Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Gertrude stares across at the uncomfortable young man sitting in her office. He’s eyeing her desk with something close to disgust, scowling at the loose papers and the organized chaos of the Archives.

That’s okay, she’s used to it. Her office is a mess, and it’s meant to be. She can weather the judgment of one ignorant man.

He shifts in his seat, dark eyes darting around the room. There’s a paranoid wrinkle on his forehead as he studies the corners, searching for cameras that aren’t there. It’s a common feeling, here in the Archives, and mentally Gertrude can respect his intuition.

“Something to say, sir?” She asks, ticking an eyebrow up.

“This place is a mess,” he snaps out, blunt and unforgiving.

Gertrude can respect his honesty, too, though perhaps not the rough and untamed way he wields his words.

“It has its uses,” she says, flatly. “I understand you’re here to give a statement.”

“Yes,” he says, taking a deep breath. “... Yes, I am.”

Gertrude eyes him warily. It’s not often she takes statements in person — her assistants are quite good at filtering and handling the numerous fakes. But occasionally something slips through, something real, and it appears that today she is simply unlucky enough to be present for this.

Already she is starting to classify the nature of the fear. The paranoia would suggest the Eye. It would explain that small jolt of familiarity she feels upon meeting the man’s gaze.

“Would you mind if I record your statement?” She asks, reaching for the handle of her drawer. She pulls out the old tape recorder she keeps in her desk for situations like these, starts to set it down on the tabletop.

But at the sight of it, the man flinches back, violently. His chair falls over, and in the blink of an eye, he’s pressed up against the wall in a vain attempt to put distance between himself and the recorder. She looks up in curiosity — she’s never seen anyone react quite like that.

“Yes, actually, I do mind,” he says, through gritted teeth. Once again, his eyes dart around the room.

Definitely the Eye, then.

“Alright then,” she says, and she puts the tape recorder back in her drawer — though not before hitting ‘record’. The audio will be muffled, but it will be audio.

The man stiffly fixes up the chair. After a tense moment, he sits back down, warily watching her movements.

“I apologize,” he says stiffly. “I — take notes, if you must, but I ask that you not record anything I say.”

“Of course,” she lies, taking out her pen and a few sheets of paper for appearances. “Let’s get started. Name?”

“Jonathan Sims.”

“And you will be speaking of…”

He grimaces. “Several encounters with my… doppelgänger.”

Gertrude’s eyes flick up, at that, because that sounds more like the Stranger at work. Perhaps more than one Fear will be present in this statement.

“Alright,” she says. The whir of the tape recorder in her desk is still audible, but only if you know what you’re listening for. She gently rests the tip of her pen on the paper.

“Whenever you’re ready.”

Jonathan Sims breathes in, steeling himself. Then he opens his mouth.

Neither of them hear the faint click of a second tape recorder, resting on Gertrude’s top shelf.

The first time Jon sees the thing is when he’s entering his flat.

(He is not counting the eerie paranoia from the weeks preceding, nor the few times a humanoid figure slipped just outside of his peripheral vision. He is not counting the times he’d whipped his head around, catching the edges of a sleeve, the scuff of a footstep.)

The first time Jon sees the thing is when he walks into his flat and stops dead in his tracks, because he sees himself already sitting down on one of his armchairs. His limbs lock up, his heartbeat stutters, and the feeling of wrongness he’d been trying to ignore for the past two weeks slams down on him with the force of an eighteen-wheeler.

“Who are you?” He manages to croak out.

The thing in his chair stiffens and turns around, and Jon feels his stomach flip over. Because he’s staring at his own face.

But not quite. It’s unmistakably his face, the same dark skin, the same coarse hair, the same moles and wrinkles. Yet, it looks older. More tired, if that were even possible. And that’s not even counting the scars.

“Oh, fuck,” the thing says, and god, it even sounds like him. “You can see me?”

But then Jon meets its eyes, its eyes, and he knows for a fact that whatever thing is sitting on his armchair, it is not human, it is not safe or friendly or anything benign.

“What do you want,” Jon grits out, defensive. “What are you?”

A flicker of emotion. Annoyance, frustration, worry, fear — and then it all goes blank, and the weight of a thousand stares settles upon Jon’s shoulders.

“I’m you,” it says.

Jon automatically steps back, gripping the handle of his grocery bag tight enough to make his knuckles hurt.

“Goddamn it,” it says. It gets to its feet, breaking eye contact, and Jon nearly falls over with relief. Though the wrongness persists.  It’s disconcerting, how familiar-not-familiar it is — does he actually look like that from the outside? “Never mind. I’m a figment of your exhausted, work-obsessed mind. Get some sleep. Forget you saw me.”

“Have you been following me?” Jon demands, because he’s scared, yes, but he’s not just going to let this thing leave without giving him some answers.

“Yes. No. It doesn’t matter, I won’t —”

It cuts off and frowns.

Jon tentatively takes a step forward. He thinks of the canned soup in his grocery bag and mentally calculates how much force it would take to hit this thing in the head and knock it out. If it were even a good idea.

“Never mind,” it sighs, pinching the bridge of its nose. The same way Jon pinches his nose when he’s frustrated. “Never mind. Good night.”

The thing walks deeper into his flat, into his room.

For a second, Jon is frozen solid, he can’t breathe, there’s a thing in his house and it’s him but it isn’t. Then he realizes. There’s a thing in his room.

He runs after it, bursts through his bedroom door with shouts and thoughts and questions and —

When he opens the door, the bedroom is empty. The window is shut, and there are no signs of anything there.

He checks every room in his flat, locks all the doors, and tries to fall asleep under unseen eyes.

He’s more irritable and snappy for the next few weeks. His coworkers give him a wider berth than normal, but it otherwise changes nothing. Not that Jon ever talked to them anyway.

He still can’t help looking over his shoulder, can’t help tensing up on his commutes. He doesn’t see the shadows anymore, the fleeting glimpses of something, but that doesn’t mean much. Maybe it was more careful, now. Now that it knew that Jon could see it.

… Maybe it was a figment of his imagination.

He can’t imagine why it would tell him that, though. He likes to think his subconscious is as rational as his conscious self, but he’s been having weird, abstract dreams of worms and doors and eyes, and that undermines the idea that his imagination actually obeys anything logical.

So instead, he uses his time at work to research doppelgängers. It’s not exactly helpful. There’s the classic lore, that seeing your doppelgänger is a sign of your impending death. There’s the warnings to not communicate with it, as it might try to twist your mind. Which, too late for that.

There’s nothing concrete, though. It’s all folk tales and old myths, nothing up-to-date. He asks Rosie to keep an eye on any cases that deal with that, but he doubts anything will come out of it.

Three weeks pass, and Jon sees no sign of his apparent doppelgänger. He still feels like he’s being watched, but he can rationalize the fear, now. He was tired. It was nothing, just the product of an exhausted mind.

So naturally, by the time he’s almost done convincing himself to let it go, he sees the thing strolling the halls of the Magnus Institute as if it belonged there.

Jon yelps and nearly drops the stack of documents he’d been carrying. At the sound, the thing looks up — and then looks genuinely surprised to see him.

“What are you doing here?” It asks, holding a tape recorder in its hands.

Jon stares at it incredulously, too confused to be scared. “I work here?”

“No, I know that,” it says, waving its hand dismissively. Jon can see that the recorder is running, and he scowls. “Aren’t you supposed to be devouring lore over by the library? This is the laboratory wing. You’re a qualitative researcher.”

“How do you know what I do?” Jon snaps back.

“I told you, I’m you.”

“What are you trying to do? Kill me?”

“If I’m you, why would I be trying to — never mind.”

“I don’t think that you’re me.”

The thing grimaces. “Good. You don’t want to be me.”

Jon frowns. “Aren’t you supposed to be convincing me that you’re on my side? Or stealing my soul? Eating me?”

The thing’s gaze flickers over to Jon. Jon flinches. Once again, he feels more than he sees the eyes that watch him.

“I don’t eat people,” it says. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Jon wants to say that he’s not being ridiculous, because all his paranoia is actually justified and this thing is actually real.

“Just get back to work,” it says, already turning away to go do — whatever the hell it was doing. “I’m not going to bother you.”

Yeah, right, Jon thinks.

“Can you at least stop watching me all the time?” Jon asks. “I don’t appreciate being stalked by supernatural creatures.”

The thing blinks. “You’re being watched?”

“Yes,” Jon says impatiently. “By you?”

“What makes you think that?”

“You’re recording our conversation right now.”

“I —” it looks at its hand and grimaces, and pointedly presses stop. “I was recording my own thoughts. You interrupted me.”

Jon stares back, dead-eyed, and the thing shoves the recorder into its pocket.

“There’s also the fact that your thousand-eye-stare has been following me for over a month,” Jon adds, frustrated. The thing already knows that Jon doesn’t trust it — why is it bothering to lie about this? Some sort of weird mind game?

“Thousand-eye-stare,” it mutters, ignoring the point entirely. “Hmm. There’s really only the two, unless somebody got their hands on a Leitner. She wouldn’t have a reason to, so that leaves — Magnus.”

That last word is hissed with enough poison to kill. Jon frowns, because who the hell is Magnus? Is he talking about the Institute? And what’s this business about that cursed library?

“Are you going to stop watching me or not?” Jon asks, impatient.

The thing grimaces, as if reminded that Jon was there. He doesn’t believe its claim, but it’s nice to know that, theoretically, he can’t stand himself. “I’ll… try,” it says. It’s not very convincing.

“You’ll try,” Jon scoffs.

“I can’t account for your own sense of paranoia,” it says. “Goodbye. Hopefully this will be the last time we see each other.”

It turns to go, before abruptly halting and swinging its gaze back around.

“Why are you in the laboratory wing?” It asks, a strange depth to its voice that wasn’t there earlier.

“Asking about what research they have on doppelgängers,” Jon says, feeling his mouth move to answer the question, and he presses his lips together, surprised.

“Oh, of course,” it says, rolling its eyes. “I’ll save you some time, then. I’m not a doppelgänger, at least not in the, ah, traditional sense.”

“You’re not me, either.”

“I suppose you’re right, in a way,” it replies, already walking away.

“Wait —” Jon says, taking a step forward. “What are you, then?”

“Hopefully, not lost,” it says, as though that answers anything. It walks down the hallway with a sense of purpose and turns out of sight.

Jon runs after it, but even before he pokes his head around the corner, he already knows that it’s gone.

The eyes don’t stop. If anything, Jon feels like he’s being watched more often. In his flat. At lunch. In the Institute. The feeling is especially strong within the Institute.

He likes to think that it doesn’t affect his work, but some of his coworkers have been sneaking suspicious glances more than usual, and it’s not helping with the feeling of paranoia. One of them even asks him if he wants a cup of tea.

Jon tries his best to not snap, but he suspects he fails when his coworker scampers out of the break room. No matter, it’s not like he’s eager to maintain his reputation for Martin Blackwood.

To make matters worse, he’s hearing clicks and static everywhere he goes. He tries to pass it off as nothing, but when he finds a tape recorder on top of his fridge, he knows.

“Whatever happened to trying?” Jon hisses into it before turning it off and dropping it into a dumpster. He finds the next one running underneath his desk at work, and deliberately removes the tape before tossing the recorder into the trash. When he tries to play it, later, all he gets is distorted static. He nearly sets off the alarm in his flat when he attempts to light it on fire, and his kitchen smells like burnt plastic for an embarrassingly long amount of time.

He’s taken to communicating with his coworkers through post-it notes and unimpressed stares. If he doesn’t speak, it can’t hear him.

Someone must have decided that he had laryngitis, because he starts finding cups of chamomile tea on his desk. Jon pours them into the various potted plants scattered throughout the Institute when no one is looking. After all, he doesn’t know who made it, or what went into it. The tea might have even come from his doppelgänger (or whatever it was).

Of course, while keeping silent might prevent his everyday happenings from being recorded, it doesn’t do anything to stop the eyes.

His independent study in the library has shifted. Stories of doubles and clones have proven to be useless; he starts looking for accounts of sudden paranoia, of things that can turn corners and disappear and summon tape recorders. It’s frustratingly vague, and goes absolutely nowhere.

It’s with a kind of defeated resignation that he enters his flat and spots the thing sitting in that same armchair, flipping through one of his books.

“What is it this time?” he asks, dead tired from his inability to get a restful sleep.

The thing looks up at him and snorts with amusement. “You look like shit.”

“Well, whose fault is that?” Jon snaps. There’s a part of his brain that is screaming at his mouth, telling him to shut up and stop mouthing off to the thing, but he’d passed the point of no return a long time ago. And for all its watching, it didn’t seem like it wanted to kill him.

“Not mine, actually,” the thing answers his accusation. It sets the book down on his table and turns its gaze on him. “I — can’t do anything about the eyes, unfortunately,” it grumbles. “I’m essentially invisible to anyone but you, and am unable to affect it. I can promise, though, that I haven’t been watching you.”

“And the tapes?” Jon asks. “Because I’ve found quite a few since we last spoke.”

“The tapes are — a side effect,” it grimaces. “I was trying to see if I could counter the other’s… ah, eyes.”

“What, by watching me first?” Jon scoffs.

“I admit, not the brightest of ideas,” it answered. “In any case, you are quite literally, the only being I can interact with, so there’s nothing I can do to stop it. My advice to you is: quit your job, Jonathan Sims, and run far, far away.”

“What.”

“If you don’t want to be me, you’ll walk away,” it says. “And if you walk away, you are far less likely to be watched.”

“I can’t just — I can’t just quit my job on the word of some, some thing,” Jon stutters. “What will you do if I refuse?”

It shrugs. “Keep trying to convince you, I suppose?”

“You’re not even me,” Jon continues protesting. “You’re just some — some creature that can mimic me, like some sort of, some sort of changeling-shifter-thing.”

“Ugh, don’t compare me to that,” it grimaces. “Not-thems are pure evil, for one thing. I like to consider myself a true neutral —”

“Do shut up,” Jon says. “And no, I’m not quitting my job.”

“Fine,” it says. “I can tell when I’m not welcome. Just — if you listen to one thing I say: stay out of the Archives.” It brushes off its coat and gets to its feet.

Jon steps forward, hand outstretched. “Are you leaving?”

It looks at him, quizzically. The effect of it is disorienting; it’s hard to focus on its eyes. “You don’t want me here, right?”

“Well, no, but — I have questions.”

“You’re better off not knowing the answers. I’ll just — find another thing to do, I suppose. Go on with your life, forget you saw me. Stay out of the Archives. Farewell.”

Jon snarls. He crosses the last few feet separating him from the thing, and he grabs its arm.

“What are you?” he demands.

The thing sighs. “I’m… what shouldn’t have been,” it says, as though deciding its words carefully.

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, you shouldn’t,” it snaps, and it yanks its arm out of Jon’s grip. “Quit your job, Jonathan Sims. It’ll be better for both of us.”

With that, it strides past Jon and out his door, into the night. Jon runs out and tries to track its progress, but once again, it’s hidden from sight.

He walks back into his flat, fuming with the lack of information, and is unsurprised to see a tape recorder on the coffee table, still running. He chucks it out the window.

The first thing Jon does when he gets to the Magnus Institute is to head over to the Archives.

“Well, the Eye must have something to do with it,” Gertrude says into the recorder, after Jonathan Sims has left the basement. “I can think of no other Power that would feed off of such paranoia. It also mentioned ‘Magnus’ — perhaps that it is the name it gives to our illustrious Mr. Bouchard, as head of the Magnus Institute. The intentions of this doppelgänger, however, are unclear. I don’t believe it’s working with Elias. And I certainly have never seen or heard of anything like it.

“There is also the question of why Mr. Sims is the only one who can see it. The obvious connection is that of its appearance, although how much of that is contrived is unknown. I do wonder what it meant to accomplish by claiming to be Mr. Sims himself. I do not believe this to be the work of the Stranger — the creature’s words are too heavy-handed for that. Perhaps it is a new manifestation of the Spiral, overlapping with the Eye.

“In any case,” she sighs, “I’m afraid that I will have to add to the number of eyes watching this Jonathan Sims. I’m more concerned that Elias is turning his gaze on the general employees of this place… I do hope that he is not looking for a replacement.”

A pause.

“Unfortunately, I believe that is exactly what he is doing,” she finishes, with a resigned tone. “End recording.”

With the final comments recorded, Gertrude Robinson ejects her newest tape and simply labels it ‘SIMS’. She slips it into her pocket and steps out of her office.

Hours later, and long after dark, an unseen figure steps inside and grabs a tape recorder off the top shelf.

“I should have known,” Jon grumbles, after listening to his younger self give a statement after explicitly being told not to.

When had Jon ever listened to other people, anyway? The only reason he was even here was because he had ignored Martin’s sound advice and somehow ended up six years in the past. And was pretty much ineffectual, because he couldn’t do shit.

The only person who he could interact with was his past self, who had (perhaps rightfully) zero trust in anything Jon had to say. He’d tried bothering Magnus in the office multiple times, but the man just kept doing business without even acknowledging Jon’s efforts. He’d checked up on everyone he could think of — Martin, Tim, and Sasha couldn’t see him at all, Basira and Daisy didn’t seem to notice anything, even Georgie just looked through him as though he weren’t there. He’d knocked things off of Gertrude’s desk just to see if she would notice, but there seemed to be some sort of compulsion of sorts, causing people to just… ignore him.

Jon could break into a person’s house and steal all their food, and the most that would happen is blame each other for eating everything. He could hide all of Jonah’s pens, but he’d never suspect it to be anything other than a simple misplacement.

Jon supposed that, with this newfound invisibility, he could disrupt a few rituals and annoy a few avatars. But it wouldn’t change anything — the rituals were doomed to fail anyway, and petty revenge would only go so far.

The only way he could get anything meaningful done was to get his past self to do it. To change. And his past self had just so helpfully proven that he couldn’t listen, even to save his own life.

How did people ever get Jon to do what they wanted, anyway? That was one of the reasons he and Georgie broke up — he was just ‘too independent’. He listened to Martin, occasionally, but, well. Jon wasn’t Martin, and he didn’t think that romancing his past self would actually go anywhere, if he could even figure out how to do it.

“Well,” Jon says out loud, and with a sinking feeling in his stomach. “I guess that means I have to channel my inner Jonah Magnus.”

With a heavy sigh, he gets to his feet.

“I’m you,” Jon says, for what feels like the millionth time, because his younger self only ever seems to have one question. God, was this how Elias felt whenever he just bluntly asked for answers that he couldn’t actually give?

(Jon’s genuinely surprised that Magnus kept him for so long. Well, he did put a lot of work into building and marking up an Archive, but. Still.)

This time, however, Jon is not talking with the goal of convincing his past self. This time, he has a plan. Sort of.

“I noticed you went to the Archives,” he says, still annoyed. “Despite my explicit instructions.”

“I noticed that you kept watching me after you said you’d try to leave me alone,” young Jon snaps. “And what were you even hoping to accomplish with that?”

“I had hoped to keep you out of the Archives,” Jon answers. “And to keep you out of… things.”

“Things,” young Jon says, with a familiar glare that did wonders to cement his authority in the early days of his Archivist career, and did absolutely nothing after everything had gone to hell.

“Yes, things,” Jon says awkwardly. How does the Web get anything done? Forget manipulating other people, he can’t even manipulate his own self. “The Archivist is dangerous. You should stay away from her.”

“Why would you even care?”

“Because I’m you,” Jon repeats. Again. “In fact — you should go to Elias and get her fired, even. That should definitely keep you safe. Elias is quite good at that. Keeping people safe.”

“I’m not listening to you!”

“Your loss,” Jon shrugs. “Sorry about the tape recorders. Force of habit.”

“What?”

“I’ll see you around, Jonathan Sims,” he says, injecting just the right amount of ominous energy. “Do try and stay out of trouble.”

With that, he turns to walk away, ignoring the protests of his younger self. He takes a sharp corner, into his old bedroom, and then promptly shoves himself out the window and onto the fire escape as quickly as he can, closing the window behind him. He can hear his younger self chasing after him for answers, but he ducks out of sight and climbs up onto the rooftop of the building.

He stands quietly, for a moment, until he’s certain his younger self hadn’t spotted his very human escape.

“Where’s Helen when you need her, huh?” he mutters to himself. Once he’s in the clear, Jon starts making his way back down to the ground floor.

The next day, Jonathan Sims the Younger is back in the Archives. Gertrude is intrigued. Jonah is fascinated. And Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist, watches over all of them, wondering if his efforts will be enough to save his friends.

Chapter Text

There’s something about Jonathan Sims.

Jonah can’t really put a name to it. On the surface, he’s a bitter, antisocial, asshole of a man. Look a little deeper, and he’s a nervous, emotionally-constipated, and insecure wreck. Try to see him, you find classic childhood trauma, an encounter with the Web. Nothing new, nothing special — plenty of humans put up a prickly façade to hide their inner demons, and often those who come to the Institute have had a couple encounters of their own.

What Jonathan Sims has is… potential, of a sort. He reminds Jonah of the Archivists of old: curious and misanthropic, selfish.

(Jonah had miscalculated with Gertrude. He’d seen her quiet ruthlessness and had mistaken it for a lack of empathy. He wouldn’t make that same mistake twice.)

Jonah starts watching Jonathan Sims, thinking that maybe Gertrude is getting old and inconvenient, and it might be time to start looking for potential replacements, and then he is pleasantly surprised to see that Jonathan can feel him watching. Good instincts, Jonah thinks to himself. It means that he’d adapt quickly. Jonah wonders how he’d do. He starts keeping an eye on the man more often, taking notes on what traits might be problematic in an Archivist.

Which is why he witnesses Jonathan talking to himself in the middle of one of the western corridors.

Well, ‘to himself’ is not quite accurate. It looks like he’s witnessing a one-sided conversation, because Jon’s eye contact and body language are all suggesting that there’s another thing there in the hallway with him — but there isn’t.

Something is haunting Jonathan Sims, and Jonah can’t see it.

Jonah’s not omniscient, but it’s quite rare that something escapes his eyes. Whatever is haunting Jonathan Sims is powerful, powerful enough to go undetected and ignored.

Something with a ‘thousand-eye-stare’. Something with a tape recorder.

Jonah almost jumps the gun and starts preparing to confront Gertrude, but then Jonathan brings up doppelgängers and look-alikes. Then Jonathan starts arguing that he doesn’t want to quit his job. Then Jonathan goes into the Archives to give a statement, and he realizes that whatever is haunting Jonathan Sims, it knows things, and it is trying to keep him away from the Archives.

One of the other powers must be trying to snap up Jonathan Sims for itself. If Jonah wasn’t sure before, he knows now.

Well, too bad. Jonathan Sims is his territory. And if some blind spot in his vision wants to steal his things, well.

It’s in for an unpleasant surprise.

“I want to have access to the Archives,” Jon says.

Gertrude leans back in her chair and lifts a single, unimpressed eyebrow.

“I want to see if similar encounters have been recorded,” he explains. “To learn more about this double of mine.”

“No,” Gertrude tells him. “You’re with Research, not the Archives. Technically, you shouldn’t even be here — we have a statement room for people like you.”

Jon’s fingernails dig into his palms. “Then what am I supposed to do?”

“We’ll look into it,” Gertrude says, and she casually collects her written notes together. “That is what the Archives are for. We’ll follow up if we find anything.”

“So, what, I just — keep coming back if it talks to me again?”

Gertrude looks thoughtful. She narrows her eyes at the notes in her hands before turning that gaze onto Jon. “Have you tried recording it?”

Jon feels a shiver run down his spine. “Recording it?”

“It appears to have a fondness for cassette tapes,” she says, mildly. “And, well — we haven’t been able to follow up on your statement, given the unfortunate lack of… material.”

Jon swallows, feels his stomach turn. “You don’t believe me.”

“I never said that,” she says. “But the more information we have, the better. And your recollection of events may not be complete.”

Jon scoffs. “My recollection of events —”

“Fear can often affect the memory, Mr. Sims,” Gertrude says. “And as a researcher, I’m sure you can appreciate the need for solid evidence.”

Jon grits his teeth and takes in a breath. “Yes,” he grimaces. “I understand.”

Gertrude nods, looking infuriatingly even. Jon glares at her, but she doesn’t back down.

She doesn’t believe me.

“Should this double of yours mention anything else about the Archives, come back and inform me,” Gertrude says.

Jon gets to his feet. He can recognize a dismissal, despite popular belief.

As he walks out of Gertrude’s office, he glances back. She has a cup of tea on her desk, and she takes a small sip, unsympathetic to his plight.

He turns away and looks out at the Archives, where loose documents and nonsensical labels cover the shelves.

His double didn’t want him here for a reason. Somewhere in there is something that can shed light on what’s haunting him. Somewhere in there is something that can help him get rid of his doppelgänger.

He just needs a way to get to it.

Martin Blackwood’s livelihood depends on his ability to befriend Jonathan Sims, and he’s failing. Hard.

He’s not sure why, either. Martin’s spent his whole life perfecting the art of being inoffensive and friendly. Everyone likes a listener and a good cup of tea. At the very least, no one dislikes it.

Except for Jonathan-bloody-Sims, apparently.

Jonathan Sims, with his stupid nice voice and stupid glare with his stupid eyes, and his stupid smart brain who definitely knew that Martin was lying about his parapsychology degree.

He’d seen the other man in passing, of course, but the first time Martin actually met Jonathan Sims was a month ago, when their research crossed over for a series of ghost sightings in Greenwich. The research wasn’t that bad — some rifling through some historical records and a couple of phone calls — but they didn’t really, for lack of a better phrase, hit it off. Jonathan was abrasive and brusque, and Martin was not, and Jon’s sheer capacity for organized research and getting things done had — well, it intimidated him. So he wasn’t exactly on top of his game. (He’d mislabeled a file and missed a lead. They got the job done, but Jon had been rightfully annoyed at the extra week they’d wasted chasing ghosts, and Martin got the feeling they wouldn’t be working together anytime soon.)

And that could have been the end of it. Jon’s dislike of Martin wouldn’t have become a pressing issue if it weren’t for the pointed comment he’d made in the break room one day.

Degrees aren’t everything, I see. You would know all about that, wouldn’t you, Martin?

He’d said it while looking directly into his eyes, saying it with painful articulation and a dismissive sneer. It left no room for interpretation.

Martin can’t remember what his response was. But he knows that his job relies on the goodwill of Jonathan Sims, which means that his job is on very shaky ground indeed.

He’s in the break room making another cup of chamomile tea. He’s made Jon tea before, but at best he’d taken a couple sips and at worst he hadn’t even noticed. But Jon’s been crabby and silent for the past couple of weeks, and has been draining Martin’s offerings with alarming frequency.

The laryngitis must be super frustrating for a man so used to barking out his opinions — frustrating enough that he’s accepting Martin’s unspoken bribes.

Unless he’s just biding his time. Healing. After all, he can’t talk to Elias about getting Martin fired if he doesn’t have a voice to talk with.

… Oh god, is Martin hastening his expiration date at the Magnus Institute? He stares at the kettle, betrayed.

The door opens behind him, and Martin jumps, whirling around to face — him. Dark, greying hair and a scowl that could break stone. The man of the hour.

“Oh! Uh, hello, Jon!” Martin squeaks out, and then regrets it when Jon turns that intense glare onto him.

“Martin,” Jon says, slowly, and his voice sounds perfectly healthy. His eyes drop down to the kettle, and then to Martin once more.

“You’re talking,” Martin says, and internally curses himself. You’re talking? Way to state the obvious, Blackwood —

“You’re making tea,” Jon says, eyes narrowing in on the box of tea bags in Martin’s hand. Martin resists the urge to hide it behind his back. He has nothing to hide! (Except for the one thing, of course.)

Something seems to click on Jon’s head as he looks back up. “You’ve been making me tea,” he says.

Martin flushes. “Oh, you, ah — didn’t know? I, I thought you knew it was me, it’s not exactly a secret or anything.”

Jon steps forward. Martin squeaks. He’s a good five inches taller than Jonathan Sims, but that doesn’t mean much when the other man is staring at him like he’s a particularly annoying and disgusting insect.

“Did someone put you up to this?” Jon says, low and dangerous.

“W-what? No!” Martin yelps. “I just wanted —” to stay on your good side so you don’t get me fired “— to be helpful?”

Jon continues to stare at him. Martin sweats.

“I mean, your throat is better, right?” he rambles. “You’re talking now?”

Jon blinks and steps back, his hand unconsciously flying up to his throat. “I — yes,” he says. His eyes widen and he looks around the room. “Yes, I am talking,” he repeats, and then he’s frantically opening the cupboards and looking behind plates and cups.

“Jon?”

There’s no response as Jon throws open the microwave and sticks his head in to look around. Martin tries to walk away, but Jon abruptly cuts him off to rummage through the fridge with frightening intensity.

Oh god, Martin thinks, distantly. He’s snapped. I’ve broken him. I’ve broken Jonathan Sims.

Martin watches in mute shock as Jon bends down and crawls under the break room table. There’s a bump, followed by muted cursing.

Martin wants to hide his face behind his hands. It inexplicably feels like he’s witnessing something private, but his feet won’t carry him outside of the room.

“Uh, Jon?” He says, quiet. “Are you, uh, looking for something?”

Jon crawls out from under the table, hair disheveled and glasses askew. He gets to his feet and brushes off his pants.

“We’re clear,” Jon says, and he turns his gaze back onto Martin. Martin gulps.

“You know Gertrude Robinson? The Head Archivist?” Jon asks, as if he didn’t just overturn the entire break room.

Martin nods, silent.

“Do you know what kind of tea she drinks?”

“I, um, no, I don’t — I don’t know?”

Jon scowls and rolls his eyes. “Useless,” he mutters under his breath, and Martin flinches. He can’t let Jon tell anyone.

“Jon, I —”

“What?” Jon snaps.

Martin’s voice comes out annoyingly timid when he finally gets the courage to offer his services. “I could, um. I could find out…?”

“Oh, never mind,” Jon hisses. “Forget I asked.” He strides out of the break room as quickly as he came, not once looking back.

Martin wobbles over to one of the chairs and flops down. He drops his face onto the table.

Three minutes later, someone opens the door.

“Oh, Martin! You, ah, doing alright, there?”

“Yeah, m’okay,” he says, not lifting his head from the table.

He’s fine. He’s just. Screwed. He’s just so, severely screwed.

“A dead end, huh?”

Jon trips in the middle of the grocery store and nearly knocks down a display of toilet paper rolls. He swivels his head around and spots his doppelgänger standing there with an amused look on its face.

“You’re back,” Jon deadpans. “Can’t you leave me alone for a lifetime or two?”

“I wish,” it says. “Seeing you reminds me of every mistake I’ve ever made, all at once.”

“Oh, fantastic.”

“I told you to stay out of the Archives,” it says. “Gertrude Robinson is quite ruthless when it comes to her territory.”

“Do you know her?” Jon asks, curious to hear the answer.

The thing shrugs. “By reputation,” it says, lips curling into a humorless smile. “I don’t think she’d have liked me much. We’re not very likable people, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“We — I’m a likeable person,” Jon snaps.

It stares.

“I can be likeable,” he amends.

“Sure, once you stop living off of the tears of your coworkers and canned soup,” the thing sneers, observing his basket. “Why don’t you cook some tandoori chicken? You still have Grandmother’s recipe in your kitchen drawers somewhere, right?”

“How do you — never mind. You’re me. I get it. Never mind.”

The double gestures to a sign. “Look, they have a sale on the poultry. You could make enough for both of us.”

“I don’t have the time to — wait. You eat?”

The thing looks at him. “Yes.”

“You eat human food?” Jon asks, trying to wrap his mind around the concept. “You — you consume food. And drink. You eat food.”

It smiles, all teeth. “Among other things.”

“Other things — ?!”

“Here,” it says, ignoring his protests, and it drops two packages of the chicken into his basket.

Jon immediately picks them up and puts them back. “I told you, I don’t have time to cook.”

“I’ll cook, then,” it says. “I’m tired of consuming used statements and leftovers from people’s kitchens. Don’t worry, I’ll clean up afterward.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.”

“Oh, I know,” the thing says, nonchalant, but then it looks at him, really looks at him, and it feels like the temperature has dropped eight degrees.

“You’re worried about lots of things, Jonathan Sims,” it says, and Jon involuntarily takes a step back. Its eye(s) zero in on him, but it just continues on with an even tone. “You’re worried that you’re never in control, that you’re only ever reacting to what the universe throws at you. That’s why you’re always so snippy, aren’t you? Because if you can’t control the way the world crumbles beneath your feet, you can at the very least control a conversation —”

“Do shut up,” Jon snaps. Across the aisle, someone gives him a startled look and quickly walks away.

Right. He’s the only one that can see his double. That’s convenient. Conveniently hard to prove.

Although, speaking of his current lack of evidence, that does remind him of Gertrude’s suggestion: to record his doppelgänger.

“Case in point,” it mutters, drawing Jon back into the conversation. “It’s a genuine wonder Georgie didn’t cut me off after that breakup.”

