Chapter Text
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Jane Prentiss is gone.
Gone? No, that can’t be. There was a sighting just last week. I know she’s left Archway, but that doesn’t mean she’s gone. People don’t just vanish.
Not that sort of gone.
You’re wrong. You’re lying.
Michael said you would Lie.
You’ve spoken to Michael?
No more than you have. Have you ever even met him? Would you kill him, too?
I know someone who would. I knew someone who did.
Gertrude… made a great many mistakes in her time as Archivist, yes.
A monster by any other name.
I was almost Archivist, wasn’t I?
There’s no way to know for certain, but I think there was a chance it could have been you.
Say it had been me. Or say I’m still this, but no one feared dying unforgiven. Would we be having this conversation? Is there a pistol under the table? Are you just here to do it for them?
My hands are quite empty. Why don’t you look and see for yourself? I’ve got nothing to hide.
They’re cowards, calling in the cavalry. They can have an army behind them, inside them, but they want to take mine? What makes it so easy when it’s me?
None of this is easy. It’s been allowed to persist this long because it’s anything but. For some, it’s harder than dying. Can you consider what that means for just a moment?
Is it because they can talk like people? Masquerade as one you know? It’s all masks.
We can’t do that anymore.
Isn’t that the only difference? They can hide, and I can’t. You can’t always see it when they change.
You don’t care about that, though. You’re the knife in their pocket, you— You don’t care about monsters unless they help you catch a monster you hate more.
You’re the only one who keeps saying that word. Have I called you a monster?
Your face did. Your eyes.
You’re doing it right now.
You haven’t looked at me since we sat down. You’ve been staring at the clock this whole time, tapping your finger with the seconds.
Not the seconds. The song.
You’ve never heard music like this.
There’s a moth in your hair.
I’m not surprised he called you. He really looks up to you, him and Jon. Why is that? You’d step on a dandelion before a rosebud, too. Just like everyone else.
You’re just like everybody else.
I’m here to help you, Sasha. That’s all anyone here has ever wanted to do.
Don’t lie. There’s only one person who’s ever tried to help me.
Tim, isn’t it? He’s your best friend.
He’s my family. My family. Mine, not theirs.
They thought I wouldn’t notice.
Notice what?
I heard them. Arguing about me, I heard it. I hear it when people don’t want me.
I waited for them to come clean on their own. They lied to me for days.
I think they were just waiting for me to come.
So it’s your fault.
Perhaps it is. I’m sorry it took me so long to get here.
Don’t apologize to me. I said I don’t want your help.
Don’t you? Don’t you want someone to help you? Isn’t that why you agreed to meet me?
I want to find Jane.
And then what?
And then what, Sasha?
You were right.
About?
They want to make me alone. I don’t want to be alone.
Poor griefkeeper, slighted and torn. You already know what will fix it. Don’t you?
It’ll hurt Tim.
You’re only protecting him from other harm. Surely, any true friend will understand. Any real family, bloodsharing or elseways.
You could share blood, if you’re willing to spill it.
Are you, then?
Do you know how?
Stop talking. Where does this door let out?
Michael might recall something, if he wasn’t so mistaken… Under the floorboards, where the Archivist sat. Yes, there might have been something hidden there.
What is it?
I did just say he was mistaken. It could be nothing. What do I know?
You’re lying, too.
Were you expecting another little winged thing to whisper sin or justice in your ear? Oh, no. There is no room left for me on your shoulder.
But you know as well as Michael does that the Archivist will always have a secret. Somewhere in plain sight, just under your feet, always. Haven’t they proven that? You don’t need me to tell you thrice. Wouldn’t it be nice to be one step ahead?
Where does this door let out?
Open it and see.
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Tim slams the car door getting back inside. He seethes through an impatient count to ten, clutching the wheel with both hands. The vehicle gently rocks as Gerard settles back into the passenger seat.
“Jon says no sign at her flat, either.” Gerard taps out a text message that Tim doesn’t try to read over the center console. He sets the phone on his lap to tighten his ponytail before another message comes in. “We could send them in a different direction on their own, or meet somewhere. Up to you.”
“Great,” Tim sneers. “Now I get to choose.”
He wanted to tell Sasha about everything on that tape the minute they crawled back out of the tunnels, but no. The decision to wait the weekend for Dekker to make it here personally was two to one. Three to one, Tim supposes, but he still isn’t sure how to count the votes now.
