Archive of Our Own ^beta

Against all sane and rational advice—as well as Alice's—Sam is in the break room, staring at the dregs of his fourth coffee of the night. The ancient coffee pot sputters next to him as it brews his fifth, and maybe he's being optimistic, thinking it'll do anything different than the first four, but, well. Lena's been in a terrible mood all night, and Gwen and Alice are in rare form. If he wants to make it to 8 AM with this headache and without committing murder, he may very well need this sludgy placebo effect.

Why does this job need to be done at night, again? He's not sure he ever got a proper answer the last three times he asked. Maybe it's for the spooky ambience—he's not so sure hearing Chester's and Norris' voices crackling out of speakers as old as he is in broad daylight would have quite the same effect. But then again, is there a reason for him to be scared shitless several times a night? Is that part of the job? At this point, he wouldn't put it past Lena, and maybe it'd explain Colin's paranoia. If only Sam felt comfortable asking him about it.

The coffee maker clunks loudly next to him and then falls quiet, obviously proud of itself for completing its singular job. Sam sighs as he reaches for the powdered creamer in the upper cupboard; break's just about over.

It's when he's pouring the creamer that everything goes to hell.

There's a shock of light like a flash grenade, and a bang as loud as a gunshot from directly behind him. The creamer goes flying out of his hand as he spins around on instinct, trying to blink the stars away and pressing himself against the counter in a probably useless effort to protect himself. It's not like that extra three inches will save him, with the break room so cramped, and with the still-indecipherable source of light appearing directly between him and the door.

He fumbles blindly in the drawer to his left, looking for something to use as a weapon. He comes up with a crusty, dull bread knife—probably leftover from Teddy's farewell party. It'll do. Probably. At least, it makes him feel a little better about being trapped in here with—whatever this is—

The light is still painful to look at, but it looks like it might be coalescing into some sort of jagged, blinding crack in space, suspended improbably in the air up toward the ceiling. Sam blinks at it, rubs at his eyes with his free hand, and wishes he had brought his phone with him from his desk so he could call for help—

There's another noise from the gap, impossibly louder and impossible to identify—only that it's deafening, and maybe that it's human. Countless human voices layered over each other, maybe screaming and laughing and crying and talking, so much that it sounds like nothing at all. Sam's face screws up as he tries again to get away from it all, his grip tightening on the knife as the pressure in his head increases steadily.

Maybe—maybe Gwen heard all this? Alice's noise-canceling headphones have definitely filtered out worse; Sam has literally never seen Lena leave her office while on the clock; and Colin...well, Colin isn't any more sane than whatever's happening right now, so Sam's not entirely sure how much help he would be. But Gwen doesn't listen to music while she's filing, says it's too distracting—and she seems responsible, right? So maybe she'll come and help him, even if she doesn't really seem to like him all that much—

His head is pounding in time with the pulsing light filling the room, and something like radio static is layering over all of it, growing from a whisper to a roar in the span of a few seconds. Sam rubs at his eyes again, and looks up just in time to see the crack flare again in sync with a deafening crash, like something collapsing under a heavy weight. Then, the light extinguishes abruptly—like it'd never been there at all. The almost-human noise cuts off so sharply that he hears the after-effects of it for several moments after; the sunbursts behind his eyes linger even longer as he blinks quickly, trying desperately to focus. The break room still doesn't look like it did when he first walked in, and the white noise is only growing louder.

The flimsy card table crammed in the middle of the room is in pieces, and in the wreckage, there's someone lying on the ground. Two someones, and Sam feels his breath hitch as he brings the knife up protectively in front of his chest, as if they could attack him from all the way over there. (He's seen enough incident reports in the last month that tell him that isn't entirely out of the question. He tells himself that it's not paranoia if it's a rational fear response.)

The big guy nearer to him appears to have cushioned the fall for the person held to his chest; he rolls immediately to the other side, like he's laying the other out, so he's the only one Sam can see with any certainty. He's big— maybe even taller than Alice; his jacket is so dirty that Sam honestly can't tell what color it's supposed to be. His hair is unkempt and overgrown, a kind of washed-out red color Sam has never seen before.

But that's all the detail he gets before the guy is moving with purpose, sitting up with a grunt like he's in pain, glancing at the table around him and then immediately leaning over the other person, who's now flat on their back. His hands hover anxiously as he seems to say something to them, reluctant to touch; he's looking them up and down frantically, like he's just as scared as Sam is.

If he is saying something, the second person doesn't respond or even move; Sam can't hear a word of it over the static in his head. The guy grabs the other's shoulder, shouting something short, something like a name, and his face contorts when he gets no response.

He looks up and around, then, like he's just realized they teleported here. His gaze flickers over the remains of the table and the rickety chairs before it locks onto Sam. The guy's eyes widen to match his own, and he says something again, but Sam still can't hear him over the static. He only has a moment to wonder whether whatever just happened actually deafened him, before the guy on the ground shifts his grip to hold his friend’s shoulder more firmly, and shifts his weight slightly. That's when Sam finally sees the knife.

The knife hilt, specifically, because the business end of it is buried in the second person's chest. He recoils even more, stumbling back into the corner by the fridge to give him that extra couple feet of distance. Like he could do anything to protect himself against a guy that big. Like he has any chance at all of getting out of here alive, when the guy in front of him has obviously committed murder and would probably be willing enough to do it again—

(Where is Gwen? Where is everyone—?)

His breathing's picking up as he presses himself more firmly into the corner formed by the fridge and the wall, and the guy's face twists before he looks back down at the second person, his free hand fluttering before pressing on their chest near the wound, like he's trying to apply pressure, like he's trying to save them. He says something again, maybe that same short name as before. When they don't react, he looks up and around again, something wild and scared in his face; a thought hits Sam like a truck. It's a very real possibility that someone else wielded the knife; that the man crouched over his companion is family, or a friend, or a witness; that all he's seeing, here, is the bloody aftermath of a danger long since past.

