Chapter Text
With Daisy gone, the Archives were thrust into an awkward sort of limbo. Nobody would quite look Lyf in the eyes, any of their eyes, and most would avoid the bullpen entirely if Lyf was there. They took to skulking around the filing shelves instead, picking out statements at random to skim and discard. Many weren’t even Statements, and those were set down next to Jon’s discredited category, which was indeed quite substantial already. How they even made it into the shelves was a mystery. It felt… somewhat productive, at least, something to fill the solitary hours. They hoped that Jon would notice, maybe even appreciate it.
Needless to say, they were lonely, and by consequence, also more than a little bored. With nobody to… well, nobody to listen to the rambles of (while they could certainly still eavesdrop, the conversations at hand didn’t help matters), and nothing to do until Daisy returned, they were left restless and antsy, pacing on a knife’s edge. It was a wonder the floors didn’t wear any faster, considering the sharpness of their claws.
Eventually, their mind wandered its bored halls to an oft-visited place, also known as Artefact Storage. The Not!Them still wriggled within its constraints, after all. It waited patiently (or perhaps not so patiently) for anyone to get close enough, to stay for long enough to feed, to be free. Probably. The constraints wouldn’t last forever, after all. The trap wasn’t completely unbreakable. Generally, they’d have other priorities, but… well, it would be just like the Web for Her bindings to fail just as they were about to get Jonah, wouldn’t it.
They sighed and slipped out of the archival stacks, creeping towards the door and hoping that they wouldn’t be noticed. That was easier than it would normally be in the bullpen, nowadays, considering that just about everyone was making a concerted effort to ignore them. The issue was elsewhere. Sure, they could tug people’s eyes away as they always did, but it was harder to do now that so many employees were both aware of their presence and not habituated to it.
They stuck to the shadows as they made their way up to Artefact storage, not that there were many in the brightly lit stairwell. The door was closed, naturally, but that had never stopped them before and it wouldn’t start now. They messed with the lock until it let them through, and slipped inside, following the walls to avoid encountering anyone.
The table hadn’t been moved in quite some time now, and was still tucked in a corner employees weren’t supposed to go to on a regular basis. They’d listened to the odd recluses in the basement, which was good considering how dangerous the thing was. Unfortunately, the fact that it was dangerous also meant that moving it would be risky at best, even if they knew where to move it to.
On the plus side, their bindings seemed to be holding so far. It wouldn’t hurt to refresh them, adding a few more for good measure.
That, at least, was a simple enough task, and not one that disturbed the table enough that the Not!Them attempted to escape again, if it even could. While it was far from a permanent solution, something had caught their eye on the way in; a particular wooden coffin, with several sets of chains wrapped around it and the keys most likely destroyed.
Not that that would stop them.
They waited for the work day to finish, for most of the employees to file out of the room and go home. No sense in accidentally getting some poor employee Not!Them’d or eaten by the coffin, never mind the fact that sneaky as they were, someone would probably notice their activities when two large and very unwieldy objects were involved.
Luckily, one of those items (the coffin) didn’t need to be moved or anything. The table would be quite hard to actually fit inside of its new home, but they’d manage. Probably. For the moment, though, they simply broke eye contact with the hypnotic patterns as much as possible and shoved themself under it to carry it on their back. Someone might think them a very, very odd... horse or something. Perhaps a mule, in the same way that they were a hybrid between a moth and an eldritch horror.
Moving the table was easier said than done, and involved a lot of crawling across the floor, inching forward bit by bit as the wood pressed harmlessly into their ink. Their wings didn’t much appreciate the pressure, and they ended up pausing at one point to free them and let them drag on the sides instead, but eventually the table was deposited next to the coffin.
There were two issues at this point. One: someone had hidden the key to the coffin. Two: the coffin was, well, coffin-sized. The first was, at least in theory, easy to remedy. Lyf abandoned the table for the moment and stuck one talon into the Storage-added lock, jiggling it around until they heard a click. The second lock, the one that actually came with the Artefact, apparently required its own key. It wanted to be fed, though, and so Lyf tried to force the lock open only as long as it took for the Buried to guide them to the key’s location.
I’m feeding you, you daft thing, Lyf thought bitterly at it as it did its utmost to completely take over their mind. They didn’t want to be the food, but fear was fear, and the Not!Them would learn to be afraid. Irritated, now, they shoved the damn thing’s key into the lock, releasing the chains, and dragged the lid aside. It took a monumental mental effort not to try and peek down the hole, to stick one limb down into it to see how it felt.
Instead, they forced themself away, turning towards the table instead. Now for the even more annoying part. Absently, part of them wondered if Tim would count this as on par with sending it to the bottom of the ocean. The only difference was that the Not!Them would likely never re-emerge, as the Buried had never let anyone leave the coffin before. (Daisy - and Jon - had been the first, but that was in another world.) The only ones who might end up suffering because of the creature were the ones also stuck in its tunnels, forever undying. On the other hand, it wasn’t as though their situation could get much worse than it already was.
Lyf squashed themself beneath one corner, hauling it up with all their strength. They managed to get it balanced on one edge of the coffin, which, somehow, didn’t tip over. A miracle. Maybe it was just that heavy once it was open, that stable. Regardless, there was still a fairly major issue: the coffin was wide enough for a large person, but not for, well, an entire table that seated a small family, especially not with the legs. Hm.
Lyf stepped back, inspecting the legs. Maybe there was a way to remove them. Hopefully the not!Them wasn’t contained specifically within the legs. That would be profoundly awkward.