He’s never kept a secret from Sasha this long when it actually concerned her. It’s not the same as taking three weeks to tell her that he was getting so caught up in Gerry because he was waiting to see if it was real enough to be good news. This time, he wanted to run to her just as fast as he did on his first day down in the Archives, but—
But what? Why didn’t he? He should have.
“I don’t know,” he finally says to Gerard’s expectant silence. “I can’t think of where else she might’ve gone off to. Does mapping realistic distance from the safehouse even matter when we have no idea how she even got out of the room?”
He’d sat on the couch with Jon and Gerry while Dekker asked Sasha to another part of the safehouse for a chat. She was stiff about it, but waved him down when he tried to tag along. Dekker stepped out to whisper something to Gerry, only to turn back around and realize that she was gone.
How? How could she do that? What would she have to be capable of now in order to even make it possible? There are no other doors out of that part of the house. No window that would have opened without a sound.
Everything Tim thought he knew about her might have ceased to matter if she didn’t go to his house when she was in trouble. It’s not like she could go to her parents, or her brother. Isn’t that where it started? And he wasn’t there. As of tonight, Sasha might as well be a different person that he’s never met before.
“The Institute,” Gerard decides. “Next logical step, if she didn’t go home.”
Tim glowers at his front door through the windshield and puts the car in drive.
It was Gerry this morning, when they went to talk to the Cave Rescue Organisation about Laura Popham’s camera. They managed the quicker train to Yorkshire from King’s Cross and made it there before noon, back again by the time Dekker called to say he’d let himself into the safehouse. Tim didn’t want to leave London while Sasha was so high-risk, but there was some foundation to Jon’s hypothesis that the further he and Gerry got from her, the easier it might be to keep her calm until help arrived.
She doesn’t fight with Jon. She doesn’t glare at him, or snap at him, and it makes Tim feel like a real prat now that he’s realized he doesn’t like it.
Tim thought he was well past being a jealous friend. The last time he can remember doubt getting the best of him like this was when Sasha got distracted dating that snobby Katrina in lower sixth. He worked through that lying facedown on Jordan’s bedroom floor being told he was an idiot, not to worry, they were all friends and Katrina did help him with his maths homework whenever he needed it, so he shouldn’t be fabricating a bullshit competition with her. He worked through it by remembering how happy he was for Sasha that she was getting to be in a gay relationship with another girl for the first time, and how it didn’t reflect on their friendship if she split up her time between people who loved her just as much.
It shouldn’t even have to be the same deal now that they’re grown and it’s not just insecurity, but fear of something bigger. So why does he feel the same twisting in the chest? Like it’s petty to care, like speaking up about this would have been just as wrong as blaming her back then?
Recognizing himself as an easy target feels like a terminal diagnosis.
Tim didn’t want to leave London, but lately, everything he’s wanted has only made everything worse.
Laura came into the Archives to give her statement just after lunch, and Gerry took her to the conference room down the hall. When he came back, his hair was tied up in a ponytail. He took it down again that evening, pale with all his awareness. Tim had managed to accrue more information about Dissociative Identity Disorder in forty-five minutes of Googling than Gerry apparently had while living with it this entire time, and he supposes that makes all the sense in the world, come to think of it. Looking back.
Between Gerard and Sasha, Tim couldn’t choose what to be worried about this morning and so he focused on the case. Missing sister, presumed dead. Maybe drowned in the dark, maybe not. Gerard had as many suspicions about Alena as he did Laura herself, but listening to the copy of the footage they got from the CRO on the way back just made Tim disable his hearing aids to shut it out.
Take her, not me.
“We should have called Dekker sooner,” he finally says, halfway back to Chelsea.
Gerard looks at him without turning his head. “Would you have found it any easier to accept?”
Tim won’t hand over the satisfaction of saying ‘no.’ He turns a rough corner and brakes hard, caught by a changing light at the last second. Gerard’s hand snaps up to the grab handle above the window with a sharp inhale. Slow breath out. Gerry doesn’t get jumpy in the car.
“This would have happened anyway.” Gerard eases his arms back onto his lap like he’d never jolted at all. “Only then we wouldn’t have a real adult around.”
“We’re real adults.”
“Not right now, we’re not.”
No energy to spend on resentment. “We shouldn’t have let it get this bad. How— How bad even is it, what does any of this mean?”
