Chapter Text
Gerry wonders what it says about him that the people in his neighborhood he's the most familiar with are the clerks at the nearest 24 hour convenience store. Yes, he is definitely antisocial, and the only thing that stops him from fully qualifying as a shut-in is that dealing with the Powers isn't really a work-from-home type of career. However, he is also personally making sure that not everyone who the overnight clerks come in contact with is a belligerent drunk (by not drinking until he gets back from the store), and he is more than capable of scaring away any would-be harassers, so he's basically providing a public service. He also appreciates the fact that the clerks at the 24 hour convenience store are so deeply averse to the idea of people sticking around any longer than they need to that they have not even once tried to ask him if he was the guy who skinned his mum. It was five years ago and it's not like there haven't been other grisly crimes since, but apparently it really made an impression on some people. He still gets recognized sometimes, and approached, which doesn't make much sense. If he really had killed and skinned his mum, what the hell makes people think he's safe to come up to and ask about it? He doesn't even know how they recognize him. You'd think there were no other goths in London.
If any of the clerks have ever recognized him, they've kept it to themselves. So that's cool.
Less cool is the fact that some asshole seems to have cleared out the stock of his favorite flavor of energy drink. He's pushing cans around to see if there are any hidden in the wrong row, careful of overextending the shoulder he dislocated last month, when he hears the door chime. Ugh. Shopping past midnight means he doesn't often have to deal with other people, and he really doesn't want to have to say so much as a hello. He'll say hi to the clerk, he's not fucking rude, but that's the limit of his current social capacity. So it takes him a moment to notice that the creeping, crawling feeling of things brushing the wrong way against his skin, shuddering distaste and revulsion, is more than the usual deep antipathy to the idea of an unexpected interaction with another person. But then he recognizes that it's not just a feeling of dis-ease, but a feeling of disease, and he realizes he has bigger problems on his hands than an unplanned interpersonal interaction.
Gerry looks around the edge of the aisle. The person shuffling in is clutching a paper in their hand. They're overdressed even for the middle of the night in early January, wrapped in a thickly padded, hooded coat that shadows their face and covers most of their body.
They feel like Filth. Look like it, too, an ugly sheen crawling and squirming over them in his augmented sight. Awesome. So clearly, his top priority is getting them out of the store, without touching them. He steps out, around the aisle, and they look towards him. An animal panic flashes across what little of their face is visible. They grip the paper tighter and shuffle right back out of the store.
Well. That was easy. Sooner or later, he's going to have to reckon with the fact that things touched by the Powers have been responding to him in a decidedly different way recently. He'd quite rather it be later.
"Forgot my wallet," he tells the clerk, before leaving after the poor bastard, heart pounding and shoulders tight.
Sometimes Gerry is too late to save people. It always sucks. It just sucks more when they're still in a state to attack him.
The person who is, regrettably for both them and for Gerry, alive and functional enough that the Corruption can compel them to violence, stumbles towards him as soon as he enters the shadows between the light at the front of the shop and the streetlights. Their hood has fallen back and their mouth is moving, but all that comes out is a quiet, strained wheeze. Their eyes and nose are weeping something thick and viscous that dries into an ever-building crust on their skin. It's a small mercy that the fluid isn't dripping on the ground — there's probably not enough bleach in the world to render whatever it touches sterile. The hand not holding tight to the paper is reaching for him, fingers hooked. He dodges away from them, away from the store. They're not fast, but they do everything at the same speed. Each step, each motion, it's all the exact same speed, uniform and relentless. Their eyes are flat and hazy, pointed towards Gerry but not focused on him.
Gerry does not just walk around with the tools for killing humans. Or at least, not any that would work for this situation. He's got a knife, but using that requires being much closer than he would ideally be to the shambling biohazard. He also has a lighter. Maybe that would be enough for some tools of the Corruption, artefacts and creatures alike, but this is something that is, or recently was, human, and seems far too juicy to catch fire. So he should probably… try to run from it, keep leading it away from the store, and think of a better plan on the way. That seems good. He glances over his shoulder, to make sure when he runs he's not going to step on a piece of garbage and slip or something equally stupid. As he faces forward again, the person suddenly pulls up energy from somewhere and their stumbling walk becomes a disjointed sprint.
Gerry doesn't even have enough time to turn around and take off before their foot comes down on nothing and they drop down through a doorway that wasn't there before.
In a moment, all that's left is the crumpled, stained sheet of paper. Gerry decides the paper is a more urgent matter than the door, because he can do something with and about the paper. He can't do anything to the door.
