Chapter Text
Gertrude stares across at the uncomfortable young man sitting in her office. He’s eyeing her desk with something close to disgust, scowling at the loose papers and the organized chaos of the Archives.
That’s okay, she’s used to it. Her office is a mess, and it’s meant to be. She can weather the judgment of one ignorant man.
He shifts in his seat, dark eyes darting around the room. There’s a paranoid wrinkle on his forehead as he studies the corners, searching for cameras that aren’t there. It’s a common feeling, here in the Archives, and mentally Gertrude can respect his intuition.
“Something to say, sir?” She asks, ticking an eyebrow up.
“This place is a mess,” he snaps out, blunt and unforgiving.
Gertrude can respect his honesty, too, though perhaps not the rough and untamed way he wields his words.
“It has its uses,” she says, flatly. “I understand you’re here to give a statement.”
“Yes,” he says, taking a deep breath. “... Yes, I am.”
Gertrude eyes him warily. It’s not often she takes statements in person — her assistants are quite good at filtering and handling the numerous fakes. But occasionally something slips through, something real, and it appears that today she is simply unlucky enough to be present for this.
Already she is starting to classify the nature of the fear. The paranoia would suggest the Eye. It would explain that small jolt of familiarity she feels upon meeting the man’s gaze.
“Would you mind if I record your statement?” She asks, reaching for the handle of her drawer. She pulls out the old tape recorder she keeps in her desk for situations like these, starts to set it down on the tabletop.
But at the sight of it, the man flinches back, violently. His chair falls over, and in the blink of an eye, he’s pressed up against the wall in a vain attempt to put distance between himself and the recorder. She looks up in curiosity — she’s never seen anyone react quite like that.
“Yes, actually, I do mind,” he says, through gritted teeth. Once again, his eyes dart around the room.
Definitely the Eye, then.
“Alright then,” she says, and she puts the tape recorder back in her drawer — though not before hitting ‘record’. The audio will be muffled, but it will be audio.
The man stiffly fixes up the chair. After a tense moment, he sits back down, warily watching her movements.
“I apologize,” he says stiffly. “I — take notes, if you must, but I ask that you not record anything I say.”
“Of course,” she lies, taking out her pen and a few sheets of paper for appearances. “Let’s get started. Name?”
“Jonathan Sims.”
“And you will be speaking of…”
He grimaces. “Several encounters with my… doppelgänger.”
Gertrude’s eyes flick up, at that, because that sounds more like the Stranger at work. Perhaps more than one Fear will be present in this statement.
“Alright,” she says. The whir of the tape recorder in her desk is still audible, but only if you know what you’re listening for. She gently rests the tip of her pen on the paper.
“Whenever you’re ready.”
Jonathan Sims breathes in, steeling himself. Then he opens his mouth.
Neither of them hear the faint click of a second tape recorder, resting on Gertrude’s top shelf.
The first time Jon sees the thing is when he’s entering his flat.
(He is not counting the eerie paranoia from the weeks preceding, nor the few times a humanoid figure slipped just outside of his peripheral vision. He is not counting the times he’d whipped his head around, catching the edges of a sleeve, the scuff of a footstep.)
The first time Jon sees the thing is when he walks into his flat and stops dead in his tracks, because he sees himself already sitting down on one of his armchairs. His limbs lock up, his heartbeat stutters, and the feeling of wrongness he’d been trying to ignore for the past two weeks slams down on him with the force of an eighteen-wheeler.
“Who are you?” He manages to croak out.
The thing in his chair stiffens and turns around, and Jon feels his stomach flip over. Because he’s staring at his own face.
But not quite. It’s unmistakably his face, the same dark skin, the same coarse hair, the same moles and wrinkles. Yet, it looks older. More tired, if that were even possible. And that’s not even counting the scars.
“Oh, fuck,” the thing says, and god, it even sounds like him. “You can see me?”
But then Jon meets its eyes, its eyes, and he knows for a fact that whatever thing is sitting on his armchair, it is not human, it is not safe or friendly or anything benign.
“What do you want,” Jon grits out, defensive. “What are you?”
A flicker of emotion. Annoyance, frustration, worry, fear — and then it all goes blank, and the weight of a thousand stares settles upon Jon’s shoulders.