Gerard stares ahead and mulls it over. “We’ll have to see when we find her. I don’t think it’s safe to share theories.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because it’ll only rile you up. You already shoot down everything that doesn’t sound like it’ll end with ‘close our eyes and hope she gets over it.’ You’re afraid that if we say something you don’t like, you won’t have the power to contest it because you’re inexperienced.”
The scoff burns in Tim’s throat. “And could that not have been remedied by, I don’t know, telling me more?”
“No, I don’t think it could have.” Gerard pulls his ring splints off one by one and drops them into the cupholder. Rubs at a weathered old welt between his knuckles. “It’s the sort of thing you have to live through. Stories don’t cut it.”
“You forget I’ve lived through some of this by now, too. I went to Toulouse, I helped set that bloody house on fire.” I smelled it burning, I still taste it sometimes, I remember.
“Then you shouldn’t want me to make graphic suggestions.”
“I want you to be honest with me!” Tim would pull over on the shoulder somewhere to yell at him proper if he could afford to stop. “Or does that stop meaning anything when Gerry’s not around?”
Gerard finally turns his head. “Do not waste your breath lashing out at me. I know you’re scared.”
“Damn right, I’m scared!” Tim laughs. “What else have you left me?”
Gerard swallows and looks back out the window. “I don’t think she’s the same as Maçon. I don’t think she’s the same as Prentiss.”
“What do you think? All you’ve told me is what you don’t want to do, what you don’t think she is, and that doesn’t help me. It doesn’t help Sasha.”
“I think—” Hesitation. “Neither of us even know what you’re looking for. You want me to tell you we’re not going to kill her, and I’ve said that already. I don’t even know if it’ll be true by the end of whatever this is, but I want it to be, and so I’m going to try.”
“Going to try what?”
“I don’t know!” The first time he’s snapped, and it’s still so quiet. It’s not good enough.
“Well, why don’t you know! Aren’t you supposed to be the guy with the plans? Haven’t you been pulling the strings this entire time, isn’t that your whole ‘thing?’”
Gerard looks insulted. “Is that what you think I am?”
Regret is a cold knife. Tim dries his palms on the side of his trousers. “You made it sound like you were coming forward because you knew what to do next.”
“Yeah, call Dekker. That was what to do next.”
“And what if he decides that it’s a lost cause? That she— That we need to—”
He could tackle an old guy if he had to. It wouldn’t feel right, but he could probably do it. If he had to.
“Then he’ll suggest it, and we’ll decide then if he’s right.”
Tim shakes his head. “That’s leaving a lot to chance. You’re really telling me there was no way to plan for this?”
“We still don’t even know what she’ll do. The moths don’t seem to be coming from inside her, it doesn’t feel like she’s homing them, but she’s definitely had some kind of effect on all of you. Your perception, your bias, denial. Things that are mostly existential like that, just ideas and undercurrents of influence— They’re not so easy to fight or stop. Most things I’ve encountered like that have been places you could escape, or things that could be left behind. People are different, and the Corruption is different. The way it’s manifesting for her, I can’t pin it down, it’s—”
A pause, then. Tim glances at him, brow drawn.
“It’s unpredictable.”
Okay. “Meaning?”
Gerard sits up. “Why do we fear things that fly? Birds, bugs, all that.”
“Uh— Shit!” Tim jerks the wheel to turn a corner before he misses the street, too late to flip his turn signal. It hits him by the time the car straightens out again. “Because we don’t know where they’re going to land.”
“Or if they’re going to land on us,” Gerard adds. He undoes his hand from a desperate grip on the door. “So we try not to think about them, and cross our fingers that they’ll pick someplace else.”
Take her, not me. Take her, not me.
“And moths aren’t known for steady flying,” continues Gerard. “I don’t think they’re inspiring anything. I think they represent it, maybe carry it. But whatever all this is, it’s coming from Sasha.”
Her statement had been about grief. Double-knots in severed connections to beg them back together. A guilty conscience.
The more Tim tries to understand it, the less it feels like he ever will. Loving her has always kept him afloat. How could it be what drags him under?
“How do you usually do this?” he asks, mellowed as he can be. “Take it from the top.”
“You’ve been working with Gerry for almost a year. You’ve seen.”
“I’m asking you.”
Gerard pokes out his lips to nudge the hoop in his septum.