He'd really expected Michael and the doors (which are definitely the same, somehow, except for the ways that they're not, in typical Spiral fashion) to lose interest in him by now. It's been about four months since they met. Four months of doors popping up like dandelions, four months of Michael turning up unexpectedly in incongruously normal locations that somehow manage to still feel like the wrong setting no matter how habituated he should be by now to monsters being in places that are 'normal.' On a park bench, in a coffee shop, leaning on a bicycle rack that was slowly twisting itself into tighter and tighter loops. Helping catch a lost cat. Haunting the freezer aisle at the grocery store. It always seems happy to see him, even when it doesn't leave happy, and he can't tell if it's just wandering around in his general vicinity waiting to run into him or if it somehow knows where he is.
(Couldn't tell, rather. The appearance of this door would seem to settle that question. This was not a coincidence.)
They haven't gone away and they haven't eaten him, so what do they want? They can't be lulling him into a false sense of security for later consumption, because that's kind of the opposite of how fear monsters work. They could be trying to recruit him, but Michael hasn't really given him a sales pitch. It's said a few weird things that could be taken as an invitation to join the Spiral, but that's significantly tamer than the usual 'join me or be lunch' which is usually less of a specific proposition and more of a heat of the moment, do or die type demand. Gerry is rapidly running out of explanations that aren't… well, what it's told him. It wants to be friends. It wants to help. Which is nonsense.
Gerry inches around the edge of the doorway to peer a little closer at the paper. It's smudged and crumpled, but he manages to make out the words 'healing sessions' and 'vaccine-damaged'. Whatever that means. He inches closer still and takes pictures. He could hope that the advert is all there is, that the 'sessions' themselves are fictitious bait to induce someone to touch an evil paper, but he is rarely that lucky. He can't even be sure that the infection came from the paper, not that he's going to take any chances with it.
Gerry checks if any of the pictures are clear enough that he can see the contact details on the advert. He'd feel relatively secure in the functionality of his camera if it weren't for the door. With the door, though… as expected, most of the pictures are full of weird static, broken and blurred and unusable. Only two of them are clear enough that he can make out any of the words on the paper at all.
Not that he's entirely in a position to be ungrateful. He would have figured out some way of dealing with this situation, probably, but there's a chance he wouldn't have, or that it would have taken longer or gotten messier without the door's intervention. It's creepy and unsettling and makes him very uncomfortable that the door knew where he was and decided to help him out, but he did undeniably benefit from it. "Thanks," he tells the door. He can see the corridor within, the usual rug lain on top of the carpet like it's not at a 90 degree angle to the ground, but not the person. They have already been swallowed.
He spares himself a brief moment to ponder the fact that he has just thanked a monster for killing a human. He knows he doesn't feel bad about it. He knows he's not going to feel bad about it. But he still wants to think about it, so he doesn't become too comfortable with it, so his concept of acceptable losses doesn't expand beyond the borders of rationality. The fact that he's not sure he'd know the borders of rationality if he encountered them is a minor detail.
The person that the door ate was dead before he even saw them. At least now they can't take anyone else down with them.
The door swings slowly shut, against gravity. This one opened inwards rather than the more typical outwards, presumably designed to catch people taking uncautious steps. Sometimes the doors are clearly made with a function in mind. More often they seem to fit whatever passes as the corridors' idea of aesthetics. This one is a bit of both, painted gray-green houndstooth that, in the moment before the doorway disappears entirely, almost blends in with the shadows on the asphalt.
Gerry takes a few more pictures. With the door gone, they turn out way better. Once he's secure in his possession of a readable photograph, he lights the advert on fire. Then he goes back into the convenience store, because if he's got to deal with whatever this is, he's going to need a caffeine supply.
The clerk doesn't even look up as Gerry re-enters. He loves this store. Even if they are out of his favorite flavor of energy drink.
The good thing about this whole situation with the advert and the plague carrier is that Gerry was there. Much better that they ran into him than ran into someone else, because not only did he not fall victim to it, he can actively try to make sure no one else does either.
Gerry's no capital-H Hunter. He doesn't have the ability to permanently kill the strongest servants of the Powers, and his own durability comes more from a high pain tolerance and an excess of stubbornness than an actual immunity to injuries. But that counts for a lot, especially if you also have knives. Not everything that serves the Powers is far enough gone to be immune to a good old-fashioned stabbing. He's killed plenty, and plans to continue that way until something kills him.
Gerry is so utterly twisted up in the Powers and the people and things that orbit them that he will never get free. He might as well do what he can to spare other people that fate, even if he harbors no illusions about being able to make any kind of long-lasting impact. He's just a guy. The world is fucked up all over, and cleaning up whatever little corner of it he happens to find himself in isn't going to do anything in the long term, especially given how the people unlucky enough to meet him don't usually learn anything useful from the encounter, besides not to be so friendly with mysterious books. But his actions matter to the people who end up not getting eaten, even if they never know what he did, who he is, or why he did it. So that's okay.
