Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Statement of S...” his fingers come up to adjust the collar of his shirt, his voice going dry. There’s the whisper of air between flat, closed teeth, the vague beginnings of a name, but his hands are shaking. “Of Sa...” 

He hisses. 

The silence looms over them, like a guard bracketing them in. It becomes difficult to discern who the shadows are, or if the shadows are anything at all. 

Her voice slips into the recording low, threadbare with nervous confusion. It lifts at the end, like a question. “It’s Sasha James.” 

Her legs are long, packed beneath the wooden table. She doesn’t sit like she is unfamiliar with the office, or uncomfortable with the space she holds. Under their bulbous eyes, she starts to rub her fingers of her left hand together. She rushes to say, “I know you thought I was dead but,” her forehead is creased, the right frame of her glasses is scratched, “I mean- I wasn’t expecting a big party or anything like that, but this isn’t exactly the reaction-” 

“You’ve missed,” Elias says softly, in a friendly cadence, but no less wondering, “A lot while you were away.”  

The door opens. 

“Oh my god, it’s really you.” 

“Oh!” there’s a surprised smile in Sasha’s light voice, “You... I- Melanie, right?” 

“You found her.” the relief swells loudly, oversaturated, unbecoming. For someone who had only known the Archival assistant Sasha James for a day, or half. “You actually-” 

“Um,” her laugh is bright, and bubbling, pleased, “I found myself, thank you,” 

“You look great!” the hug is undeserved, by the soft sound of surprised it pushes out of the strange, tall woman. Sitting, her head tips to rest on Melanie’s shoulder awkwardly. “I mean,” Melanie says triumphantly, in a voice of someone who’ve been made to feel like she was going off the deep end for weeks, half muted by the odd, crinkly fabric that covers her from head to toe. “You look terrible, but you’re alive!” 

“Why are you,” Martin swallows, his confidence wilts in his throat, when the woman turns her big eyes on him, over the slopes of Tim’s shoulder, “In crepe paper?” 

“I think we’d all like to hear it,” Elias interrupts, and the air turns frigid. His voice gentling, “Jon, if you would,” 

A hand, hesitant, almost folds over his shoulder. 

“I’ll do it.” Melanie says firmly, and her hand slides onto the back of the chair instead, as if she never meant to touch him. She sounds, somewhat softer, than she’s ever sounded, her boisterous, sullen attitude curtailed. The effort must be grand; does it pain her to coddle him? 

“Yes... I think you’d...” the chair creaks as he pushes himself off, clearing his throat weakly, “Yes.” 

The small expanse of the recording room does not keep them from forming a space between packs. Elias stands smug by the broad shelves, an elbow resting against the lower rung. He creates a berth on his own, a physical gap that everyone else knows to steer from, under the shrewd gaze of the tall woman. 

Melanie checks the recorder. 

“Statement of Sasha James.” she says, “Regarding her... supposed death in the tunnels under the Institute.” 

Her eyes flick upwards, as if to check. 

The tall woman nods. 

“Statement begins.”

Unsounded words seem to swell in the air, every eye tracking the way slow fingers walk a path along the recording table. The woman’s face is dipped downwards, trained on a grain in the wood. She says, “Have you ever burnt yourself over the stove?” with awkward deliberation, a youthful juxtaposition to the faint, crawling lines on her round face. “Not... ‘my skin got red and it’s a little achey’, but properly burnt. Your skin turns white, and then it starts to blacken. And then it starts to peel.”

“... It peels right off. It shrivels and flakes, it gets... everywhere.” Her face is frozen in a mirage of what thoughtful should be. “My skin peeled.”  

Her head shakes, an etch-a-sketch trying to be rid. "Not like a suit," she corrects in a rush, frustration paints across her forehead, her tongue heavy at the back of her throat, clumsy. “But like it was natural. Like I was on fire, and my skin just had to peel, and the skin under that, and the skin under that. Not all at once... in patches... in bits. In long... papery strips.”

“It hurt."

"I was being disintegrated on the spot- I think I tried to run, go back the tunnel - I would have died. I know that. If they- hadn’t wanted to...”  her voice cracks, gives way to a scathing, rumbling rage molten in the back of her throat, “Play with me.”

“I fell into a door.”

Her hand spread across her face, palms splayed.  

“I didn’t think at the time, I was a bit- preoccupied.” Her smile is bitter, “Not that it would have done me any good- it was a yellow door.”