Maybe something shifts on his face, or he lowers the knife a little, because the big guy locks onto him again with growing desperation and terror. Help me, he begs, and even if the sound itself is swallowed up by the static, the plea is clear in the way his mouth moves, in the tears on his cheeks. The pale hand on his friend’s chest is already stained liberally with blood. Please—

Sam's stomach twists in on itself, and his hands are shaking violently, and his heart is pounding in his throat and behind his eyes, above even the static. But as his vision finally starts to clear from the lingering starbursts, he can see the nasty wound on the side of the first guy's head, the blood matting down his hair and dripping steadily onto the shoulder of his jacket and the floor. The bloodstain on the other person's coat, growing larger by the second, starting to pool beneath them. The scrawny chest that doesn't appear to be moving in the slightest.

He's known for a long time that he cares about others too much for his own good. That he cares about others to the point that he can stop caring about himself.

That knowledge doesn't stop him from dropping the knife from nerveless fingers and bolting toward the drawer where they keep the towels and paper napkins.

He took a CPR class a year or two back, because it felt like an important thing to know, because he thought he'd never forgive himself if someone died in front of him and he couldn't even try to save them. But that class didn't cover what to do if someone isn't responsive because of a knife in their chest, and he knows enough not to pull it out but he can't do chest compressions when it's still in there—

He hates himself for hesitating with the whole stack of supplies, by the counter, but there's still a knife and a huge guy who could snap him in half if he pissed him off. But the guy's still fretting over his friend, both hands on their chest now. The tears are tracking down his cheeks thick and fast, and his shoulders are shaking like he's sobbing. Sam can hear the faintest sound now, around the still-oppressive static; it's words, mostly indistinct, but the tone sounds desperate, like begging, bargaining, like the world is falling apart under his feet—

Sam's across the room in three strides, uses his foot to shove aside the parts of the table in his way, and drops to his knees beside the person on the floor, on the opposite side from the big guy. He passes the towels over to press around the knife wound, and he takes them without even looking up, immediately packing them in around the hilt. But Sam keeps the thick wad of napkins in his hand, leaning forward to press it against the side of the man’s head.

He startles badly, flinching away before looking horrified, correcting to keep the pressure on his friend's chest. Once he’s settled he glares at Sam for the contact, and he swallows thickly. He still isn't sure whether the hearing loss is universal or just affecting him, so he decides to try, softly, trying to project how much he isn’t a threat—”You’re bleeding pretty bad too. I’ll hold these, all right?”

He can’t hear his own voice—can’t tell if the stranger heard him. He doesn’t react except to stare harder at him, his frown deepening significantly. Sam sighs, tries to steady his hands, and sets the wad of napkins carefully on the man’s side of the space, outside the perimeter of all the blood. Then, he leans forward and hesitantly puts his own thin hands on his friend’s chest. The guy hesitates, considering Sam for several moments before leaning back a bit, retracting one hand and using it to hold the napkins against his own wound.

Great, still inconclusive on hearing, but hopefully he won’t have two unconscious people on his hands now. Sam takes a deep breath and looks down at the person on the floor, trying to think around the static and the growing panic. The knife’s still there; it’s even bigger up close like this, and it’s still definitely embedded deep. The guy himself looks like death; his cheeks are gaunt under a short, scruffy beard, and his long hair’s in a haphazard ponytail that’s come mostly undone. His dark skin’s scarred to hell and back, and his clothes are just as grimy as the other man’s. All in all, not in good shape, even before the stab wound.

If Gwen hasn’t shown up yet, she probably won’t at all—either she doesn’t care, or she somehow didn’t hear any of this commotion to begin with. The towels under their hands are soaking up blood quicker than he expected, and Sam swallows as he adjusts his position to apply more pressure. “Do you have a phone?” he tries after another moment of swallowing down nausea. He’s never been good with blood. “We need to call 999—”

The guy grimaces, shakes his head, and gives the same answer when Sam asks about his friend. Sam grits his teeth, and squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, and glances toward the door again. That answers that question, at least, but it also leaves him with a situation that needs three hands, only has four to go around, and has an equally critical requirement to take his away to get help—

He’s taking deep breaths, trying to ignore the overwhelming smell of blood quickly filling the cramped room. Trying to stay calm. He’s survived plenty already—maybe nothing quite like this, but staving off a panic reaction is old hat at this point. He can have a breakdown later; right now, he has two strangers to keep alive.

He’s just decided to try yelling for one of the others when the chest under his hands jerks suddenly, like it’s expanding. Sam gets dizzy from how quickly he spins back around to stare at the guy on the ground, his eyes widening as he sees him breathing again.

Sure, he’s no doctor. He’s just a nobody who scraped by in uni with barely a Second in Psychology, earned in the hopes that he could make sense of the parts of his childhood that he keeps buried. But this guy’s been unresponsive on the floor for a few minutes now, with no rescue breaths and no compressions. He’s pretty sure you don’t just bounce back from that out of nowhere.

Then he looks back up at the man’s face, and his eyes are open. His eyes are green, but not in the normal way. Not even in the unnerving way Gwen’s eyes are green. They’re acidic green, sickly green, and Sam feels pinned to the spot even as the man stares through him like he’s seeing something else entirely. Maybe he is, with eyes that uncanny. With their sockets so sunken and bruised with lack of sleep, with the poorly-healed scars dotted across his face, Sam thinks he wouldn’t look out of place in a horror movie.

But he doesn’t have much time to dwell on it—the big guy, his left hand still under Sam’s, has lunged forward, crowding into Sam’s space and damaging his leverage. His own makeshift bandage drops to the floor, forgotten. “Jon!” he says, loud and desperate—or, at least, that’s what Sam thinks he says. His voice is audible, now, but so distorted by static and crackling that it’s hard to tell. His intent is clear regardless as his bloody right hand goes up to cradle Jon’s face. Sam mentally revises his assumption about their relationship as the stranger leans even closer, pressing their foreheads together for a moment as tears keep falling down his cheeks.

