Work Text:
On the top floor of the Magnus Institute in London there was a spacious, elegant office. The plaque on the door was stamped Elias Bouchard. The face of the man in it was also Elias Bouchard, although like the office, the face was merely a space from which to operate, and a functional bit of window dressing besides.
The man in the face, and the office, finished going over some administrative reports. It was important to keep tabs on the state of the organization, the status of various projects. Speaking of which…
He closed the slim, expensive computer he had been working from, and shut his eyes. He looked.
"...especially since we have been unable to get permission to physically investigate whether this place even exists. It seems we’ve reached something of a dead end." Jon paused, realized what he'd just said, and rolled his eyes at himself. "No pun intended. End recor – eurgh!"
His hand was already hovering over the tape recorder when he noticed a flick of movement from the corner of his eye — a flick of silver from one of the damaged floorboards. He reached for the CO2 — they were all keeping a can by their desks these days, as the worms found their way all the way into the archives with distressing frequency.
Jon pointed the fire extinguisher at the knot of worms, pulled the trigger … and produced nothing but a flatulent squeak. "Goddamn it," he snapped, tossing it aside. Apparently he'd been rather too thorough with the last batch of intruders. He tossed the extinguisher aside and slid around his desk toward the door. "Martin!"
No response. Not that he expected one, honestly. Martin had been … quiet, lately. Distant. Which should've been a good thing. He was supposed to be establishing boundaries.
He wasn't supposed to miss him, for fuck's sake, when they still worked together. Still slept in the archives, less than twenty feet apart.
Jon made it into the corridor without incident. "Martin, where did you put the rest of the extinguishers?" he called, scanning for any helpful scarlet cans. None were in sight. Well, bloody lot of good that did them— "Martin!" He was the self-appointed captain of their anti-worm defenses, he ought to actually do something about it….
Jon stalked toward the breakroom, where he definitely remembered a fire extinguisher on the wall.
The Archivist is frightened.
He does not want to show that he is frightened, though he has confided it already in one of his assistants. He prefers to be aggressive, angry, cold; he prefers the illusion of self-control, though his lack of control is one of many things that scare him. His becoming is proceeding far ahead of schedule, perhaps spurred by his unfortunate masochistic fixation on the aforementioned assistant, though that is becoming commingled with a more appropriate modality of desire. One more conducive to his purpose.
He believes with an almost childlike earnestness that understanding a thing will remove the fear of that thing, and that will be his undoing.
Martin heard Jon calling for him; he would've noticed that voice from the other side of the building. But he wasn't exactly eager to get told off again for — whatever Jon had a bug up his arse about today. The filing, maybe. Martin had been slacking.
(There were things Martin deserved a telling off for. Worse than that. Maybe if Jon wanted to get angry about those, instead of this cold withdrawal — at least if he was yelling about it, it'd mean he cared, yeah? No, shut up, he was being ridiculous. He should be grateful that the cold shoulder was all he was getting.)
By the time Martin shuffled into Jon's office, the door was hanging open — a novelty, as of late — and Jon was nowhere to be seen. Huh. Maybe he'd been hearing things. Maybe Jon had just decided to do whatever it was he was annoyed about himself. Maybe he'd gone up to Elias's office to demand Martin get sacked once and for all. That would require acknowledging Martin's presence, though, wouldn't it?
"Jon?" he tried anyway, stepping into the office. (Like he'd fallen down between the floorboards, or behind a shelf.) "Did you call for—"
"'Scuse us—"
"—Looking for the Archivist."
Martin spun on his heel. Two men were behind him, enormous men in coveralls and flat caps. They looked like any other delivery men who might stop by the Institute in a day, even if most of them didn't come down to the archives. They looked perfectly innocuous.
So why did he have the sudden urge to pull his lips back and hiss like an angry cat?
"I’m sorry," he said instead, "are you two meant –"
"Won’t take up your time—"
"— Just got a delivery."
Martin's heart didn't beat, so it couldn't race, but the hair on the back of his neck still prickled upward. He realized he hadn't heard them coming, was the thing. He hadn't heard them coming. "Look, you really can’t actually –" he stammered.