Not like he knows how to live a normal life anyway. Breaking into weird old hidden crypts, sifting through the detritus of the internet looking for genuine signs of the supernatural, and selling the occasional harmless-by-comparison curiosity to people with far more money than self-preservation instincts are all the life skills he has, really. He supposes dealing with things that want to consume him from the inside out, utterly breaking down his humanity and will to live, might count as preparation for a retail job, but quite honestly, monster hunting pays better, even though most of his work turns out to be pro bono. This is probably gonna be one of those cases, unless a door regurgitates the victim's wallet later.
There are plenty of unknowns here, but that's typical. He may not know how the person he encountered was infected, if it was a book or a monster or being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or what they were doing running around, or who they used to be. But he's going to find out as much as he needs to know to stop it happening to more people. He's got the advert, at least, and he's certain it has something to do with the whole situation. Why else would that person be carrying it, in the state they were in?
Also, it's the only lead he has, so he really hopes he can get something from it.
When he gets home, he checks the photo again, and types the name of the woman delivering these 'healing sessions,' Jodi Lewis, into Google. The first result he gets is something called "The Organization for Wholesome Synergetics," which makes Gerry feel good about his hunch that the advert indicated the source of the infection, because nothing with a name like that can't be evil. The website is full of pictures of smiling, thin, pale children and the text only sometimes has enough contrast to be readable against the backgrounds. Even when it's visually readable, Gerry struggles to actually process the words. If he's reading it right, the website claims vaccines are designed to damage people's brains and immune systems. It says that most, if not all, forms of illness can be traced back to vaccines, and is particularly aggressive in its assertion that mental illnesses and autism are caused by vaccines, though it also lists cancer, arthritis, and hayfever as the afflictions of a vaccine-damaged population.
Jodi Lewis is the organization's founder. Her biography page thankfully has a solid colored background with readable text, and features an ordinary headshot of a smiling white woman in a floral top. The picture is remarkably good, which means whatever she is, she's not strong enough to start corrupting cameras and websites just by having her photograph on them. Photoshop only does so much. There's no amount of touch-up that can fix the pixelated ruin something with a strong connection to the Powers becomes when you try to take pictures of it. If a listing for an alleged Leitner has clear photos, Gerry knows he doesn't need to bother with it. So the photo says good things about his chances against Jodi in a fight, provided it's not an old one. The other three listed members have similarly clean headshots, and similar large, white smiles. There's another tab beside them labeled 'in memoriam,' and Gerry clicks it only to find an 'under construction' banner with a cheery set of balloons.
Their pages on the website do not list any home addresses, which would have been convenient. But there is a phone number that matches the one given on the advert. And clicking through the website reveals that the organization is currently accepting applications for a 'healing retreat' that starts on… Gerry checks the date on his phone and swears. This Friday. Gerry doesn't know if the website is out of date, if they're still accepting new applicants this close to the start of the retreat, but he also knows he has to try. A healing retreat sounds like a perfect opportunity to grab victims, and a perfect opportunity to try to set Jodi and whoever else on fire before they can do any more harm. Hopefully a healing retreat in January, the time of year best suited to doing fuck-all, sounds as appealing to others as it does to him and not every spot is filled. He's still going to need to plan to get up early and give her a call as soon as possible.
Gerry checks the time.
Almost 4 AM.
He should probably get to bed. In a rare moment of foresight, he didn't actually drink any of the energy drinks he bought, so that's one less thing working against his ability to actually sleep. Now all he has to contend with is a lifetime of insomnia, nightmares, and a general distaste for the concept of sleeping which pushes him to be awake until he physically can't be. He'd chug a medically inadvisable quantity of the Nyquil he keeps on hand specifically so he can sleep, but the whole point of this is that he wants to wake up sometime tomorrow.
He resigns himself to at least an hour of staring at the ceiling and shuts off the lights.
Gerry's mother is at the door.
He lets her in. He tells her she shouldn't be here. She demands to know what he was thinking, trying to keep her out. This is her house. She's his mother. Doesn't he care? Doesn't he love her?
Of course he loves her. He has to.
She's angry. She's hurt. He's betrayed her, all he's ever done is betray her. He betrayed her every time he tried to run away, especially…
Especially when he ran instead of helping her skin herself.
As if she feels the memory as he recalls it, her skin fills in, line after line of writing that he refuses to read, that he has never read. He did not want to know about her last moments, her last thoughts. He does not want to know all of the details those pages are filled with. The words demand he look at them, and when he does not, his mother smiles her vicious smile as her skin begins to peel off. Red lines cross her body where she made the cuts, bleeding faster as the skin pulls away. It reaches for him, for his face, demanding that he see, that he read the words she wrote on her hanging skin, how can he say he loves her when all he does is deny her. She's bleeding more, and beneath the obscuring blood he can see the fat and the muscle and the wet, shining tendons, and she is still smiling -
Gerry wakes to a sharp pain in his stomach. He thinks he might be about to throw up, and tries to sit up enough to at least lean over the edge of the bed, only to realize that his stomach hurts because something is pressing down on his torso. Something heavy, and lumpy, and sharp.