“It just… comes down to practicality. I use what’s on me or around me, or I have us run. Sometimes you can outsmart them, contradict them.”
“How do you contradict the Corruption?” Too broad; reframe it. “What is it about fire? You trust it so much for this that not having it as an option seems to be what’s stumping you. Why?”
He would think someone in there would have to fear it, after what it’s done to them. Which one of them exists as a fever? Is there one? Is Gerard home to those feelings, too, or has he walled them off to make himself fortitudinous?
“A total cleansing,” Gerard says. “Not even in the Biblical sense, I mean purely physically. They’re right that people can’t abide by fire, though. Only things, places.”
“It can be broken down to clarity, then.” One more left turn, almost there. “If it’s all in her head, then it is going to come back down to just making her see. And trying to reason with her hasn’t been cutting it, so that’s where you come in, right? The Eye?”
Gerard goes for the phone and taps out another text message, quick and silent. Then he stares out the window at the shadow of the Institute. Tim has to believe he’s blinked in all the time that his own eyes have been on the road, but studying his profile now, there’s no telling.
“Tabula rasa.” To himself, maybe. Could be anyone.
Moonlight struggles through paintstrokes of purple cloud. Tim would presume that the only people left in the building would be Artefact Storage security, but Gertrude’s skeleton key is one of the first things of hers that Gerry turned up in possession of straight away. Bypassing the front entrance for the courtyard’s open arches is the easiest choice they’ve made together all night.
Gerard walks differently than Gerry does. Holds himself taller. That deliberate shark circle stride may have always belonged to him.
Tim follows behind him until he stops. A searing yellow headache straight ahead sends him staggering back a step, spinning around to find the source of uncomfortable laughter beside them. The hand around his elbow doesn’t even feel like Gerry’s.
A man perches in the wrought iron chair with the uneven leg by its friend the table, perfectly still when it should wobble in the brittle autumn grass. He’s too bright to belong in nightscape, a desaturated photograph taken in broad daylight. He’s smiling at them with a fond sort of viciousness, pale hair motionless in the breeze, and placing himself in the center is Tim’s native language.
Gerard doesn’t take to it the way Gerry does. He steps away from Tim’s arm outstretched in front of him when it doesn’t lower at his touch, his voice dry with plain accusation.
“So, it was you.”
Michael laughs again — of course this is the famed Distortion, of course it was Michael — and shrugs up a hand. For a flickering moment, it looks like it’s tossed something into the air. A cigarette butt? A butterfly? It’s dust before Tim can decide.
“So, it’s finally you.”
“I don’t have time for your games.” Warning sloughs off Gerard’s shoulders like flesh and stone. He’s only small for Tim. For Gerry. “What’s your stake in this?”
“Something had to convince you to heed my warning.”
“Don’t act like this is about me.”
“Why does it need to be about anyone at all?” Michael tilts its head too far to three sides. “Can’t it just be fun?”
“You son of a bitch—”
The edge of Gerard’s hand at Tim’s chest, now. It feels like it could cut right through if he followed through with his lunge. Tim can’t tell which of them is molten.
Michael’s fascination is loud and grinning. “It could be about you, too, of course. She does think awfully highly of you. Ask nicely and she might even let that factor in.”
“Factor in to what?”
“Don’t talk to it.” Gerard grips his arm tighter than Gerry does. Presses harder with his fingertips. Pulls harder when he turns. “We’re using the other door.”
“It hardly matters which door you take.” Michael calls from the table, but the sound comes from up ahead. “All roads lead to Damascus.”
“Rome,” Tim spits over his shoulder. “All roads lead to Rome.”
“You’ll find they’re hardly different places.” The yellow door creaks open as they pass and Michael pulls itself out of the chasm. Even gaining distance, Tim feels its words like a whispered hint right against his first ear to go quiet as a child. “Even Hell bears a striking resemblance. Delano could tell you.”
Tim can’t help the screw you before Gerard has dragged him around a corner. He rips his arm from his grip and picks up his own pace down the shadowy hall, the blueprint of the building coming back to him the further they storm from interruption. Gerard keeps his pace, even slowing when he catches the wall to find his breath.
“So— So, what, that thing just… beamed her here like an alien spaceship?”
“It would explain how she got out without anyone noticing.”
“Well, how the hell did it get in? What about all the anti-monster mumbo jumbo you’ve got built up to protect the place, how could it even find us there?”