“I’m you,” it says.
Jon automatically steps back, gripping the handle of his grocery bag tight enough to make his knuckles hurt.
“Goddamn it,” it says. It gets to its feet, breaking eye contact, and Jon nearly falls over with relief. Though the wrongness persists. It’s disconcerting, how familiar-not-familiar it is — does he actually look like that from the outside? “Never mind. I’m a figment of your exhausted, work-obsessed mind. Get some sleep. Forget you saw me.”
“Have you been following me?” Jon demands, because he’s scared, yes, but he’s not just going to let this thing leave without giving him some answers.
“Yes. No. It doesn’t matter, I won’t —”
It cuts off and frowns.
Jon tentatively takes a step forward. He thinks of the canned soup in his grocery bag and mentally calculates how much force it would take to hit this thing in the head and knock it out. If it were even a good idea.
“Never mind,” it sighs, pinching the bridge of its nose. The same way Jon pinches his nose when he’s frustrated. “Never mind. Good night.”
The thing walks deeper into his flat, into his room.
For a second, Jon is frozen solid, he can’t breathe, there’s a thing in his house and it’s him but it isn’t. Then he realizes. There’s a thing in his room.
He runs after it, bursts through his bedroom door with shouts and thoughts and questions and —
When he opens the door, the bedroom is empty. The window is shut, and there are no signs of anything there.
He checks every room in his flat, locks all the doors, and tries to fall asleep under unseen eyes.
He’s more irritable and snappy for the next few weeks. His coworkers give him a wider berth than normal, but it otherwise changes nothing. Not that Jon ever talked to them anyway.
He still can’t help looking over his shoulder, can’t help tensing up on his commutes. He doesn’t see the shadows anymore, the fleeting glimpses of something, but that doesn’t mean much. Maybe it was more careful, now. Now that it knew that Jon could see it.
… Maybe it was a figment of his imagination.
He can’t imagine why it would tell him that, though. He likes to think his subconscious is as rational as his conscious self, but he’s been having weird, abstract dreams of worms and doors and eyes, and that undermines the idea that his imagination actually obeys anything logical.
So instead, he uses his time at work to research doppelgängers. It’s not exactly helpful. There’s the classic lore, that seeing your doppelgänger is a sign of your impending death. There’s the warnings to not communicate with it, as it might try to twist your mind. Which, too late for that.
There’s nothing concrete, though. It’s all folk tales and old myths, nothing up-to-date. He asks Rosie to keep an eye on any cases that deal with that, but he doubts anything will come out of it.
Three weeks pass, and Jon sees no sign of his apparent doppelgänger. He still feels like he’s being watched, but he can rationalize the fear, now. He was tired. It was nothing, just the product of an exhausted mind.
So naturally, by the time he’s almost done convincing himself to let it go, he sees the thing strolling the halls of the Magnus Institute as if it belonged there.
Jon yelps and nearly drops the stack of documents he’d been carrying. At the sound, the thing looks up — and then looks genuinely surprised to see him.
“What are you doing here?” It asks, holding a tape recorder in its hands.
Jon stares at it incredulously, too confused to be scared. “I work here?”
“No, I know that,” it says, waving its hand dismissively. Jon can see that the recorder is running, and he scowls. “Aren’t you supposed to be devouring lore over by the library? This is the laboratory wing. You’re a qualitative researcher.”
“How do you know what I do?” Jon snaps back.
“I told you, I’m you.”
“What are you trying to do? Kill me?”
“If I’m you, why would I be trying to — never mind.”
“I don’t think that you’re me.”
The thing grimaces. “Good. You don’t want to be me.”
Jon frowns. “Aren’t you supposed to be convincing me that you’re on my side? Or stealing my soul? Eating me?”
The thing’s gaze flickers over to Jon. Jon flinches. Once again, he feels more than he sees the eyes that watch him.
“I don’t eat people,” it says. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Jon wants to say that he’s not being ridiculous, because all his paranoia is actually justified and this thing is actually real.
“Just get back to work,” it says, already turning away to go do — whatever the hell it was doing. “I’m not going to bother you.”
Yeah, right, Jon thinks.
“Can you at least stop watching me all the time?” Jon asks. “I don’t appreciate being stalked by supernatural creatures.”