“I know enough about yellow doors- reading... statements. The... Thing that peeled me, like a grape , it said, “No fun.”  The sanded, jagged line of yellow nails rap on the table. “It said that twice. It didn’t enter the corridor. It stood right at the wooden rim, didn’t even move to touch the frame - said “No fun,” like I was... a tennis ball. And I was no longer in... its court.”  

“There was blood stuck in my mouth. I couldn’t breathe. I moved like a dying engine, sputtering, dragging, I walked with my elbows and it made this... squelching, clicking sound.” She makes a face, apologetic, as if it had spilled out of her without her knowledge, that she had never meant to tell them. Moving on with a loose roll of her shoulders, “There was another door at the end of the corridor.”

“I made it there, inch... by bloody inch.” Her mouth opens in a smile, almost pleased, “And I do mean, bloody. It let me there too.”  

A dry, hacking laugh pressed out of her flat teeth. “I knew why when I got there.”

“The door. Would not budge.”  

“... It moved well enough, right to left, left to right, but it couldn’t be opened. Not at all. I- tried.  I really did, I knew it was my only hope- I could feel it. I stared over my shoulder, down the long, compact hall.”  

“There was a shadow.”  

“It seemed to grow. It became bigger, and clearer. Like a loping, pulsing creature, barreling down the corridor.”  

“I don’t know how long I screamed. If you could call it that. My mouth opened, but I sounded like an animal... the noise was... guttural... gurgling. It came from a raw, gaping wound, not a person... not a human being. I banged until the wood carved into my exposed meat. My limbs were blood bags, bursting at the seams.”  

The shrieking scrape of metal legs cut through the room. Melanie lunges across the table, “Sasha-!” 

The crepe paper blouse is darkened with oozing spots. Melanie’s hand is enclosed around a thin wrist like a manacle, where jagged nails had been pulling at a long... papery strip. The skin underneath is glistening pink. Parted. In some places. A stammered apology slips from cracked lips. The woman looks mortified. “Oh god,” she accepts the napkins Melanie thrusts into her hands, “I swear I- this isn’t some weird spell. It’s just so peel-able.” 

“It’s alright,” Melanie says faintly, “Please, you were saying,” 

“Right.” The woman breathes deeply, shrugging her shoulders, “Well- you must have guessed by now. The door opened. I fell flat on my face.”

“I must’ve taken in a lungful of sand. Because it was- on the other side of the door, it was a desert.”

“I reached out, to dig my fingers into it, slow and shifting. It was dry, so dry that I could not take a hold of it, and I could feel the thing in the corridor get closer, hear its crashing, heavy running. I didn't notice the shoes, right in front of me. They were slippers, each bright with sickening yellow, dusted with fine grains of sand. Someone must've opened the door, I know- but I didn't think, I wasn't very aware of anything at that point, was I? I didn't even know there was anyone there- not until, someone took ahold of my arms.”

“Not until they pulled.” Her hands slide to her knees, curling over the spindly knobs. “The wooden frame hit my shins, so that was great too... There was a click, of someone closing the door gently. No urgency, in it...”

“My vision had begun to run. Every part of my body was screaming, it felt as if my skin had been peeled away until all the little bits of sand is stuck into my meat, into my muscles. Blood was warm and wet against my cheek.”

“It was leaking out of me.”  

“I could see it, lying on my side, beyond the folding... alluring darkness.”

A fidgeting finger scratches the end of her left ear, head ducking to reveal the long length of her neck, the crusted skin crawling like knife wounds into the lapels of her crepe paper blouse. 

“... And I woke up.”

“I was lying on my back, staring up at a beige, flat roof. The roof was made of stone. The small house was made of stone. The bed underneath me was lumpy, it wasn’t a real mattress, but stuffed with cloth, so it was soft. There was a crick in my neck, like I’d been lying for a long time. Sand scraped the top of my mouth. I tried to sit,”  the woman scrapes a finger down the side of her mouth, leaving a long, pinking gash, the curl of a garish smile. “You can imagine how well that went.”  

“I remembered even before I looked down.”

A crooked leg hooks around the chair, rubbing against it with an absent-minded force. “I mean,” she murmurs, “All I’ll say is, I looked like a Halloween costume.” A wry smile curves across her papery face, “One of the really good ones. I-... I must have lost a lot of blood. It- peeled the skin off me. My face first. I know it did that, the... Thing in the tunnels. It didn’t even have to try-”  

Melanie’s pen hangs loosely between her forefinger and her middle finger, a voided, forgotten tilt hovering over voided, forgotten papers. 