They ignored him. "Package for Jonathan Sims." "Says right here." The slightly shorter of the two — who still towered over even Martin — held out a padded mailer in one muscle-bound arm. This close, Martin should've been able to smell the blood flowing under his skin. He should've heard them coming.
"Well, I don’t know where he –'' he started to bluster, but again they cut him off.
"We’ll just leave it with you." The mailer was thrust into Martin's chest with enough force to rock him back on his heels. "Be sure he gets it."
Martin took the mailer and stared into the eyes of the — men? People? Things that were no more human than him. Or Prentiss. They didn't have the earthy, rotted smell of the worms, though, now that he was paying attention to it; they didn't smell of anything at all. Like they were hollow on the inside. Or worse. "I will," he said. "Now, you really have to actually –"
"‘Course. Much obliged." "Stay safe." They smiled identical, leering smiles. At least their teeth all seemed blunt.
"You too," Martin said, and forced a smile that showed that his teeth weren't.
They left the archives in the direction of the stairs, but as soon as they were out of Martin's line of sight the sound of their footsteps also vanished. He fought the urge to chase after them; he had a hunch that he wouldn't be able to find them if he did.
"What were those?"
Christ. Martin had been so focused on the delivery men that he hadn't noticed Tim coming up behind him — and it was Tim, the real Tim, made of skin and blood and irritation. "Dunno," Martin mumbled, covering his mouth self-consciously. "Not — not human."
"No," Tim said, low, tense. For once his glare wasn't directed at Martin. "Not human at all."
Timothy Stoker is frightened.
He would not say that he is frightened. He would use the vocabulary of violence: besieged, threatened, stabbed in the back. He sees the worms as clearly as anyone else, though he does not bother to report them. He sees the monster in his office more clearly than most, apparently, and he has given up on reporting it. But like the Archivist, his anger is a veil for his fear, and for his guilt, as a wound that had barely closed bursts open afresh.
He tells himself it is a logical response to the presence of a predator. He tells himself it is a reasonable reaction to a lie. These things are, perhaps, true. What he has not told anyone, not even his closest confidant, is that he let himself forget a lesson writ in blood. He has not told anyone, even himself, that he thought the monsters were confined to the hollow places, the London under London that serves the Good Cousins in the absence of their customary hills and mounds. And now that he knows they are not — that there are more things in heaven and earth than his nightmares had imagined — he is angry, and bitter, and so, so afraid.
(He has not yet realized that those hollow places are, in fact, quite close at hand.)
(He has not yet realized how many monsters surround him.)
"And you're sure it was—?" Sasha asked, for what felt like the thousandth time.
"Yes, I'm fucking sure!" Tim hissed. He couldn't say how he was sure, exactly, only that he knew it on sight; perhaps he'd been inoculated, after seeing the mask pulled back before. Perhaps he'd been blessed, or cursed. "Martin saw it too. Or smelled it, I don't know. He was practically snarling at them."
"Huh." Sasha's eyes went distant for a moment. "I wonder if — sorry, not important." She eyed the entrance to Artefact Storage with a little frown. "Hate this place."
"I know, I know." Tim poked his head through the doors, but there was no sign of Sophia or any of the usual suspects. The check-in desk wasn't even occupied, and the package was still sat in front of it, taking up most of the entryway. "Did you bring scissors?"
"There should be — yep, got it." Sasha reached over the check-in desk and produced a battered Stanley knife. "If they left the delivery here, why were they in the archives at all?"
"Gave something to Martin. He was going to show Jon, since they're all buddy-buddy these days."
"Not so much, actually," Sasha said, deftly cutting through the packing tape. The box was plain brown cardboard, with no markings save the address written on it in thick, curving letters: The Archivist, ℅ Magnus Institute. The envelope Martin had been holding was addressed similarly. "I think they had some kind of — oh my god!"
The box contained a table, one made of old, intricately carved wood. It wanted a bit of cleaning — the crevices of the carved parts were black with old finish and built-up grime — but even so, it was beautiful, if a bit disconcerting to look at. Tim couldn't quite make out the pattern to it, but the longer he studied it, the more it seemed to be just out of reach—
He jumped when Sasha smacked him on the arm. "Don't look at it," she said, sounding a bit dazed. "Not too closely, as least."