The thing blinks. “You’re being watched?”
“Yes,” Jon says impatiently. “By you?”
“What makes you think that?”
“You’re recording our conversation right now.”
“I —” it looks at its hand and grimaces, and pointedly presses stop. “I was recording my own thoughts. You interrupted me.”
Jon stares back, dead-eyed, and the thing shoves the recorder into its pocket.
“There’s also the fact that your thousand-eye-stare has been following me for over a month,” Jon adds, frustrated. The thing already knows that Jon doesn’t trust it — why is it bothering to lie about this? Some sort of weird mind game?
“Thousand-eye-stare,” it mutters, ignoring the point entirely. “Hmm. There’s really only the two, unless somebody got their hands on a Leitner. She wouldn’t have a reason to, so that leaves — Magnus.”
That last word is hissed with enough poison to kill. Jon frowns, because who the hell is Magnus? Is he talking about the Institute? And what’s this business about that cursed library?
“Are you going to stop watching me or not?” Jon asks, impatient.
The thing grimaces, as if reminded that Jon was there. He doesn’t believe its claim, but it’s nice to know that, theoretically, he can’t stand himself. “I’ll… try,” it says. It’s not very convincing.
“You’ll try,” Jon scoffs.
“I can’t account for your own sense of paranoia,” it says. “Goodbye. Hopefully this will be the last time we see each other.”
It turns to go, before abruptly halting and swinging its gaze back around.
“Why are you in the laboratory wing?” It asks, a strange depth to its voice that wasn’t there earlier.
“Asking about what research they have on doppelgängers,” Jon says, feeling his mouth move to answer the question, and he presses his lips together, surprised.
“Oh, of course,” it says, rolling its eyes. “I’ll save you some time, then. I’m not a doppelgänger, at least not in the, ah, traditional sense.”
“You’re not me, either.”
“I suppose you’re right, in a way,” it replies, already walking away.
“Wait —” Jon says, taking a step forward. “What are you, then?”
“Hopefully, not lost,” it says, as though that answers anything. It walks down the hallway with a sense of purpose and turns out of sight.
Jon runs after it, but even before he pokes his head around the corner, he already knows that it’s gone.
The eyes don’t stop. If anything, Jon feels like he’s being watched more often. In his flat. At lunch. In the Institute. The feeling is especially strong within the Institute.
He likes to think that it doesn’t affect his work, but some of his coworkers have been sneaking suspicious glances more than usual, and it’s not helping with the feeling of paranoia. One of them even asks him if he wants a cup of tea.
Jon tries his best to not snap, but he suspects he fails when his coworker scampers out of the break room. No matter, it’s not like he’s eager to maintain his reputation for Martin Blackwood.
To make matters worse, he’s hearing clicks and static everywhere he goes. He tries to pass it off as nothing, but when he finds a tape recorder on top of his fridge, he knows.
“Whatever happened to trying?” Jon hisses into it before turning it off and dropping it into a dumpster. He finds the next one running underneath his desk at work, and deliberately removes the tape before tossing the recorder into the trash. When he tries to play it, later, all he gets is distorted static. He nearly sets off the alarm in his flat when he attempts to light it on fire, and his kitchen smells like burnt plastic for an embarrassingly long amount of time.
He’s taken to communicating with his coworkers through post-it notes and unimpressed stares. If he doesn’t speak, it can’t hear him.
Someone must have decided that he had laryngitis, because he starts finding cups of chamomile tea on his desk. Jon pours them into the various potted plants scattered throughout the Institute when no one is looking. After all, he doesn’t know who made it, or what went into it. The tea might have even come from his doppelgänger (or whatever it was).
Of course, while keeping silent might prevent his everyday happenings from being recorded, it doesn’t do anything to stop the eyes.
His independent study in the library has shifted. Stories of doubles and clones have proven to be useless; he starts looking for accounts of sudden paranoia, of things that can turn corners and disappear and summon tape recorders. It’s frustratingly vague, and goes absolutely nowhere.
It’s with a kind of defeated resignation that he enters his flat and spots the thing sitting in that same armchair, flipping through one of his books.
“What is it this time?” he asks, dead tired from his inability to get a restful sleep.
The thing looks up at him and snorts with amusement. “You look like shit.”