Jon mentally shoves the implication of it knowing his history with Georgie away and resolves to keep his mouth shut. He resolutely walks away from the chicken, aiming to get some form of vegetable, and slips his hand into his pocket. Jon pulls out his phone, opens the camera, and switches to video mode. Then he hits record and hides it out of sight.

His double doesn’t seem to notice, just walking alongside him.

“Hmm,” it says, and it casually grabs a tin of yunnan tea. “Maybe I’ll get this.”

Jon doesn’t speak, but he does look back at his double. He lifts a skeptical eyebrow. I don’t drink yunnan tea.

“Not yet, you don’t,” it mutters, shoving the tin into its pocket. A store worker walks by, oblivious to the act of shoplifting occurring right in front of them.

Jon blinks at that, unable to stop himself from voicing the question. “Not yet?”

“What?” it says, and once more it looks at him, this time with a level, confused frown.

“You just said, ‘not yet’,” Jon says. “What do you mean? Do you know the future?”

The thing looks away. “Didn’t say anything.”

“Yes, you —“

“Sir?”

Jon turns to look at a store employee, standing in front of him. The employee swallows nervously.

“Are you alright, sir?”

“Yes,” Jon lies, fingernails digging into his palm.

He pays for his food. When he looks up, he sees his doppelgänger walking out of the store without anyone lifting a finger to stop him.

He plays his phone video, later. It’s muffled, with random noises littered throughout, but he can still hear himself respond. The rest of the audio is all static.

It’s been a long while, but Jon thinks he can remember a Statement on time travel. The fact that the details are fuzzy doesn’t encourage him. If they’d gotten it on tape, he’d probably remember more. As it stands, he’d take any information on his current predicament. There wasn’t a precedent for his supposed time travel, or the whole ‘ignore my entire existence’ thing.

If anything, that latter part stinks of the Lonely, but it would be a weird way to go about it — especially since he can still talk to his past self.

And speaking of his past self, he hopes that he’s pushed him in the right direction. If he can’t stay away from the Archives, he could at least prepare himself. Maybe reveal to him the the truth of the Archivist position. Best case scenario, he helps Gertrude successfully burn down the Archives, but Jon’s not holding out any hopes for that.

So he lurks through the Archives, skimming through statements and searching for any relevant cases. He occasionally finds a real one to feed on, and it’s enough to keep him from falling apart.

It’s on one such day that he watches Martin Blackwood enter the Archives, and the sight makes him freeze.

One of Gertrude’s assistants leads Martin to the statement room. Martin awkwardly sits down, with a sheet of paper and a pen in hand.

Jon walks over to hear more.

“Just write your statement down,” the assistant says. “We’ll get it to Ms. Robinson, don’t worry.”

“I, uh, actually, I was hoping to, to maybe. Talk with her?”

“She’s busy,” comes the reply, flat and unsympathetic. “Head Archivist. She runs this whole place, you know.”

“Right, right. Um, of course. Guess I’ll just…”

The assistant leaves, and Martin stares dejectedly down at the paper in front of him. And he doesn’t seem to know what he’s writing either. Jon watches the man write out a couple lines of poetry before catching himself and scribbling them out so harshly he nearly tears the paper.

Jon tries to remember if Martin ever had an encounter with the supernatural, before the Archives. He feels like it would have come up. Then again, he’d never told Martin about his first Leitner.

(Then again, he’d never gotten the chance.)

“Ugh,” Martin mutters. “I just wanted to know what tea she drinks, why am I here.”

“Who, that assistant?” Jon asks irritably, even though Martin can’t hear him. “Why does that matter to you?”

Martin slumps back in the chair and drags a hand over his face. “I’m going to die.” He mumbles.

Jon really hopes that’s a particularly morbid metaphor.

“Jon’s going to kill me,” Martin grumbles.

“... What.”

Jon wracks his brain and tries to think of what would make his younger self seek out Martin. Until the Archives, he doesn’t think they interacted much. Just joint research on a case that didn’t go too well.

Although… is it possible that Jon’s changed things enough to cause something like this? Except for the grocery store, he hasn’t been watching his younger self too closely lately (too busy hiding all of Magnus’s pens) so it’s entirely possible his younger self… what, recruited Martin as support.

But why? Jon’s an antisocial asshole, finding allies isn’t the first idea his mind jumps to when he needs to get something done. And even if he did, he’s pretty sure Martin Blackwood is the last person he would have thought of, six years ago.

Now Jon wants to find and throttle his younger self. It’s one thing for him to get bound to the Eye — but Martin? Martin, who doesn’t deserve to have the world hanging over his head, who doesn’t deserve to be caught in between entities because Jon isn’t good enough to protect him. Martin has no reason to be down here in the Archives.

As he thinks that, Martin leans forward and begins to fill out the form on the top of the statement sheet. Jon’s seen enough of these over the years. Name. Date. Subject. For the subject line, Martin writes “ghost in the bathroom”.

At least it’s not a Statement. Jon stays in the statement room with Martin, watching him write out a fake encounter that encapsulates everything wrong with ghost stories. Martin gets a little too into it and starts writing a tragic history for the ghost, before remembering that this was supposed to be from his point of view. After a moment, Martin takes that section of his statement and puts it in his pocket, probably for later reference.

Jon smiles at that.

Once Martin finishes the encounter, he lines up the papers and heads out of the statement room. The assistant looks up.

“All finished?” she asks.

“Yep,” Martin says. “Er — is there a break room here? May I have a cup of water?”

The assistant points over toward the break room door. Martin scampers over, and Jon follows.

As soon as they’re out of the assistant’s view, he heads not for the cups and sink, but instead starts opening cabinets and poking his head around. Jon watches Martin pull out a box of tea and nod, his eyes focused and determined.

Martin snaps a photo of the brand before replacing the tea, and from there he grabs a paper cup and pours himself some water.

“Let’s hope that’s enough to get on his good side,” Martin grumbles, and he takes the water down in one gulp like he’s taking a shot.

He leaves the Archives, long strides and purposeful. Jon watches him go.

“I suppose,” he says, after a pause, “I had better see how this plays out.”

“Hey, uh, Jon?”

“What.”

“I, um, I have something? Thought you might want it. Here.”

“…”

“It’s tea.”

“Well, obviously, Martin, I can see that it’s tea. Why are you giving me a box of tea.”

“It’s, uh, it’s earl grey?”

“And? I don’t drink earl grey.”

“Getrude drinks earl grey.”

“Gertrude — Getrude Robinson?”

“Yeah, you wanted to know, so —”

“You stole Gertrude Robinson’s tea?”

“What? No!”

“Then how —”

“I found out what kind of tea she likes! And then I bought some! Geez!”

“… Oh. Okay.”

“Look, I, um. I don’t know why you wanted to know this. But I think, I think we got off on the, ah, wrong foot, so I thought I’d just, ah. Make it up to you.”

“… Okay?”

“So. You’re not going to, uh…”

“Going to what?”

“You won’t tell Mr. Bouchard?”

“About the tea? Why would I?”

“No, I meant the other thing.”

“… Martin, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I — oh. Ohhh. Oh! Thanks, Jon.”

“What?”

“Means a lot to me, really.”

(“What?”)

“I’ll just, uh, go. Do some work. Elsewhere. Bye.”

“Wait.”

“... Er, Jon?”

“You make tea.”

“... Yes? I like making tea?”

“Can you make this tea? Tomorrow morning? For Gertrude?”

“... What?”

“I need you to make Gertrude’s tea and deliver it to her. And then stall her.”

“Stall her?”

“There’s… information, in the Archives. Pertaining to my latest case. But Gertrude won’t let me look through the Archives.”

“Oh! Is that why you’ve been going down there lately?”

“Yes. But she’s not giving me access to the statements.”

“... So you’re going to sneak in.”

“Yes.”

“How — why —”

“Look, I’m not asking you to cover for me. I just need you to… Distract her.”

“That’s covering for you, Jon.”

“It’s a yes or no question, Martin. Will you help me or not?”

“I…”

“Well?”

“Are you going to tell anyone if I won’t help?”

“Why would I…?”

“Oh. You really wouldn’t?”

“No? I think telling people would be counterproductive.”

“Oh. Oh. Well, I guess I could help.”

“... Good.”

“Can you let go of my arm now?”

“Wh — right, uh. Yes. Sorry.”

“I guess. I guess I’ll just get back to work?”

“Yes, of course. Er, bye. Martin.”

…

…

“What’s thi — oh, fuck off —!”

Click.

Jon pinches the bridge of his nose when he hears it. So that’s how it happened. That’s the plan.

Nothing he can do about Martin’s involvement at this point, but he can at least streamline the process of his younger self’s blind search of the stacks.

After dark, once everyone has left, Jon breaks into the Archives and moves some files around. Finds the Statements that deal with the Eye, with the Archives. #8163103. #9721207. #8312111.

His younger self isn’t the Archivist yet, so Jon doubts he’d be able to get anything Fear related out of it, but he places them in the first shelf he knows his younger self will search. It’s the only way he can warn him without being ignored and rejected. Once he’s arranged the shelves properly, he steps back and nods, satisfied.

He’s about to crawl back down into the tunnels, where he’s been spending his nights, but then the sound of a door opening slices through the silence. Jon freezes, turns his head, and curses softly under his breath.

The figure of Elias Bouchard enters the Archives, scanning the rooms. Jon’s relieved to see those unnatural eyes slide right past him, seeing nothing, but that doesn’t change the fact that Magnus is here.

In the Archives.

He watches Magnus stride over to the stacks. Jon backs away, and Magnus stands right next to him and pulls out a manila folder. Magnus slips the folder into the shelf, right in the middle of statements he’d just arranged. Magnus looks around one last time. Jon’s heart pounds in his chest as Magnus glosses over him before he leaves.

As soon as the door closes behind him, Jon pulls the document out of the shelves. He’s about to start reading when he hesitates.

Last time he started reading something Magnus gave him, he couldn’t stop. Jon forcefully tears his eyes away and closes the folder.

I want to know what this says, but I probably shouldn’t read it, he thinks. And I can’t let my younger self read it, either.

He mulls over it for a second before deciding on a course of action.

Jon walks into his kitchen and sees a manila folder, next to a plate of tandoori chicken. There’s a post-it note on the folder, light blue. And in his own, familiar, scratchy handwriting, the words “READ ME.”

Jon drops the chicken into the trash, turns on his stove, and burns the document.

(Elsewhere, Jonathan Sims smirks while Jonah curses up a storm in his own flat.)

Chapter Text

This whole thing was a mistake, Martin thinks to himself as he walks through the Magnus Institute basement.

Emma, Gertrude’s assistant, reluctantly accompanies him to the Archivist’s office. Martin clamps down on his tongue, resisting the urge to ramble about the weather.

Lovely storm, we’re having, huh? He thinks, somewhat hysterically. Stormy. Like my future is going to be after this bullheaded stunt.

“Look, I don’t know why you’re doing this whole ‘tea delivery’ thing,” Emma tells him, face flat. “But, off the record, I’m only letting this happen because this place is either terrifying-as-hell or mind-numbing-as-heck. I need some safe entertainment, and you’re way less intense than that other guy that keeps coming back.”

“Other guy,” Martin repeats. He has a sudden mental image of Jon bullying Emma and an old woman, and he grimaces at how in character it seems.

“Yeah,” Emma says, twisting her mouth in disgust. “Unfortunately, he had the right criteria for an in-person statement. Wish I’d just forced him to write it. His case is so weird.”

Martin blinks. “He came to give a statement?”

“Yep,” Emma says. She deposits him in front of Gertrude’s door. “Here you go.”

Martin watches as Emma knocks on the door.

“Gertrude?” She asks softly, poking her head in. “Got a tea delivery from Research.”

“What?”

Emma opens the door fully, and Martin locks eyes with an older woman. Her gray hair is pulled back into a tight bun, and she stares at him from over her reading glasses with a firm stare.

He swallows and holds up the earl grey tea like a shield.

She sighs and beckons him in. “Who put you up to this?”

“No one,” Martin answers, squeezing past Emma, careful not to spill any tea.

“Right,” Gertrude grimaces, and scans him like she’s attempting to see his soul. “Well, you can just put the tea down right there. Tell whoever sent you that the answer is ‘no’.”

“No one sent me.”

“Is that a lie, Mr. Blackwood?”

“No — er, how do you know my name?”

Gertrude reaches into her drawer and draws out a familiar document. “You gave a statement two days ago, regarding…” she squints at the subject line. “A ghost in the bathroom.” She turns back to look at him, face blank. “Really.”

“That’s real!” Martin protests. “I really did find a ghost! In the bathroom!”

“Perhaps that would be more believable if you didn’t switch to third-person-perspective halfway through,” Gertrude says.

Aw, hell. This is why he sticks to poetry — it’s easier to get his emotional creativity on paper than his narrative ones.

“Okay. I know it looks bad,” Martin says.

Gertrude stares. Emma, still standing in the doorway, stares. Martin blinks.

“And?” Emma prompts. “I’d love to hear what excuse you have lined up.”

“Oh, don’t encourage him,” Gertrude grumbles.

“Wait!” Martin says. “There really is an explanation for this,” he insists, trying very hard not to think of Jon rummaging through the shelves a couple doors down. “I’m not spying on the Archives or anything. And nobody sent me. I sent myself.”

Another silence. Gertrude sighs once more an opens her mouth, most likely to kick him out of the basement. He needs to speak. He needs to stall. He needs to say something.

“I want to transfer into the Archives!” Martin blurts out, before she can say a word. “And I’m here to get a feel for the work environment!”

“What.”

What, Martin thinks to himself. What the hell am I saying?

“I haven’t submitted a transfer request yet because I, er, I don’t really know what you guys do? It’s pretty secretive down here,” Martin improvises. “But I’m — I’m a quick learner and a hard worker. It’s just, I’ve been in Research for nearly five years now, I think it’s time for a change of, um, scenery, and Artefact Storage doesn’t really appeal to me —”

“Oh, dear,” Gertrude says, rubbing her temples.

“Martin Blackwood,” Emma says, her voice rising slightly in pitch. When he turns to look at her, she’s clenching the door handle hard enough to turn her knuckles white. “You really don’t want to work in the Archives.”

“Look, if you’re busy, I can lighten your workload,” he offers, unsure where he’s pulling this from. “I make really good tea! And I have some experience in organization. I worked in a library. In uni.”

And by ‘uni’, he means primary school, and by ‘library’ he means organizing the book shelves during recess. This is what’s known as ‘stretching the truth’.

Gertrude looks up at Emma. Emma stares back, pale-faced. Martin shuffles awkwardly, trapped between the two women.

“You’re not actually considering this, are you?” Emma asks Gertrude, her voice tight. “Elias wouldn’t let —“ she falters. “He would.”

Gertrude doesn’t answer, just turns her gaze onto Martin. Like she’s sizing him up. He shifts self-consciously under her scrutinizing eyes. The tension is thick enough to choke on.

“Martin, can you step outside for a moment?” Emma grits out.

He almost cries at the escape offered to him. “Oh, um, er. Sure?”

He switches places with Emma and steps outside of Gertrude’s office. The door slams behind him.

He can’t make out the words — the soundproofing in the Archivist’s office is pretty strong, oddly enough. But he can hear muffled shouts on Emma’s end.

“Geez,” he mutters to himself, mildly offended at the frosty reception. “Didn’t wanna work here, anyway.”

Jon slips into the Archives and sticks to the shadows until Martin and the assistant are out of sight. Once they turn the corner to Gertrude’s office, he slides into the room where all the shelves and filing cabinets are.

There are loose documents littered across the tops of the cabinets. Some shelves are bursting with papers, while others have nothing. And worst of all, there are no labels for anything.

“Dear god,” he mutters. He’d been spot on, when he’d first came down here to give a statement. This place is a mess.

It might take several trips down here to find what he’s looking for, in which case, he’s not sure what he would do. Using Martin as a distraction would only work once, if it worked at all. The clock is ticking — this might be his one and only chance to search the place unsupervised. So he rolls up his sleeves and heads toward the furthest shelf on the left.

“Okay,” he says, thinking of all the things he can associate with his doppelgänger. “Doubles. Paranoia. Tape recorders. And… potentially seeing the future.”

(He hasn’t forgotten that comment about the tea, in the grocery store. Jon’s not one for fate or destiny or prophecy, but something in the way it was said stuck with him. The thing knows more than it lets on, and it lets on quite a bit.)

The first file he skims is a statement from 1816, about a man who found some books in an ominous tomb. The second file is from 1972, about a woman who had a nervous breakdown. Paranoia is a common theme, but other than that, he’s pretty sure these statements don’t have anything to do with his case. Jon’s annoyed that the statements are so vague and fake-sounding, and he’s especially annoyed that two files from two different centuries are right next to each other on the shelves.

He skims through other ones for a bit. They’re obvious drug trips, sleep-deprived hallucinations, campfire stories. No doppelgängers.

Finally, he grabs another folder and looks it over — and pauses. The name Albrecht von Closen catches his eye; he’d read it in that first statement he picked up. Jon shares a name with the author, too. And even better — this particular file mentions Jonah Magnus, founder of the Magnus Institute.

He reads it a little more closely, partially out of academic interest, but mostly for the ‘sense of being watched’. An outsider’s view of the slow decline of an old friend. The strange and horrible fascination with those evil books. The wide, inescapable gaze of an unseen watcher, present even beyond the grave.

Once he finishes, he decides that he doesn’t like the ending. He wishes he could attribute the whole story to a hallucination or a nervous breakdown, but his gut tells him otherwise. Plus, he can relate a little too well to the feeling of a thousand eyes just… watching.

Whatever it was that did this to him, I know in my heart that it is your fault, Fanshawe wrote.

Jonah Magnus’s fault. Something about that tugs at Jon’s memory, but he can’t quite catch that train of thought. He sits down on the ground, re-reading the letter. What is it that his mind is trying to tell him? What connection can he make here?

He stares at the words for a long time, but his mind remains frustratingly blank.

It’s a lazy Tuesday morning for Jon the Elder, waking up slowly on a cot in the tunnels beneath the Institute. It’s surprisingly comfortable — although that probably has to do more with his ever-growing collection of Magnus’s missing blankets than with the location itself.

He gets up. Somewhere above him, his younger self is hopefully getting a sense of the danger he’s in. Maybe he’ll be smart enough to walk away.

(He doubts it, though. Jon’s smart, but he’s not that smart.)

Jon leaves his little room in the tunnels, mentally composing a list of things he needs to get done. Right now, his biggest priority is to make sure his younger self will never, ever trust Elias Bouchard. Gertrude can handle that once she catches his younger self in the Archives — he doesn’t know her outside of the recordings she left behind, but from what he does know, she’s a commanding, human presence. His younger self will trust her, if only because she’s not… spooky, for lack of a better word.

(Jon wishes he could say the same about himself, but wishes don’t always come true.)

Other things on his list include: bothering Magnus, taking a shower, making his daily rounds to make sure Georgie and his old assistants are all safe, stealing Magnus’s lunch, checking in on his younger self, knocking over Magnus’s books in his office. The list goes on. It’s almost comforting, really, now that he has a semblance of a plan. Sure, he’s invisible to literally everyone he’d ever cared about… but at least the sky isn't watching him back. Jon thinks he’s had enough of the mortifying ordeal of being Seen.

He takes a turn, hoping to find the exit that opens up just outside the Archives, when his foot steps on something plastic. Jon looks down and sees a crushed plastic wrapper for a granola bar. He stares at it, for a moment, before his mind catches up to his eyes.

“Oh,” he says, in realization. “It’s 2014, isn’t it.”

2014, and Jurgen Leitner is not only still alive, but also living in the old prison tunnels. He must be pretty good at it, too, considering it’s been over a month and Jon hasn’t seen him at all, despite being an invisible being that no one knows to look out for.

Hmm. Will Jurgen Leitner’s existence affect Jon’s plans at all? It’s not like Leitner has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. If anything, he’s on Gertrude’s side, really — the vengeful third party doing what it takes to put an end to the horror.

Jon shrugs. Well, as long as Leitner doesn’t get in his way, Jon’s not planning to go and track him down. He can still remember that initial adventure through the tunnels, getting turned around and lost with the walls closing in. It’s not something he wants to experience a second time.

Alright, he’ll leave it alone. In the worst case scenario, he needs Leitner to be around to start telling his younger self about the entities. Hopefully without getting beaten to death by a pipe and a bodyhopping fanatic.

He runs through his mental to-do list one last time. Today, he thinks, he’ll start off by visiting Georgie and the Admiral. It’s been a while since he spent any actual time with the good boy. Maybe he’ll stop to buy some cat treats. The thought makes him smile.

Mind made up, he cheerfully walks down the tunnels, humming softly. Bothering Magnus is all well and good, of course, but at the end of the day, it’s not something he loves — more of a hobby, really. In contrast, Jon could spend days playing with the Admiral and never get bored. If there’s one thing Jon loves, it’s every single moment he spends with Georgie’s cat.

“I hate every single moment I spend in this godforsaken basement,” Emma shouts, pointing an accusatory figure at Gertrude.

Gertrude sits, stone-faced. Emma’s in the middle of a long overdue rant. To be quite honest, Gertrude’s surprised the girl didn’t snap sooner.

“You just — just sit there and never tell me anything! First Eric, then Michael, just — gone! They’re all gone! And you just don’t care! You’re just as bad as the Eye!”

“Don’t you dare,” Gertrude snaps back, flinching at the low blow. “Everything I’ve ever done, every sacrifice I’ve made, has been dedicated to stopping the spread of the Entities.”

“Or so you claim,” Emma yells. “You’ve been running around the world for the past whatever, while I’ve been running the Archives in your stead, like a good little assistant. Do you even know what’s going on around here?”

“I,” Gertrude says lowly, “have been at this for longer than you’ve been alive. Do not lecture me about how to do my job.”

“You’re only alive because you’re a ruthless bitch,” Emma hisses. “I’ve been working here for nearly a decade and I still don’t know you.”

Gertrude’s fingers curl. “I wouldn’t do something without reason.”

“‘Without reason,’ huh,” Emma scoffs. She places her hands on Gertrude’s desk and leans forward, eyes blazing. “Alright, then. If you have your ‘reasons’, then why don’t you tell me what really happened to Michael?”

Gertrude opens her mouth — to lie, to confess, to deflect, she’s not quite sure herself — but then suddenly.

She feels a tingle down her spine. The presence of the Eye weighs down, dropping onto her shoulders like a stone.

She stands up.

“Gertrude,” Emma says, a warning note in her voice.

“Quiet,” Gertrude hisses. “Do you feel that?”

Emma shuts up. The tension thickens, for a different reason.

Gertrude moves around Emma and her desk, wary. She looks up. Is Elias watching? He did, occasionally, but the atmosphere right now feels more… involved, than it normally did.

She opens the door. Martin Blackwood, still in the hallway, looks up from his phone, shifting uncomfortably.

“Oh, hello,” he says. “Are you two, um, done?”

“Is anyone down here besides us?” She asks him.

“No,” he says, offended at the accusation.

Gertrude grimaces. “Let’s try that again. Is anyone down here besides us?”

“Jonathan Sims is looking through the Archives,” Blackwood answers. He stiffens and covers his mouth, wide-eyed.

Emma groans. “Oh, great, now it’s Jonathan-bloody-Sims, again. Just what we needed. Absolutely brilliant.”

“His double must be watching us,” Gertrude concludes. “He’s searching through the stacks?”

Blackwood’s eyes dart around, looking anywhere but her face. “Um.”

Gertrude doesn’t bother to wait for confirmation, instead striding down the hallway. Two pairs of footsteps follow behind her. She opens the door and enters the file storage.

“Alright, Mr. Sims,” she calls out. “Time’s up, we know that you're here.”

Silence. Gertrude rolls her eyes and heads down to the furthest row of shelves. She finds Sims sitting on the ground, guiltily surrounded by loose-leaf papers. There’s a file half-closed in his hand, as if he were actually trying to hide it.

“Mr. Sims.”

“Ms. Robinson,” he replies with forced levity. “Hello.”

“I am reasonably certain that I didn’t give you permission to be here.”

“That is a reasonable assumption to make,” Sims agrees.

Gertrude waits. Partially to see if he has any justification for breaking into her Archives, but also just to make him squirm.

He finally breaks eye contact. Gertrude mentally records the victory.

“I don’t suppose you found anything,” she prompts him.

Sims looks down at the file in his hand before looking up at her. “No.”

“I thought not,” she says. “Please leave.”

“Right,” Sims says. He moves to gather up the papers, but Gertrude waves him off.

“My assistant will do that,” she says. “We have a system.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Sims mutters, under his breath. If Gertrude weren’t what she were, she wouldn’t have caught it. She shakes her head.

“I suppose all that was just a distraction, then,” Emma says to Blackwood.

“I, um, yes. Yes, it was.”

“Good,” she says, voice hard. “Don’t come back here, Martin. You seem like a nice bloke — we wouldn’t want to steal you from Research.”

“Oh! Er… thank you. I think?”

Emma nods, satisfied, and walks forward, brushing past Gertrude.

“That conversation isn’t over,” she hisses as she passes by.

Of course it wasn’t. Gertrude misses the old days, when Michael and Emma first started working with her. Before the trust deteriorated. Before she got attached. Maybe she’s getting sentimental in her old age; it certainly makes it harder to do what she needs to do.

As Blackwood and Sims walk out of the Archives, the sensation of the Eye decreases. Gertrude frowns.

“Mr. Sims.”

He pauses in his walk and turns to look at her, a single eyebrow lifted.

“Find any recorders down here?”

Sims shakes his head. “No,” he adds, just for the confirmation.

Hm. If his double isn’t listening in, that means Elias must be watching. But what exactly would have made him sit up and take notice?

She dismisses the researchers with a quick gesture, and they head for the stairwell, stiff and silent. Blackwood seems especially eager to get out of the Archives, rushing up ahead, leaving Sims to scoff and follow him up.

“... Gertrude.”

Gertrude turns to look over at Emma. She’s expecting a fight, but Emma just stares at the file in her hand.

“This file — it’s in the wrong spot,” she says.

“What?”

Their system is borderline nonsensical, but it is a system. Emma gestures to the series of colored labels on the folder tab. “This is from the other end of the Archives.”

“Someone must have wanted him to read that file,” Gertrude murmurs. “Let me see.”

Emma hands it over. Gertrude adjusts her reading glasses and looks it over.

It’s a Magnus file. Jonah Magnus and his Eyes. Elias wouldn’t want Jon to see this — it gives away far too much about the nature of the Institute. Which means…

“That doppelgänger of his must have placed it here,” Gertrude deduces. The thought makes her skin crawl. Something that no one can see. Messing with her Archives. Watching.

(She’s aware of the irony, but she likes to think she’s still human enough to be allowed to make that judgment.)

“But why?” Emma asks, frowning hard. “If it’s aligned with the Eye, wouldn’t it want to draw him in?”

“The Eye and the Institute are not necessarily the same thing,” Gertrude comments. She looks, really looks at the statement. The words. The fear. The players involved.

Corpses. Magnus. Watching.

If the message is saying what she thinks it’s saying, then she just got confirmation for a theory that’s been fifteen years in the making.

“Take the rest of the day off, Emma,” Gertrude says, mind running through the implications.

Emma blinks. “W — What?” Then the words register in her head, and she stands up, abrupt. “What.”

“Take the rest of the day off,” she repeats.

“Oh, keeping me in the dark, again?” Emma snarls. “Gertrude, you —“

“This isn’t something that affects you,” Gertrude lies, firmly cutting her off. “And I need to think.”

Emma scoffs and storms away. “Let me know what you come up with. Or not.”

The door slams behind her.

Gertrude sighs, watching through the glass as Emma kicks open the break room door and aggressively begins to make coffee.

Keeping her in the dark isn’t safer. But it is easier.

She shakes her head one last time before refocusing. She needs to arrange a meeting with Jurgen Leitner.

“So that went better than expected,” Jon says, as they climb up the stairs.

Well. That wasn’t how Martin would have described it, but there’s nothing objectively wrong with that statement. That whole debacle did indeed go better than Martin expected. Mostly because Martin expected to end up losing his job.

“So,” he says carefully. “Did you find what you were looking for? For your case?”

“Case?” Jon blinks, baffled. Then realization dawns. “I mean, yes —“

“Ha!” Martin turns around and faces Jon. “Emma said that you came to give a statement. You didn’t need the Archives for a case at all!”

Jon scowls. “It’s none of your business, Blackwood,” he says.

“No, it’s not,” Martin agrees. “But it’d be nice to know what exactly I’m risking my job for.”

Jon frowns. He’s very good at frowning, Martin thinks, because his default expression is already pretty grumpy and for him to intentionally frown and make it look different is quite the feat.

“I’m being… watched,” Jon says, stiffly. “By a potential supernatural entity.”

Martin blinks. Partially because he didn’t expect to receive an honest answer, and partially because he still gets caught off guard by the paranormal nature of his job. “Oh. Do you know what’s haunting you?”

“It’s not a haunting,” Jon snaps. “It has a physical, corporeal form, and it eats food.”

“Manifestation, then, whatever you want to call it,” Martin amends, though the ‘food’ part throws him off. How did Jon even figure that out? He has a mental image of Jon eating a meal with a ghost and has to fight to keep his laughter inside.

Jon rubs his temples, looking at his wit's end. “I don’t know what it is. I… had hoped that the Archives held the answers, but I didn’t even get through a single shelf.”

“Why the Archives?” Martin asks. “The library seems more useful in terms of applicable information.”

“I spent a month in the library,” Jon says. “And it didn’t want me to go to the Archives. I’d assumed there was something it didn’t want me to find.”

“Didn’t want you to go to the Archives?” Martin echoes. “Was it just an impression? Or a feeling, or —“

“It told me.”

Martin pauses in his walk and looks at Jon, startled. “You talked to it?”

“Yes.” Jon grimaces, as if remembering an unpleasant experience. “Several times.”

“What did — what did it say?” Martin wonders, unable to contain his curiosity.

“It told me to quit my job and stay out of the Archives,” Jon says. “Advice I did not take, for obvious reasons.”

“Huh,” Martin says. He thinks back through his years at the Institute, thinks through every case he’d ever worked on. “I’ve heard of people quitting due to supernatural causes, but usually it’s due to stress and not because their ghost told them to. That’s interesting.”

Jon looks at him.

Martin shifts from foot to foot, uncomfortable under the other man’s stare. “What?”

“No questions?” Jon asks him. “You’re not going to accuse me of lying? Or of being crazy?”

Martin blinks. He thinks of Jon’s more-irritable-than-normal month and of his strange behavior in the break room. It makes more sense with the context of a haunting. Manifestation. Whatever. Plus —

“You don’t seem like the type to lie about something like this,” he answers honestly. Martin likes to think he has a good intuition for this sort of thing.

“Oh.”

The conversation dies. Once it gets too awkward, Martin turns away to continue climbing the stairs. He can hear Jon’s footsteps just behind his, echoing around the concrete stairwell. Soon, they reach the second floor, and they begin to turn their separate ways.

Before Martin can walk away, though, something grabs his wrist and stops him from leaving.

It’s Jon’s hand.

“... Thank you,” Jon says, stiff. He looks like he’s swallowing lemons, but he manages to get the words out anyway. “For your assistance.”

Martin can only nod in response, suddenly unable to speak.

Jon drops Martin’s arm, turns around, and walks down the hallway without looking back. And Martin…

Martin swallows, thinking over the feeling of Jon’s hand on his arm. Of Jon’s unexpected honesty. The show of trust. Against his will, his cheeks begin to burn.

“Oh, god,” he says out loud, immediately regretting everything he’s done in the past month. “I’m so, severely screwed.”

So Jon might have been a little too on-the-nose when deciding which statements to leave out for his younger self, because right now, Magnus is losing his mind.

“Did she do that on purpose?” The man mutters, pacing back and forth inside his office. Jon sits on the desk, purposely crumpling paperwork, and eyes Magnus with concern.

“Jonathan can’t figure things out too quickly, she knows this,” Magnus says. “But even Gertrude seemed surprised at the file. Which leaves whatever is haunting Jonathan.”

“Not ‘haunting’,” Jon says.

Magnus pauses his pacing to look up to the sky and groan.

“It’s the Web, isn’t it,” he says, glaring at the ceiling of his office. “Here to reclaim the life that slipped out of her reach.”

“I almost wish I was,” Jon grumbles. “Maybe I’d be better at this manipulation thing.”

“Unless Gertrude was acting,” Magnus murmurs, giving no indication that he heard anything. “But in that case — she would already know.” He stiffens. “Well, if she didn’t know then, she certainly knows now. I really do have to kill her, then.”

“Oh shoot,” Jon says, alarmed with the sudden escalation. He straightens up, preparing to hop off the desk. “Did not think one file would speed things up that much.”

“But not yet,” Magnus decides. “My next Archivist isn’t ready.”