She clears her throat, uncomfortably, “Any- anyway, that’s when I saw the door.”  

“It was right across from me.” her long arms bracket a space, “Just- standing there. Supported by nothing. The frame wasn't even on the ground, there was a small slip of space between it and the sand that surrounded the both of us. It was so- out of place. The wood was dark, with white streaks where the varnish came away. It was old, an old wood. It wasn't yellow at all, but you can imagine that it scared the living hell out of me anyway. It was utterly silent, it certainly wasn't opening or anything like that; but seeing it- I, my heart started to pound and all of the air rushed out of me-”  

The whites of her eyes glinted darkly in the dingy light above them, casting a wide net. They were unreadable, and unfocused, directed only half at the rolling tape visible through the recording’s scratched plastic. The silence swells with her, the stillness of her chest, not a single fluttery film of crepe paper moving. The tape continues to run. 

The tall woman that claims to be Sasha James mouths a small, inaudible word. It shapes the parting of her lips, an impossible, unknowable word. 

“... A man walked into the tent.”  

“He was quite a-” Interupted, a huff of quiet humour slips just beneath the hum of the old, varnished recorder. A delicate flush warms the very tips of pointed ears. “He was quite a handsome man. He wore a lab coat. He had brown, dusky skin... perfect hair...  

...and teeth like a military cemetery.”  

Chapter Text

“He was American – I could tell because of his accent... and he called himself a scientist.” 

“I told him he didn’t look like any scientist I knew.” The pause that follows is considering, a sheepish tilt to her long, embarrassed face. The woman uncrosses her legs, rubbing the back of her left calf. “... I was lying.” 

“He looked like someone had told an elementary class to dress someone in what they thought a scientist ought to look like. I couldn’t very well tell him that he looked like he couldn’t be anything else. He didn’t seem bothered by the door- for a second, I thought I was going mad, that only I could see it. So, I pointed at it, and I asked him if he could see it.” 

The woman smoothens her fingers of her right hand over the half-bitten nails of her left. She was quiet for a moment, but not fearfully. Her eyes seemed opaque beneath the glare of the light, less fearful than the door warranted.“He said yes.”  

“He said it went quiet a few hours ago. When I asked him what he meant by that, he said, in a very factual way, ‘The knocking.’” 

“... I was- I felt like I was in an episode of Doctor Who. He was just so- blasé. I asked him, not very kindly, if he knew anything about it. If he was- one of them-” 

She laughs, a nervous, but nostalgic sound. It’s a pitter-pattering sound that melts into the old, electrical lights above them, picked up in spatters by the recorder. The sound worms its way into their ears, begging for entry in the valleys of their soft, malleable heads, but there is just no place. “Poor Carlos,” she sighs, in a voice they don’t know. “I know the statements need full names, but he never gave me one. He said, ‘I’ve been looking for a door, but I don’t think your door is the door I'm looking for.’” 

Her eyes flickers to Melanie, stuck on whatever she saw, “Yeah- that was the face I made too.” 

“He said it’s generally a bad idea to open knocking doors, but that I sounded...” She can’t look them in the eye, when she does, her face pulls downwards, unwittingly, sagging with a skittering unease. Her confidence roped off and tightened. Her voice gentles, becomes lower and quieter until it seems a stream of gurgling water. “I guess I sounded convincing.” 

“He checked my bandages, and he told me that if blood started coming out of my skin, to not worry, because it just- did that sometimes. He asked me if that used to happen before I got churned to strips. I said- ‘God-! No!’, which... seemed to surprise him.”

“... I asked if he had a phone on him, and he did. He left to give me some privacy, so I...”  a nail scratches down her cheek. She mutters, her head ducking into her arm, her eyes bright, “Called the Institute.”

“I d- I could've called anyone but I-”

Her mouth snaps shut with an audible click of gnashing teeth.

“... Rosie picked up.”

“... And I was so relieved to hear her voice. If she picked up, I thought, the Institute- it must have been over. Jane Prentice must have been stopped- and that meant that even though I was in a Desert, it was all- even though it-” 

She quiets.