Jon’s eyes seem to shine brighter for a moment before his gaze drifts over, catches on his partner’s face, and then finally focuses. He says something that sounds like a question, but the words are lost to the static and the breathy tone of his voice. Sam grimaces, and presses harder into his chest. The towels are probably soaked through by now, with how heavily he was bleeding earlier. Odd, that they don’t quite feel that way, but Sam doesn’t have the stomach to check at the moment. He’s just trying not to think about it.

Instead, he considers whether any of the offices upstairs might have stocked break rooms he could raid for more towels. He doesn’t actually know whether any people work the day shift in this building, and the strangers’ jackets are way too dirty to be safe. He’ll offer up his own hoodie, if he has to, but he’s really quite fond of it, and he’d prefer to—

He startles as he glances around the room and realizes that both Jon and the other man are staring at him expectantly. Then he flushes as he realizes he must’ve missed a question between everything else, and tries for an apologetic smile that probably appears a little more insane. “Sorry, I, er, the static,” he says, eloquently, trying to gesture at the general situation with just his head and probably failing. “Can’t really hear you.”

The big guy’s brows rise fractionally as he turns from Sam to Jon, asking a question verbally though Sam can’t quite parse it. Jon looks surprised, too, and then he frowns, closing his eyes for a moment as if in concentration. After another few seconds of awkward silence, the static starts to recede. Eventually, Sam honestly can’t tell if it’s reached some new manageable baseline, or if his ears are just ringing with the memory of it.

“Is that—I hope that’s an improvement,” Jon says, his voice breathy and pained but clear as day. He still looks pretty out of it, and Sam starts.

“Uh, yeah,” he says, a drop of fear settling in his gut. He knew this was something weird and probably supernatural right out of the gate. That was—uncomfortable, but fine. He could deal with uncomfortable. But this might’ve just tipped into eldritch territory, which is entirely uncharted, for him.

Especially with the way Jon reaches up to Sam’s hands to try and lift them off the gaping knife wound in his chest. Sam has never claimed to be a strong guy, but Jon seems genuinely malnourished, and he doesn’t have any trouble keeping them where they need to be. “You almost bled out,” he argues, trying to be gentle about it, but he thinks things might be catching up to him. He feels shaky, and he has to swallow thickly before continuing, “We need to keep pressure on it until the ambulance can get here, right?”

Jon startles, looking between the two of them with lines of tension around his eyes. “An ambulance?” he repeats, something like exasperation in his voice. Though it’s still rough and deeply pained, Sam thinks his voice is starting to sound just slightly familiar. “Martin, did you really—”

“No, we didn’t,” ‘Martin’ says indignantly, though he does look down at Jon’s chest consideringly for a few seconds. Inexplicably, considering how desperate he was earlier, he carefully withdraws his hand from under Sam’s. “S’not like I’ve got a phone on me, right?”

“Right,” Jon agrees, and then oofs, a little, as Sam renews his efforts to apply pressure without Martin’s help. “Really, er—” he squints at Sam’s ID badge, but it’s been flipped around backwards in the commotion. Instead, he sighs. “—you, it’s…difficult to explain, but I promise, I’m all right. I would very much appreciate it if you let me sit up.”

Sam can’t help but roll his eyes; he thinks this guy might be almost as bull-headed as Alice is. “You literally have a giant knife sticking out of your chest right now,” he counters. “What I really need to do is find one of my coworkers, or my boss, and have them call 999—”

Jon sighs, loudly, and Sam cuts himself off with a scowl. He’s dealt with Alice’s moods for years; this possibly-eldritch stranger isn’t going to phase him. “The knife, objectively, killed me,” Jon says, in almost the exact tone Gwen gets when she thinks he or Alice is being particularly stupid. “And then I woke up regardless, after we arrived here. Take a look for yourself.”

He gestures to his chest, though he doesn’t bother trying to remove Sam’s hands again. Sam takes a deep breath, tells himself that it’s fine, and drags his eyes down. And…

Hm. There’s plenty of blood on the towels, definitely, but they’re not saturated like he was expecting. He lifts his grip very slightly, experimentally, and doesn’t feel the gush of blood he was expecting. Then he takes a closer look at the knife; it looks like it’s been pushed partway out of the injury, despite his and Martin’s best efforts to keep it in. He frowns at it, and Jon huffs a little laugh. The movement dislodges the knife further, and Sam hastily looks back up to stare between Jon and Martin, his hands stubbornly holding his chest down even if the pressure is loosening, incrementally.

“What the hell?” he demands, and Jon laughs again, settling himself a little more comfortably against the crummy linoleum. Martin shifts until Jon can rest his head on his lap, and Jon acquiesces easily, like it’s an old, practiced movement. Sam’s forced to sit back unless he wants to knock heads with Martin; he glances away, too, feeling like he’s intruding on something. As Jon gets comfortable, Sam’s gaze lands on Martin’s discarded, bloody napkins.

One glance back at him tells Sam that he does not have the same magical healing powers as his partner, and he snatches them up with one hand, determined not to be proven completely useless, here.

”You’re still bleeding,” he says, accidentally accusatory as he thrusts them out toward Martin, who takes them reluctantly. He shoots a guilty look down at Jon, who’s craned his neck against Sam’s grip in a way that cannot be comfortable to see what’s wrong. His face twists when he sees the bloody mess of the side of his head, but Martin waves him off.

“I’m fine,” he says dismissively, but he does press the paper back up against the wound. “It’s a head injury, of course it’s bleeding. Nothing to worry about.”

Jon’s frown grows deeper, and he stares intently at Martin for several moments longer before twisting back to face forward, resting his head back onto Martin’s thigh dramatically. The movement seems to be the last straw for the knife’s hold on his body, because it slips the rest of the way out, toppling handle-first over Sam’s knuckles before tipping the rest of the way to the floor with a clatter.

Jon stares up at Sam with one brow raised judgmentally, and Sam tentatively lessens the pressure again to find the wound by no means healed, but no longer gushing blood.