“Oh, thank god.” Jon flops down onto Magnus’s desk, knocking over a pencil cup.

He’s still not sure how to derail Gertrude’s eventual death without sending in his younger self to become collateral damage. Maybe he can get Leitner to do something about it. If he could figure out how to talk to him.

“What I need to do is figure out what to do with Jon’s doppelgänger,” Magnus muses. “Last time…” he trails off.

Jon waits for an elaboration on ‘last time’, but Magnus instead goes around to sit at his desk. Jon hops off the tabletop, curious to see what he’d do.

“Lots of earthquakes we’re having,” Magnus mutters, adjusting his pencil cup. He searches through his collection of writing utensils for a bit before giving up and using a pencil. Jon assuredly pats the collection of stolen pens in his pocket.

Magnus reaches into his drawer and pulls out a familiar form. A statement form.

Jon grimaces. Magnus’s attempt at another fake statement, no doubt. As Magnus writes, the urge to read over his shoulder grows ever stronger. There’s a part of him that longs to read Magnus’s statements. A statement from an avatar is powerful, addicting. But the memory of the apocalypse keeps his curiosity at bay.

“You’re not getting me that easily,” Jon tells him, even though he can’t hear. “I’m just going to keep tossing those out. I’m not falling for that twice.”

Magnus keeps writing. Jon watches the movement of his pen tip, almost ends up reading the loopy cursive that’s spreading across the page.

“I’m not falling for that twice,” Jon repeats, and he pretends that the words are more confident than they actually sound.

(It’s not until three days later, when Jon’s back in his cubicle doing work, that his brain finally makes the connection.

His double said that it wasn’t the only thing watching him. His double said that it couldn’t affect ‘the other’s eyes’. He remembers its words, too. That leaves Magnus.

Jon closes his eyes, thinking of the tale of Jonathan Fanshawe and Albrecht von Closen, and of how it reminds him of his own paranoia. It doesn’t make sense. Jonah Magnus is long dead — has been dead since 1888. But he thinks of Fanshawe’s letter, of that persistent tug on his senses. He thinks of von Closen’s autopsy. Of the eyes.

It doesn’t make sense, except that it somehow does.

“Jonah Magnus is watching me,” he says into the silence, voice echoing off his cubicle wall. As soon as the words leave his mouth, the air itself turns oppressive. Jon gags on nothing as his skin begins to crawl. When he looks down at his arms, his hair is standing on end.

Oh god, it was right. I really should have stayed out of the Archives.)

Chapter Text

So. Jonah Magnus is alive, kind of, and probably watching Jon. This is fine. Wimpy academic Jon may be, but he thinks that even he can take an old Victorian creep in a fight.

Assuming, of course, that Jonah Magnus is human. Which, now that he thinks about it? Is unlikely. Scratch that, then. Jon probably wouldn’t win in a fight against Jonah Magnus. He’s going to die, and when they autopsy his body, they’re going to find a bazillion different eyeballs under his skin.

This was so much easier to process when only one supernatural being was watching me, Jon thought. At least his doppelgänger had the decency to use tape recorders. Jon could break tape recorders. Invisible eyes? Not so much.

That leaves him… very few options, then. He could ignore the stares and give in to the supernatural surveillance state. He could run, quit his job.

Or, no, he can’t. That’s what his doppelgänger wants him to do. Jon’s not sure what would happen if he quit, but it probably wasn’t anything good.

The only other thing he can think of is to find a way to get rid of both his double and Jonah Magnus, and Jon hasn’t made progress on the former despite having weeks to do so. He needs… he needs…

He needs information. Yes. He’ll just. Do his job. Research. He’ll learn all he can about Jonah Magnus and he’ll find a way to get his doppelgänger on tape the next time it pops in to criticize his eating habits, and then he’ll have something to work with —

“Hey, Jon —”

“AH!”

Jon jumps, almost knocking over his chair. He clutches his racing heart and turns to look at…

At Martin. Who is standing at the entrance to his cubicle and looking very uncertain of himself.

“Everything alright there, Jon?” Sasha James, who sits across from him, pokes her head up over the cubicle wall.

“Yes, I was just. Startled,” Jon answers, definitely and completely composed.

“Alright,” she says, with a light smile and a nod, and she ducks back into her cubicle space.

“Er, sorry!” Martin says, with an apologetic panic on his face. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I’m fine,” Jon replies. “Did you need something?”

“No,” Martin says. “I was just — I made tea?”

“Oh.”

“Here.” Martin sets the cup down on his desk.

Jon looks at it. Martin usually delivered the tea while he was away from his desk, though to be fair, Jon had spent an unprecedented amount of time in the library for the past few weeks. It’s interesting to see the tea while it was still warm. He holds his hand over the cup, feeling the steam brush against his open palm.

Martin clears his throat. Jon yanks his hand back and looks up.

“I’ve been thinking about your whole… situation,” Martin tells him seriously. “And I want to help you figure it out.”

Jon scoffs. “That’s unnecessary, Martin. I have it under control.”

“Like you did while sneaking into the Archives?” Martin asks.

Jon stubbornly remains silent.

“I think that an outside perspective might help,” Martin offers. “You’ve been working on this for — what, a month? — and you haven’t found anything useful, have you?”

“... No,” Jon admits. “But —”

“I also think this is a good opportunity,” Martin continues, steamrolling past Jon’s protests. “Because you’re a good researcher. And I could learn a thing or two. From you.”

Jon stares at Martin. Martin stares back, face red.

“You want me to mentor you,” Jon says, realization slowly dawning. “You want me to mentor you.”

Martin nods, without breaking eye contact.

“You want me to mentor you while we look into the thing that’s stalking me.”

“That is correct.”

Jon thinks of mentoring Martin Blackwood. He wrinkles his nose in disgust. “Why?”

“Because you need help,” Martin insists. “And I want to get better at my job. It’s a win-win situation.”

Jon stares at him, trying to figure out Martin’s real motive.

“Yes, Jon, it’s a win-win situation,” a new voice pipes up.

Martin yelps. Jon nearly knocks over the teacup when he flails in surprise.

“Sasha.”

The woman in question is once again poking her head up over the cubicle wall, pushing her glasses up her nose and grinning with poorly-concealed glee.

We need to get taller partitions, Jon thinks, although at one-hundred and ninety centimeters, Sasha would probably find them only a minor inconvenience.

“Sorry, couldn’t help but overhear,” she says, looking completely innocent. “Jon, why didn’t you say anything about being haunted?”

“It’s — it’s not a haunting,” Jon snaps at her, clutching his chest. Forget Magnus and his doppelgänger, it seems like his coworkers are the ones shoving their noses where they don’t belong. “It has a physical, corporeal form, and —”

“Manifestation, even better,” Sasha waves it off. She turns to Martin and smiles encouragingly. “Martin Blackwood, right? From the northern research wing?”

“I, uh, yes. That’s me?”

Sasha sticks out her hand. “Sasha James, researcher, tech enthusiast, local cryptid expert. Pleasure to officially meet the man who makes Jon’s most excellent tea.”

“You — know? That I make the tea?” Martin says, reaching up and across Jon’s personal space to shake her hand.

“Well, it’s not exactly a secret, is it?” She asks.

Jon scowls and shoves Martin’s arm out of his face. He glares up at her. She smiles back, unaffected. “Sasha, what do you want?”

“I want in,” she tells him. “I can’t believe you went and broke into the Archives without me. I thought we were partners. I thought we had something special.”

“We did one case together.” Jon protests. “Against my will, might I add —”

“Don’t act like you didn’t enjoy it,” Sasha says.

“I did not.”

“What was the case?” Martin asks, because he’s a bumbling idiot who doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut.

Sasha perks up. “Oh, I helped Jon go undercover in a —”

“This is not relevant,” Jon says, loudly. “This is unimportant information.”

Sasha tilts her head and stares him down, still smiling that infuriating genial smile.

“What do you have to offer,” Jon sighs out, already seeing the end.

“Experience in team espionage, unparalleled technological prowess, and also a lead on your ‘manifestation’,” she recites without hesitation.

Jon frowns. “How —”

“You’re not subtle, Jon,” she informs him. “Also, my latest case has been to investigate a series of thefts on the administrative level and I think you might wanna take a look.”

She waves them over and ducks back into her cubicle.

Martin and Jon exchange a look. Martin shrugs and then turns to join Sasha.

Jon sighs and gets to his feet, moving to join them. And hesitates. His eyes land on the still-warm cup of tea.

He considers it for a moment. Then he picks up the tea and brings it with him to Sasha’s desk.

It’d be a waste to let it go cold, after all.

Gertrude leans back and examines her handiwork with a critical eye. Symbols of the Dark are inked in key locations around the room, along with other, more mundane precautions. She’d chosen this room for its thick walls and dirt floor, natural soundproofing. It also helps that it’s not too far from the Archive trapdoor — she’s not as young as she once was. Gertrude sets down her brush and checks her watch. Leitner should be arriving soon. She sits in one of the two folding chairs she brought with her and settles in.

As she waits, she thinks over Jonathan Sims’s case. Ever since it fell into her lap, she’s been unable to come up with anything conclusive.

Or — not quite. She knows some things. She knows it’s not aligned with the Institute. She knows that it knows things. That it watches, and listens, and has a fondness for cassette tapes. She can’t think of a motive, however. Why let her know who she’s working for? Why use Jonathan Sims? She’s hearing of the secondhand effects of an unknown agenda. It’s frustrating to have pieces and no picture.

A few minutes later, Leitner walks into the room. Gertrude nods at him as he takes his seat.

“Elias Bouchard is Jonah Magnus,” she says, cutting straight to the point. “And so was James, presumably.”

Leitner looks at her, eyes dark. “You’ve confirmed it, then.”

“Yes,” she says. “No hard evidence, but there’s a new player in the game and it… volunteered some information.”

Leitner sighs and leans back in his chair. “You trust your source?”

“I trust the conclusion, at least,” Gertrude says. “I’ve suspected for years. This is just one final nail in the coffin.”

Leitner shakes his head. “Your plan, then?”

She considers the facts. “Burning down the Institute won’t be enough. We’ll have to stop whatever allows Magnus’s continued existence.”

“We’ll have to find what it is, first.”

Gertrude nods. “I believe my source will know. And I need your help finding it.”

“Finding it? Magnus’s anchor?”

Gertrude makes a face. “Well, yes. But first, I need you to help me find my source.”

“Finding your source?” Leitner echoes. “You don’t know where it is?”

“No.”

Leitner pinches the bridge of his nose. “Gertrude, what is your source?”

“It’s haunting one of the employees here.”

Leitner stares at her. “You haven’t seen it, have you.”

Gertrude stares.

“You don’t know what it is.”

“Nope.”

“Gertrude,” Leitner says, pleadingly. “Do you at least know which one it works for?”

“The Eye, most likely,” she offers up.

“Most likely,” he repeats, scrunching his eyebrows together. “Good Lord, you’re terrifying. How have you kept this up all these years?”

“You don’t get results unless you take risks,” she shrugs.

“‘Risks,’” he says, incredulous. “You haven’t learned anything about this thing!”

“You’re one to talk,” Gertrude scoffs. “You tried to learn everything you could, and look at you now. Which one of us has to live underground?”

He sighs. “I suppose you’re right,” he says. “Alright, then. How do I find your source?”

“It’s invisible, apparently,” she says. “Elias — Magnus — might not be able to see it. You may have to be on the same plane of existence.”

Leitner’s hand drops to his coat pocket. “You want me to use A Disappearance.”

Gertrude nods.

“Alright, I’ll help you out,” he grumbles. “Not like there’s much else to do, anyway.”

“You may have to go above ground for this,” Gertrude warns.

“I’ll be careful,” he promises.

“Good,” she says. “Because if Magnus finds you, we’ve never met.”

“You think you can hide from him?” Leitner scoffs.

“I’ve lived this long, haven’t I?”

“Point taken,” Leitner says dryly. “Good luck, Gertrude. May your actions be unnoticed and unseen.”

She smiles back. “Oh, don’t be so dramatic, Jurgen. It doesn’t suit you.”

She watches him leave the room, carefully stepping out into the tunnels. She waits a few minutes, and then begins to scrub the symbols of the Dark off of the walls.

Hopefully, Leitner will find something on Jonathan Sims’s doppelgänger. She doesn’t know what it is or what it wants, but she has the feeling that it’s not on Magnus’s side. And if Leitner gets caught… well, it’ll be useful to see what Magnus would do to him.

It might help her better prepare for the war she’s about to wage.

“Wait, wait. Go back a little bit.”

“Here?”

“No, a little more — there. Left corner.”

“Oh! Nice catch, first m—”

“Do not call me that.”

Sasha laughs as she marks down the time and location of the sighting. Jon rolls his eyes.

Martin feels very much like a third wheel, what with all the teasing and inside jokes.

Teasing on Sasha’s end, at least. Jon just grumbles like a grumpy cat.

They’re going over security footage on the Administrative level. Apparently, Elias Bouchard had asked Sasha to look into the security on the upper levels — something about earthquakes and missing lunches? — and while there’s no footage of something going in and straight-up stealing from the fridge, there are few anomalies. No obvious glitches or distortion, just… stray floating objects. Always at the edges of the frame, never in the center.

Sasha thinks it has something to do with Jon’s manifestation because she found footage of him yelling at nothing in the laboratory wing. Jon had refused to elaborate.

“What’s in this direction?” Sasha muses, attempting to follow the path of a floating mug. “I don’t think we have cameras in that area.”

“Eastern stairwell,” Jon informs her. “It’s headed down.”

“To our level, you think?”

Jon scowls. “Either that or the Archives.”

“Ooh. Based on what you tell me, my money’s on the Archives.”

“But we already knew that, didn’t we.”

It’s weird, seeing Jon interact with someone he actually respects. He’s not nicer, or anything, just less… mean. Jon doesn’t insult Sasha’s intelligence or work ethic, and when he snaps at her for going off-topic, she snaps right back without any fear. Sasha is smart, competent, and confident. And Jon clearly recognizes that, because he listens to her and doesn’t call her ‘useless’ or ‘stupid’.

Martin wants Jon to respect him the same way he respects Sasha. He thinks of that moment on the stairs. Somewhere within Jonathan Sims is someone decent, and Martin… well, for better or worse, he’s always been a project person.

(Which is a nicer way of saying he has shit taste in men.)

“Alright,” Sasha says, closing out the current video file. She double clicks on another folder and starts pulling up footage. “Into the Archives we go.”

Jon’s eyes are trained on Sasha’s computer screen with a laser-like focus. Martin can’t relate. Instead, he watches Jon sip his tea and catalogues all the little microexpressions. Does he like it? Martin can’t tell. Jon’s face is locked in a perpetual frown.

Sasha fast forwards through hours of footage trained on the Archive entrance. The door on the screen remains closed for the whole time. Martin’s already lax attention starts to slip even further.

Suddenly, Jon stiffens. “The door.”

Sasha blinks and leans forward, squinting at the screen. “It’s open.”

“When did it open?” Martin asks.

She’s already rewinding the footage. Martin feels his eyes wander. When he manages to focus, the door on the screen is closed.

“Whoa,” Sasha says. “That was weird.”

“Frame-by-frame, maybe?” Jon suggests.

Sasha nods and starts clicking through the frames one at a time. Martin tries his best to actually pay attention this time, but his eyes continue to slide off of Sasha’s computer monitor.

“It must be a compulsion or something,” he says out loud. “It’s there, on camera. We just can’t look at it.”

Jon frowns. “I should be able to see it, shouldn’t I? I’ve always been able to see it.”

“Selectively,” Sasha reminds him. “It chose to show itself to you. Maybe it can choose to hide as well.”

“We also don’t know how technology affects it,” Martin offers up, trying to be helpful. “You haven’t seen it through a camera, have you?”

“Huh,” Jon murmurs. “Where does that mug end up?”

Sasha flicks through a few more cameras. It takes them thirty minutes to spot the corner of a ceramic mug, disappearing behind a shelf. Despite their best efforts, the mug doesn’t show up again.

“Lots of blind spots in the Archives,” Sasha complains. “I mean, makes sense, who wants to steal a ghost story? But also annoying for us.”

“I highly doubt there’s a collection of Elias’s stolen items sitting in the corner of the stacks,” Jon says. “They have to be hidden.”

Martin winces. “We have to go back, don’t we.”

“This is a one-person job,” Jon dismisses him. “I can do it.”

“Jon!” Both Sasha and Martin speak at the same time.

“What?” Jon says. “It is.”

“You’re mentoring me,” Martin reminds him.

“And you’re not getting into the Archives without me,” Sasha says. “This is my case.”

Jon sighs. “Sasha — okay, you have a point. Martin, I’m quite certain I never agreed to mentor you —”

“Win-win situation, Jon,” Sasha cuts in. “And come on. He’s helped you break into the Archives once. Are you going to let him die of curiosity?”

Jon sighs at her before swinging his gaze over to Martin. He scans him, appraising. Martin squirms uneasily under his gaze.

“I’m not mentoring you,” Jon says, in no uncertain terms.

Martin deflates. That was the only excuse he had to spend more time with Jon and fix his awful first impression.

“But —” Jon says, frowning as he does so. “You are already involved, so —”

“Nice,” Sasha says, quietly. Martin breaks out into a smile.

Jon pinches the bridge of his nose. “... Dear god, what am I doing…”

Emma is running on two hours of sleep and four cups of coffee, staring at her screensaver. Gertrude is probably off in her office making evil plans or whatever. Emma doesn’t know for sure because she’s been sitting here, not getting stuff done, for the three hours she’s been here at work. It’s not her job to keep track of her cold, unfeeling boss.

She’s not even sure why she showed up today. She isn’t planning to do any work. She’s… on strike. A one-woman strike.

Michael and Eric probably would have joined her strike. If they were still around.

She reaches for her coffee mug and brings it up to her lips. There’s nothing left. Mechanically, she sets the mug back down and stares at her screensaver some more.

She jumps when the desk phone rings. An old, shitty thing, with scratched corners and beat up plastic. She stares at it, betrayed. She doesn’t want to do anything.

Still, she picks up the phone. “Rosie?”

“Miss Sasha James and two assistants from Research are requesting permission to look through the Archives,” the receptionist informs her. “They’re investigating some thefts for Mr. Bouchard, and current evidence suggests the thief has been storing them in the basement.”

Emma’s tempted to just flat out refuse. Anyone who steals from Elias Bouchard gets points in her book. Serves him right for not letting her quit.

But… well, now she’s curious. Has Gertrude been stealing from the Administrative level?

And she didn’t include her?

Gertrude is a secretive bitch, but surely she would have let Emma in on a plan to enact petty revenge on Elias Bouchard.

“Send ‘em in,” she says.

“Alright. Good day, Emma.”

The line clicks off.

Emma lets out a frustrated moan. She spins in her chair and throws her head back, grumbling. With great effort, she manages to pry herself off her chair and walk out of her little office. She stands in the hallway and tries to work the grumpiness off her face before the research team shows up.

Of course, naturally, the first person through the Archive door is Jonathan Sims.

“You just don’t know when to quit, do you?” She asks, striding forward. “Mr. Sims, we’ve told you —”

The next person out of the door is a tall, Amazonian goddess with long, luscious hair and glasses. The complaints die in Emma’s throat.

“Hi,” the goddess says, and she sticks out her hand. Emma barely registers the second man behind her. “I’m Sasha James, researcher. We’re here to investigate a series of thefts for Mr. Bouchard.”

Emma takes the goddess’s hand in a daze. They shake hands, and Emma desperately scrambles to reboot her brain.

“Emma Pereira, pleasure to meet you,” she manages to answer, intimately aware of the bags under her eyes and the fact that she didn’t bother to brush her hair properly this morning.

“We’d like access to the stacks, if that’s alright?” Sasha asks with a soft smile.

Emma looks over at Sasha’s companions, Jon and Martin. Idiot lesbian she may be, but even she can pick up on the fact that this is probably an elaborate ploy to get Jon access to more of the statements.

She should say no. But she’s in a rebellious mood today. She thinks of Jon demanding information from Gertrude that he’ll never get. She thinks of the nine years’ worth of questions she’ll never have answered.

(It helps that Sasha James is still looking at her with that dazzling smile.)

Gertrude is going to kill me.

“Of course,” she answers. “Let me know if you need anything — coffee, perhaps? Tea?”

Sasha perks up. “Oh, coffee would be lovely!”

“Great,” Emma says, smiling back. “Stacks are to your left. Please don’t remove any of the statements without me present; we have a system.”

Jon coughs into his elbow. Emma ignores him.

“Absolutely,” Sasha beams. “Thank you so much, Ms. Pereira.”

“Emma’s fine.”

“Emma, then,” Sasha says. “Call me Sasha.”

Her face heats up, and the words bounce around her brain. Call me Sasha. Call me Sasha.

“I’ll just — I’ll get started on your coffee?” Emma says, and she turns around and makes her way to the break room.

As soon as she gets inside, she slams her hands on the table and screams quietly to herself.

“I think it’s this shelf.”

“This one?”

“Yeah, see that camera in the corner? Angle matches up.”

“Alright.”

…

“Wow, no one’s been here in a while. Look at all these cobwebs.”

“Yes, the state of this place is atrocious — mm. I see you.”

“Jon!”

“Oh shoot —”

“... Shit.”

“Pick ‘em up, pick ‘em up! Quick, before she gets back with my coffee.”

“Wait, she said they have a system —”

“Look at this, Martin. No labels. The dates are all out of order. There is no system.”

“Even if there is, we’ll be long gone before they go through and check. Here, just dump these back into the box.”

“Oh, ohh, they’re going to kill us. You just knocked over that box. Why would you do that?”

“Yeah, Jon. You nearly hit me. Why would you do that, I thought we were friends.”

“... There was a spider on that box.”

“Oh. Okay, fine, next time you could just warn me —”

“Did you kill it? Spiders are an important part of the ecosystem, you can’t just —”

“Wait. Martin, shut up. Is that a trapdoor?”

…

“Well, I guess we know where your ghost has been taking things.”

“It’s not a ghost, it’s a manifestation.”

“... The door’s unlocked.”

“Wait, really? Oh god. I don’t have a torch on me.”

“My phone has full battery.”

“Maybe Emma knows where the torches are down here — Jon? Jon, what are you doing —”

“Going in, obviously, Martin.”

“Jon!”

“You two can stay up there.”

“No! No, we’re not just going to let you wander down into this — this spooky trapdoor by yourself!”

“Suit yourselves.”

“Ugh. Ugh, I did not wear the right shoes for this. Wait for us, Jon, we’re coming. Martin, you go first I need to tie my hair back —”

“Um, alright. Okay. Here I go.”

…

“You good?”

“Yeah, you can come down now, Sasha.”

“Alright. I’m coming down.”

(“Damn, I really wanted that coffee.”)

…

…

…

“Hey, Sasha, I’ve got your coffee — Sasha?”

…

“... Jon? Martin? Where did they — whoa.”

“... I have never seen this door before in my life.”

Click.

The best thing about his invisibility is that Jon can swap out all of Magnus’s pens for crayons while the man is still in the room. It’s pure entertainment, watching Magnus put down a gold-tipped fountain pen for just a moment, only to pick up a neon green crayon.

What’s not as fun is the psychological compulsion that causes Magnus to just gloss over everything Jon does. Magnus gets annoyed, sure, but he never curses at the walls or chucks crayons out the window. Jon just really wants to see Magnus break composure, at least once.

The closest he’s gotten was that not-quite-breakdown from three days ago.

(Jon doesn’t know what happened to Magnus’s fake statement. He tries not to think about it — wouldn’t want to accidentally See anything. And if he thinks about it too much, he’ll get curious, so it’s probably better for everyone if he just ignores its existence.)

So for now, Jon just has to settle for the expression of pure bafflement that crosses Magnus’s face when he sees the writing utensil in his hand. He goes cross-eyed, his eyebrows tilt at a weird angle, and his mouth curls into a comical frown.

It’s a good expression.

“Ugh, this headache,” Magnus murmurs, rubbing the back of his head with an annoyed grimace.

Jon’s been bouncing a small rubber ball off the back of his head for the past fifteen minutes. He figures he can get at least another five minutes of enjoyment out of this activity. Afterward, he’s thinking of intermittently opening the windows so that the rain splashes into the office — that’ll be fun.

In front of him, Magnus adjusts his collar and goes back to filling out paperwork. Something about Artefact Storage’s budget. Occasionally, Jon wonders why Magnus made this whole place when he only really cared about the Archives, but then again, maybe he likes overseeing everything. Scratch that — he absolutely loves overseeing everything, it’s in his nature.

And speaking of nature, Jon’s getting hungry. Not for a statement, but for actual food. He gets up to head to the fridge a couple of doors down from Magnus’s office. He's not a fan of the old watcher’s taste in food, but it is fun to leave the man with a half-eaten lunch.

He’s just about to exit the office when Magnus stands up behind him.

“Oh, Jonathan,” the man breathes out, and Jon’s stomach leaps up into his throat. “Where do you think you’re going?”

He can see me, he thinks, whipping his head around in fear, oh shit he can see me —

Wait.

Magnus’s eyes are fixed on his desk, but there’s an eerie feeling to them, like he’s watching something else entirely. Jon follows his gaze, looking down below. To where his younger self is currently working. Or, is supposed to be working.

Oh, you bloody little bastard, what did you do now?

Magnus straightens up and adjusts his tie. He steps out from behind his desk, his eyes filled with calm determination. Jon swallows. His past self might be a bastard, but he’s not just going to watch Magnus do… whatever the hell he’s going to do. Plus, Martin and Tim and Sasha are down there in Research, too. He can’t let Magnus leave this room.

Okay, he thinks, looking around for something, anything that can help him buy time. His eyes land upon a sturdy black umbrella with a metal tip, resting on the side of Magnus’s desk.

Before he can think it through, Jon grabs the umbrella with both hands.

Magnus takes a step forward, heading for the door. Jon tightens his grip and pictures Melanie King in his mind.

CRACK!

Magnus stumbles, clutching his head. He drops to his knees, in pain, but still aware.

“What was that?” he asks, voice tight with pain.

Jon swings again.

“Where are all these falling books coming from?”

“Oh, do shut up,” Jon snaps, and he hits Magnus over the head one last time.

Magnus crumples to the ground. Jon twirls the umbrella around in his hand, warily watching for signs of consciousness. The man lays still.

“Well, that was fun,” Jon says, breathing hard from the adrenaline rush. His grip loosens, and the umbrella clatters to the floor. He probably has a couple minutes before Magnus gets up again.

Jon rushes out of the office and looks around. The hallway is deserted; no one’s heard anything. He turns toward the stairwell, preparing to rush down to his younger self, when a sudden thought occurs to him.

He steps back into the office and grabs the umbrella. It might come in handy — and it has the added bonus of forcing Magnus to walk through the rain.

A tape recorder appears in his hands halfway down the stairs. Jon takes the time to listen.

Once the recording finishes, he tightens his grip on Magnus’s umbrella.

“If I ever get the chance,” he mutters. “I am going to throttle the Web with my bare hands.”

Chapter Text

Jurgen hasn’t been properly above ground in years. The closest he’d been was old church basements and forgotten buildings still connected to the Millbank Prison tunnels. He’d been to the Archives, once, with Gertrude, but had only spent a few minutes before the paranoia kicked in and he’d retreated to the safety of the tunnels.

Now, though, Gertrude’s given him a mission. Idiotic as it is. Still, he trusts her more than he trusts himself, these days. Even if she callously sacrifices him in her war against fear itself, it’s not as though he doesn’t deserve it.

(Jurgen fears and admires Gertrude in equal measure. Perhaps because she’s so foreign to him; Gertrude, too, has blood on her hands, but she owns her choices in a way Jurgen never has.)

It takes a moment to adjust to the daylight, even when the sky is overcast. His eyes were weak before, and they’re even weaker now. The world above is a mass of blurry colors for a good thirty seconds before he can start making out signs and faces, and the moment his brain registers the sheer amount of people around him, his guard snaps up.

Leitner’s hand drifts to his copy of A Disappearance. He wants nothing more than to be invisible, to hide from this crowded world — but it would take more than a couple words to hide from all these eyes. It’s not worth the risk. Words have a way of drawing him in.

So he takes a breath and forces himself to walk through the crowd. According to Gertrude, there’s a tall building nearby that should give him a good view of the Institute’s entrances. It’s a good place to start, he thinks. Unless the thing lives in the Institute (or god forbid, the tunnels) he might catch it entering or exiting. Most likely it would be following this ‘Jonathan Sims’.

He’ll have to come back tomorrow morning, when the employees start trickling into work, but for now, he’s just going to stake it out.

On his way to the front of the Institute, he comes across a small café. He’s normally not one for coffee, but the scent of freshly roasted beans floods his nose, and he has a keen craving for a fresh, hot roast. He’s been living off of stolen leftovers and instant foods for so long. He enters the shop, waits in line, and orders a small macchiato.

The barista smiles at him. “Name, sir?”

“Jurgen,” he answers automatically, and then flinches.

He looks around the shop. No one seems to recognize it, or even be listening. He breathes out a sigh of relief.

He sits at a corner table to wait. It only takes a couple of minutes. The barista calls his name, and he takes the coffee. The smell is wonderful, but the taste leaves something to be desired.

Perhaps next time he’ll order a tea.

Jurgen exits the café and resumes his journey to the front of the Institute. He sips his coffee and looks around, enjoying the view of the outside world. He should do this more, he thinks. It’s been twenty years. Surely it’s not half as bad as his paranoid mind makes it out to be.

“Jurgen Leitner?”

Like a fool, he turns around.

A young man with poorly dyed black hair and a frankly terrifying amount of piercings glares at him with a fury that rivals the Desolation. His clothing can only be described as ‘angry goth’.

Jurgen turns around and walks faster.

“Leitner,” the man growls, and footsteps pound behind him.

Jurgen breaks into a run. His hands shake, reaching into his coat and trying to pull out A Disappearance. He turns a corner into a shaded alley — a mistake. It’s a dead end. He pulls out his book, but it’s too late. The goth has him cornered.

The book gets slapped out of his hands and flops uselessly to the floor. Jurgen cries out and takes a step back, but his back hits the brick wall. He’s trapped.

The goth grabs him by his shirt collar. A whimper escapes Jurgen’s throat.

“Do you have any idea,” the goth hisses, “the pain you’ve brought into this world?”

“I — I’m sorry,” Jurgen cries. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please, sir —”

Crunch.

Pain blossoms across Jurgen’s face. His nose throbs, and he crumples down to the ground. Something warm drips down his upper lip, and he tastes metal.

“You — ruined — my — life!” The goth yells, each word accompanied by a kick to Jurgen’s gut. “Your cursed books — keep ruining people —”

“Please, I — oof.” The wind gets knocked out of him and he chokes on the ground.

The goth takes a step back, eyes wild. Jurgen takes the chance to curl up into a ball, cradling his bruised-maybe-broken ribs.

“Well?” The goth snaps. “You have anything to say, old man?”

Jurgen coughs. Tears are leaking out of his eyes and he can’t think past the pain of his nose. “I — I, I don’t… ‘m sorry…” he chokes out, hiding his head in his arms. “I’m sorry, please, spare me.”

He lies on the ground, curled up and shaking, and doesn’t dare look up. Blood rushes through his ears as he waits for the goth’s judgment.

It feels like a lifetime passes.

“... Never mind,” the goth chokes out. “I need — I need to go.”

Jurgen’s head shakes as heavy footsteps pound out of the alley. He tentatively looks up. The goth is gone.

It takes him some effort, but he somehow manages to get to his shaky feet. He grabs A Disappearance on his way up and leans against the wall for support.

The words swim around as he tries to read through the pain. He can feel a fog settling around him as he mumbles the words. Jurgen snaps it closed before he can get sucked in, and he limps his way out of the alley. No one pays him any attention as he stumbles back to the tunnel entrance. He returns to the underground.

When the door clicks behind him, he leans against the brickwork and sinks down to the floor.

His nose is still throbbing. He tries to wipe away the blood, but it only sets off another wave of pain.

“I don’t care what Gertrude wants,” he says, wincing at the way his ribs ache with every breath. His hands tremble, even as they’re stained with his own blood. “I’m never going above ground again.”

It’s the weirdest feeling, especially considering that he’s walking within a secret underground tunnel hidden beneath an Institute dedicated to studying the supernatural, but Jon actually feels… less paranoid, here. Like the eyes that normally follow him have vanished. He’s been watched for so long he’d almost forgotten what it felt like to have complete privacy.

“Oh, this is such a bad idea,” Martin murmurs.

Okay, almost complete privacy.

“I wonder if these connect to anything?” Sasha wonders aloud. Her hand brushes the damp walls around them. “They look old. Hey, Jon, maybe we should ask —”

“No,” Jon snaps. “The origin of these tunnels is irrelevant to the case. So we’re not bringing him in. I expressly forbid bringing him in.”

“Bring who in?”