Eyes that don't reflect light so much as they emit it shine at him from the darkness. "Hello Gerard," Michael says.
Gerry attempts to say something. He's not sure what, and it doesn't really matter, since all he manages is a slurred exhalation. He's never coherent when he first wakes up. Less so when he wakes up unexpectedly, or after a nightmare. Michael responds as if Gerry had spoken anyway, lifting its hand. It becomes easier to breathe, but Gerry still struggles to, heart beating in that weighty, thumping way that only really comes from nightmares. "Why did…" he manages, before he has to catch his breath again. Michael is in his bedroom. Michael is in his fucking bedroom, and while he knows, intellectually, that Michael can enter his house at any time, it hasn't done so in his sight. Not without permission, not since Ex Altiora. He shouldn't have let himself feel safe, shouldn't have let himself put aside the thought of Michael walking through his space freely, but it's hard to function in a constant state of paranoid terror and Gerry has things to do. He couldn't have a breakdown about the concept of Michael having access to his house every time he found a bookplate in his mug.
"You were having a nightmare," Michael says. "It wasn't to my taste."
"To your… are you eating my dreams?" Gerry says.
"No," Michael says.
"You're lying."
"I am lying, as far as I am anything, as far as I am," it agrees easily. "But I am not eating your dreams. Your fear was not of me, and needed to be altered."
Gerry frowns, and tries to force his thoughts to arrange those statements into something meaningful. Waking from the nightmare brought a false and primitive alertness, where all he really knows how to do is watch for danger, and there is a very identifiable danger at the foot of his bed. On the foot of his bed, actually, crouched and weighing down the mattress. Hard to entertain any competing thoughts when every nerve is screaming 'predator, predator.'
Michael sighs contentedly.
Oh, good god, Gerry thinks, then winces at the profound irony a moment later. There are no good gods involved in this. "You want my fear," he says.
"Yes," Michael says.
"You woke me up because I was afraid of something else?"
Its eyes narrow, then widen. "That is a close enough explanation, yes."
"Great," Gerry says. "Thanks." He doesn't know if he'll be able to get back to sleep. Normally after a dream like that he wouldn't try, but the alternative, turning on the lights and trying to figure out what to do with Michael still watching feels somehow worse than trying to go back to sleep with Michael watching. At this point, he barely fears Michael killing him, on an intellectual level. It could have happened so many times. It could have happened tonight. What he fears more is how little he understands Michael, and how easy it is sometimes to forget that Michael is something sharp and warped, impossible geometries and incomprehensible thoughts, existing in the pursuit of madness and terror.
He never thinks Michael is human. But sometimes he's not sure what 'human' means, what he can and cannot expect from Michael. Maybe he should think less about what kind of human things he can expect from Michael and more about what kind of monstrous things he can expect.
"Christ," he mutters. "Get off the damn bed. Don't follow me." As long as he's up, he might as well take a piss.
When he comes back to the bed, Michael is gone.
Well. Gerry can't see it.
Hopefully that means it's gone.
And he's definitely awake now, so.
It's 7:04, which is a stupid fucking time to be up. But it gives Gerry time to shower the nightmare sweat off his skin and chase an energy drink down with coffee. He even eats a piece of toast beforehand, since he's learned the hard way that dumping caffeinated drinks into an empty stomach unsettled by fear is a bad idea. So he's practically a regular, functional member of society.
At 8:00, he calls Jodi Lewis.
"Organization for Wholesome Synergistics," says a bright, breathy voice that seems like it's simultaneously trying to sound youthfully energetic and sagely tranquil. "This is Jodi Lewis. How may I heal you today?"
Gerry hates this.
"Hey, uh, I was calling about the… healing retreat?" he says. He's got the webpage pulled up right now, and hopes he can remember enough of the terms to sound like someone who's definitely interested in this sort of thing and is definitely not a suspicious hooligan who may murder Jodi Lewis before this time next week. "I was wondering if you still had openings?"
Jodi Lewis laughs. "I try to accommodate everyone who wants to come! Now, this week, because of the upcoming season, we're trying something special and doing a couples' retreat. Is that something you're interested in, or would you rather wait for the solo retreat in two months?"
If she is the source of the infection, that's a whole two months for her to do things to people. If she's not, that's two months of time wasted when he could eliminate her as a suspect right now. "Yeah, that sounds great!" he says, mustering up his best attempt at not-fake-sounding fake enthusiasm before he can fully think through the implications of what she's just said.
"Wonderful!" she says. "Payment is in cash, at the time we meet. We'll be meeting at," she gives him an address, which he hastily scratches onto the back of the receipt for the energy drinks with a half-dead pen, "and traveling to the retreat together! I look forward to meeting both of you."