“Thank you,” Jon says, like a long-suffering parent, when he eventually pulls away entirely, sitting back and trying to calm his shaking hands. Martin rests his free hand, gently, on the crown of Jon’s head, and he leans into the touch like a cat. A bit of an anachronism, Sam thinks a little hysterically, when set next to Jon’s impatient demeanor. But then, the guy was just stabbed—he thinks he can probably forgive some clinginess, even if he is an ass.

“So…” Sam starts, after several long moments of silence that neither of them seem eager to break. He shifts back several inches to get out of their personal space, and winces at the smear of blood he leaves behind. “Do you know what the hell is going on?”

Martin stiffens for just a second, glancing down at Jon, whose still-eerie eyes have closed in the interim. He shakes his head minutely, so Martin swallows and looks back up at Sam. “Er,” he starts, uncertainly. “Honestly, not really?”

Sam almost reaches up to wipe at his eyes, only stopping himself at the last second when he remembers that his hands are literally dripping with blood. “I mean, you showed up at my boring civil-service desk job and turned the break room into a warzone. And now I’m the one who gets to deal with Lena about it. Obviously, something happened.”

Martin winces in sympathy, and shifts slightly so that Jon can lay his head more comfortably. “Er, I am sorry about that. We can help clean up, if she gives you any trouble.”

Sam plans to take him up on that, because he’s one hundred percent sure the janitors here won’t touch it. They don’t even take out the office trash more than once a week; god forbid they ever touch the floors. “Would you mind telling us where we are?” Martin continues after a moment. “We’re—a little disorientated.”

Yeah, Sam can imagine. “We’re in the basement of the OIAR building,” he says, and manages to laugh, a little, at the blank look Martin gives him in return. “Yeah, that’s what everyone says. It’s in Westminster, not too far from the Tate?”

“So, in London?” Martin asks, more cautiously than Sam would’ve expected, and he squints at him as he nods. “All right. And…” he hesitates, like he’s preparing to ask a difficult question; Sam’s stomach drops again in trepidation. “Do you know the date?”

Jon stiffens, very slightly, in his lap; Sam’s confusion just multiplies. “Uh, the twelfth, I think?” Sam says. Shit, is it, or is it the eleventh? The thirteenth? Switching his brain to night shift still hasn’t kicked in all the way; he’s finding it hard to keep track. He’ll double check on his phone, once he gets back to his desk.

Martin hesitates for a couple seconds, like he’s waiting for more, but Sam isn’t sure what he could want. He just waits for him to elaborate—reminding himself that wiping his hands on his pants would just make everything worse. “The twelfth of…?” Martin says eventually into the awkward silence, and Sam frowns at him.

“February?” he offers slowly, and then he sees Martin stiffen at the same time Jon’s shaky breath hitches. Damnit, every time Sam feels like he has the situation under control again, they go and do something ominous like that. What the hell—?

“Okay,” Martin says, except his voice is a little wobbly, this time. “And, er, just humor me one more time—”

There’s no way, Sam thinks hysterically, that this guy is going to ask the year.

Except that’s exactly what he does, and Sam can’t help the strangled, incredulous noise he makes before he even considers answering, because—what the hell?

“Just tell us, please,” Jon insists, and he sounds so, so tired that Sam almost feels bad about his reaction. He still can’t get all the disbelief out of his voice when he tells them that it’s 2024, and there’s that weird static rising in his ears again as Martin makes a weird, keening noise in the back of his throat; Jon’s hand has clamped, white-knuckled, around Martin’s.

They sit there for close to a minute as Sam watches them warily, wondering whether he should get them some water, or maybe some paper towels to clean up the blood on their faces and hands. Whether it’d be rude to ask the obvious question, when they have to be expecting it anyway. Absent-mindedly, he wipes his hands across the floor beside him, trying to get some of the blood off as it slowly coagulates.

“So…” Sam starts eventually, awkwardly, once it looks like neither of them will burst into a panic at the sound of someone else’s voice. “You know how weird that was, right?”

“Yes,” Jon says immediately, still with his eyes closed, still with a tight grip on Martin’s hand. “I imagine you have a lot of questions.”

Sam laughs, a little. “Where do you want me to start?” he asks, but Martin flinches at that. “Sorry,” he says hastily, cringing back, but Martin shrugs with one shoulder and shakes his head.

“No, we’ve just…we’ve had—a bit of a rough time,” he says, and then laughs at his own understatement, a little bit of hysteria behind it. “And I’m not sure how much of it you’ll believe, if I’m being honest.”

Sam stops, and blinks, and considers them for several seconds. “So just to recap,” he says slowly, “you two drop out of a crack in the universe that nearly burst my eardrums, that somehow none of my coworkers heard? One of you was actually, literally dead fifteen minutes ago, but you’re mostly fine now? And you very seriously asked me what year it is, just now?"

He laughs, and doesn’t really feel bad about it once he sees Martin’s self-deprecating little smile. “At this point, I don’t think there’s much that could surprise me.”

Martin hesitates, glancing down at Jon for a few seconds like he’s asking his opinion. Jon shrugs minutely, tilting his head, and Martin looks back up at Sam. “Right then,” Martin says resolutely. “So, how do you feel about the supernatural? Theoretically?”

Sam blinks. “I mean,” he starts, and he sees the tension rising in Jon’s shoulders, the sigh building up Martin’s throat. “Dealing with it is…literally my job? It’s not great, but it’s—fine?Pays the bills?”

Martin blinks right back at him; Jon’s actually opened his eyes again to stare at Sam in something like shock. “Your job?” Jon demands, sharp, and Sam nods warily. “I thought you said you worked for the government?”

“I do,” Sam insists. “It’s maybe the smallest, most under-funded department you’ve never heard of. There are five of us—maybe six, if we’re lucky and the new guy sticks around after today.” Sam still hasn’t met them, but Gwen told him not to get his hopes up.

Jon’s mouth opens. Then, it closes again, and Sam tilts his head as he watches them both process this. “What’s the acronym you said?” Martin says eventually. “O-something?”