“Tim Stoker, specializes in paranormal architecture,” Sasha explains. “Beautiful man. Also a fantastic field researcher. I was the getaway driver and backup while Tim and Jon went undercover as —”

“Again, irrelevant.”

He’s in front of Sasha, but he can still feel her gleeful grin.

They walk in silence for a moment. Jon’s just starting to get used to the quiet again when Martin speaks up.

“Learn anything new about your ‘manifestation’?”

Jon looks to the ceiling above him. “In the past few hours? No.”

“Er, right,” Martin says. “Right.”

The silence returns. Eventually, his ears start tuning into even the softest sounds — Sasha’s and Martin’s breathing, their muffled footsteps on the damp earth beneath their feet. It starts becoming unbearably loud.

It’d be nice to know what exactly I’m risking my job for, Martin’s voice echoes through his head.

Jon grimaces.

“I think something else is watching me,” he admits, before the odd feeling in his stomach can settle into guilt.

Behind him, Martin and Sasha stiffen.

“What?”

“Something else. In addition to my doppelgänger,” Jon clarifies, and again he thinks of von Closen’s statement. “I know it sounds… unlikely. But there was a statement I read in the Archives. It captured my experience fairly well.”

Sasha narrows her eyes, honing in on the implications. “How do you know it’s not your doppelgänger?”

“My doppelgänger uses tape recorders,” Jon says. “And while I’m not inclined to blindly trust what it says… it implied it was working against this… other entity.”

“Working against it,” Sasha muses. “Like, fighting each other?

“Maybe. It sounded frustrated when mentioning this other party,” Jon says. “A genuine enough emotion.”

Martin looks around the tunnels, a new fear in his eyes. “Do you know what it is?”

Jon swallows, preparing to go for the hardest sell. “Jonah Magnus.”

The footsteps stop behind him, and Jon forces himself to turn around and look at them.

“I know it’s insane,” he says. “But the statement in the Archives — it’s, it’s real. And I felt it.”

“I probably wouldn’t have believed you a couple hours ago,” Sasha says. “But. Well, we have video proof of at least one thing that’s following you, and we are walking through secret tunnels underneath the Institute.”

“Yeah, this whole week has been pretty insane,” Martin adds.

Jon’s shoulders sag in relief. He hadn’t even realized he’d tensed up.

“Jonah Magnus, huh?” Sasha asks. “What was the statement?”

Jon tells them a summarized version. It comes out awkwardly, and he feels like he’s missing all the important bits. But Martin and Sasha nod along. And they believe him, or at least, they pretend to.

They come up to a five-way fork in the tunnels. For a moment, they stare at the different branches.

“I admit, this may take longer than I thought,” Jon says. He’d assumed this was a secret basement room, not a maze.

“We could do the ‘hand on the left wall’ trick,” Martin says. “Take all left turns.”

“Ooh, good idea,” Sasha says.

“We might not find anything, then,” Jon argues. “The chances of our culprit taking all the leftmost branches is minuscule.”

“... Hand on the right wall?”

“Martin, really.”

“I’m just — I’m trying to be helpful! You’re the one that hopped into the underground without a map.”

“We could turn back, maybe?” Sasha suggests. “Get chalk or something, track our progress.”

Jon’s skin crawls at the thought of going back into the Archives, but he can’t argue the point. He sighs and begins to turn around. “Alright, let’s — oh.”

Martin takes a step forward. “What is it?”

Jon shines his phone light on a discarded plastic wrapper, looking like it’s been crushed underfoot. It looks out of place among the Victorian brickwork.

“It eats,” Jon reminds himself. “So it is living down here.”

Martin shifts uncomfortably. “Should — should we still go back?”

Jon forcibly turns his eyes away from the wrapper. “Probably,” he admits with a frown. “We need torches. And the chalk is a good idea.”

“Okay,” Sasha says, shoulders dropping. “Then let’s just —”

They all turn around at the same time, each facing a different direction. For a tense second, they stare at each other.

“It — it was here, wasn’t it?” Martin asks, pointing at a tunnel that is most definitely incorrect.

“No, I’m pretty sure it was this one,” Sasha says, looking down an equally incorrect path. “We came from here, I’m sure of it.”

Jon looks down at the tunnel he’s facing. Suddenly, he’s no longer sure of anything.

Sasha swallows nervously. “Footprints,” she decides. “We left footprints, right? The floor’s —”

“Brick,” Martin says, looking down at his feet.

Jon follows suit and looks down. There’s splotches of mud on his shoes, but the ground beneath them is dry stone, too hard to leave marks on. Where did the dirt go? He’s pretty sure the floor was dirt at some point.

“Oh no,” Jon mutters under his breath, feeling his breathing pick up speed. “Ohhh, this is not good. This is not good.”

“Okay!” Sasha says, voice two octaves higher than normal. “Okay, um… we’ll just — we’ll think through this! Logically! We didn’t come from the tunnel with the wrapper. And we didn’t come from any of the ones right next to it. So that’s three routes we can cancel out.”

As she speaks she points to the tunnels in question. Jon turns to look at their remaining choices.

“The leftmost one,” he says. “We’ll — we’ll do Martin’s left wall trick. And, uh, if we don’t hit dirt in ten minutes, we retrace our steps and come back here.”

“Alright,” Sasha says. “Alright. I’m — alright! Sounds like a plan. Let’s leave a marker or something so we know where we were.”

“I’ve got a pocket knife,” Martin offers, reaching into his back pocket.

“Really?” Jon asks. “You?”

“It’s good for opening boxes.” Martin pulls out his keychain and flips open his small knife. He walks up to the tunnel with the wrapper and scratches a large ‘X’ into the brick at eye level. It’s rather shallow, but it should be deep enough to stay.

Assuming it doesn’t get disturbed, of course.

“Are we ready?” Martin asks, as he scratches the number ‘1’ in the tunnel they’re about to explore.

“No,” Jon says. But he steps forward anyway.

“Oh, we’re going now?” Martin says. “Er, okay. Left hand on the wall, then.”

Jon’s fingers brush the cool stone of the wall. He takes another step forward, hoping that he won’t have to look Martin or Sasha in the eye anytime soon.

He’s lost. He’d gotten them all pathetically lost. He wanted answers, and now they’re stuck in some underground hell, and it’s all his fault.

(But at least he’s not being watched.)

Jon bursts into the Archives and starts sprinting for the trapdoor — only to fall over as a speedy, dark-haired blur cuts off his path and makes for the stacks.

“Wh — who the hell —” he cuts off. It’s Gertrude’s assistant. He gets to his feet and follows her into the shelving, watching her warily.

As she speedwalks through the shelves, she checks a small drawstring backpack filled entirely with torches and batteries. After looking it over, she swings it onto her back and pats her pockets, which are filled with chalk. She has an industrial headlamp strapped onto her head, and her wrists are covered with glow stick bracelets.

“Ugh, you too?” Jon says, and she doesn’t hear him.

She stops in front of the open trapdoor and stares at it, mouth pressed tight.

“Okay,” she says to herself. “Step one: find them. Step two: get them out. Step three: ask Sasha out on a coffee date because life is too short to let good things pass by.”

Jon tries to squeeze around her and get into the tunnels, but she’s standing too close to the entrance. He tries to move her out of the way with Magnus's umbrella. She doesn't notice.

“Step four: start a relationship with Sasha. Step five: break it off before I drag her down into the Archival shit. Step six: pine from afar as she begins a relationship with someone new —"

“Please get on with it,” Jon says, but it does nothing.

“— Okay, shut up, Emma, you’re catastrophizing. Find them. Save them. Coffee.” she says.

Jon taps his foot impatiently. The assistant… continues to stare at the trapdoor, beads of sweat pouring down her forehead, and she bites her lip.

“Good lord,” Jon grumbles. “Hurry up.”

She breathes out and drops her shoulders. “Here I go.”

She finally climbs down into the tunnels, her collection of torches and batteries clattering in her backpack. Jon climbs down after her and squeezes past her, prepared to chase down his idiot younger self — only for both of them to stop in their tracks.

“Is everyone down here today?” Jon says, at the same time the assistant says, “Gertrude?”

“Emma?” Gertrude asks. “What are you doing down here?”

Emma — that was her name — scoffs, offended. “What am I doing — wow. Wow! What the hell, you old bag! I can’t believe I worked on top of this bullshit for nine years and you knew about it!”

“You didn’t need to know,” Gertrude tells her.

“Nine years, Gertrude! Nine, goddamn, ignorant years!” Her hands wave frantically as she tries to make her point, and Jon is forced to take a step back, unable to walk around her erratic movements.

“I shouldn’t have to explain myself to you —”

“Never mind, I don’t have time for this,” Emma cuts her off. “I’m guessing you didn’t see them, then.”

Gertrude’s eyes sharpen. “Them?”

“Jon Sims and his companions,” Emma tells her. “I don’t know how they found the trapdoor. Hopefully, they’re not dead.”

“Oh, the tunnels aren’t dangerous,” Gertrude says. “Mostly.”

“Whatever,” Emma growls, and she steps forward. “I’m going to get them back before they get themselves lost. Or killed. Not like you care.”

“I’ll go with you,” Gertrude offers, not even blinking at the insult. “I know my way around.”

Emma stares at her for a moment before shaking her head. “Fine. Lead the way.”

Gertrude and Emma set off down the tunnels. Jon’s not entirely certain where his younger self is, and he’s headed in the same direction anyway, so he ends up tagging along. He wishes he hadn’t, though. Emma is pissed, and it shows in every stomp and stony glare she sends at Gertrude’s back. She’s not angry at him, but Jon can recognize that fury easily enough. He’d seen it directed at himself several times.

Gertrude can sense the rage, too, because after three whole minutes of tense silence she sighs and opens her mouth.

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want Elias to know,” she says. “He knows that I know about the tunnels, but he doesn’t know how much I rely on them. I wanted to keep it that way.”

“You’ve been using them,” Emma says. “Often.”

“Yes.”

“And for a long time.”

“Years.”

“Years —“ Emma chokes back the anger and takes a steadying breath. Jon shifts uncomfortably. He shouldn’t be watching this. He’s heard this conversation play out several times over the course of his career, and knows how it ends.

“Whatever you’re using these tunnels for,” Emma says slowly. “It’s going to save the world, right?”

Gertrude makes a face at the phrasing, but nods.

“Alright, then.” Emma takes another shaky breath. Her mouth is still contorted into a scowl, but she lets it go. “Keep your secrets.”

Jon looks back and forth between Gertrude and Emma, waiting for the explosion. It never comes. “Thank you, Emma.”

“It’s not for you,” Emma spits out. Her face is eerie in the colored lights of her glow stick bracelets. “Just do your damn job, Gertrude.”

“Thank you, anyway.”

Emma scoffs. They continue forward. The quiet is… not relaxed, but less oppressive. Just three sets of footsteps softly padding through the dark. Together.

Jon feels distinctly sad, and he’s not sure why.

“Okay, we definitely haven’t been here before,” Sasha remarks.

Jon shines his phone light over the pile of random items stacked across a small room. Blankets. Books. Dishes. His gaze lands upon a discarded mug, the same one they’d followed down to these tunnels, and he makes a face.

“So this is where it lives,” Jon says.

It’s… mundane. Jon wasn’t sure what he expected. Shelves of cassette tapes, maybe. Obsessive drawings of Jon’s face. Secret plans for driving him mad and stealing his life.

Instead, there’s a cot piled with a luxurious amount of blankets and a collection of boxes that look like they came from the Archives.

“It’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?” Sasha asks, picking up the mug. She looks around at everything else.

“You think so?” Jon studies the arrangement of the room. There’s a pattern here. The cardboard filing boxes seem to be filled with stolen trophies, mostly office supplies, from what Jon can see. There’s a single industrial lamp underneath the cot, along with two other plastic boxes. If he has to guess, that would be where the food would be — somewhere close at hand, and in a sturdier box more protected from the elements. When he walks up to check, he’s half-right — one is filled with non-perishables, and the other is filled with Archival statements.

‘We have a system,’ his ass. Jon would bet this month’s salary that Gertrude never noticed these statements were missing.

“Interesting taste in snacks,” Martin comments, peeking over Jon’s shoulder. “... Are those shrimp chips?”

Jon scowls when he recognizes the brand. He’d been wondering where his chips had disappeared to.

“You don’t see any tape recorders, do you?” he asks out loud.

“No,” Martin says, twisting his head to look around.

Jon hasn’t seen any himself, confirming his feelings from earlier. He’s not currently being watched right now.

Meanwhile, Sasha is digging through the boxes behind them. “It’s got a box of brand new crayons,” she says in wonder. “Does it have coloring books, you think?”

For some reason, the thought of this thing having coloring books fills Jon with alarm.

“Does it have chalk?” Jon asks her, trying not to think for too long. This whole place is filled with normal things. It puts him on edge for reasons he can’t explain.

“Chalk would be useful,” Sasha agrees, and she opens up another box. “This one has staplers.”

Jon steps away from the snacks and the statements to help Sasha look. From what he can tell, most of the writing utensils are all dumped together in a couple of boxes. But if he had to choose, he’d put the chalk with the tunnel-exploring supplies, all in one place. He finds a box with batteries and torches, and starts rummaging through it. He is rewarded with a thick chunk of sidewalk chalk.

“Nice find, Jon,” Sasha says.

“Thank you.” He tries not to think about the ease with which he’d intuited its organization system.

“I wonder what it wants from you.” Martin randomly tosses blankets around and looks in corners. What he’s looking for, Jon isn’t sure.

“I don’t know,” Jon says quietly. “I thought… I thought it was targeting me for a purpose. Drawing me in. But…” he looks around the room, equal parts baffled and uncomfortable. “This looks so… inane.”

“It is strange, isn’t it?” Sasha asks. “The thought of monsters having lives.”

“Maybe it’s not a monster at all.” Martin’s voice takes on an airy quality. His eyes are bright, but distant, like he’s daydreaming out loud. “Maybe it’s a time traveler here to prevent a horrible future from happening.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Martin,” Jon snaps.

“Right. You’re being haunted. Sorry.”

“We should get out of here, now that we have chalk,” Jon says. “We’ll leave a marker here so we can retrieve Elias’s things later, and then find our way out.”

“Sounds good to me,” Sasha agrees. She picks up a box of pen and ink and tucks it under her arms. When Martin and Jon stare at her, she shrugs. “Elias wants his fountain pens back, ASAP,” she says. “You know, Rosie got a memo written in crayon the other day? Bouchard’s really grasping at straws.”

“You need help with that box?” Martin asks her. “I can carry it, if you want.”

“Mm, we can trade off later,” she says. “C’mon, let’s get out of here. I want to take my lunch break.”

Jon steps out of the room first and marks a star on the brickwork next to the door. Sasha and Martin join him in the corridor, and he looks through the doorway one last time. The cot. The blankets. The semi-organized system of boxes. He tears his eyes away from the sight.

Something about the whole setup reminds him of his room.

They’re making good progress through the tunnels, Jon thinks. It’s hard to See down here, even for him, but there’s a tug at his senses getting stronger by the minute. They’re close to his younger self, he can feel it. His fingers curl around the handle of Magnus's umbrella.

Now he just has to decide what he’s going to do about it. Gertrude and Emma will want to drag them back up to the Archives, but Magnus is going to be out and about any second now. If he isn’t already.

It sure was satisfying to knock him out, but he’s no Daisy Tonner.

“Here,” Gertrude says, stopping in front of a corridor half the width of the one they’re currently in. “We should be able to cut them off down here somewhere.”

“And you Know this?” Emma asks, staring down the corridor. She grips a torch tightly in her hand.

“Yes,” Gertrude says. She’s lying. Jon doesn’t know what her tells are, but he only has the faintest sense of where Jon is and he knows for a fact that he’s more Archivist than she is.

Emma steps into the tunnel anyway, and Gertrude fits in behind her.

They’re forced to walk single-file due to the narrowness, and Jon ends up last, shuffling slowly behind the two women. He should have gone first; he needs to make sure Martin and Sasha are safe with his own eyes. Maybe he’d have caught up to them by now.

Or maybe he’d be hopelessly lost. Jon doesn’t have the best track record with the Millbank Prison.

Suddenly, Gertrude comes to a halt. Jon’s startled and bumps into her, but she only pauses to adjust her shirt collar and brush dirt off her shoulders.

Emma’s voice sounds from up in front of them. “Gertrude?”

“Yes?”

“This is a dead end.”

“Ah, yes,” Gertrude says, and she starts digging through her pockets. “Shine that light over here, will you?”

Emma points the torch over at Gertrude’s hands, which are now holding a book. Jon recognizes it immediately — The Seven Lamps of Architecture, the same book Leitner had used to shift the tunnels around him in 2017.

When they look back up from the book, the wall in front of them is gone.

“Precaution,” Gertrude says as an explanation. “This is a rather useful shortcut, and I don’t like sharing it.”

“I’m honored,” Emma deadpans. Jon snorts.

They walk forward for another hundred meters. The corridor begins to widen. Once he has enough space, Jon prepares himself to squeeze past Gertrude and Emma — when a pained shout sounds through the underground and stops them all in their tracks.

Jon reflexively tries to See what’s happening, but the damn tunnels keep messing up his focus.

“Oh, fuck,” Emma says. “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know,” Martin yelps, jogging forward. “I swear, it was just — waddling, over there, around the corner.”

“Should we be checking it out?” Jon asks, even as they run toward whatever Martin saw.

“We probably should,” Sasha shrugs, looking disturbingly at ease with the whole situation. “We’re lost, anyway. And if it’s what we think it is, we might even get a chance to stop your doppelgänger.”

Jon is curious, but he has to admit that there was a significant part of him hoping she’d say ‘no’.

They keep chasing after the thing, anyway.

Jon sprints as fast as he can toward the source of the sound, fearing the worst. Gertrude and Emma are right on his invisible heels.

Gertrude’s voice is flat. “This could be troublesome.”

“‘Troublesome?’” Emma echoes.

The older woman doesn’t answer, just keeps running forward with grim determination.

There’s only two things in these tunnels that the others could have run into. One is the Panopticon — highly unlikely, considering the absolutely insane path they’d have to take to find it, and the fact that Gertrude herself still doesn’t know how to get there. The second is —

“Shit, where’d it go?” Martin pants, skidding to a stop. “I swear, it went right —”

“There!” Sasha says.

Jon follows her gaze and narrows his eyes at the humanoid figure hobbling away from them. It’s clutching something in its hands, but not for long, because Sasha pulls out a glass bottle of ink from her box and chucks it at the back of its head. It flies true, hitting its head before smashing against the brick floor.

The thing lets out a cry and drops the item it’s holding. It slumps against the wall, and its head rolls.

It looks like a man. Aged, Caucasian features, smeared with blood and contorted with pain. Tired blue irises peek out from swollen eyelids. He looks like he’s been in a fight.

An older man. In the tunnels. Fighting with something.

The pieces click into place.

Jon takes a sharp right and bursts into a new corridor. He is greeted with the sight of his younger self holding a bloody old man by the shirt collar while Martin and Sasha flank him.

“What,” Jon says.

His younger self looks up at the sound of his voice, like a deer in the headlights. His hair and clothing look disheveled.

Behind Jon, Gertrude and Emma stumble into the corridor, breathing hard. They stop and stare, drinking in the sight of three young researchers standing over a bloodied and broken man.

“... What the hell happened here,” Emma says.

Jon lets his eyes sweep over the scene. There’s broken glass on the ground and Sasha is holding another glass bottle like a grenade.

Martin lifts up his hand in a tentative wave. “This isn’t what it looks like,” he says. His hand is holding a pocket knife.

At least they look unharmed. He turns his gaze back to his younger self.

“It’s him,” His younger self says, his voice echoing off the walls. “It’s Jonah Magnus!”

“What?” The old man says.

“What,” Jon repeats, because he feels like it needs repeating.

“He's Magnus,” The younger Jon insists, shaking the old man with aggressive fervor. “Jonah Magnus, the thing that's been watching me!”

Jon's tempted to say 'what' a third time, but he's pretty sure he's not going to get a better explanation than that.

Elsewhere, Jonah Magnus pushes himself up from his office floor with a groan.

"Oh, good. You're awake."

He whips his head around to glare at the intruder sitting on his desk. "Wh — you. What the hell are you doing here? Did you do this?"

Annabelle Cane smirks at him, making the webbing on the side of her face stretch and contort. "No. Actually, I think that was Sims's mysterious ghost."

He scoffs at the idea. "The ghost? Surely I would have —"

"Not gotten clubbed in the head with your own umbrella in your own office?"

...

"Why are you here?" He grumbles, unable to come up with a counter-argument.

Annabelle Cane — the Web — hops off his desk and smiles at him, eyes empty. Jonah has never liked dealing with her. She makes his own grand plans feel small in comparison.

"I'm here for the same reason you are 'Elias'," she says, in an almost sing-songy tone.

She leans forward, and he feels the uncomfortable tickle of cobwebs on his hands. He tries to subtly wipe them off, but she just laughs in his face, a sinister smile creeping across her lips.

"I want to know what it is."

Chapter Text

Jonathan Sims knows lots of things. Sure, he doesn’t know everything. But he knows more than the average person — hell, more than the average Magnus Institute employee — and that comforts him. He likes to learn, likes to read. He likes asking questions and getting answers, and because he dedicates so much of his life to learning, he’s often one of the smartest people in the room. He likes that. He likes being right. He doesn’t like being wrong.

All this just to say: Jon isn’t having a good time right now.

“That’s not Jonah Magnus,” his double tells him, looking pained. “That’s — what the hell. I don’t even know how you came up with that.”

“That’s not Jonah Magnus,” Gertrude says, unaware that something else had beaten her to the punch. “Please let my assistant go.”

Emma whips her head around to stare at her incredulously. “Assistant?”

“Assistant?” The old man repeats.

Gertrude lifts an eyebrow. “Is that not what you are?”

“I was hoping — partners, at least?”

“What do you mean, he’s not Jonah Magnus?” Jon demands. “He’s old. He’s in the tunnels. He has eyes.”

“The fact that those are your main reasons deeply concerns me,” his double says. “I can’t believe you three beat him up. I do not remember having those kinds of guts.”

Jon abruptly lets go of the old man’s shirt collar. The old man falls to the floor and yelps in pain, clutching his bloody nose.

“I — we found him like this,” Jon says, defensive.

Gertrude blinks. “You found him like —”

“It’s true, Ms. Robinson!” Martin says, lifting his arms in surrender. “Sorry for the misunderstanding! We did not beat up your assistant!”

Sasha grabs his arm. “Put that knife away, you’re not helping.”

Martin looks at his hand and pales. He folds up his pocket knife and smiles weakly.

Gertrude steps forward and helps the old man get to his feet. “What happened to you?” She asks, looking him up and down.

“I got beat up by an angry goth.”

Jon thinks he sees her smile at that, but the moment passes, and she’s just as serious as ever.

“Ah,” his double says, nodding. “That’ll be our Gerry.”

“Gerry?” Jon asks.

Gertrude looks at Jon, eyes narrowed. “What did you say?”

Behind Gertrude’s back, the doppelgänger attempts and fails to explain. “Gerry Keay, he’s — never mind, it doesn’t matter. Jon, I’m going to need you to come with me.”

Jon takes a step back. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Mr. Sims,” Gertrude says. “I know the way out of these tunnels, I can lead you back out —”

“Not you,” Jon snaps at her, and then suddenly he realizes that now’s his chance. He points at his double. “My doppelgänger! It’s here!”

Everyone follows his gaze and stares uncomprehendingly at his double.

“... Er, Jon?” Martin says quietly. “That’s a column?”

“This tunnel doesn’t have columns!”

“Yes, it does,” Martin says. “There’s one right there.”

Jon wants to tear his hair out and shake Martin until his head falls off.

“Don’t bother,” his doppelgänger sighs, shoulders slumping. “I’ve tried so hard for so long. They can’t see me, no one can.”

“And I’m just supposed to take your word for it?” Jon snaps.

“When have you ever?” the thing mutters. “Look — Magnus knows you’re down here. We don’t have much time, you need to come with me.”

“If this guy isn’t Magnus, who is?” Jon complains.

“Elias Bouchard,” it says.

Jon frowns.“I thought you said that Elias was good at keeping people safe.”

The thing runs a hand over its face, and it rolls its thousand eyes at him. “Why is that the only thing you took away from that conversation.”

“It’s not my fault everything you say is an inconsistency!”

“Wait — your double is here?” Gertrude says, as if the situation is just registering. She squints a little to his doppelgänger’s left, her eyes unfocused.

“Yes,” Jon blurts out. Gertrude’s tone is all skepticism, but at least she’s considering the idea.

She picks up something off the ground — that object that the old man had dropped earlier. It’s a pamphlet. She opens it up.

“Oh, smart,” the doppelgänger comments, when it sees it. “I wonder if that will work.”

Jon steps closer to her, intent on asking what she’s doing — but then she vanishes.

“Gertrude?” Emma shrieks, and she looks around, eyes wide. She points the torch in her hand around the room, and Jon winces as the beam of light hits his eyes. “What just happened?”

“She’s fine,” the old man says. “That pamphlet she has — reading a couple words lets you temporarily vanish from the senses —”

“It’s a Leitner?” Sasha speaks up, her eyes piercing and face suddenly deadly serious.

The man pales. “I, uh. Yes. It’s a, um. It’s a Leitner.”

Jon can feel his fingernails digging into his palms. He’s not the biggest fan of Leitner’s work.

“Gertrude, listen,” his double says. “You need to get out of these tunnels. Magnus is coming, and if he finds you down here, he might just —”

“Nothing,” Gertrude announces, materializing back into existence. She glances down at the Leitner in her hands, and then at the space where his doppelgänger is standing.

“Dear god,” his double groans, tossing its head back with frustration. It lifts something — an umbrella? — and whacks it against the wall as hard as it can. A chunk of brick flies off and hits in the face, and it hisses in pain.

“Wait, what will Magnus do?” Jon asks it.

“What he always does to his problems,” his double says, rubbing its eyes. It glares at him, and Jon involuntarily stumbles under the weight of its gaze. “You know what — never mind. I don’t know why I ever thought talking would work.”

It takes a step forward.

Jon tries to back away, but there’s nowhere to go. His back hits the wall.

“Jon?” Martin says.

“Stay back,” Jon hisses. He wants to look up, but the thing’s eyes bore into him, and it feels like every thought, every facet of his soul is being laid bare. He keeps his eyes trained on the floor.

“I won’t hurt you, idiot,” it says with disdain. “Look, I just need you out of the way while I find a way to deal with Magnus.”

It grabs Jon by the arm and yanks. He stumbles forward with a yelp, and it begins to drag him away.

“Jon?” Martin repeats, with alarm. He squints, hard, but his eyes keep sliding away, looking at nothing.

“Let go of me!” Jon yells, swatting it as hard as he can.

“Wow,” it says. “This is actually quite embarrassing. I hadn’t realized I was so weak.”

Jon lurches backward, ignoring the way his arm feels like a tug-of-war rope. They both tumble and hit the ground.

“Jon!” Sasha gasps with relief upon seeing him. She rubs her temples like she’s warding off a migraine. “What are you doing on the ground?”

“I told you, it’s the doppelgänger — mmph!”

A hand closes over his mouth. He kicks at the ground, trying to stop himself from getting dragged away.

“And I told you, I’m you,” it grumbles. “Christ, I’m annoying.”

Jon licks its hand and it draws back, disgusted. Jon scrambles away and spits on the ground.

“Are you five?” It asks him, wiping its hand on its pant leg.

“It is here,” Gertrude says, in wonder.

“Incredible,” Jon snaps, a note of hysteria leaking in. “I should think that was obvious by now!”

He wants to keep chewing her out, but falters. Gertrude abruptly whips her head around and stares into the tunnels. Beside her, Emma stiffens up, eyeing Gertrude warily.

“What is it?” she asks.

“... He’s in the Archives,” Gertrude answers, infuriatingly vague.

But it must mean something to Emma, and the old man, and his doppelgänger, because all three of them freeze up at Gertrude’s announcement.

His double’s fingers curl around the umbrella in its hands. “Shit.”

“Jon, are you alright?” Martin’s voice breaks Jon out of the sudden unease. Martin holds out a hand, offering to help him up.

Jon stares at Martin’s hand for a moment. Then he reaches for it.

But before he can take it, something hits him over the head, and it all goes dark.

“We need to get out of here,” Gertrude hisses. She tosses the pamphlet back to the old man. “Hide.”

The man opens the pamphlet and promptly disappears.

“Wait,” Martin gasps out, still reeling. His hand is still outstretched, but there’s nothing in front of him. One moment, Jon was there, and the next — the next —

“Where’s Jon?” Sasha yells. She whirls around and stares at Gertrude with wide eyes. “What the hell is happening?”

“Your friend is alive,” Gertrude answers, rushed. “That’s more than I can say for us if we get caught down here.”

“Alive?” Martin demands. “What just happened? How can you know that he’s still alive?”

“Because it doesn’t want him dead,” she says. “In fact, I’d wager that Jonathan Sims is probably the safest person down here in the tunnels. We need to get out.”

“We can’t just leave him,” Sasha protests. “That — that was his manifestation, right? What if he —”

Emma steps forward, lips drawn tight. “We’ll come back, Sasha,” she says. “I’ll — I’ll come with you guys. We’ll find him. But we can’t do that if Elias is here.”

Sasha stares at her, eyes wide. “Do you know what’s happening here?”

Emma glances over at Gertrude. Gertrude stares back, the frown on her face growing ever deeper. The older woman shakes her head, a warning in her eyes.

Emma’s eyes harden, and she looks back at Sasha and Martin. “I’ll explain on the way,” she promises.

This is what Emma says:

There are fourteen eldritch monstrosities behind every spooky and creepy supernatural happening in this world. Behind every Leitner. Behind every thing that goes bump in the night.

The Magnus Institute, apparently, is a restaurant that feeds one of them. It’s called ‘The Eye’, or the fear of being watched, and Elias Bouchard, the current head of the Magnus Institute, is the restaurant owner and is keeping the Archives, or kitchen, hostage.

“That’s a terrible explanation,” Gertrude mumbles to herself.

“I’m telling the story,” Emma snaps.

Martin and Sasha exchange an uncomfortable glance. With Gertrude leading them out of the tunnels and Emma bringing up the rear, they’re right in the middle of the world’s most antagonistic boss-employee relationship, and they can't escape.

Or, correction: the world’s second-most antagonistic boss-employee relationship. Elias, apparently, won’t let them quit, haunts their nightmares, and semi-annually encourages ‘team bonding’ by telling them about their rival restaurants’ attempts at turning the world into a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Naturally, this is to be avoided, so Gertrude and Emma have to trawl through the Archives and do research on how they can prevent the apocalypse on a bi-annual basis.

“That’s kinda badass,” Sasha whispers to Martin.

That’s not the word Martin would have used to describe it — awful sounds a bit more accurate to his ears. He’s also still trying to puzzle out what a Hieronymus Bosch is. It sounds like something he’d have learned about in uni.

“Gertrude is an Archivist,” Emma continues. “Normally, this means that she’d be the Head Chef of Fear, but she’s worked very hard to stay physically human. That’s half of why Elias hates us. The other half is that we try to make his life as annoying as possible. But I guess our presence down here dips into the ‘dangerously annoying’ territory, which is why Gertrude wants us to get out.”

“So if he finds us down here, he’d kill us?” Sasha asks with forced levity. “Bouchard, really? I always pegged him as a blackmailer.”

“Oh, he’s definitely that,” Emma says, with a bitter chuckle. “But his patience only goes so far, and Gertrude’s been at this for fifty years.”

Gertrude grunts. She leads them up to a very narrow corridor, and they end up squeezing in single-file: Gertrude, then Martin, then Sasha, and then Emma. It’s a very tight fit, makes Martin feel like he’s being pressed in on all sides, but whatever is happening to Jon is probably worse.

Oh, god, Jon. Martin’s brain is still swirling around with the idea of fear-eating gods, but he also keeps rewinding and replaying that earlier scene. Why hadn’t he believed Jon about the column thing? He’d known his manifestation was real. He’d known that it had some sort of compulsion thing on it. Why hadn’t he realized?

“So — ah, do we know what was haunting Jon?” Martin asks.

He can hear Jon’s voice in his head. Not a ‘haunting’.

“I don’t know,” Emma admits. “I think it’s aligned with the Eye — what with the paranoia and tape recorders and ‘always watching’ thing.”

“Really?” Sasha says. “It’s stealing from Bouchard, though.” She shakes the box of pen and ink, which she still has after everything.

(Martin can’t really blame her. His pocket knife hasn’t left his hand since Jon disappeared.)

“The Eye and the Institute aren’t always the same thing,” Emma says. “Who knows, maybe it wants to take his place as head priest.”

“Why haunt Jon, then?” Martin asks. “Why try and look like him?”

“Question of the year,” Gertrude mutters.

She sounds very tired. Apparently Elias and Jon are not the only people it’s been annoying.