The recording runs with the silence. The paper dress seems to crumble with her face, a mournful, ugly way that it curled around their ribcage. Melanie, as if come alive in an instant of adrenaline, stifles herself with an aborted movement. Perhaps she meant to reach out, to turn the recorder off, so overwhelmed the woman looked. But the woman, weary alarm flitting across her mouth, stretches herself away with a snake-like precision. 

“No,” she mouths, inaudible, as if not to them.

“I'm going to continue.” Her eyes are fixed on the recording, with a strange intensity, pinprick. The recorder creates a fritz of static with the working line of her inflection. The torn, fluttering skin around her bruised mouth stretches and cracks further down her cheeks. Melanie’s knuckles whiten, and the woman’s face shatters. She says, deliberate, “I told her it was me, and that I was fine.” 

“... I told her I would be coming home as soon as I could find out where I was.” 

“‘Sasha?’ Rosie repeated, sounding like I hadn’t spoken well enough, ‘Is that who you’re looking for?’ The line was difficult to listen to, there was all this static in some places. But I could hear her, clear as crystal, in others. I said, ‘No- Rosie, this is Sasha.’” 

“She said, ‘Sasha is taking her lunch break. Can I ask you to call back?’ She said that.” 

“I thought, ‘That can’t be right.’”

“I said, ‘Rosie, it’s me.’ I felt sick to my stomach. I wondered... a little, if I was dead. It didn’t make sense to be dead, if Rosie was talking about a Sasha, but I don’t know- It- It stuck in my chest, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I started saying that- that if- if it was a joke, she should cut it out, if she was trying to be funny-” 

The woman grinds her teeth. Her lips press inwards, hard enough that when she relaxes them, they come away red-streaked. “... I must have scared her.” she says, her eyes dart to the door behind Tim. In a tone, like berating herself, “I was a little rude. I should apologize to her, is- is she...?” 

Melanie’s knuckles are white. There is a strain behind her eyes, and her forehead is damp with an enduring sweat. “She’s at the front desk.” she says, her usual waspishness turned quiet. 

“Yeah... I mean I was swearing pretty hard. She hung up.” the woman rakes a hand over her hair, her chest rose and fell. “Christ, I’m- I was very rude.” 

The woman plays circles into the meat of her thigh. She's nearly hushed, like her attention is drifting. “The man came in again.” 

“He seemed... very sympathetic. He gave me a napkin, it smelled like lavender. He said time was a very weird thing over there, where we were. “Sometimes you call someone you thought you know,” he said, “And it turns out they haven’t met you yet.” 

“I told him to give me some of whatever he was smoking. I mean I work at the Magnus Institute, but we don’t- time travel is just, not even supernatural- I knew however I got here was supernatural, but not time... bending... supernatural.” 

“Well.” 

“... Shows what I know.” 

“Carlos wasn’t walking around the Desert alone. “ 

“There was a... the Desert was an old place. If I was there, and Carlos was there, well... it made sense that there were other people... I say people. He was with these... giants.” She smiles helplessly, shoulders rolling, “I don’t know how else to describe them. They were taller, and larger, than even the tallest, largest man. They were very sandy, Carlos called them the Masked Army.” 

“The Masked Army had been in the Desert for longer. I asked if they built the ruins we were in, the sort of place that hadn’t been livable in decades... millennia. There used to be settlements, it was where we stayed. It had been in the middle of a renovation, and above us, watching, was the mountain... and the lighthouse.” 

“Carlos would walk in a straight line.” 

“He would try to walk until he could no longer see the mountain, but he would always be back in the camp.” 

“It would be a day... a week... it would be that night, if he set out in the morning, if the words night and morning meant anything in that place. But he would be back.” 

“Didn’t ruin his day.” 

“He was always just happy to get that data.” 

“I always thought it was odd, that Carlos was so unphased by the Desert. I don’t think I would’ve lasted, if I had been alone. The sand went on forever, there was no night, no day. Sometimes, when I fell asleep, it would be as if I saw the same, dark blue, white sand behind my eyelids. Until I just wanted to scratch them out.” 

“He said, ‘I am a scientist.’ He likes saying stuff like that, like, ‘I like science.’ Like it’s supposed to convince me of what a scientist he is- anyway, I shouldn’t make fun of him. He’s a good guy.” 

“I... would have done it, I would have tried to help him. He was mapping, and god knows it would’ve been faster if I’d gone the other way. If we end up in the same place every time, what does it matter?” 

“... But everywhere I went, the door I fell through, followed me.” 

“And I couldn’t bear to be alone with it.”