Both of you.
Ah, shit.
There's no question of what he's going to have to do to handle that. He doesn't want to risk getting kicked out of the retreat if he shows up single, and he doesn't… know… people. But he knows something that can pass for a person. At least he can trust that Michael won't be infected by the Corruption. Or… mostly trust that. He hopes it can't be. But Michael definitely has a better chance of surviving this than any random human, and Gerry, again, doesn't know people.
"Thanks!" Gerry says, doing his best to imitate her tone. "We're looking forward to meeting you too!"
He hangs up.
Michael said it wanted to help. It hasn't retracted that sentiment. It's been leaving him bookplates, or other souvenirs of its book-destroying missions. And it's Spiral, so maybe it'll like the lying part? The content of that lie — the fact that they're going to be pretending to be a couple — he's less sure how it will react to. He still hasn't figured out what the hell he occasionally does to make it so angry it becomes threateningly physical. It hasn't attacked him, but he knows that won't be true forever. He can only hope that whatever it is that makes Michael angry won't come up in conjunction with pretending to date.
Gerry can probably pretend to be dating it. He has very little personal experience to draw on, considering he was raised to hunt monster books, kept trying and failing to escape that life, was wanted for his mum's murder, and then got haunted by her for about four and a half years, none of which really left time for dating, but he watches TV. He knows dating things. But will Michael?
Then there's the matter of finding it at all, which he doesn't know how to do, and also the fact that when he saw it earlier today it was feeding on him and he very justifiably got short with it.
This is already a disaster.
At least it's a disaster he can afford to put off, at least for a little while.
Instead of trying to find Michael, he's going to do more research on anti-vaccination. He gets the basics of why it's great for Corruption — namely, scaring people about vaccines causing diseases makes more people get diseases — but the more angles a fear has on any given form, the more powerful it often is. The Dark does great with the figures of children's fears, for example. So much of the world is unknown to children. Children's lack of power, the fact that they're often not trusted, the way that kids are used to using their imaginations to cover their inexperience… the Dark is frightening because you don't know what's in it. Because you can't prove one way or the other that anything is in it. But you can imagine. You can imagine all sorts of horrors right up till the point where something unseen really does come at you.
So. Corruption. Anti-vaccination.
Gerry prepares himself for a day of truly excruciating Google results.
Gerry's been down worse internet rabbit holes, but not by much.
One thing's for certain. The Corruption has so much to build on here.
There's the obvious, that a lack of vaccinations means diseases spread better, and the more disease spreads, the more people are afraid of it. And the whole concept of refusing vaccines because they cause sickness requires a pre-existing fear of sickness.
But it's not just about that.
He doesn't totally get what the Corruption's whole deal is with love, but he knows it really, really seems to like love as a vector. Toxic, controlling love. And there's plenty of it here. The idea of having to save a child that's been stolen from you by vaccines, of a child who's no longer capable of love unless you make the correct sacrifices and hurt them the right ways. And it does hurt them. He saw some things about bleach and chelation that made his insides ache.
He doesn't even know why autism's such a big deal. All the stuff he's reading says it's terrible because kids with autism don't know how to relate to others socially and don't make eye contact and aren't able to stand various kinds of touch or noises. Which is stupid. That's how everyone is. These websites are just picking things that everyone deals with and making them sound like they're some terrible disease vaccines cause. Which, yeah, maybe it'd be nice if Gerry could handle loud, crowded spaces all the time instead of just sometimes, and didn't usually have to be somewhere alone and quiet for a variable amount of hours afterwards, but that's normal. He guesses some of it, like not wanting to be touched or throwing random tantrums, could be sort of frustrating, but again, that's how kids are.
What a mess. No wonder the Corruption's all over it.
Gerry frowns at the clock in the corner of his computer screen. It feels like it should be later than 8:04 PM, but that's probably because he woke up so fucking early. He feels wired, and like he could pass out right this second. Passing out may be the better idea. He definitely shouldn't try to talk to Michael like this, right? His brain's already fried. He's not going to be good at things.
Right. As long as he's got a reasonable explanation for avoiding it, he's not actually avoiding it.
He's absolutely avoiding it.
Two days until the retreat starts, and he still hasn't talked to Michael. He also hasn't managed to find the shirts he wore in Genoa, which is annoying. They're the best clothes he has for passing as someone who belongs at this retreat, and if they've up and vanished, he's going to be really annoyed.
In his defense, he doesn't know how to find Michael any more than he knows how to find the shirts. He conducts a halfhearted search of his home for extra doors every day, but he doesn't find any. The house is empty. He's the only one here.
He's the only one here except when the door monster that can just walk in whenever it wants decides it wants to harass him.