At that, the conversation dies. Emma has wrapped up her explanation and Gertrude doesn’t have anything to add. Martin still feels like he’s trying to process everything, and Sasha is probably in the same boat.

Martin rolls his shoulders, feeling restless. The walls continue to press in.

Gertrude suddenly stops in front of a dead end. Martin nearly bumps into her, but manages to stop in time.

“Is that the wall?” Emma asks.

“Yes.”

Gertrude reaches into her pocket and pulls out a book. Martin dutifully holds up a torch for her — Emma had a whole bag of them and passed some around — and he reads a couple words over her shoulder. She swats him away before he can register anything.

“Hey —”

“It’s a Leitner,” she says. “You don’t want to read it.”

“Oh.” Martin quickly averts his eyes. You don’t work at the Magnus Institute without hearing the name ‘Jurgen Leitner’ getting tossed around.

Behind him, Sasha makes a noise of disgust. “You’re awfully comfy with those,” she grumbles.

“I used to work in Artefact Storage,” Gertrude says.

Emma scoffs. “Feeling chatty, are you?”

Gertrude sighs.

“Right, right,” Emma says, sarcastically. “Shutting up.”

Gertrude looks up from the book. The wall in front of her is gone, and she begins to walk forward again. Martin follows close behind. The next time she stops, he does bump into her, and he lets out a quiet yelp.

“Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean —”

“Quiet,” Gertrude hisses. “Lights out.”

She switches off her torch. Martin doesn’t know what’s happening, but Gertrude seems to know what she’s doing, so he copies her. He can hear another click behind him as Sasha hits the switch on her own torch.

He can still see his shadow on the wall, though. He turns his head around enough to see Emma’s wide eyes, illuminated by the bright light of an LED bulb.

“What?” Emma whispers furiously.

“Emma,” Gertrude says, calmly. “You need to turn off your torch. And cover up the glow sticks. If Elias sees us, we all lose.”

Martin can hear Emma’s breathing increase in speed. “But —”

“I know,” Gertrude says, and for the first time, Martin thinks he hears a sliver of emotion in her voice.

“He can just See us anyway,” Emma protests, her voice sounding very small. “If he’s here, he probably already knows where we are, so why —”

“Down here, his eyes are as human as the rest of ours,” Gertrude says. “Emma, listen, this is Smirke’s architecture —”

“That isn’t nearly as comforting as you think it is —”

“I’m here. The dark won’t bother me.”

Emma doesn’t answer, and the shadows flicker as her hand trembles. Martin glances around nervously.

Sasha clears her throat. “Emma, can I hold your hand?”

A pause.

Emma laughs incredulously. “W — what? Um, uh, you really don’t have to —”

“Will you feel safer if I do?” Sasha asks, her voice quiet.

“... Yes,” Emma answers, shakily.

Martin can hear Sasha shift her position behind him.

“Okay,” Gertrude says. “Turn it off.”

The light clicks off.

It’s dark. Perhaps that should have been obvious — they’re in a secret underground tunnel — but it still catches Martin off guard. It takes his eyes a couple moments to adjust, and then he can make out the vague impression of Gertrude in front of him. They stand there, silent and still, and then Martin hears it — the sound of footsteps on stone echoing around them.

“... don’t do anything. He’s mine,” a familiar voice drifts down. It sounds far, but Martin can’t quite make out where it’s coming from. In front of him? Behind him? It’s impossible to tell.

“I don’t want him,” a second, feminine voice says. “I’m just… curious, is all.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“I’ve had my fun. And it would have been more satisfying to see your plan play out with him.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. It’s a fascinating theory you and your Archivist have. Makes me understand the appeal of the Eye. I almost just want to kick back and see what happens.”

“Hm. Well, as long as you do your part…”

Martin strains his ears, but he can’t pick up any more than that. The sound of footsteps fades, until they’re left in the silence. A moment passes.

“... Can I turn it on, now?” Emma asks, strained.

“Yes.”

Martin blinks rapidly at the sudden change in lighting. He flicks on his torch, after a moment, and he takes in a deep breath.

“We should hurry.” Gertrude starts heading down the corridor, and Martin scrambles to keep up. They walk as quickly as they dare. Until they don’t.

Emma’s voice is tight with fear as Gertrude comes to another stop. “What is it this time?” she says, as if stubbornly trying to hold on to her sarcasm.

In front of him, Gertrude straightens up.

“Oh, dear,” she says. “Run.”

She takes off. Martin doesn’t bother to think, just runs after her, with Sasha and Emma right behind them.

The narrow corridor is an awful environment to run in. Martin wants to burst into a full sprint, but his shoulders keep hitting the walls and he can’t squeeze past Gertrude. And her age is working against her — Martin can hear her labored breaths, see the way she clutches her side.

By the time they reach the end of the corridor, Gertrude is winded, moving at a slow jog.

“Curse my age,” she wheezes out, leaning against the wall for support.

Emma bites her lip. Her eyes are blown wide with panic. “Gertrude, I heard footsteps behind me.”

Footsteps. Martin really doesn’t like that.

Gertrude points a shaky hand to her left. “Exit’s that way.” Her chest heaves as she tries to catch her breath. When she finally turns around, she looks frustrated.

Martin doesn’t hesitate and bends down next to her.

“Get on my back,” he offers. “I’ll carry you.”

She doesn’t look too fond of the idea, but climbs onto his back, anyway. Martin straightens up and adjusts his grip. He looks at Sasha and Emma, both of them breathing hard, but still able to run. Sasha nods at him.

He takes off down the corridor with Gertrude on his back. He’s not used to carrying people; he feels like she’s on the verge of falling with every step he takes. He tries to keep as steady as possible. His hands grow slick with sweat. His heart pounds in his ears until he can’t hear anything else but the roar of rushing blood.

Gertrude guides him through the turns and forks, pointing out the right tunnels and paths. They follow a twisting path until the brick turns to dirt and the walls become vaguely familiar. He’s just starting to feel hope, just starting to feel safe again, when something suddenly occurs to him.

He hasn’t heard anything behind him for a while.

Martin slows and risks a glance backward. His stomach leaps up into his throat.

Sasha and Emma are gone.

He skids to a stop.

“Wh — when did —” he stutters to himself, trying to recall the last time he’d heard them. “They were right behind us.”

He combs through his memory. He’d heard them running and breathing and following behind, and then at some point he just… stopped listening. Did he — did he leave them behind? Did he run too fast, take too sharp a turn?

Gertrude slides off his back. “Blackwood, we need to go —”

“Where are they?” He demands. “Did you see where they went?”

Gertrude swallows and shakes her head. Her eyes drop to the ground. “... No.”

“Oh my god,” Martin mumbles. “Oh my god, this is — I left them.”

He didn’t see anything. He didn’t hear anything. Martin tries to go down the corridor, back the way they came, but Gertrude catches his wrist and holds it tight.

“They’re going to be fine,” Gertrude says.

“How do you know that?” Martin asks her. “How can you promise me that?”

“He won’t kill them,” Gertrude says, evenly. “He’d kill me without hesitation. But he won’t kill them.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you!” Martin snaps. He pulls his hand out of her grip. “First Jon, now everyone else — she’s your assistant —”

“They’re not alone in here,” Gertrude says.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about!”

“No, not — my other assistant,” she clarifies. “He’ll lead them out of the tunnels. They’re going to be fine.”

“And you know this, how?” Martin says, thinking of that bruised and battered old man. “He’s just going to waddle up and fight Elias? We don’t even know where that guy went!”

“If there’s trouble, he’ll find it,” Gertrude shrugs. She starts walking away. “We have to go.”

“I’m not leaving them!” Martin says. “I won’t just —”

“Listen to me, Martin Blackwood,” Gertrude says, and the frostiness in her voice makes him shut up. “Your friend has a reason to be here. She was retrieving his things. Emma came along as support, to help navigate the tunnels. Elias will be annoyed, but your friend has a peace offering. She has his pens, knows where his things are. They’re innocent. They’re going to be fine.

“Me, on the other hand? Elias would kill me on sight if he caught me down here.” She stares him down. “I can’t help Jonathan Sims if I’m dead. We’re going to need a plan. One that involves us not getting caught by Elias.”

Martin looks at her, at the grim determination in her eyes, the quiet expectation. Her words make sense. They’re almost comforting, even, in the sense that Gertrude exudes the air of someone who knows what she’s doing. But even so. He can’t explain it, why something feels off. Why it feels like there’s something she’s not telling him.

But he doesn’t have any other options. Going back in by himself would end with him lost or worse. Gertrude, however, knows her way around. Most importantly: she knows more than he does, about Elias, about these fear gods, about everything.

He didn’t see what happened to Sasha and Emma. He didn’t see what happened to Jon. One moment, Jon was there, reaching for his hand. And the next moment — Martin looked away.

“Fine,” Martin says, and he swallows back the pleas and protests waiting on his tongue. “I’ll follow you.”

Gertrude nods. She starts walking down the corridor without sparing him a second glance, and Martin is right behind her. Gertrude might not be willing to share what she knows, but that’s alright. Martin’s spent his whole life perfecting the art of being inoffensive and friendly. She’ll let her guard down eventually.

He looked away when Jon was taken. He wasn’t watching when Sasha and Emma disappeared.

He won’t make the same mistake again.

To be honest, Jon feels a little bad about knocking out his younger self and dragging him away. Sure, he deserved it. But if he could have, he would have tried to reassure Martin and Sasha at the very least. They were distraught at the thought of an invisible monster taking their coworker. He wonders if they would have listened to what he had to say.

(Probably not. Jon’s presence is unsettling at best and horrifying at worst. It would have been a depressing interaction.)

He drags his younger self by the feet and heads toward his hideout in the tunnels. He has rope in there he can use to keep the younger Jon from getting into trouble. And once young Jon is all tied up, he’ll… distract Elias. Make sure Martin and Sasha can make it out of the tunnels. Maybe if he can’t persuade or warn himself away from the Archives he could try blackmail and intimidation?

Or could he? Is his younger self too wrapped up in the mystery, now? Will curiosity kill the cat?

A low moan echoes around the corridor. Jon looks down. His younger self blinks in confusion, then recognition, and then fear.

“Wh — where are you taking me?”

“Someplace where you’ll be out of the way.”

Young Jon’s eyes widen. He kicks his legs out of Jon’s grip and scrambles to his feet.

“Hey.” Jon stares down his younger self and watches his limbs freeze up. He grabs his arm and drags him down the corridor.

His younger self trembles under his grip. “Please don’t eat me.”

Jon rolls his eyes. “We’ve been over this, I don’t eat people.”

“Really?” Young Jon asks, with a waver in his voice.

“I know you don’t believe most of the things I say, but I actually tell very few lies,” Jon sighs. “I don’t eat people. I don’t want to kill you.”

Young Jon scowls at him. “Then what do you want?”

“Would you believe me if I told you I’m a time traveler here to prevent a horrible future?”

Young Jon looks horrified. “Were you listening to us? We didn’t find any tape recorders —“

“What?”

His younger self continues to ramble on. Jon tunes him out, instead focusing on walking.

When he comes to his hideout, the first thing he notices is the chalk star next to the entrance. The second thing he notices is the cobwebs on the corners of the doorway.

“Oh, hell.”

“What is it?”

“Location’s compromised,” Jon says, turning around and dragging his younger self down another tunnel.

“Yes, we found your little stash —”

“Not by you,” Jon hisses. “The Web.”

“The Web?”

He ignores the question. Why did the Web bring his younger self down here? Why would it explore the tunnels? Why would it be looking for him? He didn’t do anything to get its attention. Although… maybe that was the problem.

An invisible rogue element was probably just as annoying to the Web as it was to the Eye. His very nature of existence is causing this. Once again, the question of what is causing his strange invisibility comes up.

“What’s the Web?” Younger Jon asks, interrupting his thoughts.

Jon opens his mouth. His first instinct is to tell himself to shut up.

His second instinct is to remember how Elias beat Leitner to death for daring to tell Jon about the Entities.

“It’s an entity of fear,” Jon says. “The fear of being manipulated. The loss of free will.”

His younger self frowns at him, confused and disbelieving.

Jon’s going about this all wrong. “A Guest for Mr. Spider,” he says.

His younger self stiffens. “How do you know about that —”

“That book is part of the being known as the Web,” Jon continues. “The Web… created that book, you could say.”

It’s the easiest way to think about it, at least.

His younger self stares at him. “Is this Web thing watching me, too?”

Jon lifts an eyebrow. “Oh, now you want to hear what I have to say?”

His younger self breaks eye contact and huffs in frustration. “I just. I want to know.”

“Of course you do,” Jon grumbles, but he resolves to take advantage of his trusting mood. They reach another fork in the tunnels, and he chooses the path with the least amount of cobwebs. “It’s probably working with Magnus.”

“And what does Magnus want with me?”

“He wants to hire you.”

“I’m… I already have a job?”

“Hire you to start the apocalypse.”

His younger self shoots him an unimpressed look. “Sure,” he says, voice loaded with sarcasm. “What do you want with me?”

I want to save my friends. I want to be human. I want you to walk away, even though I know you won’t.

“I want to screw over Magnus,” he says instead, because it’s the only thing his younger self will accept as genuine. “If he loses you, he’ll have to start all over again.”

Another fork in the tunnels. There are fewer cobwebs, now, which makes Jon feel better. He drags his younger self through another doorway, this one completely free of webs, and he takes a step forward — and then suddenly he’s falling, and dragging his younger self with him.

Both of them scream as they fall through the air. They hit the ground with a solid thump, and his ankle rolls painfully beneath his legs.

“Shit,” Jon curses, rolling over and scrambling to his feet. He stumbles when he puts weight on his left foot and curses some more. “I… didn’t see that coming.”

“Clearly not,” his younger self snaps. He doesn’t seem to be badly hurt, just some scraped elbows and new tears in his pants.

Jon looks around their new setting — a roughly circular hole, about three meters in diameter. And at least four meters in depth. The walls, though dirt, are vertical with few handholds. It’s going to be difficult to climb out, he thinks.

And — there’s a spider on the wall next to him.

Jon smashes it without hesitation, inwardly cursing his weakness to reverse psychology. He looks up, expecting more spiders to start rushing into the hole. For the Web to spring its trap. But there’s nothing.

“What’s this?”

Jon turns to face his younger self.

His younger self bends down to pick something up off the ground, his eyes narrowed with suspicion and curiosity. It’s a manila folder. A very familiar folder.

Oh, fuck, Jon thinks. Perhaps ignoring Magnus’s statement wasn’t the best course of action.

Chapter Text

Martin follows Gertrude through the trapdoor. Judging by his watch, it’s only been a few hours since he’d last seen the Archives, but it feels like a lifetime. The stale, dry air of the basement is a welcome change from the moist tunnel air.

“Goodness, what happened here?” Gertrude asks as she walks in.

She’s looking at a cardboard box, stuffed with folders and loose papers in disarray. Martin keeps his mouth shut.

They walk out of the stacks and toward Gertrude’s office. Once inside, Gertrude flops down into her chair.

“So what’s the plan?” Martin asks her.

“Would you mind getting me a cup of water?” Gertrude asks him.

Martin blinks. “Excuse me?”

“A cup of water,” she repeats. “Hydration is important, you know.”

“I — yes,” Martin says, squashing down his frustration. She’s old. She’s tired. And after all that running, he could do with something to drink himself. He rushes over to the break room and comes back with two cups of water. Gertrude gulps one down, sets the cup on her desk, and leans back in her chair.

“So,” Martin says, again. “What’s the plan?”

“You found out where it was living, didn’t you?” Gertrude asks. “Sims’s haunting.”

“It’s not a haunting,” Martin says, automatically. “It has a physical, corporeal form, and it eats food.”

Gertrude gives him a look.

Martin feels his cheeks burn. “It… it had shrimp chips.”

“His manifestation, then,” she says. He can’t see it, but he has the feeling that she’s internally rolling her eyes. “Would you be able to navigate to its hideout?”

“Uh, maybe?” Martin says. He doesn’t have the best sense of direction, but they did mark it with chalk.

“That’ll have to do,” Gertrude mutters. “When you were there. Was there anything in particular that stuck out? Anything of note?”

Martin thinks back to the thing’s piles of blankets and office supplies. “... It had a box of statements,” he remembers. “From the Archives.”

Gertrude’s eyes sharpen at that. “Statements,” she repeats. She leans forward and drums her fingers on her desk. “Now that’s interesting.”

“What’s the plan?” Martin asks again, impatient.

“We’ll go back in once Emma and your friend make it out,” Gertrude says. “I can’t enter the tunnels until Elias leaves, and once he finds them, he’ll be forced to escort them out.”

Martin feels the paper cup crumple underneath his grip. Water spills over his fist. “I thought you said that your ‘other assistant’ will find them.”

“He will,” Gertrude says. “It doesn’t matter who finds them first. They’ll be safe either way.”

The frustrated discomfort on his face must be pretty obvious, because she takes one look at him and sighs.

Her tone is even when she speaks. “You’re welcome to go back in and search, Mr. Blackwood. It’s not going to do them, or you, any good.”

Martin wants to toss his remaining water in Gertrude’s face. Instead, he takes a deep breath and continues to crumple the paper cup in his hands.

“What about Jon, then?” Martin asks. “You said his manifestation didn’t want to kill him. Do you have an idea about what it wants?”

“Fears only want one thing,” she says.

“So he’s being, what, psychologically tortured right now?” Martin says, alarmed. How did Emma describe the Eye, again? ‘The fear of being watched’? What does that even entail?

“He’s alive,” Gertrude says. “That doppelgänger of his wants him alive — god knows why — so anything it does to him is likely to be non-fatal.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“What do you want me to say?” Gertrude asks him. She rubs her temples, looking exhausted. “I can’t do anything for him at the moment. Once Elias is gone, we go back in and try to find him as quickly as possible. No use in thinking about anything else.”

No wonder why Emma spent a solid fifteen minutes screaming at this woman. Not only is she frustratingly vague, but she also doesn’t even have the decency to pull her punches.

Gertrude purses her lips. “... Could you make me a cup of tea?”

Martin stares at her.

“Earl grey,” she adds. “That last cup you made was… quite pleasant, actually.”

“Are you serious right now?”

“It’ll be some time before we go back into the tunnels,” she says, nonchalant. “Might as get our strength back.”

Apparently, most of the Archivist’s ‘badass’ job is sitting around doing nothing. Martin grits his teeth, but holds his tongue.

Martin makes her tea. Makes himself tea, too, because the alternative was to sit and watch Gertrude drink tea without having a cup for himself, and he’s already having a bad enough day without adding that on top of it.

When he returns, Gertrude is looking at statements. She’s continuing research into a project she’d been working on before this whole thing began.

She peers at a statement through her reading glasses. She takes notes on a separate sheet of paper. Martin can read upside-down and backward, but he can’t make sense of what she’s scribbling down. It looks like it’s in a very specific shorthand. Possibly code. Martin’s always liked the idea of writing in code; there’s something romantic about a message only a few could read. He wonders what it says.

“Is there anything I can help with —“

“No.”

Martin’s mouth clicks shut. Gertrude doesn’t seem up to talking and this isn’t the best environment to snoop around in. Now he’s reduced to waiting and thinking about why he’s here and everyone else isn’t, and he wishes dearly he had something else to dwell on.

Because here’s the thing: Martin isn’t fast. Maybe adrenaline gave him a boost, but he was awkwardly also carrying an old woman on his back and having her shout directions in his ear. Sasha and Emma were behind him, yes. Still, he doubts he could have run ahead and lost them entirely. They weren’t injured, not to his knowledge. And the turns weren’t sharp. If they’d lost sight of him, it wouldn’t have been for long… unless.

Martin swallows back the fear and anger, and he keeps his eyes trained on Gertrude’s incomprehensible notes.

One moment, she’s running for her life. The next moment, she’s swerving to avoid a wall.

Sasha crashes into Emma, and they both fall over and eat dirt. The box in her arms drops to the ground, and the remaining two bottles of ink clink together.

“Oh god, are you alright?” Sasha asks, shoving herself up onto her elbows and looking over at Emma. She shakes her hair out of her eyes.

“Yes, I’m — I’m fine,” Emma says, rolling over and sitting up. She whips her head around. “Where’d they go?”

“I —” Sasha swallows. She looks at the wall she’d narrowly avoided.

“Was — was that wall there before?” Emma says.

Sasha’s voice cracks. “... I don’t know.”

Emma scrambles to her feet and rushes to the wall. She takes the metal torch in her hand and whacks it against the brick. The brick is solid and unyielding, as though it’s been standing there for a hundred years.

“... She wouldn’t,” Emma breathes out. Her eyes flicker across the wall, searching. It doesn’t seem like she finds what she’s looking for. Her eyes darken.

“What is it?”

Emma takes a step back from the wall, mouth drawn into a tight line. She looks over her shoulder, and Sasha can’t help but mirror the action.

The path behind them is dark. If Sasha focuses enough, she thinks she can hear someone walking down the hall.

“We have to keep moving,” Emma declares, holding out a hand. “It’s blocked off. We’ll have to find another way out.”

Sasha lets Emma help her to her feet. She wipes off her trousers and picks up the box of Elias’s pens, still intact. “I hate this place.”

“Awful, isn’t it?” Emma aims her torch down the only remaining path and grimaces. “Ready?”

“As much as I can be,” Sasha replies.

They start running, and Sasha tries not to think about the steady rhythm of footsteps chasing them down.

If a certain someone were to take a peek into the head of Jonathan Sims the Elder at this current moment in time, they would probably leave immediately due to the sheer vulgarity of the internal screaming echoing around his brain.

Shitshitshitshitshit, he chants in his mind. Time seems to slow down as his younger self narrows his eyes at the folder, reading the careful print on the tab.

Jon needs to do something. Tell him to drop it? No, that’ll only make him more curious. Read it himself? Wow, that’s even worse, good job, brain. Smack it out of his younger self’s hands? Satisfying, but it’s a short-term solution. Though, to be fair, it’s currently a short-term problem.

Decision made.

Jon smacks the file out of his younger self’s hand. Papers flutter to the ground, and he scrambles to pick them up before his younger self can, ignoring the pain in his twisted ankle. All the while, he keeps his eyes focused away from the sheets.

“What was that for?” His younger self says, and Jon’s brain kicks into overdrive, calculating his next move. His younger self might be willing to hear information from him, but there’s no guarantee he’d listen.

“You can’t read this,” Jon says, trying to think of the best way to impress the danger upon his younger self. This is dangerous? This came directly from Jonah Magnus’s stubby little hands?

You think you know yourself, but then you travel back in time and remember that you’re a piece of shit. What would Jon believe, were he in his younger self’s shoes?

Martin was better at this sort of thing, he thinks. Martin would know what to say here. Martin was a liar and a poet. Good with words. Jon always liked reading Martin’s poems, even the hopelessly mediocre ones — wait, where was he going with this again —

He hears his younger self snarl. “What are you hiding from me?”

“Poetry,” he blurts out, and then winces. His symphony of internal screaming hits a crescendo.

“Poetry.”

“... Sort of.” Jon doesn’t know what Magnus wrote in this statement, but a ritual is kind of like a poem, right? All weird traditions and fancy words.

“Sort of,” his younger self repeats, derision dripping from every word.

“It’s like a Leitner,” Jon says, desperately trying to get back on track. His younger self flinches at the familiar name and starts eyeing the papers with a little more caution. Jon allows himself a split second of triumph before pressing on. “Magnus wrote it, and he wants you to read it.”

“What is it with everyone wanting me to read things?” His younger self sends him an annoyed glare.

Jon frowns in confusion. “When did I — oh, right.”

His one successful adventure in reverse psychology. What a waste of food. Though it was very amusing to see Magnus storming around his apartment cursing at nothing.

Jon shakes his head and continues gathering up the papers. Once he has them all, he shoves them into the folder and then closes it, resolutely averting his gaze from the words. Then he carefully sets it on the ground. Task complete.

The two Jons stare at the file. It looks so innocuous from this angle. Just a collection of papers.

“... We should probably find a way out,” Jon suggests, forcefully tearing his eyes away from Magnus’s statement.

His younger self scowls. “We?”

“Yes, ‘we,’” Jon sighs. “We’re not exactly swimming in options, are we?”

He experimentally flexes his injured ankle and winces. Climbing out is going to be difficult.

His younger self experimentally kicks at the dirt walls. It’s solid earth the whole way around, not that Jon had expected anything different. He watches his younger self try to cling to the walls. He doesn’t get far before losing his grip.

Jon limps around the hole, carefully keeping Magnus’s statement out of his line of vision. He watches the walls carefully. No spiders. No webs. He attempts to dig into the dirt with his hands, hoping to make a handhold, but the earth is hard and dry. It would take a while without a tool. Jon looks around for Magnus’s umbrella before remembering: he’d ditched it after knocking himself out so he could use two hands to drag around the unconscious body.

“Damn,” his younger self hisses, turning his pockets inside out. Jon pats his own pockets, but he comes up empty as well.

No spiders. No webs. No tools. Nothing to fight with, nothing to fight against.

Well, almost nothing. Jon turns around and stares at Magnus’s unread statement. It’s waiting there. Waiting to be read.

There’s nothing for Jon to fight down here. Nothing but himself and his own curiosity.

Jurgen stumbles around the tunnels, slowly making his way to his personal rooms. He’ll have to wait until this chaos is over before he can ask Gertrude to smuggle him painkillers and medical supplies. Until then, he’ll… suffer, he supposes. Every step he takes reminds him that he has bones in his body. It’s an unpleasant feeling.

Even more unpleasant is the fact that Gertrude has Seven Lamps. It would probably help him shorten his travel distance. They’d argued about it when collecting books to help him hide. He’d wanted to keep it for himself, to help him navigate the tunnels. She’d told him he was an idiot. It was a short argument, made shorter by the fact that, despite it being irrelevant to the situation, he couldn’t refute her point. Gertrude kept the book.

“Oh, hell, now we’re back here?”

“I guess so. There’s the ink I spilled on the ground.”

“This place makes zero sense.”

“Hey, at least the footsteps have stopped?”

“Ha, there’s that…”

Jurgen stiffens at the sound of voices — still some distance away, but a little too close for comfort. He hand drifts to his copy of A Disappearance.

At least it’s not Elias’s voice. Or, Magnus’s voice, he supposes. It’s one thing to suspect that Jonah Magnus is a body-hopping avatar and another thing to know.

The footsteps come closer. Jurgen keeps his hand on his book, but doesn’t move to read it. A light comes into view, and Jurgen squints at the approaching figures. It’s Gertrude’s assistant and the other woman from earlier; they must have split up to make it harder for Elias to find them.

Jurgen just wants to go back to his cot and sleep, but he also knows that Gertrude has plans for her assistant. So that means… it’s probably his duty to guide her out. He can almost hear Gertrude’s voice in his head, barking out orders, expecting to be obeyed.

Jurgen sighs, lifts his hands, and steps into view.

“Hello —”

The taller one shrieks. Jurgen screams as a bottle of ink hits his broken nose before shattering at his feet. A wave of pain reverberates across his face, and he doubles over, feeling fresh blood come dripping down his upper lip. Dear god.

“Wait, Sasha,” Gertrude’s assistant catches the other woman’s arm. She points her torch at him, and he winces as the beam of light hits his eyes. It’s probably not intentional.

“I — I mean you no harm,” he stutters through the pain. “I’m Gertrude’s… other assistant. I can lead you out of here.”

“You work with Gertrude, huh?” she asks him, mouth flattening into a thin line. “Does Elias know you’re here?”

“No,” he answers, quickly.

“Interesting,” is her only comment. She lowers her torch and looks him up and down. He squirms under her appraising gaze. “Well, if Elias doesn’t know about you, I won’t be the one to tell him.”

She steps forward, and Jurgen relaxes at the show of trust.

“Is Elias close?” he asks, reaching into his pocket to pull out A Disappearance. “If he’s been following you, it might be safer to —”

“Oh, no thanks,” the taller one says. “Not too comfortable with Leitners. Hard pass.”

“Oh,” Jurgen says. His eyes dart around the corridor. Being discovered by Magnus would not be good, and he’d feel much safer if he were invisible. “But —”

“It’s not personal,” she tries to assure him. “It’s just — so many of those things pass through the Institute. And I’ve seen firsthand how much damage they can do. They can’t be controlled, and anyone who thinks so is an idiot. So many lives, so much pain, it’s really not worth it to try. I just think, there’s no good that can come out of a Leitner.”

Jurgen swallows.

“Ahh, sorry, didn’t mean to rant like that. And — I’m so sorry about your nose, it’s been a rough morning,” she says with a sheepish grin. She digs through her pockets and hands him a handkerchief, which he takes gratefully. “I’m Sasha. What was your name?”

“... Johann,” he lies.

“I’m Emma,” the assistant says, giving off no sign of recognition or suspicion. “Alright, Johann. How do we get out of here?”

He waits a beat, waiting for the moment one of them realizes. But the two women only blink at him, expectant. Okay. He’ll just have to be Johann for a half-hour, and then he can invisibly stumble back to his room.

He thinks of where they are. The closest exit is technically the one he’d gone through this morning, but Jurgen’s not setting foot above ground if he can help it. That means he’ll have to take them to the Archives trapdoor, which is at least twice as far.

He groans when he imagines how hard it would be to limp over there. But then he remembers how many people are above ground. Limping through the tunnels is the lesser of two evils, he decides.

He clutches his chest and gestures for them to follow.

It’s quiet for the first few minutes, almost uncomfortably so. Jurgen keeps expecting one of them to jump up and say, ‘He’s Jurgen Leitner! Get him!’ but it doesn’t happen. He’s just starting to relax in the silence when one of them clears their throat, and he almost falls over.

“Uh, thanks for earlier,” Emma says quietly.

“Huh?” Jurgen asks.

“Not you — I mean, thank you for showing us out,” she says. “But I was, uh, talking to Sasha.”

“Oh,” Jurgen says.

“Of course,” Sasha answers her. “I… I’m glad it helped.”

A pause. They take a turn. Jurgen clutches his side and mentally calculates how much further he’ll need to walk.

“Do you want to get coffee after this?” Emma asks, abruptly.

Jurgen stumbles at the question, and the phantom taste of his morning macchiato spreads across his lips. Does she know? Is she working with the goth?

The bruises on his skin seem to stretch with every step. He wipes sweat off his forehead with a shaky hand.

“Oh!” Sasha says, and then he realizes the question wasn’t directed at him, and he takes a painful, but relieved breath through his nose.

“I mean, ah. I never got a chance to give it to you. We could — there’s a café a couple blocks from the Institute. I could take you.”

Jurgen’s stomach twists at the mention of the café, and his already aching ribs throb at the memory.

“Oh! I’d been meaning to check that place out. I’d love to go.”

“It’s — it’s a date, then?”

“Yeah,” Sasha answers. “A date!”

Relieved laughter. “Oh, thank god!”

Jurgen wonders if that coffee shop has significance. What if they’re meeting that angry goth? What if they figure out who he is and come back into the tunnels to hunt him? Is he compromised?

Sasha clears her throat. “Emma… Did you think I was —?”

“Oh, no, of course not!”

“Oh, good. I’d hate for people to get the wrong impression.”

Emma laughs at that.

Jurgen leads them down another turn. This corridor turns into a winding tunnel, brick fading into dirt. He can never keep track of the building materials. He has a suspicion that the brick and dirt and stone like to shift, remaking potential landmarks. Though that twisting, nonsensical road remains the same, despite the impossibility of charting it.

The two women continue their quiet chatting. Their voices are impossibly light, considering the situation. Every time they circle back around to the topic of coffee, Jurgen flinches, and then has to spend a moment with tears in his eyes as he tries to manage the pain in his chest. They must know. They’re just messing with him, now. As soon as they know the way out, they’re going to finish the job.

It‘s not until the two of them start discussing Bend it Like Beckham that he realizes what’s actually happening.

“Oh,” he says, relief filling his chest. “You’re gay.”

The chatter dies.

Jurgen continues leading them through the tunnels in complete silence, intensely aware of the awkward way he’d killed the conversation.

It feels like it’s watching him.

Jon sits on the dirt, eyes carefully avoiding the manila folder resting on the ground. Like if he ignores it, it would ignore him back. Instead, it burns a hole in the back of his mind.

He needs to focus on something else. Count the cracks in the ground. Attempt to climb. Anything to distract him so he can pretend that there isn’t a metaphorical stick of dynamite waiting for him to light the fuse.

Jon hasn’t felt seen since the moment he woke up in a dusty chair in 2014. Somehow, he’d been hidden away from everything, the Eye, the Lonely, the Web. He’d spent weeks invisibly wandering through pre-apocalyptic London, convinced that he was dead. No one could see him, or hear him. There were no monsters openly walking the streets. The sky wasn’t watching him back. Up until that first encounter with his younger self, he’d genuinely thought he was an invisible ghost.