“Office of Incident Assessment and Response. O-I-A-R,” Sam rattles off dutifully. “As far as I know, we just do the ‘assessing’ part, though. We’ve got an ancient DOS-based system that pulls weird, supernatural stories from the internet. We read them, classify them, and send them to a database no one has looked at in twenty years.”

Jon looks perturbed by this—even more than Sam was expecting, to be honest. “Right,” he says, sounding genuinely unbalanced, and it sounds odd in the voice that’s been confident and a bit cocky the whole time he’s been conscious. Sam still can’t shake the feeling like he’s heard it somewhere before. “Er, and these—these stories, you believe they’re real?”

“Some of them,” Sam acknowledges with a shrug, playing at casual. Tries his best to push down the memory of the Augustus case he listened to yesterday, one about World War II refugees getting lost in the middle of the ocean on their way to America. He’s not usually shaken up by those kinds of accounts, but it’s been a rough week. “Some of them are crap, obviously, but we’re not paid enough to judge them.”

Jon still has a little frown on his face, but after another moment, he nods sharply, glancing at Martin before focusing on Sam again. “In light of that, I’d like to ask some clarifying questions. If that’s all right.”

“Er—sure?” Sam offers, his brow creasing. “Isn’t that what you’ve been doing?”

But Jon just shakes his head, sits up stiffly, and squeezes his eyes shut for a second. “Did anything remarkable happen here, in October 2018?” he asks, the words coming out of his mouth carefully, like he’s modulating his voice. When he’s done speaking, he squints over at Sam’s face critically—whose brows wrinkle as he tries to remember. He was—working that call center job, at that point, he thinks? And he was burnt out enough by it that he didn’t really keep up with the news, but—

“Um,” he starts, unsure. “What kind of remarkable?”

“Right. That answers that question,” Jon says briskly, except Sam feels like it really doesn’t.

“Er—”

“Now, does the term The Magnus Institute mean anything to you?”

Sam stiffens on reflex, his hands flinching into fists, and Jon picks up on it. His frown deepens as he leans forward, his eyes flashing. “Jon,” Martin starts, quietly, but Jon shakes his head.

“What do you—”

”Jon,” Martin says, more urgently, and yanks a little too hard on his arm to pull him further back, slapping his other hand over his mouth. Sam’s surprised by the roughness with which he handles the motion, after everything else he’s seen so far; he’s confused about the crescendoing static in the room, the extra sheen to Jon's eyes; he’s horrified by the fact that even though Jon never finished his question, he feels the answer bubbling at the back of his throat anyway, ready to be ripped out of him.

He swallows the words down with some difficulty, freshly wary as he unsubtly moves several inches back on the floor. He eyes the bread knife still laying nearby, wondering if it’d be any help if they tried to attack him.

“What he means to say,” Martin says sharply, loudly, over Jon’s muffled swearing, “is that if you felt comfortable telling us more, it would help us quite a bit in figuring out where we are.”

Sam hesitates for several moments longer, still fighting with something like nausea in his gut as he presses a mostly-clean forearm momentarily to his mouth. “Right,” Jon agrees softly, rubbing at his face. He presses fingers into his eyes harshly, and doesn't meet Sam’s gaze when he eventually drops his hand. “Right.”

It’s probably the adrenaline rush, the hyper-focus, that makes his eyes all but glow in the shitty, buzzing lights. It’s probably the lingering starbursts that make him look like there might be more than two of those glowing eyes on his face. Right?

Sam takes another breath, and considers his options. Maybe, some incomplete information would be enough to satisfy them. “It was a research facility up in Manchester,” he says, and Martin’s brows crease, just a little. “Burned down around the turn of the millennium, been abandoned ever since. We’ve had a few incident reports that mention it.”

Neither of them say anything for several seconds; Jon’s back to rubbing vigorously at his face, and Martin’s still got a tight grip around his shoulders, holding him close against his side. If nothing else, Sam comforts himself with the reasonable certainty that Jon could never break out of that grip on his own.

“All right,” Martin says at length, rubbing at his face for a second in a way that just spreads the grime and blood around. “Thank you, that’s—unexpected, but helpful. Probably helpful.”

“Okay,” Sam says, still cautious, but willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. They’ve obviously been through hell—not just today, even, based on their general states—and Jon was literally dead not all that long ago. And it’s not like anything actually bad happened, right?

“I’m curious about the incident reports you review,” Jon says, choosing his words very carefully, and Sam notes with some confusion how he takes care not to phrase it as a question. “If you’re willing to give us more information on them.”

“I mean…what kind of information?” he asks, honestly at a loss. “They’re—they’re stories of supernatural things happening all over the world. Anything digitized and on the internet is fair game—we get emails, forum strings, even transcripts of video calls sometimes.”

Jon’s brows furrow at digitized, but he obviously shakes it off in favor of other points of interest. “I’ve seen archives of similar information before,” he says after several more seconds of thought, as if he’s figuring out how to phrase it without making it a question. This is just bizarre. “Those tended to be—sorted, organized, by topic, you could say. There were some common threads between different statements—being buried alive, reanimation of the dead, the uncanny valley, et cetera.”

Did this guy seriously just say “et cetera” out loud? Sam has to choke down a laugh, and doesn’t even really feel bad about it when he sees Martin try to (poorly) hide a fond little smile behind his free hand. Jon scowls at him before turning his attention back to Sam, tilting his head meaningfully like he was asking a question without actually asking it.

Sam was going to be asking about that himself, considering he was starting to wonder whether this relatively benign encounter would make its way into its own incident report. “I’ve asked about categories, trying to make sense of them,” he says with a shrug, rolling his eyes. “Everyone’s very insistent that I’m looking too much into it and wasting my time. So, in the meantime, we’re just working with a filing system that makes no sense, running on a glorified DOS system almost as old as I am.”

Martin snorts, and glances over at his partner. “Can’t be worse than Jon’s filing system,” he says, and pokes him affectionately in the cheek. Jon lets out a noise of singular offense, sitting up straighter with a wince to argue the point, when the break room door creaks open behind them.