Gerry doesn't want to invite Michael to fake date him. It wouldn't be a great situation at any point, but in the wake of Michael invading his space and feeding on him, Gerry really doesn't want to do it. He should expect it to feed on him, has been expecting it to (has it fed on him before, and this is just the first time he caught it?), but he still feels weirdly betrayed, and feels that this short of behavior should not be rewarded with fake dating. Not that fake dating is a reward. And, rationally, he can't really expect it to know without being told that he doesn't want it to feed on him. Why would it think that? It knows fear, and it knows feeding. Maybe if it were older it would have had a chance to figure out that humans don't like to be afraid and definitely don't like to be eaten, although even then, it's not likely anyone would have ever sat down and explained that.
But. Ugh. He got into this mess because he was nice to Michael in order to avoid getting eaten, what the hell is asking it to fake date him going to do? Will he end up Spiral married to it? He doesn't want to be Spiral married to it. He especially doesn't want to be Spiral married to it knowing that it's been eating him.
But he needs to go to the retreat. The more he stalls, the less time he'll have to come up with a backup plan if it says no. And it could say no, he reminds himself, even though he can't really imagine that happening.
There are still no extra doors that he can see. Gerry double-checks, opening each one, fully prepared for a door that he thinks is normal and always there to open onto the corridors. He remembers how Michael replaced the front door, and how that seemed normal until it didn't. He can't just trust he'll be able to notice any extraneous doors. But if there are any, they're so well-hidden they might as well not be there.
So he tries knocking on the wall in the kitchen, the one that faces outward and has a window rather than the one he shares with a neighbor, and calling, "Michael?"
No response. Can Michael not hear him, or is it just pretending it can't? "Michael, I need to talk to you. Come on."
Still no response. Maybe it's not actually always paying attention to him? Maybe…
Gerry was pretty freaked out by the Corruption-infected person. He handled it, he barely consciously registered the fear because he's so used to being afraid and doing things anyway, but it did scare him. What had Michael said? That Gerry's fear in his nightmare was not 'of it.'
Can it sense when Gerry fears the work of other Powers? Like an eldritch fear monster version of the completely baseless and yet totally correct certainty that someone else is eating your crisps? That's… oddly more reassuring than the idea that Michael can always see him, though Gerry isn't enthused about being a bag of crisps. It also provides a potential way to summon Michael, though Gerry isn't enthused about that either. He tries not to feel too afraid of the Powers. He doesn't want to shut that fear out entirely, because the absence of fear is stupidity, but he doesn't want to invite that shit in. That's how people get eaten.
Everything he does is how people get eaten.
So he takes a deep breath, like that'll do anything, and thinks about how many goddamn secrets he has. All the things he doesn't want people to know, all the things he wants to keep to himself. Everything from minor awkward mishaps to embarrassingly private personal facts. And he thinks about all the ways that those things could be revealed. Who they could be revealed to. What it would mean for him. What people would do to him if they knew, just random people who knew nothing about him but his worst secrets…
The sound of the door creaking open is quiet. Possibly because Gerry can hear blood rushing in his ears, and it's muffling the world around him.
"Are you alright, Gerard?" Michael asks, and its voice is… soft. Almost concerned. Gerry doesn't want to think about how long it's been since he heard someone talk to him like that. He's an adult, he doesn't need people to be nice to him. He certainly doesn't need nightmare hallways or their mouthpieces or whatever the hell Michael is to be nice to him.
"Yeah," Gerry says, and his own voice comes out rough. He clears his throat. "Needed to get your attention."
There's a long silence in which Gerry can swear he hears the sound of a clock ticking, despite not owning any clocks. "And what," Michael says, finally, "did you want with that attention?"
Gerry sighs. Maybe sometime in the past few days he should have thought about what he was going to say, how he was going to say it, but he didn't. And now Michael's here, pulling at his thoughts, making everything seem just a little sideways and spinning and hard to hold onto. He opens his mouth, already resigned to the fact that whatever comes out is probably not going to be in the vicinity of what he intended. "Thank you," he says. "For helping me. The other night, with that… the Corruption person." It's predictably not what he wanted to say, but he is surprised to find he means it. Despite what happened after.
Michael is apparently surprised too. "Oh," it says. "You're… welcome?" It clears its throat and fidgets, looking down and away, as if it's not sure what to do with itself.
It's not allowed to be cute, Gerry's not allowed to think it's cute, or at the very least he should think it's cute the way a tiger playing in leaves is cute: only if there's adequate barriers and distance between him and it. There are none here. And it might be feeling as awkward about being thanked as Gerry felt about it being worried over him, but that's because it's probably never done anything worth being thanked for. "Yeah. Well. I need to ask you to help me again. A different way."
Michael looks back at him and tilts its head, expectant.
This is going to be so stupid to explain.