“Well, whose fault is that?” Jon snaps. There’s a part of his brain that is screaming at his mouth, telling him to shut up and stop mouthing off to the thing, but he’d passed the point of no return a long time ago. And for all its watching, it didn’t seem like it wanted to kill him.
“Not mine, actually,” the thing answers his accusation. It sets the book down on his table and turns its gaze on him. “I — can’t do anything about the eyes, unfortunately,” it grumbles. “I’m essentially invisible to anyone but you, and am unable to affect it. I can promise, though, that I haven’t been watching you.”
“And the tapes?” Jon asks. “Because I’ve found quite a few since we last spoke.”
“The tapes are — a side effect,” it grimaces. “I was trying to see if I could counter the other’s… ah, eyes.”
“What, by watching me first?” Jon scoffs.
“I admit, not the brightest of ideas,” it answered. “In any case, you are quite literally, the only being I can interact with, so there’s nothing I can do to stop it. My advice to you is: quit your job, Jonathan Sims, and run far, far away.”
“What.”
“If you don’t want to be me, you’ll walk away,” it says. “And if you walk away, you are far less likely to be watched.”
“I can’t just — I can’t just quit my job on the word of some, some thing,” Jon stutters. “What will you do if I refuse?”
It shrugs. “Keep trying to convince you, I suppose?”
“You’re not even me,” Jon continues protesting. “You’re just some — some creature that can mimic me, like some sort of, some sort of changeling-shifter-thing.”
“Ugh, don’t compare me to that,” it grimaces. “Not-thems are pure evil, for one thing. I like to consider myself a true neutral —”
“Do shut up,” Jon says. “And no, I’m not quitting my job.”
“Fine,” it says. “I can tell when I’m not welcome. Just — if you listen to one thing I say: stay out of the Archives.” It brushes off its coat and gets to its feet.
Jon steps forward, hand outstretched. “Are you leaving?”
It looks at him, quizzically. The effect of it is disorienting; it’s hard to focus on its eyes. “You don’t want me here, right?”
“Well, no, but — I have questions.”
“You’re better off not knowing the answers. I’ll just — find another thing to do, I suppose. Go on with your life, forget you saw me. Stay out of the Archives. Farewell.”
Jon snarls. He crosses the last few feet separating him from the thing, and he grabs its arm.
“What are you?” he demands.
The thing sighs. “I’m… what shouldn’t have been,” it says, as though deciding its words carefully.
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, you shouldn’t,” it snaps, and it yanks its arm out of Jon’s grip. “Quit your job, Jonathan Sims. It’ll be better for both of us.”
With that, it strides past Jon and out his door, into the night. Jon runs out and tries to track its progress, but once again, it’s hidden from sight.
He walks back into his flat, fuming with the lack of information, and is unsurprised to see a tape recorder on the coffee table, still running. He chucks it out the window.
The first thing Jon does when he gets to the Magnus Institute is to head over to the Archives.
“Well, the Eye must have something to do with it,” Gertrude says into the recorder, after Jonathan Sims has left the basement. “I can think of no other Power that would feed off of such paranoia. It also mentioned ‘Magnus’ — perhaps that it is the name it gives to our illustrious Mr. Bouchard, as head of the Magnus Institute. The intentions of this doppelgänger, however, are unclear. I don’t believe it’s working with Elias. And I certainly have never seen or heard of anything like it.
“There is also the question of why Mr. Sims is the only one who can see it. The obvious connection is that of its appearance, although how much of that is contrived is unknown. I do wonder what it meant to accomplish by claiming to be Mr. Sims himself. I do not believe this to be the work of the Stranger — the creature’s words are too heavy-handed for that. Perhaps it is a new manifestation of the Spiral, overlapping with the Eye.
“In any case,” she sighs, “I’m afraid that I will have to add to the number of eyes watching this Jonathan Sims. I’m more concerned that Elias is turning his gaze on the general employees of this place… I do hope that he is not looking for a replacement.”
A pause.
“Unfortunately, I believe that is exactly what he is doing,” she finishes, with a resigned tone. “End recording.”
With the final comments recorded, Gertrude Robinson ejects her newest tape and simply labels it ‘SIMS’. She slips it into her pocket and steps out of her office.