All three of them snap to attention. All traces of humor gone, Martin quickly puts himself further between Jon and the door, like he’s going to protect him from whoever walks in. Sam considers his current state, the way he’s absolutely covered in blood, and, nonsensically, has just enough time to mourn his favorite pair of work pants before Alice is slamming the door wide, making to stride into the break room.

Her greeting to Sam visibly dies on her tongue as she takes him in, along with the two strangers, the smashed card table, and the truly unfortunate amount of blood splattered across the floor. She freezes mid-stride, her face going chalky; one hand grabs for the doorframe in a steel grip as she slowly puts her foot back down behind her.

“Sam,” she starts, her voice frighteningly blank and measured as she keeps her gaze locked on Martin and Jon. “Wanna fill me in on what’s going on, here?”

“Hi, Alice!” he starts with, trying to sound as casual as possible. “First off, blood’s not mine, I’m fine.” He can see the way she’s continuing to tense, like she’s ready to pounce at the others for hurting him, and he would really like the situation to de-escalate as soon as possible.

“Oh, yeah, because that makes everything better,” she says, rolling her eyes. Still, he thinks he can see a bit of the tension leaving her shoulders, and there’s a hint of levity in her voice as she continues, “Fact is, someone obviously bled out in here, and you really don’t want to know how much paperwork goes into an on-site death. Trust me. So, please give me an explanation that doesn’t involve…all of that.” She waves her free hand vaguely, and squints at the two strangers some more.

“Uh,” Sam starts, stutters, and glances toward them as well. Martin gives him a look that very clearly says “your job, your problem, what do you expect me to do about it?” so he sighs, looks back up at Alice, and levers himself to his feet carefully without getting more blood on his pants.

“I know you tell me to leave work at the door and not to think about the spooky stuff,” he says as he makes his way over to the sink to start scrubbing his hands. He thinks he sees Jon twitch at the phrasing, and decides to double down. Petty? Maybe, but he’s had a hell of a time tonight, and it’s entirely his fault. “Think the spooky stuff might’ve come to meet us, instead.”

“What?” she asks sharply, looking more closely at Jon and Martin, and Sam sighs.

“The skinny guy was dead less than half an hour ago, when they both fell through a spooky rift in the ceiling. He got stabbed,” he says, matter-of-fact, and as he glances over, he can see Alice blanch as she catches sight of the blood-caked knife lying, abandoned, somewhere near Jon’s knee. “But then he got better, so…maybe we don’t have to do the paperwork?”

“What do you mean, he got—”

“Like I said,” he says, and then looks back at the sink. He’s known that getting blood off your hands is a difficult process, colloquially, but in practice it’s even worse than he feared. “They also asked me what year it is, so…have you ever seen an incident report about time travel?”

Jon makes a similarly affronted noise to earlier. Apparently he’s properly gotten over the wariness, and probably also the collapsed lung, because he takes a deep breath, exactly like Alice does before she launches into a lecture. “It’s certainly not time travel,” he says, and Sam can hear the eye-roll and the air-quotes without even turning around. “Inter-dimensional travel at best—”

“Same difference,” Martin mutters under his breath, and Sam is inclined to agree, but Jon—well, sure enough, he’s on a roll, apparently, because he talks over Martin while barely slowing down. Sam tunes him out for a few moments, like he often does to Alice, and starts scraping at his fingernails. Oh, god, this is going to take forever.

Alice is uncharacteristically quiet for longer than he expected, and when he glances over again, she’s staring at Jon with an odd look on her face. But then, that could easily be chalked up to her coming around to the idea that she’s looking at a reanimated corpse. Sam’s way past that at this point. “Right,” Alice says sharply, and Martin and Jon turn back from their bickering like they forgot she was still standing there. She starts ticking off on her fingers: “None of this answers the questions of who you people are, why you look like you walked straight out of an apocalypse movie, why you’ve been holding Sam hostage in here for half an hour, or—”

“We aren’t holding him hostage!” Jon says indignantly, sitting up straight enough that he then has to flinch down around his gaping chest wound again.

“—or how you’re still alive, buster,” she finishes, pointing an accusing finger down at him. Jon seems honestly at a loss for words for a second, apparently wholly unprepared for that sort of name-calling from someone he met three minutes ago. Evidently, he decides to answer one of her other questions entirely.

“We fell through a dimensional rift—a crack within the fabric of our universe, and landed here in yours—”

Martin groans. “—oh don’t start with this again—”

“—I’m sorry that I’m ’pedantically splitting hairs about the very nature of our existence in this universe,’ Martin, but if I—”

Sam blinks, hard, as something trips that sense of deja vu again. The way Jon said that, sounding even more stuffy and academic than before, sounds incredibly familiar in a way that’s almost within his grasp. Like he heard it not three hours ago, toward the start of his shift. Like he hears it several times a week, droning at him from a computer speaker about the latest horror story the web has to offer—

“Wait a second,” Alice says, her voice pitching up significantly, and from the wide grin growing on her face, she’s come to the same conclusion. Jon and Martin look up toward her skeptically. “Are you Chester?”

Sam’s so caught up in the realization that for several moments, he takes Jon’s baffled expression to mean that he’s been caught out. “I beg your pardon?” Jon asks after several seconds, sounding incredibly offended. “My name is—”

“You are!” she cuts him off, sounding even more delighted, and the wary look on her face is completely gone now as her eyes light up. “Oh, just wait until I tell Gwen—”

Jon looks—honestly at a loss, and it’s such an odd look on his face that Sam can’t help but laugh. “Wait, sorry,” Martin says with an incredulous little laugh, his own voice pitching up in what’s probably nerves, or maybe just concern that Alice has lost her mind. “Have we met?”

“Oh, have we,” Alice says, something wicked on her face as she whips out her phone. And then she pauses, her finger over Gwen’s contact info, before she looks at Martin in a new light. “Wait, you—say something else.”

“Er,” Martin replies, unhelpfully, but Sam thinks he sees where Alice is going with this. He’s honestly just surprised he didn’t notice earlier. Must’ve been all the blood and the static.