"Right," Gerry says, running a hand through his hair, which is still damp from his shower. "So, I think there's a bigger Corruption thing going on here, and it might be related to this weird group I read about on the internet. And to figure that out, I need to see the people in charge, probably spend some time around them, figure out if they're doing it and if so, how. The good news is they're running an event. This weekend. But it's only for couples. But I need to go, so I need to be part of a couple." He pauses, waiting to see if Michael will complete the thought, put the pieces together without Gerry having to spell it out.
Michael continues to stare expectantly.
"A couple needs another person in it," Gerry tries.
Michael looks no more illuminated.
Great. "I need you to go with me to this event and pretend we're dating so I can get the information I need," Gerry says.
Michael frowns. Oh no. "I am not a person," it says.
"Yeah. Right. Of course," Gerry says. It gets tetchy about semantics, he needs to be delicate. "You can do a better impression of one than a coatrack can, though, which was my next option."
Michael considers this.
"Okay," it says.
"Yeah?" Gerry says.
"Yes," Michael confirms.
That was easy. Why was it easy? Far from being relieved, Gerry feels like he's about to step off the edge of a building blindfolded. The drop is there, he's sure, but he doesn't know exactly when it'll take him. "So you know what all of that means. You know what dating is."
"I am aware of dating," Michael says, which is not the same thing as saying it knows what dating is.
"Tell me what you think dating is," Gerry says.
"Dating is when you go places with someone and give them gifts," says Michael.
"Sort of, ye-" Gerry begins to agree, and then it hits, the drop off the edge of the building, the horror of the fall. Because it occurs to him that is technically a description of what he did with Michael when they first met. "No. Absolutely not, no, those are things that can happen with dating, but those are not dating." Oh god, does it think they're dating? Is that why it took this so well? How do you break up with a monster you didn't intend to date?
"You also kiss, I think," Michael says pensively. "And sometimes you have se-"
"We're not doing that," Gerry says. At this rate he's not going to have to worry about the retreat because he's going to die right here on the kitchen floor. "This is pretend dating. We are not dating. We are pretending, and we're not going to do all the dating things, because this is a fake thing that's only happening so I can go to this retreat and possibly murder the woman running it."
"I know what pretending is," Michael says, affronted. "You asked if I knew what dating is."
Gerry needs his heart to stop trying to climb up the back of his throat, and also have a less bass-boosted rhythm. "Okay," he says. "You know this isn't real dating."
"Yes," Michael says, slowly, as if it's concerned Gerry has suddenly become incapable of understanding it. That probably happens sometimes. Maybe Gerry can blame his panicked leaps to all the wrong conclusions on Spiral effects. "This is a deception. I am familiar with the concept."
"Yeah. Right, good," Gerry says. He needs to get a fucking grip and act normal. "Thanks. For helping out. You don't have to help with the… monster… hunting bit of it." Michael won't object to Gerry doing that. Right? It ate that person last night, so it's likely not allied too closely with the Corruption. They might even be actively antagonistic, which could be useful. If Michael is not just the necessary piece for getting to go on the retreat in the first place but an active participant in this fight, then Gerry feels… maybe not better about his odds, because who knows if being allied with Michael would really be safer than working alone, but potentially more secure. With numerous qualifiers on that security. Mostly he'll just feel like Michael probably won't turn on him and team up with the Corruption on a whim. "Unless you wanted to."
"Hm," Michael says. "The Corruption and I have… differences. What kind of help would you require?"
"Well," Gerry says, floundering a bit, "if any of the people there turn out to be evil, if you could just eat them that'd be a big help." Killing an actual servant of the Powers is often far more complicated than killing someone incidentally touched by their effects, even assuming they're not so strong humans can't kill them at all. Fire's a pretty solid choice for the Corruption, but it's not a sure thing, and it's not like he can pack a proper flamethrower. Aerosol can and a lighter, yes. But that's a really shitty weapon, at the end of the day, no matter how many times he's used it. 'A door monster' is a much better weapon.
"Ah," Michael says. "That may be complicated."
"Okay," Gerry says. It's likely not worth the effort to try to pull a clear answer out of Michael about why it would be complicated. Michael has been relatively forthright this conversation, but this seems like the kind of subject that could get thorny and looping and difficult to follow quickly. It would be more productive to try to narrow down what it is and is not capable of, no 'why's needed. "So I can't just shove anyone through a door?"
"You… might be able to do that. To enter the corridor, one must pass through a door. It is better if they are the one to open it. And what happens once another is within the corridors depends on how strong they are."
Gerry works that one over for a bit, trying to figure out what kind of options exist for someone once they're in the corridors. "No one could break out, could they?" Gerry asks, getting a sudden vision of white-smiled people tumbling through a new door in the middle of a hospital or a school, trailing disease in their wake. "Shit, could the one last night-"
Michael lets out a bobbing, staticky giggle. "No one gets out unless I let them. The problem is that some of them stay. Not everything is easily eaten."