Even now, he knows he’s only imagining the feeling of being watched. He’s intimately familiar with the sensation of the Eye, that unnamed restlessness in his bones, the way his skin tingles with uncomfortable anticipation. There’s none of that here. Just some old-fashioned wariness.

(Or is it? Jon might be the Archive, but he’s still not the Eye.)

“Any ideas?” his younger self asks.

They’re both sitting on the dirt, on opposite sides of the hole. They’d spent the past half-hour trying to scrape handholds with the soles of their shoes, and had given up once they realized that it wasn’t going anywhere.

“I would have said something if I had one,” Jon says, sour.

His younger self rolls his eyes.

Jon continues to not-stare at Magnus’s statement. He can see the moment his younger self realizes what he’s doing.

“Do you know? What it does?”

“No.”

“… Maybe it’ll get us out of here.”

“I’m not getting out of here on his terms,” Jon snaps.

A pause.

“What did Magnus do to you?”

Jon’s eyes flicker over to his younger self.

His younger self flinches under the glare, but even so, there’s a hint of defiance in his eyes. “Is it a crime to be curious?”

“That’s our problem, you know. Always pushing. Always needing more.” Jon says, feeling his mouth twist into an ugly snarl. Even now, before everything, that tactless curiosity is present — the exact quality that made Jon such an excellent Archivist.

“You’re deflecting,” his younger self says, disgusted. “What are you trying to hide from me?”

A bitter laugh crawls its way out of Jon’s throat. “Not everything is about you.”

“What?”

“There’s more at stake than your personal ignorance. The universe doesn’t owe you answers.”

“I think I deserve some explanation for the past several weeks.”

“‘Deserve’?” Jon echoes. “What did you do? Waffle around in paranoia for weeks on end, getting nothing done? Drag your coworkers down into these tunnels and get everyone lost? Magnus wouldn’t be chasing you right now if you’d just stopped and thought for a couple of seconds.”

His younger self falls silent at that.

Jon does not look at the Statement on the ground. “You should shut up and accept that there are things you shouldn’t know.”

“You sound like my grandmother,” his younger self mutters.

Jon chokes on air at the comparison. He can almost hear her voice, exhausted and drained of life. ‘Be quiet, Jon. No more questions, Jon.’

“I do, don’t I,” he whispers, almost to himself. He laughs without humor. “You either die a hero, I suppose…”

He gives in and stares at Magnus’s statement. It isn’t calling to him, not like the others. He doesn’t feel that tug in his gut, that impatient desire. But he’s hyper-aware of it all the same.

Trust the Web to put him in a situation like this. One question, and one way to answer it. He can sit here, bored and numb and empty, or he can read it.

His younger self seems to be thinking the same thing. He starts to open his mouth.

“We really shouldn’t,” Jon says before he can say anything.

“Then what else are we supposed to do?”

“I… I don’t know,” Jon grits out.

“What would happen if we read it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why are you —”

“Because nothing good ever came out of my curiosity!” Jon growls.

He locks eyes with his younger self. The words start tumbling out of his mouth.

“Haven’t you gotten that through your thick skull, yet? You had to go to the Archives. You had to enter the tunnels. And now Martin and Sasha are lost down here, because of you and your insatiable thirst for knowledge. Who cares who’s paying the price, as long as you get your answers.”

His younger self stares at him, glassy-eyed with fear. “That’s. I never meant to —”

“Of course you didn’t,” Jon scoffs. “But that’s not going to stop you, is it? Would you have stayed away, knowing what you know now? Do you know why they followed you? Because for some goddamn, unknown reason, they trusted you.”

“Stop it,” his younger self says, voice strangled. There are tears in his eyes. Good.

“Daisy sacrificed for you, Buried herself,” Jon continues. “She went back in for you. The information was a dead end. A waste. Basira got taken by the Vast. She’d always been the one keeping the rest of us grounded. Giving us purpose. Now she has nothing but the cold, emptiness of the universe.”

“Stop.”

“And then there’s Martin,” Jon says, his voice cracking. “You wanted to run away. Wanted to hide. But he wouldn’t, he was always that sort of idiot. He thought you would have his back. You were supposed to have his back. And you know what you did?”

“Shut up!”

“You watched.”

Jon buries his head in his hands, and for the first time in over a month, he cries. His breath hitches, the words ring in his ears, and he cannot take them back. He only looks up when he hears the choked, hysterical laughter from the other side of the hole.

“You’re… you’re lying,” he chokes out, even though his eyes say otherwise. “You can’t be me.”

“Really? After all that?” Jon snaps, angrily wiping tears from his eyes. “I just pulled an Elias on you —”

“I’m human,” he insists.

“Not anymore.”

“I don’t have scars.”

“A lot can happen in six years.”

“M — Martin Blackwood isn’t my friend.”

“Is that the best you can come up with — HEY!”

Jon lunges forward, hand outstretched, but he’s a beat too slow. He watches, breathless, as his younger self grabs and opens up the Statement. Jon’s whole body tenses up. He’s too late, it’s all over, it’s the end of the world.

Nothing happens.

“It’s blank,” his younger self stammers, drawing it closer to his face so he can study it better.

“What? No, it’s not,” Jon says. He’d watched Magnus write this thing. He’d gathered up the sheets of paper earlier. It can’t be blank. He would have known if it was blank.

He snatches the folder away from his younger self and looks at the pretentious stationery inside. There are no words. No ink marks. Just a creamy, off-white sheet of paper with the faintest hint of a pattern, twisting and turning and leading his eyes around. He chases down the lines, trying to make sense of the design. If he tilts his head and squints, he can almost see a rectangle, with the tangled impression of a doorknob. Mindlessly, he raises his hand to knock —

Someone slaps the papers out of his hand, and Jon yelps, startled.

“What were you doing?” his younger self yells at him, his voice almost screech-like with panic.

Jon blinks. There are cobwebs on his hands, and he scrambles to brush them off.

“Now, that's interesting,” someone says.

Both Jons jump at the new voice. Above them, a head peeks into their hole. Dark skin. Bleached hair. Webbing.

“Annabelle Cane,” Jon growls.

“That’s some compulsion you have there,” Annabelle comments, squinting a little to his right. In her hand, she holds a collection of papers — Magnus’s original statement.

“Who are you?” his younger self demands. “Can you see him? Get me out of this hole!”

She ignores the questions and instead continues to squint. Her eyes gloss over him, like everyone’s eyes do. “Hm. I really thought that would work.”

“Why were you looking for me?” Jon snaps at her.

“Elias was taking too long, and I wanted to figure out the newest player in the game,” she answers, and then lifts her hand to her mouth in surprise. A grin slowly overtakes her face. “Oh. Beholding’s having a little infighting, I see. And he doesn’t even know.”

“Can you see him?” His younger self demands.

“Not at all,” she answers. “Never mind about catching it. I think I’ll leave that for Elias.”

Jon grits his teeth. “You’re planning something. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to let you out of this hole and leave you two for Elias. And then I’m going to feast on his fear.” After answering, she makes a face. “God, this is weird without being able to hear you. You are there, aren’t you?”

“If you can’t hear me reply, why bother asking?” Jon mutters.

Her head disappears from view, and he can hear scuttling sounds from above. After a moment, a rope ladder descends from the top of the hole.

Jon takes a closer look at it once it’s close enough, and shivers in revulsion. Not rope, webbing. The scuttling sounds end, and there’s only silence.

His younger self rushes to the ladder and starts climbing as fast as he can. Jon rushes after him, and once he gets to the top, he latches onto his younger self before he can run away.

“Let go of me!”

“I will when you quit doing shit,” Jon snaps. He looks around. There’s no sign of Annabelle Cane — except for Magnus’s statement waiting innocently on the ground. He stares at it.

“You’re one to talk. Didn’t you let a bunch of people die?”

“I’m you.”

The fight drains out of his younger self at that. Jon lets go of him, and somehow, he doesn’t run away. For a long time, neither of them speak.

“... I can’t believe Martin was right about the time travel,” his younger self says.

Of course Martin somehow managed to daydream up the truth. Jon actually laughs at that.

His younger self flinches at the sound, but he doesn’t look away. Jon shakes his head, and the humor fades.

“Let’s just get out of here,” he says.

His younger self nods and stiffly begins to walk away. Jon moves to follow him, and then pauses.

He takes Magnus’s statement out of the folder, folds it up before he can read anything, and slips it into his pocket.

Just in case, he tells himself, ignoring the curl of guilt and fear in his stomach. Just in case.

Chapter Text

Before he opens his eyes in the morning, Jonah Magnus already knows that his milk has gone bad a full day before the expiration date printed on the carton. This realization alone is enough to make him want to stay in bed. But he doesn’t, because he is a responsible adult with a job and a desk and everything, so he gets up and he takes his morning shower.

He dries himself off and heads over to his closet. He pulls on a pair of perfectly pressed slacks and buttons his shirt up to the collar, and fiddles with the cuffs of his sleeves until he’s satisfied. Then he combs back his hair and checks his teeth, and stares himself down in the mirror.

“Today,” he says, making eye contact with himself, “you’re a man with a plan. You’re the Avatar of the Beholding, the immortal Jonah Magnus. You’re going to walk into your Institute with pride. You are going to get things done. You’re going to sign those papers. Fill out those forms.”

He takes a deep breath and stares into pale blue eyes.

“Today, you are not going to lose your pens.”

(It’s been a long couple of months for Jonah. But so what if the Spiral wanted to take his things? So what if the Corruption kept slipping worms into his shoes? If the Dark kept loosening his lightbulbs? He was the immortal servant of the Eye, and he was above them all.)

Jonah straightens his tie, nods at himself in the mirror, and heads off to work, determined to ignore the other entities’ attempts at ruffling his metaphorical feathers.

Three hours later, he’s stumbling out of his office with a raging headache. Annabelle’s high pitched giggling rings painfully throughout his head, but he refuses to show weakness.

“Quiet you wench, this is serious,” he snaps, ensuring that his written Statement is crisp and clean in his hands.

“Oh, shut up, you Victorian creep.”

Jonah grits his teeth. “I was raised in the Georgian era.”

“Same thing.”

“It’s really not.”

They make their way down the stairwell and burst into the Archives, which are — predictably, empty. His Archivist, insufferable mess, is probably down there spilling secrets to her potential successor. He should have brought his gun.

“Into the tunnels, I suppose,” Annabelle sighs, as he leads her through the stacks. “You know, I haven’t been down there before. This should be fun.”

Jonah eyes a collection of broken cobwebs leading to the trapdoor. “I highly doubt this is your first time entering the tunnels.”

“I haven’t been down there,” Annabelle corrects. “Not all of us are bodyhopping freaks.”

“What is it that they say nowadays?” He asks. “Don’t suck it until you try it?”

She grins at him, empty and amused. She opens the trapdoor and gestures for him to enter first. “That is absolutely what they say. Lead the way, old man.”

The tunnels are as familiar as they are foreign. Jonah’s been here quite a bit over the past couple centuries. He has a mental map of the entire underground labyrinth burned into his mind, but it’s more memory than it is knowledge. He can feel the Panopticon easily enough, but everything else is a frustrating blur.

He takes the obvious path, first. The one that appears to make the most sense. All the routes loop back around eventually, but he knows from experience which ones people tend to gravitate toward on their first run through.

Annabelle dutifully follows him, a vacant smile on her lips. Jonah tries not to show any discomfort at her presence.

“Nice brickwork,” she comments, running a finger along the walls. “You helped design this, didn’t you?”

He doesn’t answer her.

“If you worked on it, I don’t know why you had to make it so hard to be here,” she says. “It’s exhausting.”

“He did most of it,” Jonah snaps out. Robert Smirke may have been an arrogant idiot, but he did know how to balance fear.

Annabelle blinks at him, all innocence. “Who’s ‘he’?”

He can’t tell if she’s feigning ignorance or if she genuinely doesn’t know. On the one hand, she is relatively young for an Avatar, but on the other hand, she’s the Web. For all he knows, she’s planned this conversation from the start.

Their trek into the tunnels continues. He tries to keep his ears open, to let his human eyes take in as much as they can. He hates it.

Annabelle eyes the manila folder in his hand. “So, what are your plans with that?”

Jonah looks at her.

“I love plans,” she shrugs.

He tries to dismiss her interest. “Merely a Beholding issue. No need to concern yourself with it.”

“Who’s it for?”

Jonah looks to the ceiling and sighs.

“It’s for that Jonathan boy, isn’t it!” She says, clapping her hands. “He does love to read. A perfect bait! What does it do?”

“And why, pray tell, should I explain myself to you?”

“Why, I’m here to help, aren’t I?” Annabelle grins at him. “I can deliver it to him. Get him to read it. I’m good at that.”

Jonah considers that for a moment. The last time he’d tried to deliver the statement to Jonathan Sims, something went wrong and he’d ended up with a pile of ashes. And, well… Annabelle did seem to have a better sense of when that mysterious doppelgänger wanted to meddle.

(He tries not to think of his headache and his bruises that haven’t finished healing.)

“Fine,” Jonah says.

Annabelle’s hand immediately snakes out to grab the folder, but he yanks it just out of her reach.

“You are only to get him to read it,” Jonah commands. “Don’t talk to him. Don’t influence him. Don’t do anything. He’s mine.”

“I don’t want him,” she says. “I’m just… curious, is all.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

Her eyes are steel, but the smile never fades from her face. “I’ve had my fun. And it would have been more satisfying to see your plan play out with him.”

“Oh, really?” Jonah says, skeptical. He’d only recently been looking at Jon as a potential Archivist. How did the Web know already? Was the Web involved?

“Yes. It’s a fascinating theory you and your Archivist have. Makes me understand the appeal of the Eye. I almost just want to kick back and see what happens.”

Jonah looks at her for a moment before handing over the file. “Hm. Well, as long as you do your part, I suppose I can accept your help.”

“Oh, fun!” she says, taking it. She smiles even wider, if possible, and Jonah has to suppress a shudder at seeing the webbing on her skull contort with the motion. “I’ll be back. Good hunting, Bouchard!”

“Wait, you know where he is —?”

He reaches out to grab her, but it’s too late; she scuttles away into the darkness, leaving him alone.

“Damned wench,” he hisses, but it does nothing to make his situation any better.

He’s had a horrible few weeks. His morning affirmation rings in his head. Today, you are not going to lose your pens.

Perhaps not, but he might just end up losing his mind.

Johann takes a wrong turn.

Sasha knows this, because they end up at a dead end, and the old man is quietly cursing to himself as he looks down the different routes and tries to backtrack. She’s experiencing a strange sense of déjà vu as the three of them try to reason themselves into taking the correct path back. Eventually, they end up choosing one, but she gets the feeling that neither Emma nor Johann himself are sure of the decision.

She has words for whatever piece of shit designed these impossible tunnels.

They keep walking, and at some point Sasha realizes she can hear the click of their footsteps rather than the muffled steps from earlier. The dirt has turned to brick.

“This is awful,” she says out loud.

“Very,” Emma agrees. She’s looking down at her shoes, and Sasha knows she recognizes the shift in scenery as well.

Johann makes another navigation choice, and Sasha and Emma follow him. She hopes that they can get out of these tunnels soon. She hopes Jon is okay, hopes that Martin is okay. Her throat closes up at the thought of Jon being alone with his haunting or whatever it is, but she doesn’t know if she’d be able to help at all.

Sasha leans a little closer to Emma, making sure Johann’s back is turned. “D’you think this man can navigate?” she says lowly, careful to not let him overhear. “I think he’s got good intentions, but he’s seems, uh, compromised.”

Ahead of him, the old man is rubbing his temples and tracing lines through the air in an attempt to regain his bearings. Sasha feels bad about hitting him in his already broken nose with an ink bottle — it probably didn’t do much to help with his sense of direction.

“Do we have a choice?” Emma mutters back. “Striking off on our own just ended up with us back where we started.”

“I suppose,” Sasha grumbles. “But I just have a feeling about him —”

“I think this is it,” Johann declares, staring down a dark tunnel. He mutters words under his breath, as if trying to convince himself that they’re in the right place. “We took the left fork, and then the middle, and then we passed that circular room. I believe this one will take you to the Archives.”

That last sentence is said with more volume than confidence. Emma stares down the tunnel with a dubious expression, and it’s then that Sasha becomes aware of how dark it is. Her eyes have long since adjusted to the darkness of the underground, but even so. Is it just her fearful mind playing tricks, or are there more shadows than there should be?

Fourteen eldritch monstrosities, Sasha recalls. The Eye was one. She has a feeling that the Dark is another.

Sasha pulls out her phone and attempts to send Tim Stoker her unofficial will and testament. He gets her desk decorations and whatever snacks she has left in her drawers. Any unfinished cases are split evenly between their normal lunch break crew. The hard drive taped on the underside of her desk is to be smashed and disposed of with the utmost discretion.

The text fails to go through, naturally. She tucks her phone away in disgust.

She reaches out and grabs Emma’s hand. The other woman jumps at the contact, before taking a deep breath.

“Let’s get that coffee, shall we?” Sasha says, trying not to let her nerves color her tone.

Together, they follow Johann into the tunnel, and Sasha crosses her fingers for good luck.

It occurs to Jon, as he walks around the tunnels with his future self, apparently, who would have thought — that he could very easily run away right now, and nothing would be able to stop him.

His future self limps beside him. A twisted ankle from the fall into that hole, no doubt. Somehow, the limp isn’t as bad as Jon would predict after only a half-hour, but the inhuman monstrosity that is supposedly him is still limping, however slight. And that means that Jon could kick his ankles and run off into the dark.

He’s not sure if it’s worth it, though. Because, massive asshole or not, his future self has answers, and probably a better knowledge of the tunnels, anyway.

“Where are we headed?” Jon asks.

“We’re headed to —” His future self abruptly stops.

Jon takes a few steps forward before stopping himself. “Well?”

His voice doesn’t echo. Instead, it remains ominously quiet. The moment stretches on.

“... You don’t have a plan, do you.”

“I had a plan,” his future self protests. “I was going to hide you away from Magnus so he wouldn’t… kill the Archivist.”

“... What.”

Jon feels the impression of a thousand invisible eyes narrowing in suspicion. His future self continues on. “Honestly, though? If he found her down here, he wouldn’t hesitate, even if he planned otherwise. I hope she’s not dead.”

“Why would he kill Gertrude?” Jon demands. “What do I have to do with that?”

“I can’t tell if she’s still alive,” his future self grumbles. “I don’t doubt her self-preservation instinct, but I have been winding him up for weeks. If he got to her, then who would be left to kill him? Leitner? No, he’s too pathetic for that… huh, now I wonder if he made it out…”

Jon’s mind scrambles to fit the pieces together. “Are you — are you saying that old man was Leitner? As in Jurgen Leitner?”

His future self looks at him suddenly, as if remembering that he were here. “Uh.”

It’s practically a confirmation. He’d had Jurgen Leitner in front of him — which is even worse than Jonah Magnus. Jon immediately wishes he’d done more than shake that old man by the collar. He should have broken his jaw along with his nose.

“I don’t know what happened to them. I hate being down here,” his older self mutters. “I hate not Knowing things. It’d be so much easier to just…” He makes a slurping sound with his mouth.

Jon looks at him, terrified. “What the hell does that even mean?”

“Well, at this point, it’s too much of a hassle to tie you up. I guess you could just stick with me,” his older self says, ignoring the question once again. As soon as he says it, his face twists in disgust.

“I’m not exactly thrilled either,” Jon snaps, a little hurt. He’s always been a bit of an asshole, but he never thought he’d turn out to be an actual dick.

Or a monster, for that matter.

“Glad to see we agree on something.”

Jon grits his teeth.

His older self limps onward. Once again, Jon considers kicking out his ankles and making a break for it. In the end, he decides against it. The alternative would be running blind and possibly running into another hole. Or into Magnus. Or Jurgen Leitner.

So he holds his tongue and continues to follow his older self.

Trusting Johann was a mistake.

She’d given him the benefit of the doubt. She had felt bad about the blood dripping out of his nose. Sasha still believes that he has the best intentions, has no doubt that he legitimately tried to lead them back to the Archives, but right now, Emma is cutting off the circulation in her right hand, and Sasha needs to get them out of here. She can barely see Johann in front of her.

Maybe the bulb is starting to give out in her torch. Or maybe it’s something else, something more sinister. Or maybe the batteries are dying.

Emma is silent. Her grip is painfully tight, but Sasha understands her fear. This is more than the darkness of an underground tunnel. It feels as though the shadows have shadows. She’d rather return to the twisting, nonsensical tunnels over this blinding darkness.

Sasha swallows nervously. “Johann, we need to turn around.”

“No, no, I’m sure this is right,” he mutters to himself. “We’re close. We’re getting there —”

They stop, suddenly. There’s a dead end in front of them, a solid brick wall materialized out of the darkness. Sasha stares at it blankly. There are too many reasons to panic.

“Johann,” Sasha says, hard. “Dead end. We have to go.”

Johann is staring at the bricks in horror. He pushes against them, useless. “No, no, no.This has to be right, I swear —”

“It’s obviously not,” she states, cutting him off. Beside her, Emma shifts from foot to foot, restless. Sasha takes in a deep breath, and the sound of it feels oddly close. “We’re turning around. We need to find the right way out —”

“Oh, shit,” Emma whispers.

She’s looking over her shoulder, to the tunnel behind them, her hand cold and sweaty and gripping Sasha’s with renewed fervor. Sasha sucks in a breath and follows her gaze, and her throat closes up.

She can’t see more than a meter ahead. When she looks at the ground, there’s a definite blackness slowly creeping in, like fountain pen ink spilling across the ground.

“Ah,” is the only sound she can manage. Emma tugs her away from the darkness, closer to Johann and the dead end wall.

“Ah,” Johann echoes her quiet exclamation. “Perhaps. I might have taken a wrong turn, somewhere along the way —”

“You fucking ‘might have’?” Sasha hisses, still starting at the divide between the dark and the Dark. She points her torch directly at the shadows, but nothing reflects back at her. It’s as though someone photoshopped the rest of the world out of existence.

Johann fumbles through his pockets. “Surely I — here.” He pulls out a pamphlet, the same pamphlet he and Gertrude had used to disappear into thin air, and smiles triumphantly. “We can hide from it.”

“No,” Sasha snaps.

He stares back at her, eyes clear and focused despite his earlier confusion. “We know the danger. We can control this more than we can control the shadows.”

“The hell is wrong with you?” Sasha almost yells. “You can’t control a Leitner!”

“The Lonely, or the Dark?” Johann challenges.

Sasha frowns in confusion, but Emma beats her to it, tearing her eyes away from the wall of darkness and pinning Johann down with a desperate glare.

“Anything but the Dark,” she demands. “What do we need to do?”

To Sasha’s horror, he opens up the Leitner and holds it out to them. “A few words should do it. Do not read more than a full line.”

“Are you both insane?” Sasha demands. “That’s a goddamn Leitner!”

“You worked in Artefact Storage, didn’t you?” Emma asks.

“Yes,” Sasha grits out, trying and failing to push away the fear. “I’ve seen what these things can do.”

Emma’s eyes flicker over to the shadows on the floor, moving closer and closer to their feet. “Then you know that it’ll buy us time.”

Sasha clenches the torch in her hand, feeling the skin over her knuckles pull tight and painful. A choice. Trapped between a book and a dark place.

She doesn’t know enough. She doesn’t know what these entities are, what they mean, what they want. How to fight them.

“I’ve used this for years,” Johann tells her. “I promise I know what I’m doing.”

“Forgive me if I don’t trust your judgement,” she hisses at him.

He flinches.

“You have to choose,” Emma pleads. “Before it gets too dark to read.”

Loneliness, or Darkness? What kind of choice is that?

Sasha steps away from the oncoming flow of ink, away from Leitner. Her back hits the wall behind her, hollow and muffled. Splinters catch at her clothes.

Wait. Splinters?

Sasha turns around, heart pounding, and finds an honest-to-god door on the wall behind her. It’s a wooden door, with old, worn wood and a rusty iron knob. It looks as though it’s been there for a hundred years, seamlessly built into the crumbling brick around it. Except, of course, for the fact that it definitely wasn’t there before.

Emma makes a sound of confusion. Johann makes a sound of alarm.

Sasha pokes the door with the end of her torch. It looks like wood. It sounds like wood. Every single one of her senses is telling her that this door is an actual door, but her memory stubbornly insists upon a solid brick wall.

(Sasha questions a lot of things, but she doesn’t like to question good luck.)

“Looks like we have a third option,” she breathes out, making the decision before her common sense can catch up. Emma’s scared of the Dark, and Sasha’s scared of Leitners. Better to compromise with whatever the hell this is.

She reaches for the knob.

“Wait,” Johann gasps out. “You really shouldn’t —”

Sasha opens the door, and pulls Emma with her into the unknown.

Was it worth it? Jonah asks himself. Was building these tunnels worth it?

He’d spent his first lifetime learning the art of architecture and fear. He’d learned how to design, how to build, and he had put every ounce of his knowledge and experience into the Millbank Prison. His magnum opus. He had taken Smirke’s rules and made them his own. He’d carefully crafted every twist, every turn — all for the sake of the Beholding.

The Watcher’s Crown may have failed, but he got near-omniscience and pseudo-immortality out of the deal. He got to outlive his foolish mentor, got to witness the invention of spreadsheet programs and fascism.

But now he’s wandering blind through his own maze, unable to track down his own damned Archivist.

Not for the first time, he wishes that Gertrude Robinson weren’t so human. It’d be easier if her connection to the Eye were just a little bit stronger. But she’d taken the bare minimum of statements, had stubbornly maintained her physical humanity with everything she had.

She was also suspiciously familiar with the tunnels. She’d probably been mapping them, the old hag. He should have kept a closer watch on her — who knows what she would do when confronted with the Panopticon.

“Mr. Bouchard!”

Jonah does not jump as Annabelle pulls up beside him.

“What?” he snaps.

“What, can’t I say hello?” she says with a toothy grin.

“He hasn’t read it, yet,” Jonah grumbles.

“How would you know?”

“I would Know,” he says. “Don’t talk to me until you finish your task — wait. You don’t have it with you.”

She tilts her head.

“Did you lose it?”

“Of course not,” she scoffs, offended. “It’s exactly where I want it to be. I’m just here to give you my two-second notice.”

“Your two-second — excuse me?”

“I resign from your schemes,” she announces. “Farewell, Elias. May your plans not go to waste.” She smiles at him, devoid of warmth.

“You’re quitting,” he echoes, voice strangled. “You — give me back my Statement!”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” she sings. “Like you said, I don’t have it with me!”

Jonah’s hand twitches for a blunt object he doesn’t carry. “Annabelle Cane —”

“You might want to ask your patron about Sims’s ghost,” she suggests, already turning around and walking away. The curls of her hair bounce above her shoulders as she strolls down the corridor, and she doesn’t look back. “Maybe you’ll learn something interesting.”

“How do you even know how to navigate this place?” Jonah fumes. “Thought you’d never been here before, you liar.”

“I follow the will of the Mother,” she calls over her shoulder, and with that she turns a corner.

Jonah doesn’t bother chasing her. If she’s quit, she’s quit. The Web does what it wants.

Instead, he thinks over her suggestion. Ask your patron. He sneers at the obvious — did she think that he hadn’t tried? He’s been trying to See Jonathan’s haunting for over a month, now, always coming up with nothing. Just thinking about it gives him a headache, let alone Knowing anything about it.

Every time he finds proof of its existence, he’s flooded with murderous rage. How embarrassing, that apparently it could hide from him well enough to knock him out with his own belongings. Who’s to say how much it’s seen without Jonah ever being aware of its presence. Who’s to say how long it’s been watching him —

Oh.

It’s watching him.

Jonah stands in that corridor for a long time, wondering how and why the Eye would pull something like this.

Jon’s older self growls and stubbornly limps down the tunnels, ignoring Jon. Jon follows, determined to get some answers.

At some point, while walking around, he’d gotten tired of the sullen silence, and he’d started asking questions. At first he’d asked about the supposed future apocalypse, but he was immediately shushed with the weight of a thousand glares.

“You’d better be sure that you want the answers,” his older self had warned, and Jon had to suppress a shudder.

The images that his older self had forced into his head — the memories. Mourning for friends he’d never met, for a man he’d never loved. He had no desire to repeat that sort of exchange.

So now he has to change his line of investigation.

“I think I have the right to know what you eat,” Jon says, after a frustrating fifteen minutes of attempting to get a straight answer to a simple question. “You know, considering that you’re me from the future.”

After all, what’s the point in warning him of the future if he doesn’t actually warn him of anything?

“I eat food,” his older self insists.

“You eat food, ‘among other things’,” Jon quotes, remembering conversations from what feels like lifetimes ago. “What are those other things?”

No response.

“Do you eat eyes?” Jon asks.

“No, I don’t ‘eat eyes’,” his older self huffs.

“Then why do you have so many of them?”

“I have eyes because of the Eye,” his older self snaps, oddly emphasizing the word. “It’s another entity — the fear of being watched.”

Jon recalls the weeks of paranoia. Of tape recorders hiding around his desk and home, the feeble illusion of privacy.

“An entity of fear. Like the Web,” Jon guesses.

“Yes, like the Web.”

“That… thing back there,” Jon says. “That was Web, too.”

“Yes,” his older self confirms. “Annabelle Cane. She’s… a character.”

“What did it want?”

“She,” his older self corrects.

“It’s a monster.”

“So are we.”

“I’m not —“ Jon cuts off. He looks at his older self, at the eyes, the thing that is also him. Jon can’t deny it anymore, not after the crushing guilt and grief that had gotten shoved into his head.

He crosses his arms. “Fine. What did she want?”

“No clue,” his older self sighs. “She always gets what she wants, but you never know what she wants until it’s too late. Maybe she wants us to end the world. Maybe she just wants Magnus to be afraid.”

Jon turns the concept around in his head. “If she wants his fear… then I suppose you eat fear, too?” He asks.

His older self looks away. “Essentially.”

“How does that work?” Jon frowns. “Do you go around scaring people when you’re hungry?”

“I take their Statements.”

Jon blinks. “Like in the Archives?”

His older self lets out a hollow laugh. “Exactly like in the Archives.”

“What does that have to do with the fear of being watched?”

His older self glances at him. “Would you want people to know about Mr. Spider?”

“... Ah. I see.”

They walk some distance forward and come across a fork. His older self considers the paths for a moment before choosing one. He does not explain his decision.

Jon tries to keep track of the route they’re taking, but after getting knocked out and falling down a hole, he doesn’t have a point of reference anymore. Truly, he is lost. His older self doesn’t look any better. Jon sure hopes he knows what he’s doing, but knowing himself, he has more questions than answers.

The quiet stretches on.

“Where are we headed?” he asks, again.

“You know what? I don’t even know anymore,” his older self grumbles. “To be honest, I didn’t feel as though any of this was real until today.”

“What?”

“I thought it was some extended hallucination,” his older self says. “A strange variation of the Lonely. Or the Spiral. I figured I’d just… get some catharsis and try to fix some things. But then we fell down a hole, and it turns out this is all actually real, so.”

“So you never had a plan.”

“I thought I did,” his older self says. “Then you barged into the Archives and mucked it all up. Good job, Jonathan Sims.”

“Well, what was I supposed to think?” Jon snaps. “You broke into my flat and spouted cryptic bullshit. Let me just quit my job on the word of some monster pretending to be me. Six years go by and you forget how to write a persuasive essay?”

“We failed Persuasive Communications.”

“We passed that particular assignment.”

“Fun fact: our professor was giving us pity points —” His older self abruptly cuts off.

Jon blinks. “What is it?”

His older self turns and stares off into some direction. Jon gets the impression that he’s turning his eyes — all of them — onto some specific thing. A bead of sweat drips down his older self’s forehead, like he’s concentrating really hard.

“Oh, hell,” his older self says.

“What?”

A hand wraps around Jon’s wrist, and suddenly his older self is dragging him through the tunnels once more — this time with more purpose and direction. His eyes are simultaneously distant and focused. And he doesn’t seem to be limping anymore.

“It’s barely been a couple hours,” his older self mutters. “How the fuck did they skip all the way to this.”

“What’s happening?” Jon demands.

“Someone’s getting trigger happy,” his older self says. “I don’t know who it is, or what’s happening, but we need to get back to the Archives.”

Emma Pereira has never been a skeptic.

She’s worked in the Archives for nine years, now, nearly ten. She didn’t get the full picture until about three years ago, but she’s never been blind to the danger of her job. She’d read Statements. She’d drawn connections between the recurring names and themes between them. She knows full well what an impossible door represents.

But it’s not the Dark, so she lets Sasha pull her into the domain of the Spiral.

Johann doesn’t follow them. Emma hopes he had enough time to disappear with his Leitner. The Dark isn’t something she’d wish on anyone.

The door swings shut behind them, and Emma looks around to see a corridor. It looks exactly like the one they’d just come from, except…

“Oh,” Sasha says. She shines her torch down the tunnel. The beam of light slices through the air, travelling far enough to illuminate the area twenty meters ahead. “Wow, it feels so bright in here.”