“Good lord, do we have doppelgangers in this universe?” Jon asks, sounding honestly distressed. Sounding like this, rather than the stab wound or the universe-hopping, is the worst news he’s heard all day. “I thought—”

“Hey, Gwen,” Alice is saying into her phone, her voice shaking with excitement. “Gweeeen. Gweeeendolyn Boooouchard. You need to come to the break room right now, because I’m about to blow your entire mind.”

Jon and Martin—Chester and Norris?—both twitch, violently, at Gwen’s name, but Sam hardly notices because he can hear Gwen’s sharp voice coming from Alice’s phone speaker. “Our dear coworker Samama has uncovered definitive evidence that Chester and Norris are real,” Alice cuts her off, her voice going conspiratorial as her grin just grows wider. Martin makes a horribly affronted noise as Jon tries and fails to stifle a surprised laugh into one hand. “But, well, if you’re afraid to get your fancy heels dirty…”

The call appears to end abruptly, and Alice brings her phone back down to grin over at Sam. “She’ll be here in a second,” she promises, and somehow, Sam is inclined to believe her.

“Norris?” Martin asks her incredulously, like the very idea offends him, and Jon makes an equally nonplussed noise next to him.

”Chester?” he asks, even louder. Maybe it’s not quite the right reaction, but Sam really can’t bring himself to care as he breaks into a fresh round of laughter.

Honestly, he’s thought Chester is a ridiculous name the entire time, but if he had to pick someone to give it to, it’d probably be this scruffy, scrawny, post-apocalyptic academic type. Alice really has a knack for this.

“Alice, I swear, if you pulled me away from my work for—”

Gwen appears in the corridor behind Alice, a full foot shorter than her that her fancy heels barely put a dent in. She cuts herself off abruptly as she looks around Alice’s shoulder and sees…the everything about the break room, but she doesn’t react beyond raising her eyebrows significantly toward her hairline.

“I won’t be the one to clean that up,” she says primly, crossing her arms, and Alice rolls her eyes dramatically.

“Oh, don’t worry, we wouldn’t want you to get your designer pant suit dirty—”

“For the last time—”

“Pardon, did she say your surname is Bouchard?” Jon asks loudly, his voice incredibly tense, and Gwen actually looks taken aback for a moment as she focuses on him again. She looks him up and down before apparently finding him lacking; she tches and rolls her eyes.

“Alice, whatever joke you think you’re playing, finding impersonators of the TTS voices is really beyond the pale. Especially when you sneak them into the building after hours and make a mess of the break room—”

“Ah, no,” Sam says hastily, eager to correct her. “I was in here making coffee, and they literally dropped out of a tear in the universe. It was up there.” He points helpfully, and everyone looks up at the blank ceiling for a second. There’s an old water stain there, but not much else. Anymore, at least.

Gwen rolls her eyes, already starting to turn away. “Well, if there’s nothing else, I should really be—”

”Wait,” Jon says, getting unsteadily to his feet. Maybe it’s the lack of new caffeine in Sam’s system, or maybe his voice is starting to crackle again. Gwen freezes mid-stride, to the point where she almost falls over before regaining her balance. Martin glances at him with a little frown, but doesn’t stop him this time. Huh.

“What?” Gwen snaps, obviously trying to hide how startled she is. “Look, whatever Alice told you—”

“Your name is Gwendolyn Bouchard?” Jon asks, and his voice is breaking up again, the same way it did when he tried to ask Sam about the Institute. This time, Sam isn't quite able to convince himself that it's a trick of the light, that glowing eye-shaped slits are appearing along Jon’s cheekbones and browline.

Gwen looks unnerved, but she plants her feet, lifts her chin, and stares defiantly up at him. “Yes,” she says stiffly, like the word was pulled out of her throat by a wire, and Jon’s eyes narrow.

”Do you know an Elias Bouchard?” he presses, and Gwen gags, for a moment, like she’s trying to keep the answer from rising and coming out of her mouth.

“Uncle Elias is a weed-smoking idiot who has never held down a job a day in his life,” she says eventually, the words garbled with resistance and fury. “I haven’t seen him since I was a child.”

Jon stares at her for several seconds longer, and then he finally blinks. Gwen sags like her strings have been cut, and Sam sees her shoot Jon a half-terrified look before she’s booking it back down the hallway.

“O…kay,” Alice says after several seconds longer, looking horrified and a little impressed as she watches Gwen go. “Ominous and scary, Chester, thanks for that! Really living up to your brand.”

“Oh, for god’s sake—”

Sam startles as Colin appears behind Alice, the dark circles around his eyes more pronounced than normal as he shoulders past her into the room. Jon cuts himself off as he watches him with wide eyes, but Colin doesn’t acknowledge any of them, even though the extra eyes on Jon’s face are still in the process of closing. He steps right through the pool of blood clotting on the ground, and picks up the mug Sam made a whole lifetime ago to sniff it experimentally. It’s still sort of warm, even if he inadvertently poured half a cup of creamer in it, and he nods appreciatively at a still-quite-bloody Sam. “Cheers for this, mate,” he says, his voice croaky, and then he also picks up the carafe and lets himself right back out, cradling them both like they're his firstborn.

“Er,” Martin says, at length, and Alice shakes her head.

“He’s just like that,” she assures him. “He’s our IT guy.”

“Oh,” Martin says, with feeling. Sam gets the sneaking suspicion that he’s worked in IT, too. He must’ve gotten out before he turned into a husk like Colin; good for him.

“So…” Alice starts meaningfully. Sam can hear Jon’s sigh from all the way over here. “You don’t happen to have a third guy up your sleeve, do you? Someone who might sound like he’s named Augustus? Someone who, maybe, sounds like a sad, pathetic, queerphobic white guy from the nineteenth century?”

Jon and Martin both blink at her for several seconds. “What’s your deal with the names, anyway?” Martin asks, crossing his arms over his chest and not seeming to care one bit that he’s getting even more of Jon’s blood all over his jacket. “We literally got here half an hour ago—we’ve never met you before.”