Thankfully, it seemed to have a set of hidden bolts and screws, rather than being glued together or connected through some strange supernatural means. It took some time to find them all, and their profound lack of screwdriver didn’t help much, but they eventually managed to pry the legs off and toss them down into the gaping maw beneath. Well, not gaping, really- the cramped and filthy maw beneath. That freed up the top of the table to be aligned sideways with the coffin, the short edge feeding in first, hotdog-style.
The… sausage- er, the filling… perhaps this metaphor was not ideal. The top panel of the table was shoved forcefully down, the patterned wood scraping horribly against the dirty stone stairs that went down, down, down into the coffin, through the floor, and further into another world. The sound was awfully loud, and, for a moment, Lyf feared it might be heard from outside of the building, let alone from within its walls.
It was a good thing they were in the basement, and that most of the Institute was empty by now. Between the odd, hushed whispers of the coffin itself, not quite as awful nor as real as the uncomfortable moaning that emanated from it on rainy days, and the abnormally-loud sound of wood on stone, someone would have shown up. Someone would have checked to see what was making so much noise. It almost sounded like a screech, low and grating.
It’s scratching the table’s markings, Lyf realised. It’s sanding the lines away. It’s destroying the Artefact’s innate bindings. At least it was only damaging one side- if it had done that to the top…
Well. One could only hope that if it did damage the top, it would be when the table was buried deep enough that it wouldn’t matter.
Table successfully deposited, Lyf forced themself away, one limb at a time. The thing, despite just being fed, was no less eager for seconds. They hissed at it, then retrieved the lid, dragging it over the top. They then slowly, carefully wrapped the chains around the-
THUMP. Something hit against the lid, and Lyf had to throw themself bodily on the scratched wooden panel.
Well. That wasn’t good.
Either it was just the usual knocking that the coffin was known to produce… or the Not!Them’s bindings had deteriorated far faster than Lyf had planned. If it was the former, they probably had nothing to worry about. If it was the latter, they had a lot of things to worry about. The chains still trailed loosely on the ground around them, and they would have a lot of trouble chaining it up and staying on top of the coffin.
THUMP. The lid shook under their body. Hopefully they were heavy enough to keep it closed. Thinking fast, they threw down a layer of inky webs around the edge of the coffin. They had no illusions that it would be enough to keep the thing contained, but it might give them enough of an edge to finish the job before it could get out. They patted the webs down, then reached for the chains with their second set of limbs, using the other two sets to hold down the lid as they awkwardly dragged the chains up.
There was an odd sound within the coffin, an answer to the rattling of the chains. “Please!” a voice cried out. Lyf did not recognise its sound. “Please, I’m stuck in here! There’s... wood... things in the way, and the door’s closed, please!”
Lyf hesitated. On the one hand, if that was a real person, they’d hate to trap them within forever, especially if they’d just found the exit. On the other… well. The timing was more than a little suspicious. And if they took a moment to think about it, how would she(?) have hit the lid if she was trapped behind the table?
“It’s... the walls... I think my ribs are broken,” the voice insisted, and banged on the coffin’s lid again, weaker this time. “I- I think my ankle is too, I landed badly when I got past the wood.”
Well, it wasn’t like Lyf could respond, or ask questions to try and verify… anything. They hissed softly to themself, hunching down over the lid. No, it- it couldn’t be a real person. The timing was off. The Buried would never allow it. They’d only done it that one time because the Eye had led them out, and, even then, it had taken external effort. Someone (Martin) had helped. The tapes that had littered the floor, the coffin’s lid, the nearby shelves had called them out. This- this thing, whatever it was (though Lyfrassir was fairly certain of its identity or lack thereof), it didn’t have anything anchoring it to the outside world.
Right, then. Not!They were clearly the Not!Them. On the tiny chance that it wasn’t…
They couldn’t afford to think about that.
They snarled wordlessly, as much to themself as the thing beneath them, and yanked the chains upwards. The thing continued to wail and scream and beg, but Lyf ignored Not!Them and only worked faster and faster. They couldn’t afford to let it out. Not!They banged against the door with renewed fervour as Lyf shifted to attach the chains to one another with the lock. Not!They slammed against the lid hard enough to lift it slightly from the edges; but then Lyf shoved it down once more, joining the lock and the chain with a final click.
The banging continued, but Lyf only had to take the key away into the already-sorted section of document storage for it to no longer be a problem. (The thing now rested in the discredited section, thus reducing the risk that someone might just stumble upon it while searching for other things.)
That done, they just sort of… stared at it for a few moments. It was done. It was finished. The Not!Them was contained, at least unless some particularly stupid soul decided to open up the coffin to see what was within, but… maybe if Lyf was lucky, the Buried would… digest it or something by then. They doubted it would let the Not!Them simply stay at its entrance forever, primed to escape its hold.
In the end it took a couple days for anyone to notice the table’s absence (which only went to show how bad the Institute’s security was- no wonder the calliope had been stolen before the failed Unknowing), and, by then, it was too late for anyone to do anything about it. The panic eventually subsided, leaving its place to regular old ambient dread, a significantly preferable emotion (as it meant no one would do anything stupid until it built up enough).
Nothing felt like it had materially… changed, really. The table was gone, and the space it left behind was filled by another Artefact soon enough. The world kept turning. The space that the table had filled in Lyf’s mind, in the mind of the Archival crew… they couldn’t speak for the latter, insofar as they couldn’t speak at all, but for themself, it felt almost trivial. It felt minuscule in the face of what was coming, the gentle lapping of waves as a tsunami rose in the distance. It felt like a pebble thrown into a landslide.
All Lyf knew for certain was that something was coming; and that the last thing they needed was to be afraid.