It’s a weird observation, considering that they’re in an underground tunnel with no windows, but Emma wholeheartedly agrees.

“This is new territory,” Emma tells Sasha, her confidence returning alongside her ability to see. “Another entity. This is the Spiral. Fear of madness. Deception of the senses. Don’t take anything at face value, here.”

Sasha hums a little at that. “Sounds, ah, maddening.”

Emma cracks a grin. She loosens her iron grip on Sasha’s hand, but Sasha doesn’t pull away and Emma doesn’t let go.

“Right,” Emma says. “Guess we’ll have to find a way out —“

She’s interrupted by the sound of a phone buzzing, and she pats her pockets in surprise.

Emma pulls out her phone and is greeted with a text notification. She opens it up and tilts her screen for Sasha to see.

7th door on the left to get back to the archives!! dont stay too long pls

“Um?”

“There’s no number,” Sasha says, peering at the message. “Is that from the…” She waves her hands around.

“... Probably?” Emma says. It doesn’t look like she should be getting signal here. When she looks around the corridor, she doesn’t see anyone. Or anything. Just endless brick. “We should probably not take its advice.”

“Good plan,” Sasha agrees, and Emma puts her phone back into her pocket.

They walk.

Emma’s sense of direction is officially shot. When she looks ahead, the tunnel seems pretty straight, but if she loses concentration, it starts to feel like it’s twisting in on itself. Every hundred meters or so, a door shows up. Emma reluctantly keeps count. They pass the seventh door on the left without stopping, and continue walking.

Emma’s phone buzzes once again.

hey why didnt u take it?? i dont give directions for just anyone u kno!!!

Sasha looks around. “Can it see us? Hello?”

“Don’t talk to it,” Emma hisses. “Just ignore it. It doesn’t want to help us.”

rude. :(((

Emma pointedly shoves her phone back into her pocket. She tugs Sasha further down the tunnel.

Gradually, the doors begin to drop off in frequency. The path becomes straighter and narrower. Emma can’t pinpoint when it happened, exactly, but she and Sasha suddenly pull to a stop, and out of nowhere they’re no longer in a tunnel, but in a circular room with a single door.

“I think it wants us to take a door,” Sasha mutters.

“You think?”

Her phone buzzes and Emma reluctantly looks at the screen.

do u know how hard it is to make this place make sense??? its taking everything in me to NOT absorb u right now

“Yeah, totally believable,” Emma scoffs, unable to stop herself from getting drawn into the conversation. “You are an entity of fear.”

i saved you from the dark, didn’t i?

Emma stares at the message, unwilling to concede the point. Then she lifts her head and looks around the room. No twisting, no weird tricks or shadows. Just four walls and a singular door, and it’s not even pretending to be subtle with the trickery. It goes against everything Emma’s heard about the Spiral, and it makes her uncomfortable.

Sasha turns to Emma. “... You know more about this than me. Should we trust it?”

Emma shakes her head. “This thing deals in lies.”

“There’s nothing else, though,” Sasha says.

“No,” Emma agrees. The Spiral is supposed to be a nonsensical labyrinth. It’s supposed to be an exercise in insanity. Not… whatever weird mind game this is.

A minute passes, then two, and nothing happens. No shifting tunnels, no extra doors. No texts.

“Maybe just a peek,” Emma decides. They’re already trapped in the Spiral’s domain. Opening one more door can’t make it any worse, can it?

“I’m right behind you,” Sasha promises, squeezing her hand.

Emma goes up to the door. It’s another worn and wooden door, with a brass knob identical to the one that brought them here. She looks it up and down and tries to peer through the cracks in the wood, but she can’t see anything beyond.

She takes a deep breath, and she turns the knob.

Suddenly, Sasha yelps in alarm, and a force pushes them forward, opening the door. Emma loses her grip on the handle, and they tumble to the ground. As soon as she regains her bearings, Emma pushes herself up and whips her head around.

The door is gone. She’s surrounded by shelves and boxes. Against all odds, they’re back in the Archives.

“Did you see them?” Sasha gasps, eyes wide. She sits up and looks at the space where the door should have been.

“Who?” Emma demands. “I didn’t see anything.”

“Somebody pushed us!” Sasha exclaims, indignant. “Their hands…” she trails off, looking at the surroundings, and she blinks in confusion. “Huh. I… guess we’re back?”

“I suppose we are,” Emma says. “No thanks to Johann. Or Gertrude.”

Instead, she gets to thank the Spiral of all things. What the fuck.

Sasha takes in a deep breath. And then she stiffens. She sniffs the air again and looks around. “Do you smell smoke?”

“What?” Emma breathes in, and wrinkles her nose. She does smell smoke, in fact, and she gets to her feet.

She and Sasha jog out of the stacks, following the scent — and they freeze.

Gertrude Robinson is attempting to tackle Martin Blackwood. Martin Blackwood is holding a burning book in one hand, and a lighter in the other. The lighter hovers over a box of statements.

“You fool!” Gertrude yells, sounding more panicked than Emma has ever heard. “We can’t do this yet! You’ll kill us all!”

“You’ve already killed us!” Martin screams. “You left them behind to die!”

“Martin Blackwood,” Gertrude commands. “Put that thing down!”

“Oh, I’ll put it down, alright,” he shouts, and he lets go of the lighter.

It’s like slow motion. Emma watches the lighter fall through the air, spinning once, then twice.

It lands directly in the box of statements, and the papers burst into flames.

Chapter Text

In the interest of fairness, arson is not Martin’s first instinct when it comes to dealing with his problems. Really, it’s not!

It’s just… you know. Toss a match at your issues, and bam: you have a different problem to deal with. It’s actually quite an effective strategy. And once the flames die down, you can’t even remember what you were worried about in the first place. Fire has a way of putting things into perspective.

Arson is not Martin’s first instinct, but it’s certainly one of his instincts. And a very helpful one, at that.

So really, can you blame him when he realizes it’s the quickest way to solve the problem of Gertrude Robinson?

…

Let’s rewind.

Martin paces back and forth in front of Gertrude’s desk. He can’t comprehend Gertrude’s notes, and he can’t go back into the tunnels. He’s stuck until Gertrude makes a decision.

The absence of his friends isn’t stressing her as one might think. For Martin, finding them is a race against time, but for Gertrude, it’s a waiting game.

And since she holds all the cards, she gets to dictate the pace.

As he paces, he purposely snaps his feet on the floor, hoping to get some sort of reaction out of her. But she doesn’t seem bothered by his frantic footsteps. Gertrude Robinson flips through her files and takes her notes with a terrifying focus. She sits at her desk, completely absorbed in her task, and if it weren’t for that air of awareness about her, Martin could swear that she’s forgotten about his existence.

What Martin needs to do is to pressure her. Move up the timeline. This is easier said than done because he doesn’t know enough about the situation to start messing with it. For all he knows, one wrong move will send their precariously balanced safety to hell.

So: fishing for information it is.

“You serve the Eye,” he says, replaying everything he remembers from Emma’s hasty explanation in the tunnels.

“I work for the Eye,” Gertrude corrects him, not even looking up from her notes. “I don’t serve it.”

Oh, now there’s definitely something there.

“What’s the difference?” Martin asks, digging for anything he can exploit.

“Intent.”

She fails to elaborate, leaving Martin to puzzle out the meaning. She’s obviously not loyal to the Eye, but she’s also not opening up about it. Is it part of her plan, to keep others in the dark? Or is that born out of habit?

“So… Mr. Bouchard must have forced you into it, then,” Martin says, grasping for buttons he can press.

Her handwriting pauses for just a moment before she continues on with her notes. Martin catches the movement with sharp eyes, and he wonders.

“He forced you into becoming the archivist, huh?” Martin muses, purposely keeping his tone somewhere between innocent curiosity and random rambling. “I never interacted with him much myself, but he does have a sort of dominant charisma about him.”

She snorts at that.

He pushes forward, trying to capitalize on that reaction. “The whole ‘spooky’ side of things makes him much more… ah, ‘spooky’.”

Gertrude continues writing, and Martin winces.

Great job, he thinks. You truly are a twenty-first-century poet.

“Bouchard — he serves the Eye, right?” Martin asks, still trying to draw a reaction out of her. “Did he volunteer? Unlike you? Is that why he’s your boss?”

Again, Gertrude’s grip on her pen stiffens. That’s twice, now — that’s a tell.

“Is that why he’s the restaurant owner?” Martin asks, falling back on Emma’s metaphor. “I feel like you do more, as the head chef, but if he owns the restaurant, he’s still calling the shots—”

“This isn’t a restaurant,” Gertrude snaps. “This is a predatory institution that feeds on paranoia and collects others’ fears.”

Martin’s voice is deliberately even. “Oh, my bad. A restaurant for fear.”

“I do not cook fear,” Gertrude says. “The entities do not need fear to be ‘prepared’ in any specific way. They simply manifest through it, and in it.”

Martin carefully keeps the triumphant grin off of his face. “But there are specific fears, right? How do you know you’re serving the right meal to the right entity?”

“It’s not as clear cut as that,” she explains, with a tired voice. “They overlap. It’s more about the emotional reaction a victim gets rather than the literal manifestation of the fear, and they’re not always divided into fourteen perfect categories.”

“Oh, so different entities vibe with different flavors?”

Gertrude puts her pen down.

“Listen, here, Blackwood,” she says. “Fear is not food. ‘Feeding on fear’ is just an expression.”

Martin stares at her blankly.

She looks back, dead-eyed. “You fancy yourself a writer, don’t you? In fact, I’m quite certain you used this exact metaphor in your bathroom statement—”

“Oh, right,” Martin says. He keeps his innocent smile on while he scrambles for an excuse. “That was because the ghost ate fear.”

Gertrude leans back in her chair and stares at the ceiling. She breathes deeply, once, then twice — and then she lets it go, and returns to taking notes.

Martin inwardly sighs.

There are many ways to manipulate someone. Martin usually goes the friendly route, partially because he has a sort of ‘harmless’ atmosphere about him, but mostly because he’d like to have friends one day.

Gertrude, though, doesn’t want friends. He’d thought playing the role of the idiot might work, but even if she’s annoyed, she’s also very good at turtling up.

He can’t distract her with tea. He can’t talk her into slipping up. He can’t annoy her into slipping up.

Well, he thinks. Guess that leaves me with Plan B.

“I’m going to the loo,” Martin says, casually swiping her wall-moving Leitner from the edge of her desk.

Gertrude grunts, not bothering to look up.

He walks out of her office and gently closes the door behind him. Then he reaches into his pockets, feeling around.

Keys, a ballpoint pen, a lighter — hm, better put a pin in that one — ah.

Whistling, he grabs his multi-purpose pocket knife and pulls out the screwdriver tool. He wheels out a chair from what he assumes to be Emma’s office and looks up at the ceiling.

And then he starts removing the batteries from the smoke detectors.

Jon follows his older self through the tunnels, who is walking at a brisk pace that in no way reflects his formerly twisted ankle. It’s kind of terrifying, actually, because that means he has either an inhuman pain tolerance or an inhuman healing factor. It’s another reminder, along with those uncountable unseen eyes, that his future self isn’t human anymore.

At some point, Jon turned into that.

“Oh, no.”

His older self grabs him and pulls him against the wall. Jon almost yelps at the sudden motion, but a hand clamps over his mouth.

“Don’t lick my hand,” his older self hisses. “Magnus is around the corner.”

Oh, no, indeed.

Once Jon is properly warned, his older self lets go and peeks around the corner of the brick wall. Faint footsteps click along, growing louder and louder — and then the elusive Jonah Magnus enters the field of view.

Jon’s not sure what he was expecting. For some reason, he thought he’d see something other than his short, middle-aged, vaguely ominous boss. Nope, it’s just Elias Bouchard. He hesitates to call it a letdown, but the sentiment is similar.

“How come you have more eyes than he does?” he whispers.

“I… I don’t know, actually,” his older self says with a petulant frown. “Wow. He has two eyes! That is incredibly unfair!”

Elias — Magnus — walks down the tunnels with purpose, making his way back to the Archives. He looks annoyed.

“We need to get there before he does,” his older self says. “You get to the Archives and tell everyone to run. I’ll hold him off.”

“I don’t know how to get to the Archives from here.”

“Ah, right.”

Jon counts three seconds before his older self speaks up again.

“I get to the Archives while you hold him off?”

“I’m not the invisible monster, here,” Jon says, irritated. “And weren’t you trying to keep me away from him to begin with?”

His older self looks up to the ceiling. “Why am I so hard to work with.”

“Maybe if you came up with a better plan, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Even better — if you had a plan at all.”

“Well, if you’re so smart, why don’t you come up with something?”

“I am you!”

“Are you, though?”

“If anything, you’re older than me. Shouldn’t time and experience make you wiser?”

“Jon?”

The two of them shut their mouths and press up against the wall. Elias is swerving his head around, searching for something. For him.

His older self covers his mouth again and pulls him in close. For once, Jon doesn’t protest. Elias’s eyes gloss over their position in the corridor, and he rubs his head in frustration.

“This damned headache,” he mutters, and he turns around to walk away.

Both Jons let out a sigh of relief.

Then Elias stops dead in his tracks.

“Wait,” he says, out loud. “This headache! It’s here, isn’t it — you who watch and wait in the shadows.”

Elias swivels around, eyes wild with indignant panic. He goes cross-eyed every time he looks at them, but — despite the obvious pain it puts him in — he manages to turn his head in the right direction.

“This might be stupid,” his older self says out loud, “but I think we’re going to have to work together to get rid of him.”

Oh, joy, Jon wants to say, but he remembers to keep his mouth shut.

The door disappears behind Sasha and Emma, so quickly that Jurgen couldn’t have followed even if he wanted to.

He didn’t want to, though. Jurgen doesn’t enjoy interacting with the Spiral. As a man of learning and logic, its mind-bending insanity runs directly against his entire core.

So he flips open A Disappearance and reads the words. The fog filters in, and the darkness of the corridor softens — not gone, but muted. The chill of the Lonely is unpleasant, but at least it’s familiar. He slips through the darkness and tries to find his sense of direction once more.

(Once again, he wishes Gertrude had entrusted him with The Seven Lamps of Architecture. He would have put it to such good use, helping him navigate this underground hellhole. He longs for the day she will finally give him the book.)

It takes quite some time to retrace his steps. His ribs ache, his nose aches, everything aches. All he wants is to stumble back to his cot and curl up in the fetal position for a few hours, but then he hears the telltale sound of voices in the distance and he resigns himself to another round of chaos.

What’s one more violent event in the grand scheme of things? It’s not like it could get worse than the goth.

“… Ceaseless Watcher, grant me sight that I might face this faceless blight — AH!”

Jurgen turns a corner just in time to witness Elias Bouchard faceplant into the dirt floor. All he wants to do is turn around and walk away, but he’s pretty sure that this is the only route back to his hidden room, which means that he has no choice. A Disappearance sits in his pocket, quietly tempting him. He has to resist the urge to read more of the pamphlet.

I’m already invisible, he reminds himself, and he sticks close to the walls of the corridor. I just have to wait this out.

Bouchard scrambles back to his feet and glares at… a column. No, not a column. A person?

Jurgen squints at it. He gets the visual impression of a man floating half a meter off the ground, but the image ducks in and out of his brain. Thinking about it makes Jurgen’s aching face hurt even more, so he averts his gaze and counts bricks.

“What did you do to Jonathan Sims?” Bouchard hisses.

There’s a slight pause before a voice responds.

“I don’t care about Sims,” someone else says, and it sounds vaguely familiar. “I only want to screw you over.”

“I’ve served the Eye for centuries,” Bouchard says. “If you think you can destabilize me, then you are in for a most unpleasant surprise.”

Another pause.

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” the mysterious voice says, voice dripping with disdain.

“Oh, really?” Bouchard says, his voice smooth and dangerous, but even as he speaks, his hands tremble. “We may both serve the Eye, but I am the one who has its favor! I can See you, you know — I know you’ve been haunting my people in my Institute.”

Static seems to fill Jurgen’s mind for a moment, and he screws his eyes shut, trying to think past the buzz.

Bouchard’s next words slip out unprompted. “No, I can’t See you. I’m only bluffing — oh, damn you!” He points an accusatory finger at thin air. “I will end you, you insolent—”

“A little more to the right,” the voice says.

The strangled noise that crawls out of Bouchard’s throat sounds more ‘screaming goat’ than human.

Jurgen tries to scoot his way around the corridor. Carefully, he shuffles down the brick wall, making sure that he can still feel the cool fog of the Lonely around him. He glances up for a quick second, and then yelps when a hand swipes past his face, missing his broken nose by centimeters.

Jurgen feels a bead of sweat trickle down the back of his neck as Bouchard continues to wave his arms around like a madman. His eyes are wide as he windmills around, presumably feeling for the mysterious ghost that is somewhere in this corridor.

“Ceaseless Watcher, turn your gaze —”

A voice cuts in. “You don’t have enough eyes to ask for that.”

Bouchard looks like he’s about to tear out his hair as he lunges forward to grab at nothing. He slams into the wall of the corridor at full speed.

Groaning, he pulls his face off of the wall and spits out dirt.

“I lied, earlier,” the voice says. “I’m actually standing a little bit more to the left.”

Bouchard whirls around and points at thin air, his expression stormy. “Hang in chains, you loitering muck-spout!”

While he’s distracted, Jurgen scurries along the wall.

With a large amount of patience and a healthy amount of fear, Jurgen finally manages to make it past the chaos unscathed.

When he looks up again, the floating thing is still there. He screws his eyes shut, unable to process the sight, and he stumbles down the rest of the corridor as fast as he can.

“Okay, now say something about his height.”

Jon, who is currently being lifted by his time-traveling, older, monstrous self, looks down with irritation. Bouchard, Magnus, whatever his name is, continues to shoot out threats and pleas in their general direction.

“Listen, this is necessary,” his older self says over the white noise of Magnus’s ramblings. “Jonah Magnus is a self-obsessed narcissist with plans that pander directly to his ego. The quickest way to distract him is to toy with his self-image.”

Jon jabs his foot into his older self’s chest.

“What, you can’t think of anything to say? What happened to that acidic tongue of yours?”

“I don’t want to hear criticism from down there,” Jon says, choosing his words carefully.

“Was that directed toward me?” his older self asks in wonder.

“Was that directed toward me?!” Magnus shrieks from in front of them. “I’ll have you know, I am currently a respectable height of five-foot three —”

His older self turns a thousand eyes onto the short man before them. “Tell the truth.”

“Five-foot one-and-a-half,” Magnus says, the answer falling out of his mouth unbidden. He proceeds to let out a series of words.

(Jon can only assume that they’re swears — most of them are fairly mild, and the rest are unintelligible to a modern audience.)

His older self doesn’t laugh, but he does grin. His gaze flicks up. “Okay, that one was pretty clever.”

“Quit mucking around and start being useful,” Jon hisses. Then, as an afterthought, he adds, “To the Eye.”

“I am useful to the Eye!” Magnus protests.

“Playing distraction is useful!” His older self insists.

Jon rolls his eyes. “Temporarily useful.”

There’s only so long that they can keep Magnus occupied. What are they going to do when they run out of insults? When Magnus stops paying attention?

Magnus gasps, offended. “Was that a threat against me?”

“I am working on it.”

Jon scoffs. “You spend more time trying to come up with clever words than actually doing things.”

His older self wrinkles his nose. “The same thing could be said about you.”

“I have a fantastic long-term plan,” Magnus adds. “And it requires words!”

“No one wants to read your words, Magnus,” his older self snaps. “Tell him that no one wants to read his words.”

Why do I have to be the middleman? Jon complains within the safety of his mind. Oh, to be an invisible —

His older self suddenly stumbles beneath him, and Jon yelps, flailing his arms around to maintain balance.

“What was that?” he snaps.

“‘I don’t have time for this,” Magnus says, and Jon turns his attention back to his boss.

Magnus, too, had stumbled. He straightens up and brushes off his sleeves.

His older self’s grip on him tightens. “God. On the one hand, I do want to stop them from destroying the whole basement, but Magnus is going to kill them all—”

“Destroying the basement?” Jon echoes.

Magnus narrows his eyes. “You feel it too, don’t you?” he says, squinting in their general direction. “If you serve the Eye, then you know why I have to get there. They’re hurting my Archives.”

“First of all, they’re my Archives,” his older self says, as though he can be heard. “Second of all, they deserve it.”

Jon frowns at that. “They deserve to destroy the basement, or the basement deserves to be destroyed?”

“Yes.”

“Who are you talking to?” Magnus cuts in, but Jon ignores him.

“If it deserves to be destroyed, why do you care?”

“Because used Statements are the only form of ethical consumption under the fascist dictatorship of the Eye. That’s my food — hey!”

Jon shrieks and tightens his grip as his older self starts running down the corridor. He looks up and spots Magnus running ahead of them.

“Get back here!” His older self yells. “You do not get to mess with my friends!”

“This might go faster if you put me down,” Jon suggests, trying not to fall off.

His older self’s grip on his legs disappears, and suddenly he’s spitting out dirt.

“Hey!” He yells, scrambling to his feet and sprinting after him. “What the hell!”

“You wanted to be put down,” his older self calls over his shoulder.

“You monstrosity,” Jon grumbles, but he runs after Magnus and his older self before they can disappear from view.

“Okay!” Sasha yelps, hands twitching. “Let’s calm down, everyone! Where’s the fire extinguisher?”

Martin looks up, eyes wild, and his face slackens upon seeing her. “Sasha! You’re alive!”

Gertrude groans. “Of course they’re alive,” she says.

Immediately, Emma frowns.

“Bold words, coming from you,” she hisses, stepping forward. “You left us there to die!”

“You were never in any danger from Bouchard.” Gertrude waves her hand, dismissive. “There’s an extinguisher by the corner of the stacks—”

“No!” Martin cuts her off and turns a desperate glare onto Sasha. “The Statements are food! We’re going to starve the Eye!”

“For the last time, Statements are not food!”

Emma blinks. She squints at the burning box before her — she’d come up with the restaurant metaphor on a whim, but she’d never actually considered cutting off the flow of Statement to Archivist before.

Would that work?

“I’m with you, Blackwood,” Emma decides. “Hand me a lighter! Fuck the Eye!”

Sasha gasps. “We’re in a basement filled with flammable records and no ventilation—“

“My life is a literal nightmare, and my bitch of a boss just left us to die,” Emma says. “We had to be saved by the fucking Spiral. Don’t you understand, Sasha? Don’t you just want to go apeshit?”

“Your feelings are valid, but we’re not committing arson!”

“Thank you, Miss James—”

“Not while we’re still down here!”

“This is my only chance,” Emma says. “Bouchard’s underground! He can’t See! I’m free!”

She grabs a bundle of files off of the shelf beside her and tosses it into Martin’s small bonfire. The flames jump up, red and ominous, and Emma relishes in the way the heat licks her skin.

“Even if he can’t see us, he can still feel us burning Statements!” Gertrude says, stepping forward. “You’re calling him back here! He’s going to kill us all!”

“It’ll be too late when he gets back,” Emma says. “Light ‘em up, Blackwood!”

Martin tosses down his burning book — Gertrude’s Leitner, good riddance — and starts scooping up file boxes.

Gertrude tries to stop him, but she’s too old and too slow, and she ends up checking her hip on a table. She scoffs in disgust before turning and limping out of the stacks.

Emma moves forward to join Martin Blackwood and his fiery crusade. A hand latches around her wrist.

“This is an awful idea,” Sasha tells her, looking very pretty and very concerned.

“The extinguisher is in the southern corner of the stacks,” Emma says, pointing over her shoulder. “There’s another in the break room, and three in my office.”

“Three?”

“Good for worms,” Emma says with a shrug. “You can go ahead and keep them on hand while Blackwood and I handle the destruction part of things. Safety first, right?”

“Nothing about this is safe,” Sasha protests. “Plus, think about all the historical value of some of these—”

Martin’s muffled voice sounds from a section of the archives. “Hey! I think I found a shelf filled with Leitners!”

Sasha’s mouth closes. She blinks, like she’s processing the words, and then relaxes her shoulders. “Okay, maybe just a little arson.”

Emma gleefully shoves over another box of papers and throws them onto the fire. She starts going through the shelves, pulling off all the Statements about the Dark, and she tosses them like frisbees into the flames.

“Wow!” She says. The papers before her blacken and curl before crumbling into ash. “This is satisfying! I should have done this years ago!”

“There is a sort of beauty in destruction, isn’t there?” Martin muses beside her, after tossing in a screaming pamphlet. “The beginning of an end. A satisfaction in bringing it to completion.”

“What?”

“Here, Sasha,” Martin says, and he holds out a thick, leather-bound book. “Try it.”

Sasha eyes the book warily. After a moment’s hesitation, she takes it and tosses it into the fire. The flames jump up, and the edges of the book start to blacken and smoke.

A smile slowly spreads across her face.

She probably would have fit into the Archives, Emma thinks fondly, and she picks up another Statement to burn.

“Everybody, shut up!”

Gertrude slams the door to the stacks open and strides in, with an extinguisher under one arm and a shotgun in the other.

Emma groans at the sight. “Dios mio, can’t you just clock out and go home—”

Bang.

A shriek tears itself out of Emma’s throat as she instinctively ducks for cover. Gertrude casually lowers the gun she just fired at the ceiling, smoke rising from the barrel.

“We’re putting out this fire,” she says, like she didn’t just shoot a gun indoors.

“Why do you have a shotgun?” Emma demands. “I thought you kept that in the C-4 warehouse!”

“You have got to tell me that story,” Sasha says.

“Over coffee, if we make it.”

“Sweet.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gertrude says, cutting them off. She tosses the fire extinguisher at Sasha, who manages to catch it. “You seem to be the most sensible one here.”

A bead of sweat trickles down Sasha’s forehead as she turns the extinguisher around in her hands. “Er—”

“Don’t do it, Sasha,” Martin begs. “She might not be Elias Bouchard, but she’s no saint, either! She abandoned Jon in the tunnels! She abandoned you in the tunnels!”

“You don’t have to like me,” Gertrude says. “You just have to not burn down the foundation of this three-story building.”

Martin speaks up. “We’re on top of an ancient tunnel system. I think that point is moot.”

“Think about Leitner,” Emma adds. “Stupid, idiot, motherfucking Jurgen Leitner.”

Sasha grips the extinguisher in her hands. She looks from the shelf of Leitners, to the fire, and then around the Archives.

“I—”

“ARCHIVIST!”

The four of them jump at the sudden interruption. The shout had come from the stacks. From the tunnel entrance.

Emma turns around just in time to witness Elias Bouchard tripping and hitting the floor, face-first.

“Shit,” Gertrude says, pumping the shotgun.

Bouchard pushes himself up and gets to his feet. He looks around, first at Gertrude and Emma, and then he frowns at Sasha and Martin. “Why the hell are you two — mmph?!”

Emma averts her eyes as something slams into Bouchard, knocking him into the shelves. A new figure darts out of the chaos to join them and skids to a stop in front of the fire.

“Jon!” Martin gasps out, face slack with relief. “You’re alive!”

Jonathan Sims, roughed up with dirt and thoroughly disheveled, scowls. “Yes. I’m alive. Why are you burning down the Archives?”

Martin laughs and looks away bashfully. “Well, originally it was to force Ms. Robinson back into the tunnels to look for you, but you’re back! So, uh, I guess we don’t have to do this anymore.”

“Ahh!”

The sound of falling paper draws Emma out of the conversation, and her heart pounds as Elias Bouchard comes barreling forward.

“Emma, duck!”

The order slams into Emma's brain. Her hands snake out, grabbing both Jon and Martin by their collars, and she drags them down with her.

Bang.

“Oh, you’re a little rusty, aren’t you?” Bouchard sing-songs, stepping forward. “That missed me by a mile.”

Gertrude pumps the shotgun again and steps closer to Bouchard. “We switched to metric in the sixties, Magnus.”

They start circling each other, like predators. Bouchard smirks while Gertrude gazes back, steel in her eyes.

Emma tunes them out and looks up. “Sasha! You alright?”

“Fine,” Sasha calls back, her hair still somehow falling perfectly around her face. She’s still clutching the fire extinguisher to her chest.

“We should get out of here,” Jon says. “Let them battle it out. I’ve had enough of this goddamn basement.”

Emma snorts. “That’s the first time I’ve ever agreed with you, Sims.”

He frowns at her, going almost cross-eyed as he looks her up and down. “I’m sorry. What was your name again?”

“… Are you kidding me?”

Bang.

Emma flinches as another gunshot goes off, reminding her of the battle happening a few meters away.

“Let’s get out of here before we become collateral damage,” Martin suggests. “I don’t think Gertrude cares too much about keeping us alive.”

“Oh, believe me, she doesn’t,” Emma agrees. She finds a stray paper and tosses one last statement into the fire, reveling in the way Bouchard stumbles at the action. There’s a split-second of regret when the sensation of eyes starts tingling at the back of her neck, but Gertrude shouts something derogatory and his rage gets redirected.

Emma can’t trust Gertrude with her life, but she can trust Gertrude to keep Elias busy.

The four of them — Emma, Jon, Martin, and Sasha — begin their hasty escape, keeping low to the ground. Part of it is to avoid bullets, but part of it is to avoid smoke inhalation.

“I don’t hear any fire alarms,” Sasha comments. “Do the Archives not have smoke detectors?”

“No, we do,” Emma says. “I’m not sure why they didn’t signal anything. Maybe Bouchard is doing something spooky with his Eye powers.”

Martin coughs into his sleeve. “Right, well. We should, uh, pull an alarm on our way up the stairs.”

Sasha reaches the door first. She holds it open. Jon scrambles through, followed by Martin, and then Emma. When the door swings shut behind them, Emma straightens up so she can start running — only to shriek as the glass wall beside her shatters into pieces. Something blurs in front of her eyes, and she shakes off the image.

“Gertrude!” she shrieks, looking back toward the stacks.

Her boss grunts at her. “I told you to duck, not to run!”

“Oh god, is that blood?” Martin says, squinting at the ground. Emma follows his gaze to a small red smudge that seems to be growing by the second.

Jon gasps “Wh — did you get shot?”

“No, I’m fine,” Emma says.

“Not you,” Jon snaps. He stumbles over to the puddle of blood, and then suddenly Emma is having the worst migraine of all time. She clutches her head and screws her eyes shut, and a hiss of air escapes through her gritted teeth.

“Manifestation?” Sasha asks, looking equally pained.

“Of a sort,” Jon says, awkwardly hovering over nothing. His face is pinched up, looking more disgusted than concerned. “How did she even hit you? Aren’t you invisible?”

The unmistakable crackle of static fills the air. Instinctively, Emma covers her ears with her hands, but it does nothing to muffle the sound.

“What do you mean, ‘it will be gone in an hour?!’”

“Oh, brilliant shot, Archivist!” Bouchard calls out. He kicks down the rest of the broken panel, and a fresh rain of shattered glass falls around the hallway.

Emma backs away from him, biting her lip. All that running around in the tunnels just to end up getting killed in the Archives.

Please don’t let the Archives be the last thing I see, she quietly begs to whatever power is listening. At least let me die in the break room.

Bang!

A portrait with the eyes cut out falls off the wall, and Emma hides her head in her hands to avoid potential ricochet.

“Your fight is with me, Magnus,” Gertrude hisses, and she pumps the shotgun again.

“Two bullets left, Ms. Robinson,” Bouchard calls out, turning around with an amicable smile. “You’d better shoot carefully!”

With Bouchard’s attention diverted once more, Emma can breathe again. The whiplash of moving from one disaster to another cannot be good for her. She wonders how many new gray hairs she’ll find after today.

“We need to get out of here,” Sasha says. She brushes Emma’s hand and nods at Martin, and then she turns to Jon. “Are we, uh… bringing…?” She makes a loose gesture at the migraine-inducing blood puddle.

Jon turns to talk to his blood puddle, but then immediately recoils.

“You’re just going to walk on it?” he asks.

A pause.

“He’s coming,” Jon says, looking very unhappy about it.

“Are you sure?” Sasha asks. “Because I can always—” she mimes clubbing something over the head with the fire extinguisher.

“He can see you,” Jon says. “And it’s fine. He’s just… unpleasant.”

A pause.

“Oh, do shut up.”

Emma shrugs.

They sprint down the hallway. Emma’s blood rushes through her body, but the whole exercise seems too fast and too slow at the same time. The door to the stairwell has never seemed so far before.

A hundred meters. Fifty meters. Twenty.

Crash.

Gertrude cries out in pain, but Emma refuses to look back. If Gertrude’s done, it’s too late for them now. She has to make it to the stairwell.

I’m not dying in the Archives, I’m not dying in the Archives —

“Get down!” Jon yells, and the four of them dive for the floor.

Bang.

A bullet flies over their heads. Emma jams her finger as she hits the ground, but she ignores the pain, scrambling to her feet. The stairs are right there. She runs toward the exit at full speed.