“Au contraire, my good Norris!” she says dramatically. Martin twitches; Jon tries, poorly, to hide a smile as he carefully leans against the wall. “I’ve been meeting you both for over a year, through our very good mutual friend, Freddy!”

Martin takes a very deep breath—the same kind Gwen does when Alice is particularly trying her patience. “Okay, here,” Sam says hastily, because after everything else tonight, he’s not interested in breaking up a fistfight between two people who tower over him. “It’ll be easier to show you. If you come back to the office, one is bound to show up eventually—I’m probably about due.”

“One of what?” Jon asks warily, staying exactly where he is.

“The program I was telling you about, right?” Sam says. “That pulls incident reports from the internet? Usually they’re text files. But some of them get read out by a TTS program, for some reason. And, well…”

He trails off as he looks down and realizes that if he doesn’t want to stain his already-yellow keyboard, he’s going to need to put some more work into his hands, first. “And?” Jon prompts after a couple seconds, sounding impatient; Alice huffs, picking up his train of thought easily.

“Two of those spooky ghost-whisperers sound exactly like you guys.”

Both their faces crumple in skepticism—though, apparently, for different reasons. Martin says “That doesn’t make any sense—” at the same time that Jon says “And you decided to give them names—?”, and Sam turns pointedly back toward the sink as Alice laughs at them both.

“Don’t worry about it!” she reassures them, in exactly the tone of voice that makes Sam worry about things very much, thank you. “I’m sure you’ll fit right in, here!”

---

An hour later, Gwen’s procured some high-end noise-canceling headphones from thin air, and she’s pointedly ignoring the rest of them as they linger around the bullpen. Alice has been speed-reading through cases in the hopes that she gets a talker to show up, while Jon and Martin have made themselves (relatively) comfortable on a particularly crummy corner of the linoleum for now. “You might actually be right, Sam,” Martin says with interest, peering over his shoulder at the binder he’s flipping through distractedly. He sounds thoroughly impressed. “This is a worse filing system than Jon’s.”

“I told you,” Sam mutters, flipping back a few dozen pages to double-check whether whales-comma-music is an 8-M or an 8-N. “It makes no sense at all.”

“This doesn’t even look sorted by Entity,” Martin says conversationally over his shoulder to Jon, who makes a face, as if that statement means anything at all. “I think whoever put this together might’ve just been being difficult on purpose.”

“Maybe we found alternate-universe Gertrude,” Jon mutters, and Martin laughs at him, opening his mouth to reply.

Then, several things happen at once.

“Good evening, everyone,” Lena says loudly, and Sam sits straight again, looking over as she leads an unfamiliar woman into the office. “And…people who are not my employees.”

“Hello!” Martin says with a bright smile and a little wave of his still-bloody hand. Lena doesn’t at all acknowledge the greeting, but he doesn’t seem perturbed by it in the slightest.

Alice’s computer, which she inexplicably keeps at full volume at all times, starts reading out a Chester incident report, and Jon’s digitized voice starts painstakingly reading out some Boomer’s email address. All twelve numbers attached at the back end of it. Jon and Martin both startle, badly, and turn from Lena to stare at the computer incredulously. Jon looks incredibly disturbed.

“I do not sound like—”

The woman behind Lena—presumably, the new guy—stares at Jon and Martin, looking amazed. The little donut that she held in her hand falls, all but forgotten, to the floor; instead, she uses that hand to point at them accusingly. ”You—!”

And Colin stalks in from behind her, his face beet-red as he marches right up to Jon. He’s only a couple inches taller than him, and Jon is a probably-eldritch monster who can control people with his brain, but Colin is unphased. IT managers, apparently, have seen far worse.

”How are you breaking all the cameras?” he demands of Jon, who looks sufficiently cowed, leaning away from him slightly.

“Er, I don’t—”

“And how are you blocking recordings of your voice?” he continues, looming further. Jon finally takes a full step back, raising his hands placatingly.

“Hey, no need for that,” Martin says loudly, stepping back around Sam’s cubicle to get between them, but Colin’s manic gaze just snaps to him instead.

“And you!” he says, his voice pitching up, jabbing a finger straight into his chest. “You don’t appear on the cameras at all!”

Martin blinks at him, eventually crossing his arms and standing taller in front of Jon. “I don’t see why you need to be so aggressive about it,” he says, tilting his head mildly.

Colin blinks a few times, too. “No, no,” he says hastily, and then he grabs for Martin’s bicep with what looks like a crushing grip, staring harder up into his eyes. ”I just need you to teach me how to do it, too.”

Sam ran out of the energy needed to unpack that hours ago. He’s not sure he’s ever had that much energy in his life. So he turns back around to the rest of the room, where Alice has finally paused Chester’s retelling of clowns haunting a church organ, and Gwen still hasn’t removed her headphones, and Lena looks out over all of them, her face unreadable.

“Sam, I expect you to have the break room clean by start of shift tomorrow. However, the department will pay for a new table,” she opens with. Like that's any consolation, and he cringes back into his seat, rubbing at his eyes. Then, she continues to the woman next to her: “Celia, these are your new coworkers.”

(Presumably) Celia looks incredulous. “Even those two in the back—?”

“No,” Lena says immediately. “They’re…an unexpected variable. I’m sure they won’t be a problem much longer.” Ominous, great! Thanks. Lena turns on her heel and heads straight back into her office without another word.

“…Right,” Celia says, uncertainly, before turning back to the others with a smile. “Um, well, hi, I guess!”

“Hello!” Alice says brightly with a wave of her own. “Hope you don’t mind blood! Right now, that’s the only thing we’ve got in the kitchen!”

Celia’s gaze flickers from Alice and Sam, to Gwen, to Jon and Martin, who just now seem to be noticing her presence. “Oh, don’t worry,” she says with a little laugh. She crouches down to pick up her forgotten little donut, and pops it into her mouth. “I don’t scare easily anymore.”