Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The bright summer noon was gray-green when the bookseller caught Michael picking through her wares.

She didn’t speak at first, but he felt the weight of her gaze when it snagged and fell on him. He let the slim velvet-covered book he’d taken up slip back to the table with its siblings. He was by himself at the fair but she didn’t know that, so he glanced up and down the crowded thoroughfare, trying to look like he was waiting on someone. That he’d only stopped at her table until he wasn’t alone anymore.

The cover had left the faintest of blue fuzz or dye - he wasn’t sure which - on his fingertips. He brushed his hands on his pants and half-turned, though his hands were still blue-ish.

“It likes you,” the bookseller said, and it wasn’t a compliment.

Michael rubbed his thumbs over his fingers. “Oh, no,” he said, not sure why, or what else to say. “I don’t think so.” And then, because she was still watching him, everything about her the color of iron, her hair, her eyes, the rings on her fingers, “I’m sorry.”

The bookseller rose from her chair and picked up the book he’d held a moment before. Examined the spine. Ran a finger down the gutter. She wasn’t speaking to him, wasn’t paying attention to him anymore, but Michael didn’t dare leave, not without a direct dismissal. She was an iron spike who had fixed him to the ground he stood on. 

The sun came out from the cloud it had hidden behind, turning the gray noon a bright, hard-shadowed white.

“You smell like the Archivery,” the bookseller said, dropping the book with even less ceremony than Michael had. It thunk ed against the other books, stacked in heaps that obscured covers and spines and showed only the page edges: white, cream, yellow-brown, gold-edged, crimson, spackled with green like robin’s eggs, smooth and deckled and chipped with age. They were more vivid than the colors of autumn leaves or spring flowers, more beautiful by half. 

Michael realized what she’d said.

“What?” And, “No.” And, “No, I’ve - I’ve never been. No.”

She gazed at him, unimpressed and unconvinced. She tidied the book she’d dropped - her fingers did not turn blue - and went back to her seat, a carved wooden thing in the center of a hardy, worn rug laid over the bare earth. “Well,” she said, casually, but with the edge of a challenge. “What would I know about it?”

Michael still couldn’t tell if he’d been dismissed or not.

The bookseller watched the fairground crowds for a few moments more before she glanced at him again, surprised to see him still there. “Did you want to buy it?”

“It…? Oh, the - the--” He looked at the blue-velvet book and then again at his fingertips. “No. No, I don’t. I’m only - waiting--”

“It’s just a novel,” the bookseller said as if he hadn’t spoken. “Fake. Made up. An early one of his.”

“His…?”

“The Archivist’s apprentice.”

He stared at her, uncertain. “Ah.”

“It’s safe,” she said. “As they go.”

Another challenge. Michael hadn’t come to the fair to be challenged. He’d come to get the sweetest cake-on-a-stick he could find and listen to the loudest music they could play, to get sunburned and turn as red as he could get. Not to buy a book. Even a novel. No matter who’d bound it.

“No, thank you,” he said. “Sorry for your time.”

“No one else around, is there,” she muttered, and leaned forward to pluck the blue-velvet book off the stack herself, flipping the cover open to the first few pages, before the real story began.

“Thank you,” Michael said again, and finally her attention had shifted completely enough that he felt able to leave. He did so, turning his back on the bookseller’s stall and slipping into the crowds, obeying its natural movement, willing to follow it wherever it took him, as long as it took him away.

The cake wasn’t sweet enough. The music wasn’t loud enough. His skin stung by the end of the day, and spots swam in his eyes on the walk back home, and he was so warm that it circled back around to cold. When he tried to drink water he almost threw it back up again; he fell asleep in his small attic-room bed with the covers kicked to the floor. But the only color on his skin he could see was his fingertips: a deep, royal blue.

Chapter Text

He shouldn’t have spent so much time and energy at the fair. He woke groggy and nauseated the next morning, aching from his skin to his bones. He wanted to get up, to work with the rest of the family and farmhands, but this - not so much a relapse as a little trip-up, a bit of punishment for his indulgences - put him back in bed for the rest of the day. Mrs. Shepard brought up water and broth at intervals, saying little and smiling not at all, and he fell asleep as guilty as he was sick. He dreamed dreams colored blue.