Tim shook his head to clear the cobwebs out. It wasn't — it didn't feel like something of Them; not so much a glamour as an optical illusion. "Okay, so, spooky table," he said, trying not to get lost in the pattern again. "What d'you reckon the game is with it?"
"I think this is the table from Amy Patel's statement," Sasha said. She reached out and traced the hole in the center — about six inches square, where the carvings abruptly stopped. "The Not-Graham, remember?"
Tim didn't, actually, but he trusted Sasha to have a better memory for that sort of thing. "Why would They send us something out of a statement?"
"I suppose that depends," Sasha said, "on what happened to the original Graham Folger."
Sasha James is not yet frightened.
She ought to be.
The lighter was — it was just a lighter. An old gold-plated Zippo. The front had a faint pattern etched on it, something like a spiderweb, though the whole thing was so battered that Jon was hesitant to identify it right away. "Does this mean anything to you?" he asked.
"Sorry," Martin said with a shrug.
Right. Jon pocketed the lighter to deal with later. Tim and Sasha were looking for the rest of the delivery. That left him alone with Martin, something he'd been trying to avoid. "You, ah, you said there was something about the delivery men…"
"They weren't human," Martin said. "They didn't — smell right. Move right."
"You're sure?" Jon asked inanely.
Martin gave a little chuckle. "I'm, ah, sort of the expert on things pretending to be human that aren't, right?"
Jon flinched in spite of himself. "Right. Of course." Of course Martin would be able to tell his prey from — no, bad line of thought there, stop it. "They didn't, ah, did they seem threatening?"
"Not … directly?" Martin shrugged. "Just sort of, y'know, big and pushy."
"I supposed there's worse things."
"Yeah." Martin rubbed his mouth, not meeting Jon's eyes. "Hopefully I'm one of them."
Jon blinked. "You don't — you shouldn't — " What was he even trying to say? What was Martin trying to say? "You're not a, a guard dog, Martin."
"Course not," Martin said quickly. "Can you imagine, me...?"
Jon could, unfortunately, imagine a lot of things where Martin was concerned. "Leaving aside the question of what the delivery men were," Jon said briskly, focusing back on the matter at hand. "the packages themselves are ... intriguing." Addressed to him. No, to the Archivist, to the position he held. Prentiss had talked about the Archivist as well. What did that mean, when two different kinds of monsters used the term? What did that mean about the sender?
(He could feel that curiosity, that itch, working its way up the back of his neck. The need to know, the hunger for it, and he didn't know what it meant, and he didn't know how to make it stop...)
"I'm just going to—" Martin interrupted Jon's train of thought; he was halfway out of his chair, and pointing at the door.
"Right, right," Jon said. Don't keep him unnecessarily. Boundaries, et cetera. "I should check with Rosie, see if she noticed anything out of the ordinary when they signed in. If they signed in. I suppose it's too much to hope…"
The words died in Jon's throat as he realized Martin had already walked out. He was talking to an empty room. Oh.
(Wasn't that what he'd wanted? No, of course not; the things he wanted were the problem.)
Martin Blackwood is —
Well.
To say Martin Blackwood is frightened is to say the rain is wet. He has an anxious personality and a sensitive heart, despite all the world has done to him. If Peter hadn't found him, something else certainly would've.
But what is unusual now is that he is less afraid than ever both. His greatest secrets lie exposed now, at least to one man, and the consequences are precisely as bad as expected. It has been confirmed: he is a monster, he is disgusting, he is a parasite, he is beyond forgiveness or salvation. The deception has ended and everything he feared has been confirmed.
It's oddly freeing, in its way.
He is still frightened of Jane Prentiss, of course, and what her silver children could do to his own dead flesh. He is still worried about keeping his job. He no longer bothers with the cheerful facade, though, the endless labor of endearing himself and denying his nature. Instead he keeps his distance; he withdraws; he dwells on the memory of a fog-haunted beach, and there is no one around to notice if he, too, is dissolving into mist.
Martin Blackwood's fear is the most valuable thing about him.
The absence of his fear is the most dangerous.
Jonah Magnus opened his eyes, already frowning.
Clearly it was time for contingency plans.