Hours later, and long after dark, an unseen figure steps inside and grabs a tape recorder off the top shelf.
“I should have known,” Jon grumbles, after listening to his younger self give a statement after explicitly being told not to.
When had Jon ever listened to other people, anyway? The only reason he was even here was because he had ignored Martin’s sound advice and somehow ended up six years in the past. And was pretty much ineffectual, because he couldn’t do shit.
The only person who he could interact with was his past self, who had (perhaps rightfully) zero trust in anything Jon had to say. He’d tried bothering Magnus in the office multiple times, but the man just kept doing business without even acknowledging Jon’s efforts. He’d checked up on everyone he could think of — Martin, Tim, and Sasha couldn’t see him at all, Basira and Daisy didn’t seem to notice anything, even Georgie just looked through him as though he weren’t there. He’d knocked things off of Gertrude’s desk just to see if she would notice, but there seemed to be some sort of compulsion of sorts, causing people to just… ignore him.
Jon could break into a person’s house and steal all their food, and the most that would happen is blame each other for eating everything. He could hide all of Jonah’s pens, but he’d never suspect it to be anything other than a simple misplacement.
Jon supposed that, with this newfound invisibility, he could disrupt a few rituals and annoy a few avatars. But it wouldn’t change anything — the rituals were doomed to fail anyway, and petty revenge would only go so far.
The only way he could get anything meaningful done was to get his past self to do it. To change. And his past self had just so helpfully proven that he couldn’t listen, even to save his own life.
How did people ever get Jon to do what they wanted, anyway? That was one of the reasons he and Georgie broke up — he was just ‘too independent’. He listened to Martin, occasionally, but, well. Jon wasn’t Martin, and he didn’t think that romancing his past self would actually go anywhere, if he could even figure out how to do it.
“Well,” Jon says out loud, and with a sinking feeling in his stomach. “I guess that means I have to channel my inner Jonah Magnus.”
With a heavy sigh, he gets to his feet.
“I’m you,” Jon says, for what feels like the millionth time, because his younger self only ever seems to have one question. God, was this how Elias felt whenever he just bluntly asked for answers that he couldn’t actually give?
(Jon’s genuinely surprised that Magnus kept him for so long. Well, he did put a lot of work into building and marking up an Archive, but. Still.)
This time, however, Jon is not talking with the goal of convincing his past self. This time, he has a plan. Sort of.
“I noticed you went to the Archives,” he says, still annoyed. “Despite my explicit instructions.”
“I noticed that you kept watching me after you said you’d try to leave me alone,” young Jon snaps. “And what were you even hoping to accomplish with that?”
“I had hoped to keep you out of the Archives,” Jon answers. “And to keep you out of… things.”
“Things,” young Jon says, with a familiar glare that did wonders to cement his authority in the early days of his Archivist career, and did absolutely nothing after everything had gone to hell.
“Yes, things,” Jon says awkwardly. How does the Web get anything done? Forget manipulating other people, he can’t even manipulate his own self. “The Archivist is dangerous. You should stay away from her.”
“Why would you even care?”
“Because I’m you,” Jon repeats. Again. “In fact — you should go to Elias and get her fired, even. That should definitely keep you safe. Elias is quite good at that. Keeping people safe.”
“I’m not listening to you!”
“Your loss,” Jon shrugs. “Sorry about the tape recorders. Force of habit.”
“What?”
“I’ll see you around, Jonathan Sims,” he says, injecting just the right amount of ominous energy. “Do try and stay out of trouble.”
With that, he turns to walk away, ignoring the protests of his younger self. He takes a sharp corner, into his old bedroom, and then promptly shoves himself out the window and onto the fire escape as quickly as he can, closing the window behind him. He can hear his younger self chasing after him for answers, but he ducks out of sight and climbs up onto the rooftop of the building.
He stands quietly, for a moment, until he’s certain his younger self hadn’t spotted his very human escape.
“Where’s Helen when you need her, huh?” he mutters to himself. Once he’s in the clear, Jon starts making his way back down to the ground floor.
The next day, Jonathan Sims the Younger is back in the Archives. Gertrude is intrigued. Jonah is fascinated. And Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist, watches over all of them, wondering if his efforts will be enough to save his friends.