like flowers of fire along his thighs, calves, ankles.
And yet… he moves. He stands.
The room tilts unpleasantly. The hospital smells: antiseptic, sterile plastic from the cups and tubing. His breath comes shallow. He listens. No footsteps. No distant nurses. Just the soft, mechanical hum of the monitors.
He doesn’t know where he’s going. Just… out. Away from it. Away from everyone who thinks they can decide for him. Away from being placed somewhere, into someone’s care.
He stumbles toward the door, slippered feet making soft, uneven thuds. His bandaged hands graze the wall, holding himself upright. Every nerve is alive. Every patch of skin is aware. Every inch of him protests, aches, demands attention.
Outside the room, the corridor stretches pale and clean and quiet. Gerry breathes through it in short, shallow bursts, bandaged hands clutching the railings, gown dragging behind him. The exit sign glows like a distant promise.
He remembers again, and again and again: dead, burned, helpless. He cannot—he will not—let that happen again.
So he keeps walking, every step measured. Gerry lets himself smile, just a little. A tiny, cruel, defiant thing. He has survived the fire once. He can survive this.
And tonight… tonight, he will leave. So Gerry walks and keeps walking.
The automatic doors of the hospital loomed like an escape. Gerry’s bare, bandaged feet throb against the cold linoleum. Each step echoes softly, a protest of nerves and muscle and skin that had barely begun to forgive itself.
The gown clung to him, thin and useless. He shivers. He has nothing else. No shoes, no coat, nothing. Just the raw, stitched body he carries and the faint echo of smoke that seemed to cling to him like a second skin. He steps out into the wet, muggy London night. The pavement is damp beneath his feet. Perhaps it had rained earlier. Gerry doesn't care. He picks a direction and starts walking.
One foot slips onto something hot and sudden. He hisses, stumbling, jerking backward. The butt of a half-smoked cigarette presses into the sole of his foot, smoldering just enough to leave a sting.
“Fuck,” he spits, hopping slightly on the other foot, bandages rubbing painfully against his skin. He bends down, eyes squinting, and picks it up. The tip is still glowing faintly, stubborn.
He places it between his lips, trembling hands fumbling to hold it properly, inhaling carefully. By some miracle, it is still lit. The smoke scalds at first, fire against fire in his chest, but it grounds him. Pain and relief rolled together.
“Fuck, of course,” he mutters to no one, the hiss of the cigarette and his own ragged breathing filling the silence. He takes another drag, letting it burn down the rest of the tiny, rebellious stub.
Gerry exhales slowly, the smoke curling in front of him like a faint barrier against the world. He stepps forward again, bandaged hands brushing against a grimy lamp post for balance.
Those will kill you, Gertrude used to say disapprovingly while she lit her own, leaning against the alley wall next to him. Then he went and got brain cancer instead. Fuck you, Gertrude. Somehow she used to manage to squint down at him despite their comical height difference. He fucking hated that old woman. He misses her.
He smokes the last of the cigarette, the bitter taste grounding him in the present. The glow fades in his fingers, and he drops it carelessly, feeling the burn as it pressed against his tender heel once more. He curses again.
Gerry keeps walking.
A man leaning against a brick wall watches him pass. The man is very drunk. His eyes travel slowly from Gerry’s bare feet to the gauze wrapped around his hands, up to the blue gown hanging crookedly off one shoulder.
“…Jesus Christ,” the man mutters.
Gerry scowls at him. “What,” he rasps, voice still shredded to sandpaper. “Never seen a bloke in a dress?” The man blinks.
Gerry flips him off with two stiff, padded fingers. “Fuck off.”
The drunk raises both hands in surrender. “Alright, mate, alright.”
Gerry keeps walking.
London this early in the morning has that strange, hollow quiet to it—like the city is breathing between shifts. Streetlights buzz faintly overhead. A bus roars past somewhere distant. The pavement is still damp from earlier rain.
Gerry walks.
And walks.
And walks.
At some point he realizes where he is. “…Oh for fuck’s sake.”
The Magnus Institute stands in front of him like it always has—tall, brick, self-important and vaguely miserable. The sign over the entrance catches the yellow streetlight.
Magnus Institute, Institute of Esoteric Research. Gerry stares at it.
“I hate this place,” he mutters hoarsely.
And yet. His feet brought him here anyway. Habit, maybe.
The front door isn’t locked, of course it isn’t.
Gertrude used to say that if someone was determined enough to break into the Institute, a lock wasn’t going to stop them. Best not to inconvenience the maintenance staff.