“That’s not actually how it works.” Gerard pulls out his key and starts towards the first door they have to get through. “It’s not so much anti-monster as it is… anti-surveillance. From this place, from people like Elias. Michael doesn’t operate the same.”
Tim doesn’t give a shit about how Michael operates. He needs something to pick apart, something to bite down on until they find Sasha, but he doesn’t have the patience for all the deep lore. Gerard doesn’t elaborate any further.
It’s a series of clicking locks from there. Tim buzzes while he waits the two seconds it takes for Gerard to crack the doors, half-entertaining the thought of just snatching the key so he can be the first one to reach the Archives himself. He feels the first moth before he sees it when it collides with his cheek and then flinches under his palm.
Sasha would kill him for that, if she saw him do it. On an ordinary day at work, sitting on her living room floor back at her parents’ house. She’d threaten to kill him and she wouldn’t mean it. Back then, she wouldn’t have meant it.
Tim wants to believe she just won’t find out, but there is a ripple down the hallway after the clap. Another when Gerard’s hand comes down over one on his own face. His ponytail is a hanging cluster of wisteria, dotted with downy spots before whipping them away. Tim is almost afraid to slap at the ones clinging to his back for him, even gently. Even just to beg.
“You told them to meet us here, right?”
“They shouldn’t be long.” Gerard slows his pace at the mouth of the basement hall, turning to face Tim on the bottom step. “Do you think you can wait for them?”
“No.” He chokes the strain in his voice back down and shakes his head. His hands slap at the next moth that flutters past his face before he can stop them. “We have to go in there. Right now, I need to fix this.”
“We don’t have a plan,” Gerard reminds him. “We don’t have anything on us.”
Tim’s fist bounces against his leg. “You mean you don’t have lighter fluid.”
The stare Gerard gives him says I always have lighter fluid. It’s smart of him not to say it. It’s not fair that Gerard knows him so well when Tim doesn’t know him at all.
“You said yourself we’re going to have to wait and see. I don’t know what the hell Dekker and Jon could bring to the table here that we can’t unless they’re packing literal heat, too. Start walking, or get out of my way.”
Gerard almost seems to consider chivalry before he chooses his own head over Tim’s heart. Fine. It doesn’t matter. Tim is on his heels as he comes to the Archives’ doors, ashamed of his part in shared hesitation to pull them open. He wants to reach out with his other hand and have Gerry squeeze back.
“They’re not bleeding out of here,” Gerard observes. His eyes track a cluster of moths gathered against the hinges of the door. “They’re trying to get in.”
Hope springs like a leak in Tim’s chest. “So, she’s shutting them out? If she’s barricading herself in to keep away from them, then maybe we can get away with torching them after all.”
Gerard swats at his brow, rolling his neck with a shudder. “Call for her. One last shot.”
Tim stops short of knocking on the door in an instant, unwilling to crush and smear.
“Sasha? Sasha, are you in there? It’s me, and Ger— And Gerry. Can you hear me?”
He can hear something inside the room, but her voice doesn’t call back. She doesn’t open the door herself and look at them quizzically, or whisper through the cracks that she’s afraid. It feels cruel to hope that she’s scared, but what the hell is the alternative?
“We’re coming in,” he states, wavering. “If you made a bookshelf blockade or something, Sasha, so help me. You better hope this door opens!”
Childish to count three, two, one, but he does it anyway. Under his breath, for himself. Gerard pushes forward exactly when he does, and Tim only has a split second to process that the walls are moving before he can accept why.
Floor to ceiling is nothing but a blanket of writhing shades of tawny brown, moths upon moths crowding every inch of recognizable space and washing up against him like a tide. Only vague shapes remain, the sharp edges of desks and carts and cabinets softened with featherscales. The mere thought of the damage all the files must be taking would throw Tim into cardiac arrest if there were even just a dozen nestled in the stacks, but there must be a thousand moths swarming the room now and Sasha is nowhere in sight until he calls her name again.
There in the heart of the Archives is a crouching mound independent from replaceable structures. At the sound of his voice it rises to lift up a hand, fingers loose and reaching around little wings weaving between them. Tim’s eyes catch on the silver crescent moon dangling from her charm bracelet as the moths clear away and settle back on her closed fist, kissing the pointed finger aimed at the door.
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