"Oh," Gerry says. That makes sense, he supposes. Serving a Power makes you durable. The more you let it in, the stronger you get. Your Power scoops out parts of you and adds new bits in, feeding you as you feed it. Hard to kill someone by filling them with the fear of madness if they're already filled with something else. "So was… from the other night… are they still alive?"
"No," Michael says.
"Right." He didn't feel hopeful about that person being alive. He doesn't want them to be alive. They were beyond saving before Gerry met them. But there's something nagging at him about all this, and he doesn't know what it is. "So, maybe not eating anyone. Could you…" Gerry attempts to mime stabbing someone with knife fingers. "You know, slice someone up?"
"Potentially," Michael says. "If the opportunity arose."
"Cool," Gerry says. He doesn't plan to place the burden of all this on Michael. He wants to plan on handling as much of this as possible himself. He doesn't know how trustworthy Michael is (it's not, it's not trustworthy at all and he should know better, this is stupid, he's going to die), and he's more comfortable relying on himself. But it's good sense to know his options. That's direct offense taken care of, so now… "Can you make us less noticeable, like you do with the doors? Less suspicious?" That would be wildly useful. If Gerry can't find his vacation shirts by tomorrow, he'll buy new ones, but he can't do much about the tattoos and burn scars. Trying to bleach the dye out of his hair, he knows well, would only leave it a pale, unnatural white-blond at the roots that faded into fire-orange at the ends, which is not an improvement on black in any way. He's not going to look like the kind of person who goes to something like this, because he's not. Taking the incongruity out with a dash of Spiral…
Stupid. Reckless. He shouldn't do that, shouldn't ask that. There will be other people on this retreat, what if he's dooming them all to being marked by the Spiral by proximity? That's not better than letting the Corruption have them. It's one thing to accept a monster choosing to eat someone that was an active threat to you and others, another to use a monster to fight a different monster, and another to deliberately bring a monster into contact with vulnerable people it could consume. Right? Gerry knows that choice is important. Actions are important. But end results are also important, and is there such a difference between leaving people to be consumed by the Corruption and knowingly putting them at risk of consumption by the Spiral? How do you know when an action you take is truly to prevent a greater evil and isn't an equal or greater evil itself?
Except… there is a difference. The Spiral isn't contagious like the Corruption. The Spiral isn't running this retreat, drawing people in with promises of healing. Gerry thinks it's stupid to blame disease on vaccines, but people get desperate, and stupidity alone isn't a killing offense. If the Corruption is responsible for the retreat, if it's working through Jodi or something around her, then that needs to end, and the deaths of some people who probably would have died at her hand if he hadn't intervened are…
They're not good. They matter. But it's a few possible deaths weighted against a lot more. He doesn't know for sure that Michael will eat any of the other attendees, anyway.
(He doesn't know for sure anyone at the Synergistic Hellness Centre is responsible, either.)
"I can," Michael says.
"Will you?"
Michael's smile is all edges. "You ask so much. Do you trust me?"
"Not really," Gerry says. "But you were eating me the other day, so I think it's fair to want compensation." That doesn't… it shouldn't count as a contract of any kind. It's not like any Power-servant bond he's heard of. Plus, his deal is with Michael, not the Spiral. His mum had business relationships and… more personal relationships with servants of the Powers, and it didn't count as a tie to those Powers. This isn't going to do any worse than being 'friends' or being eaten already has.
"I was feeding on you," Michael corrects. "Not eating you. It is… an important distinction. But I am willing to concede the point." It inclines its head slightly. "I will do as you've asked."
"Great. Thanks. The retreat starts Friday. Meet me here, we'll go together, work out any other details on the way. Sound good?" Gerry asks.
"Yes," Michael says, and extends a hand.
Gerry stares at it for a moment. The hand looks normal. He knows Michael's hands aren't normal. But he also knows they can be touched without cutting, because he's seen it handle things without slicing them to pieces, because that hand was on his stomach, a few nights ago. If Michael doesn't want to take Gerry's hand off at the wrist, it won't. Whether or not it wants to take Gerry's hand off at the wrist is… less certain.
Gerry's never actually directly touched it before. Even the other night, there were sheets in the way.
But he's going to have to, isn't he? If they're going to do anything like a passable imitation of a couple, they're going to have to touch each other. He might as well start now, with no other witnesses, so he can learn what to expect in the future.
He takes Michael's hand.
It has far more weight than it should. That's the first thing Gerry notices, the weight of it, barely pressing down but unignorable. It's also… lumpy, with protrusions on the sharper side of dull or the duller side of sharp. Somewhat clammy, though that may be an illusion generated by a difference in body temperature rather than an actual dampness. Not that there's any distinguishing between 'illusion' and 'actuality' with the Spiral.
They shake hands.
"I do look forward to this, Gerard," Michael says.
That doesn't make me feel better, Gerry doesn't say.