Gerry pushes the door open. The hinge creaks softly. The second he steps inside—
It hits him. That familiar feeling. The quiet, crawling pressure at the back of his skull. Like someone standing just behind him.
Watching.
Always watching.
Gerry closes his eyes and exhales slowly. “Yeah,” he mutters. “There you are.”
The stupid, prying eye. He hates it, he’s always hated it. And yet— it’s familiar. The first familiar thing he’s felt in years. The sensation curls around him like something almost… welcoming. He hates that.
“Ceaseless watcher my arse,” he mutters.
The lobby is dim. Only the emergency lights are on, casting long shadows across the tiled floor. The place smells exactly the same as it always did—dust, paper, old wood polish, and something faintly metallic underneath it all.
Home sweet miserable home. Gerry stands there for a moment, swaying slightly on his feet. Then he sighs. “Fine,” he says to no one.
His feet carry him down the hallway almost automatically. He doesn’t have to think about the route. His body remembers it better than his mind does.
Down the corridor. Left past the old offices. Past the storage room where Gertrude once made him catalog a crate of moldy occult pamphlets for three hours straight.
The stairs creak under his weight as he descends. The Archives sit below the rest of the building like a buried organ. The air grows cooler as he goes down, and the watching feeling grows stronger.
Gerry grimaces. “Yeah, yeah,” he mutters. “I know where I am.”
The door to the Archivist's office is open. A thin line of light spills out across the hallway floor.
Gerry pauses. Inside, the Archivist sits on the desk, hunched over a stack of statements.
Jon’s sleeves are rolled up. His hair is even messier than it was earlier that night, like he’s been running his hands through it for hours. A desk lamp casts a tight circle of yellow light over the papers in front of him.
There are books everywhere, open notebooks, loose pages, a half-drunk mug of something that has long since gone cold. Jon is muttering under his breath as he reads.
“…wax figures animated through ritual sympathetic resonance… no, that doesn’t—” He scribbles something down.
“…Gertrude must have planned some kind of counter-ritual, other than blowing shit up. But there’s no record of—”
Gerry leans heavily against the doorframe. “Hello,” he says. Jon freezes. Slowly—very slowly—he looks up. For a moment neither of them move.
Jon stares at the hospital gown, the bandages, Gerry’s bare feet. “…Gerry?”
Gerry raises one exhausted eyebrow. “Surprise,” he croaks.
“You—” Jon stops.
"Me," Gerry agrees.
“You left the hospital.”
“Yeah.”
“You walked here.”
“Looks that way.”
Jon stares at him like he’s trying to solve a math problem that has suddenly started bleeding “It’s two in the morning.”
“I've been asleep for a week, love.”
“You’re a burn victim.”
“Burn me once, burn me twice, something about shame?”
Jon makes a noise somewhere between a groan and a laugh. “You shouldn’t be standing.”
“Probably not.”
“You definitely shouldn’t be walking.”
“Yet,” Gerry says faintly, “here we are.”
“You escaped,” Jon says.
“Don’t make it sound dramatic.”
“You escaped a hospital.”
“They get weird about you leaving.”
Jon presses his hands to his face for a second. When he drops them again he looks somewhere between horrified and deeply impressed. “You could get an infection,” he says weakly.
Gerry glances down at his bandaged feet. “…Yeah,” he admits.
There’s a pause, then Jon sighs. “…Sit down,” he says.
Gerry considers this. Then he promptly collapses into the nearest chair.
“Yeah,” he mutters. “Good plan.”
Gerry sinks into the chair, letting his bandaged hands rest limply in his lap. The room smells faintly of paper and old polish, with that undercurrent of antiseptic clinging to him like a memory. He closes his eyes, finally letting the weight of the last week press down fully.
He flexes his fingers experimentally. Pain blooms like old fireworks, but he doesn’t care. For the first time in a long time, he feels the edges of something like calm. A little bit of control. A little bit of choice.
“I don’t know if I can stop the Unknowing,” he admits finally, voice quiet. Jon perks up at his voice. “But… I can be here. I can do my part.”
Jon gives a small nod. “That’s all anyone can ask. That’s more than enough.”
Gerry leans back, letting himself settle fully into the chair. Bandages, burns, all of it—it’s him. And for the first time in what feels like forever, that’s enough. He's helping by choice, because he wants to. Because he's come to care about Jon, this Archivist. Gerry Keay is a person, not a thing.