Then she smashes her face into the door.

“It says ‘pull’, Ms. Pereira,” Bouchard mocks. “Nine years you’ve worked here and you can’t remember how to leave?”

“You never let me leave in the first place,” Emma snaps. Her hands find the door handle and she yanks at it with all her might.

It’s locked.

Crap. If Bouchard came into the tunnels after them, that means he was the last one in the Archives.

“No,” Sasha gasps. She drops the fire extinguisher and tries to help Emma pull the door open, but it’s held fast. “Oh shit, oh shit—”

“Can’t you do something?” Jon asks the air.

Static fills Emma’s ears. It has the distinct feeling of being unamused.

Footsteps crunch on glass as Bouchard approaches them. Emma abandons the door and searches for somewhere to hide. There’s nothing. In the end, she ends up pressing herself up against the wall in a futile attempt to disappear.

Bouchard laughs as he draws near. “I’ll deal with your insubordination later,” he says, looking at her, his voice too close for comfort.

Emma flinches as his eyes pass over her. Beside her, Sasha shudders, and Martin lets out a choked gasp.

“But first,” Bouchard says. He positions himself in front of the exit and turns to Jon.

Or, not Jon. The other thing.

An unhappy frown crosses his lips, and he narrows his eyes at a painful section of air. “I’ve got some business to deal with.”

Jonathan Sims is frozen in place. His older self is slumped against the wall, bleeding freely from the gunshot wound on his leg. Magnus, despite his height, towers over him with Gertrude’s shotgun in his hands. He pushes it forward, the tip resting against his future self’s chest.

And all Jon can do is watch.

“It’s a shame,” Magnus says, cross-eyed. “We could have worked together. But you just had to get greedy.”

“Greedy?” his older self scoffs. “You think I wanted to be here?”

“There’s only room for one of us in this Institute,” Magnus says. He has a finger resting on the trigger.

“Do it,” his older self snaps, defiant. “I’ve died before. I dare you.”

What the hell? Jon thinks.

Magnus laughs maniacally. “Oh, how I wish I could hear you begging for your life.”

“Ugh, I hate your monologues.” His older self gives the impression of rolling several dozen eyes at once. “Get to the point.”

“How does it feel to be facing defeat at my hands?” Magnus asks. “How the tables have turned!”

His older self spits onto Magnus’s pants, but otherwise does nothing. Jon’s fingers dig into his palms as he takes it all in.

Aren’t you going to run? Fight?

Why are you just sitting there?

“For months you’ve been terrorizing my Institute,” Magnus monologues. “Stealing my pens, leaving thumbtacks on my chair, cutting the eyes out of my portraits, leaving worms in my drawers, tying my shoelaces together, sticking kick-me signs on my back, glitter-bombing my desk—”

(Gertrude’s assistant chokes on her spit.)

“— but now, I have you at my mercy.”

Magnus deliberately takes the shotgun and pumps it, savoring the action with a disgusting amount of enthusiasm. He jabs the barrel forward, blindly aiming it at older Jon. “And I don’t show mercy.”

His older self averts his gaze and glares at the ground. And still, he does nothing.

Something in Jon snaps.

“Hey!”

Both Magnus and his older self startle at the sound.

Shaking, Jon gets to his feet and takes a wobbly step forward. When he speaks, his voice is rough with smoke and fear, and he has to fight to not burst into a fit of coughing. “You’re not allowed to do that!”

Magnus opens his mouth and then closes it. He blinks. “Jon, I’m your boss.”

“I’m not talking to you!” Jon hisses, and he turns his gaze to his older self. “Are you seriously going to just sit there and let him shoot you? I still have questions!”

His older self frowns, irritated. “Didn’t I tell you to quit sticking your face into Pandora’s box?”

“Since when did we listen to what other people tell us to do?” Jon snaps.

“This isn’t your business,” his older self says.

“You are literally me!” Jon says. “I refuse to die like this!”

He walks over and tries to grab the gun out of Magnus’s hands.

“Jon!” Martin gasps out.

“Shut up, Martin,” Jon responds, automatic. “How did you end up here? Why are you invisible? How does the world end?”

“I ended the world,” his future self snaps.

“I asked ‘how’, not ‘who’,” Jon says. He yanks at the shotgun, but it doesn’t budge.

Magnus looks at him, confused and amused at the same time.

“Well, it’s a shame that you’re no longer an Archivist candidate,” Magnus tells him. “You know too much. But I may end up keeping you around. You ask many questions, Jonathan Sims. A good quality for the Institute.”

“If you think I’m working here after today, you are sorely mistaken,” Jon says.

“We’ll see about that,” Magnus chuckles. He twists the gun around, forcing Jon to let go, and then kicks him in the shins.

Jon drops to the ground with a pained shout.

“Now, where was I?” Magnus drawls. “Oh, right.” He lowers the barrel of the shotgun until it's aimed directly at his older self's heart.

“A little more to the left,” Jon gasps out, desperate.

“Nice try, but I'm not falling for that again,” Magnus says. He pushes the gun forward as far as he can, until it digs painfully into his older self's chest. “I’d ask you for your last words, but I wouldn’t be able to hear them anyway. Good riddance to bad —”

“AHH!”

The door to the archives slams open, slamming directly into Magnus’s head. The shotgun falls out of his hands, clattering uselessly on the floor.

Magnus drops to the ground, unconscious, and Jon whips his head up to stare at their savior.

“Sasha!” Tim Stoker gasps, breathing hard. He looks as though he’s just run down two flights of stairs and kicked open a dead-bolted door.

“Tim?” Sasha asks, from where she and Emma are huddled up against the wall.

Tim turns to her, wild-eyed. He holds up his phone. “I just got your text, are you alright?”

Sasha stares at him, processing the turn of events. “Yeah, I’m alive, I’m —”

“Holy shit,” Tim says, and he looks around the Archives. He opens his mouth, then closes it, and then opens it again. “Sorry, didn’t mean to cut you off — is this place on fucking fire?”

Chapter Text

“Okay, not that I’m against this,” Tim says with a grunt. “I’m no snitch. I’m a team player. But what are we going to do afterward?”

Martin shifts his weight, trying to get a better grip on Elias Bouchard’s unconscious body. “I suppose we could just… replace him?”

“With who? Rosie the receptionist?”

“Maybe Ms. Robinson,” Sasha suggests, trailing behind them. “Once she gets back from the hospital.”

Tim looks skeptical. “Isn’t she like, ninety years old? You really think she’ll make it through? Pretty sure she’s missing an eye. What if it kills her?”

Up ahead, Jon snorts. “You should have seen her with the shotgun.”

“Yeah, she’ll be fine,” Sasha agrees. “As long as Emma doesn’t kill her on the way to the hospital, she’ll pull through.”

Tim laughs. Then he pauses.

“Oh, so that wasn’t a joke.”

Silence.

“God, I come to work late one time and I miss an entire best-selling conspiracy action novel —“

“I don’t think this is the way,” Jon says, sudden and abrupt, and Martin glances over at him.

He’s talking to his manifestation again.

His manifestation, which is apparently a time traveler here to prevent a horrible future — who could have guessed?

Martin tried to ask how Jon got the proof, but Jon just stared at him until he squirmed.

(Unrelated, but Jon has very striking eyes.)

“How would I know? Because I was there,” Jon protests. He gestures to the spiderweb stretching across the top of the doorway. “You took the route with the least amount of these things. Why are we following them now?”

A pause.

“Because that makes it so much better.”

“What’s going on?” Tim asks.

“He wants to follow the Web,” Jon says. “Because she’s ‘out for Elias, not us, and he’d rather stay on her good side’.”

Sasha looks fascinated. “The Entities take sides?”

Jon tilts his head, as though listening. “Depends on the… Avatar?”

“Huh,” Sasha says. “Wonder who was piloting the Spiral today.”

Jon abruptly bumps into thin air, and Martin finds himself staring at bricks instead of trying to process the turn of events.

Jon swallows. “He wants to know why you know about the Spiral.”

“Uh, Emma and I got lost with Johann, and the Spiral guided us back.”

“Johann?” Martin asks. “Who’s Johann?”

Sasha clears her throat. “The old guy. Gertrude’s assistant.”

Jon’s eyes light up with understanding. “Oh, you mean Jurgen Leitner?”

“What.”

Tim and Martin nearly drop Elias’s body, sweating from the sheer amount of rage emanating from that single word.

“That guy was Jurgen Leitner?” Sasha says. “I was following Jurgen Leitner?”

Martin laughs nervously. “Small world?”

“You know what? Fine!” Sasha throws her hands up in the air. “I hope he got eaten by the Dark!”

Jon winces, looking into empty space. “Er, he wants to know how many Entities you ran into today?”

“Four, if you count that dust-eating rat old bastard—”

Martin panics and points further down the corridor. “Hey, look! A pit!”

“Oh, thank god,” Tim mutters, quiet enough that Sasha can’t hear him. He leans forward, keeping his voice low. “You don’t know this, since we just met, but Sasha has an entire rant about Leitner. Artefact Storage — bonkers, the lot of them.”

“I thought she’s a researcher?”

“There’s a little saying we have in publishing: you can take the tiger out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the tiger.”

Martin frowns. “That’s — isn’t that just a normal saying?”

Tim winks.

They pull up next to the pit, careful to not fall in. Martin peers into the hole. It’s deeper than it is wide, circular in shape. And there’s a large mass of silvery cobwebs lining the edges. It reminds him of those funnel-web spiders.

“We’re really just tossing him in?” Jon asks the air. “Just like that?”

“Well, there are worse places to hide a body,” Tim says.

Sasha groans. “Quit making it sound like we’re murdering our boss. He’s still alive, we’re not murdering our boss.”

“We’re leaving him to starve in a pit in the ground,” Tim points out.

“Can he even starve?” Martin wonders. “He feeds on fear, right?”

Jon waits for a moment, tilting his head as he listens to his ghost.

“He can’t See anything from these tunnels,” he says, with the rhythm of someone merely repeating what they hear. “So there’s no fear to feed on.”

“Nothing to watch,” Sasha says. “Useless to the Eye.”

“Essentially.”

“All this just to say, we’re murdering our boss,” Tim finishes.

Sasha sighs and looks at Martin, as if to say, ‘what can you do?’

But Martin actually agrees with Tim in this instance, so he just keeps his mouth shut.

“Count of three, then?” Tim offers.

Martin shrugs.

“Alright. One, two — three!”

Tim lets go when he says ‘three’. Martin doesn’t because he was expecting a ‘go’ after the count. The desynchronization causes Bouchard’s body to spin on the way down, and he hits his head on the side of the wall.

Tim winces. “He’s gonna have a hell of a headache when he wakes up.”

A pause.

“Apparently, it’s not the first time he’s been hit in the head today,” Jon says. “An umbrella, really? Hey, is that what you hit me with?!”

“Seriously, is there a way for us to talk to your ‘time traveler’?” Sasha asks aloud. “I have several questions.” She squints at the impossible space of air next to Jon, frowning the whole time.

“Get in line,” Jon says with a scowl. “I’ve been asking him questions for months and I’ve only started getting answers today.”

“Oh? I can definitely buy the ‘Jon from the future’ angle, now,” Tim laughs.

Jon sends Tim a tired glare. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Remember that time we went undercover in the —“

“Never mind. Point made.”

Martin shifts uncomfortably. Once again, he’s third-wheeling a friendship he knows nothing about. Fourth-wheeling? Either way, he’s the ‘new guy’ here, and he’s intensely aware of that fact.

As if sensing his thoughts, Jon suddenly turns to look at Martin. Martin ‘eeps’.

Jon tilts his head, probably listening to his time-traveling future self.

“Martin,” Jon says, slowly. “He wants me to tell you that he’s — proud of you?” He makes a face and looks back at the bricks. “For what, resorting to arson?”

Martin blushes. “Uh —”

“He’s apparently proud of you for resorting to arson,” Jon continues. “Though he’d like you to be less destructive in the future, as Statements are one of his sources of food, and he’s concerned for your safety.”

“Oh,” Martin says, unsure of how he’s supposed to respond to that.

“But he also says if you ever need a healthy outlet, he can set up a fire pit for you in the tunnels so you can burn paperwork — seriously? What the hell?”

“Er, thank you?” Martin says. He tries to squint in the general direction of the head-hurting span of air. “I, uh, appreciate the offer?”

An awkward silence falls over the group.

Martin looks back at the hole in the ground, where Elias Bouchard’s body lies. He shifts from foot to foot, uncertain of how to continue the conversation.

“Well, should we just head back?” Tim speaks up, scratching the back of his neck. “Since we already got rid of the body, we don’t really have to be here, anymore, so…”

Jon glances over at his empty space. He looks down into the pit and chews on his lip.

“... Can you wait for us out in the corridor?” he asks. “We’ll guide you back, but I think he needs a moment to… ah, process things.”

“Oh!” Martin says. “Yes, of course! We’ll just — wait. Out there.”

Tim, Martin, and Sasha step back into the corridor and awkwardly stand a few meters away from the doorway. They try not to eavesdrop on the one-half of the conversation, but it’s hard when Jon’s voice starts filtering out from that direction.

“So…” Tim says, over Jon’s shocked exclamations and hissed words. “Are any of you planning to keep working here after this?”

“I don’t know,” Sasha admits. “I mean, I don’t exactly agree with the ‘feeding a fear god’ thing, but it pays very well.”

“Oh, for sure,” Martin agrees. “Did you get a three-hundred percent pay raise, too? I thought it was a typo when I first heard about it, but the money’s been coming in, so…”

“Yeah!” Tim says. “Though now that I think about it, it was probably Jon’s time traveler and not Elias Bouchard suddenly deciding to be generous.”

Sasha adopts a considering expression. “You know, that gives me an idea…”

When Jonah Magnus gets tossed into Annabelle’s pit, Jon feels a strange sort of relief wash over him.

Magnus is trapped. With no way out. Never, in a million years, did Jon actually think he’d be able to get rid of Jonah Magnus.

It’s a little disappointing, actually — no more bouncing balls off the back of his head, no more petty theft.

(Well, maybe a little petty theft. Jon still knows where Magnus keeps the keys to his home — he could easily get in and take more of his things.)

But most of all, it feels like he’s finally free. Magnus can’t coerce his younger self, or anyone else, into becoming the Archivist. The future is completely and irrevocably averted.

But there’s still one line left unfinished. One loose thread.

Quietly, he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a folded group of papers.

His younger self recognizes it immediately.

“Why do you still have that thing?!”

“I —” Jon falters.

He doesn’t have a reason or a defense. The truth is, despite all his warnings and anger and bitter words — he’s still curious.

Even now, after a slow and painful loss of humanity, after an apocalypse, after watching Martin die… there’s still a part of him that desperately wants to know. He wants to read those words and damn the consequences.

His younger self looks at him, to the papers, and then back to him.

“... Do you want me to read it?”

“What? No!” Jon pulls back and holds the papers out of his younger self’s reach.

“Well, one of us has to.” His younger self scowls and crosses his arms. “Otherwise, it’s going to haunt us for eternity.”

“No, it’s not,” Jon insists. “We can do it. We can let go.”

“So toss it into the hole,” his younger self says. “Throw it back in his face.”

Jon looks down into the pit. The same pit he was in earlier.

They’d failed, then, too. Trapped in a pit with nothing else to do, they’d caved to their curiosity and opened up the folder. Had his younger self not knocked the papers out of his hands, he could have died — been absorbed by the Web, like he could have been all those years ago.

It would be so easy to throw this Statement back into Magnus’s face, except for the fact that it’s so unbearably impossible.

“How many Statements did it take?” his younger self asks.

“What?”

“How many Statements did it take for you to become the Archivist?”

Jon blinks. He thinks back, rewinding and replaying all the years he’d spent, recording papers and looking for answers. “Maybe… around a hundred and twenty?”

“So one shouldn’t be too bad, right?” His younger self says, and he snatches the papers out of Jon’s hands.

“Wh — what are you doing?!”

“I’m going to read this statement and satisfy both of our curiosities,” his younger self says, and Jon winces — he didn’t mean to compel the answer out of him.

“You are not,” Jon says. “It’s dangerous.”

“He’s trapped in a hole, what can he do?”

“Start the apocalypse!”

“I thought you started the apocalypse.”

“Yes — because he made me read his Statement!”

His younger self squints at him. “But it took a hundred and twenty statements for you to get to that point, right?”

“I —” Jon frowns. “Well... yes…”

“So I’ll read it,” his younger self says. “He’s stuck in a hole, and I’m not a monster. If anything bad happens, you can just knock it out of my hands, like earlier. Either way, we won’t have to think about it anymore.”

Jon opens his mouth to protest — but finds that he has no objections.

“Wow,” he says, after thinking it over. “I can be smart.”

His younger self scoffs and unfolds the paper. “You? This was all me.”

Jon watches with bated breath as his younger self clears his throat and starts reading. His two eyes dart back and forth across the page, scanning over the words — and then something unexpected happens.

He laughs.

“What is it?”

His younger self chuckles and holds out the papers. “It’s safe.”

“Really,” Jon says. He carefully looks at his younger self, searching for anything out of place, any trace of the supernatural.

His younger self shivers under his gaze and then glares at him. “Can you not?”

“How the hell is it safe?”

“Read it yourself,” his younger self says, and he shakes the papers. “Honestly, it’s rather amusing.”

Jon frowns. Still, he grabs the papers, and, with shaking hands, he turns his gaze upon the Statement.

“... Oh,” he says, after reading it over, and he cracks a grin. “That is amusing.”

“See? Curiosity isn’t so bad, after all.”

“I… suppose not.”

“So are you satisfied?” his younger self asks.

“For now,” Jon replies, and he tosses the papers into the pit. “Shall we join the others, then?”

They leave the room and step out into the corridor, where Tim, Martin, and Sasha are waiting.

His younger self clears his throat. “We’re done.”

“Oh! Good, you can lead us back, then — holy shit!”

Sasha yelps and Tim screams. His younger self looks down at himself and then back up, frowning.

“Is there something on my face?”

Martin wordlessly shakes his head, with a pale face and…

And his eyes trained directly on Jon.

Jon clears his throat and tentatively points at himself. “Can you… see me?”

“Yep!” Tim breaks in, staring at him. “Wow! Old Jon! How far in the future are you from? Twenty years? Thirty?”

“Six,” Jon answers, too shocked to be offended by the assumption.

“Oh,” Sasha says, and she sends a sympathetic expression to his younger self. “Oh, Jon, I am so sorry —”

“You can see me,” Jon says, trying to wrap his mind around this new situation. “You can see me! I’m being perceived!”

Martin clears his throat. “Is that… a good thing?”

”Are you kidding me?” Jon says. “This is the best day I’ve had in over a year!”

His younger self makes a face. “I hope that’s because something good happened to you before we entered the tunnels, and not because the bar is so pathetically low.”

“Finally, I can take the Tube without someone trying to steal my seat! I can use the loo without someone interrupting me!”

“So the bar was that low. Good to know.”

“Shut up, Jon,” Jon says. “No one needs your commentary.”

“I could say the same thing to you.”

“Oh my god,” Sasha says, somewhere between horror and glee. She claps her hands together and looks back and forth between Jon and his past self. “There’s two of them.”

(Tim groans, Martin blushes, his past self rolls his eyes, and Jon — Jon smiles.

For the first time in a long time, he gets to talk to his friends. And this time, they can talk back.)

Even before he opens his eyes, Jonah knows that he’s failed. The realization alone is enough to make him want to curl up into a ball and hide for the rest of eternity. But he doesn’t, because he is the immortal Jonah Magnus, and every time he fails, he comes back even stronger than before.

So he sits up and takes in his surroundings.

“Annabelle Cane,” he hisses, brushing cobwebs off his suit. He adjusts his cufflinks and gets to his feet. The headache that’s been plaguing him all day feels a million times worse, and he staggers under the pain.

He feels around the edge of the hole. It’s too steep and too smooth to climb out of — plus, it’s absolutely coated with spider webs. It makes him want to throw up, but he refuses to show weakness in the Web’s domain.

“No way out,” he grumbles. “I suppose I’ll just have to wait for her to show her hand —”

He cuts off. There, lying innocently on the ground, is a folded sheet of paper. A very familiar sheet of paper.

“Oh, hilarious,” he mutters to himself, and he picks it up. “‘It’s exactly where I want it to be.’ That conniving, blazing strumpet.”

He unfolds it and smooths out the creases — really, did she shove this into her boots? — and then freezes.

He holds the paper up, closer to his face, and he reads.

Hello, Elias.

Apologies for the deception, but it’s not every day that I get the opportunity to pull one over the Eye. So I thought it best to retract my assistance and start a scheme of my own. As a fellow mastermind, I’m sure you can appreciate that reasoning. After all, how often do you get the opportunity to one-up an Avatar in their place of power?

His hands begin to shake with rage.

Really, I barely had to do a thing. The pieces simply fell into place for this one! It was glorious!

You Beholding-types are so predictable. Always watching, always seeking, always trying to step out of your place. In case you’ve forgotten, plans and schemes and manipulations are my territory. It amuses me when you put another one of your plans into action… so petty, so juvenile. You’d have made a good Spider in another life, I believe. Good, but not as good as me. ;;;;)

“That damned wench,” he hisses. “What did she do with my Statement?”

Now, you may be wondering: what did I do with your Statement?

Jonah scoffs.

Rest assured, I did not leave it to rot under these tunnels — you know how I hate wasting chess pieces. I put it into play, don’t worry.

In fact, you will probably find out what I did with it right about… now.

Elsewhere, in the tunnels, an old man limps into his room and hobbles over to his cot, ready to finally, finally curl up into a miserable ball and wait for someone to deliver painkillers for him.

Instead, he finds a manila folder.

“Oh, Gertrude,” he mutters. Gertrude Robinson is scarily productive and efficient, and she expects the same from him. He hasn’t even had a chance to wipe the dried blood off of his face, and she already has a new assignment for him. What a cold-hearted leader.

He opens the folder and reads, and suddenly, the weight of a million invisible eyes crashes upon his back.

“Jurgen Leitner?!” Jonah shrieks, upon receiving the Knowledge of the being that read his statement. “Jurgen Leitner has been living underneath my Institute this whole time?”

Yes, he has.

“How did she even know I was going to say that out loud?” Jonah mutters, barely resisting the urge to rip Annabelle’s letter into a million tiny pieces.

As I said, you’re predictable.

A minute of angry shrieking and yelling passes before Jonah’s collected himself enough to finish reading. Like it or not, Annabelle bested him in this round. He has to read to the end.

Hope you got that out of your system! If you haven’t destroyed this letter in a fit of rage, then I still have one last thing to say to you.

Go ahead. Try to escape. I’m sure you could, given enough time — you are, after all, quite established in your power.

Just remember who’s really pulling your strings.

Sincerely,

Annabelle Cane

Jonah rips up Annabelle’s letter and screams.

Three days after the incident and one day after she gets discharged from the hospital, Gertrude Robinson ignores the concerned inquiries from Rosie the Receptionist and makes her way to the basement of the Magnus Institute.

The whole place is in disarray — the lock on the door is broken, the glass panels are shattered, and there are piles of half-burnt papers left scattered around the stacks. It’s as though someone did the bare minimum of cleanup — Emma and her new girlfriend, most likely.

She limps over to her office. From the outside, it looks surprisingly untouched, though if Magnus had been taken out as quickly as Emma claimed, he probably didn’t get a chance to ransack her desk.

She opens the door and stops in her tracks.

“... You’re Jonathan Sims’s doppelgänger,” she says.

The same dark skin, coarse hair, the same moles and wrinkles and scowling face. But this man is scarred, and more than that, he’s marked. He has the air of the Beholding about him, a paranoia-inducing feeling that makes her skin crawl.

There’s also, of course, the invisible impression of millions of eyes coming from his general direction.

The man leaning on her desk nods. “That I am.”

“What do you want.”

“I thought you deserved an explanation,” he says. “So, the short version is that I am now your boss.”

“... What?”

“Yeah, I’m not thrilled about it either,” he grumbles. “But Sasha James is nothing if not persuasive. Wish I’d known her in uni, I might have gotten higher marks in that one class — but I digress. The longer version is that I’m a time-traveling Archivist from the future here to prevent the apocalypse. Now that Jonah Magnus has been dealt with, I apparently need something else to occupy my time, lest I become a ‘parasitic evil roommate who doesn’t contribute to the rent’. Somehow, this led to me being promoted to head of the Institute.”

Gertrude squints at him with her one remaining eye.

“Obviously, I am not Jonah Magnus,” he continues. “I am now going by ‘Johnathan Sims with an ‘h’’. No relation to Jonathan Sims.”

“No one is going to buy that.”

“You know better than anyone what nonsense people would buy.”

“Get to the point.”

“Right, right, of course,” he says. He spreads his hands and looks her in the eye. “You’re fired.”

Gertrude nods. Then she pulls out her phone, books a flight to the Bahamas, and walks out of the Institute without looking back.

In the weeks that follow, rumors fly. There’s an alarming amount of people that suspect the mysterious ‘Johnathan Sims’ of murdering Elias Bouchard, but those rumors quickly quiet down once everyone receives their next paycheck. When Jon asks where the money is coming from, Sasha and his older self just laugh.

So… he goes back to work.

He ends up in his cubicle, finishing up the cases he’d been assigned. He calls phone numbers and interviews witnesses and digs through the Institute’s library for relevant lore.

It all seems rather mundane, all things considered. When he first went to the Archives to tell Gertrude Robinson about his doppelgänger, he’d never have suspected that it would lead to his doppelgänger becoming his boss.

Someone knocks on his cubicle wall. Jon turns around in his seat and is greeted with the sight of Martin Blackwood, holding two cups of tea in his hands.

“Hi,” Martin says. “Made you tea.”

“Ah, yes,” Jon says. “Er, you can put that down right there.” He points to the corner of his desk.

Martin walks in and sets down the cup.

“Thank you, Martin.”

“You’re welcome, Jon.”

An awkward silence falls over the cubicle.

Jon frowns up at Martin, who hasn’t moved. “Did you… need something…?”

“Er, no, I — okay, actually, maybe?” Martin shuffles from foot to foot. “I just wanted to check something.”

“About what?”

“About — the thing.”

“I’m… not sure what you’re talking about.”

Martin huffs. “Does John — future you, John with an ‘h’ — does he know?”

“He knows almost everything,” Jon says.

“Well, yes, but —” Martin looks around nervously. Then he leans in and lowers his voice. “Does he know that I lied on my CV?”

“What?”

“Because he asked me to be his personal assistant,” Martin says, panicked. “And I might have been able to coast along as a researcher, but a PA does phone calls and budgets and spreadsheets, and I’m really not qualified for that. He says I did it in the future under a director twice as incompetent as him. I don’t know how future Martin got along, but I don’t know where to begin. Also, what if he doesn’t know? I know he’s omniscient, but what if he never bothered to look up my backstory? And then he offered to pay me triple what I’m making now, which is already triple what I was making originally, and I don’t want to suck at such an important job and also be grossly overpaid, although I admit I did not turn down the increase in salary, was that a dick move? I’m not entirely sure —”

“Wait, go back,” Jon cuts in. “You lied on your CV?”

“I — yes?” Martin blinks. “We’ve… we’ve covered this already, haven’t we?”

“No, we have not.”

“You said, ‘degrees aren’t everything’. To my face.”

“Because they’re not, and your incompetence was frustrating.”

“You said you wouldn’t tell Mr. Bouchard about it?”

“I was referring to ‘breaking into the Archives under false pretenses’.”

“Oh my god,” Martin says, face pale. “You didn’t know. Never mind, forget I said anything.”

He whirls around, ready to leave, but Jon reaches out and grabs his wrist.

Martin squeaks at the contact and nearly drops his cup of tea, but luckily, he manages to keep a secure hold on it without spilling anything.

“Jon?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jon tells him. “I can guarantee that he already knew.”

“Wh — how?”

“They were friends.” Jon replays the weird not-memories he’d had forcefully shoved into his brain, and he shrugs. “In the future. I don’t know how they became friends, but — well. You were willing to burn down the Archives for me after a day, so I suppose something similarly life-threatening must have happened.”

“Oh,” Martin says. Then he frowns. “Are we friends?”

Jon considers that question for a moment. Before everything, the answer would have been a definite ‘no’. But… Martin, despite his flaws, keeps a cool head in a crisis and is only occasionally annoying. And they did dispose of a body together.

“I suppose we are,” Jon admits, and then immediately regrets it when Martin smiles at him.

Jon averts his gaze, embarrassed to have been seen having emotions. To cover it up, he grabs his still-warm cup of tea and takes a sip.

“Whoa,” he says, suddenly distracted by the unexpected taste. “What is this?”

“Is something wrong — oh!” Martin squeaks and looks at the teacup still in his hand. “Oh, no! I must have mixed up our cups! Shit, sorry —”

“No, this is really good,” Jon says, and he takes another, slower sip. And another. And another.

… Holy shit, how did he live his life without ever drinking this gift from the gods?

Martin’s ears turn red. “Oh, it’s yunnan black tea,” he says. “It’s, ah, a little expensive, but it’s my favorite — it does taste good, doesn’t it? Most people think it’s too mild, but I — I dunno. I like it, it reminds me of home, I guess.”

“Yunnan tea,” Jon repeats, frowning. “Why does that sound so familiar — oh. Oh.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing!” Jon blurts out. “Thanks for the tea, Martin, but I really need to get back to work —”

“Oh, of course,” Martin says, nodding furiously. “Of course, I’ll just, ah, step out, then? Good-bye?”

“Bye!”

Martin vacates his cubicle, and Jon stares at the half-drained teacup in his hands.

“Oh my god,” he says, in the solitude of his cubicle. “I am so, severely screwed.”

The next time Jon enters his flat, he’s greeted with the sight of his older self sitting in his armchair, reading one of his books. The familiar scent of tandoori chicken drifts through the air.

“You cannot bribe me with this,” he says. “I am begging you to move out.”

“I’m no longer freeloading, and I cooked for us every night this week.”

“I will be frank,” Jon says. He shrugs off his coat, takes off his shoes, and points an accusing finger at himself. “I have accepted that you are a monster. I have accepted that you are me. And — somehow, I do not hate you. But you are the worst flatmate ever, and we both suffer every second we spend in each other’s company. Please leave.”

“It is remarkably difficult to find a flat in Central London.”

Jon frowns. “Can’t you just… squat in Elias Bouchard’s flat? You have his keys, right? And his papers?”

His older self frowns and looks away.

“What?”

“I don’t want to,” he mutters. “I’d rather not live in the same space where Jonah Magnus lived.”

“Oh,” Jon says. He thinks for a moment. “It’s in Chelsea, right? Close to the Institute?”

“Yes.”

“In that really nice, luxurious neighborhood?”

“Yes.”

Jon looks around his modest flat. He’s not really attached to the place — for him, it’s only ever been a place to live. And though he’s never really seen the appeal in living luxuriously… it’s not like he’d ever turn down the opportunity to.

“I’ll take it.”

“What?”

“I’ll take it,” Jon says. “And you can stay here, and then we can have a normal boss-employee-time-traveler relationship.”

“Oh. That is… an option I hadn’t considered.”

“Yes, well, we’ve established that I am the smarter one.”

His older self clears his throat.

Jon narrows his eyes. “Don’t say it —”

“‘He has eyes —’”

“Shut up,” Jon grumbles. “I’m leaving right now.”

“But I made us tandoori chicken!”

“Fine,” Jon says, with a resigned huff. “Fine. I’ll eat dinner, and then I’ll start moving out tomorrow.”

His older self smirks and heads to the kitchen. Jon follows.

While his older self plates the tandoori chicken, Jon takes the kettle off the stove and pours himself a cup. Then, after a moment’s consideration, he grabs the tin of yunnan tea that his older self had brought with him after moving out of the tunnels.

“Interesting,” his older self says, like the asshole he is. “So you’ve finally tried Martin Blackwood’s tea, have you?”

The tips of Jon’s ears begin to burn. “Please be quiet.”

“I was only curious.”

“The universe doesn’t owe you answers,” Jon snaps, throwing those words back into his older self’s face. He aggressively scoops the leaves into his mug and sits down in front of his plate.

Silently, they eat their dinner. Every time he reaches for his mug, his older self looks at him with that thousand-eyed stare. Jon continues to sip at his tea, refusing to feel embarrassed.

Three minutes later, his older self speaks up. “It’s not as good as Martin’s, is it.”

“No,” Jon sighs, and he hides his blushing face in his hands. “No, it’s not.”

After eating, Jonathan Sims the Younger walks into his bedroom to start packing his things, leaving Jon "John" Sims alone in the kitchen.

He sits for a few moments, waiting for his younger self to become thoroughly distracted. Once enough time passes, he pulls the tape recorder out of his pocket.

"I suppose," he says, "that's the end of the story."

And with that, he hits the 'stop' button and goes back to eating his dinner.