Michael had lived with the Shepards for almost five years and wasn’t certain that they knew his first name, especially not after months of his lying in bed ill. They weren’t cruel about it, of course, and they had other hands living in their big farmhouse to pay attention to - bigger, louder men and women. He was grateful to them for the use of their attic room; they could have easily asked him to leave after Ryan’s death. But they hadn’t, and a space to himself was more important to him than a friendly relationship with his employers. He stayed out of their way after working hours, and they let him alone.

The illness - pneumonia, they said; Michael never remembered enough of it to verify - had stolen much of Michael’s endurance, so he had been on easy work for the past few weeks. The fair had been the first time he’d been off the farm since falling ill. 

The next day, he was able to sit up and even stand, but wobbled on his way to the door. Mrs. Shepard tonelessly suggested he stay in, and Michael knew that he would be in the way if he didn’t, so he obeyed.

Instead of working, he took his color diary down from the little shelf in the corner. There was a leak there in the roof that Michael could never locate, and the journal pages always turned muddled and swollen after he made an entry. He’d started collecting colors shortly after Ryan died. It was a pretty distraction, finding things and places in the world where color popped through untainted by gray. Even so, he’d found less and less as time went on.

Sometimes he thought Ryan had taken all the color in the world with him when he passed.

As usual, the previous pages were unintelligible, and Michael took a moment to mourn the loss of the colors he’d found. He thought one of them had been green, but that was mostly wishful thinking; he couldn’t remember the others at all. That day, he looked at the fading stain on his right hand and wrote with the left, documenting where he’d seen the color, what it felt like, how it looked.

It reminds me of how they talk about the sky in poetry. Open, pure, a call.

On the third morning after the fair, Michael joined the household again, not that they’d much noticed his absence; they were as gregarious as ever, an effortless family of some ten Shepards and farmhands mingling like friendly chickens around the slab of wooden table. He left the house before breakfast was over, taking bread and cheese with him to nibble while he inspected the pasture fences. They didn’t need inspecting, but the Shepards needed him out from underfoot, so that was where they sent him, and Michael didn’t complain. 

The morning was cool and dry, a bluish gray that reminded him of winter ice instead of summer sun. The fence was fine. Michael didn’t hurry. The cheese was salty and still warm on the bread. At first, the sounds of the farm drifted to him over the air, inescapable, but in very little time he’d gone out of earshot, and there was only the wind and his footsteps in the tall grass and a bird here and there to listen to. A thin, thorny little branch caught in the curls of his hair and he spent a few moments getting himself free. 

At some point between now and the color diary entry, the blue stain had left his fingers.

 
Recuperating from the illnesses was second nature by now. A month or so lost, except for the flashes of... sound, coming from him, sound he didn’t want to remember after all - and then it would break. He would work easy tasks for a while and then he was fine, until it happened again. He didn’t think recurrent pneumonia was an illness that existed, but what did he know? He wasn’t the one who remembered it. The Shepards knew better than he did.
 

The family plot was at the fence’s northeast corner. Michael took a detour, licking cheese from his fingers, and went to Ryan’s spot under the oak tree. 

“Picked up a book at the fair,” he said to the newest of the dozen or so stones, and tucked his hands into his pockets. “I didn’t buy it, of course. Just held it. The dye came off on my hands. No wonder they’re so bright.”

Unsurprisingly, the stone didn’t respond, nor the body beneath. Michael withdrew one hand, brushed it across the top of the headstone. The rough surface scraped at his fingertips. 

“Take care,” he said, as always, and backed out of the plot. He didn’t like turning away from Ryan. Usually he felt his way out of the plot in reverse until the small of his back hit the fence again. Then, as if he’d bolted a door behind him, it was safe to turn away and leave Ryan under the sod.

He kept tradition today. Shuffled back, the stone in sight. Felt a solid wooden post bump up against his spine. Stopped, blinked--

A yellow door stood behind the stone.

Michael held himself in place. His breath dried in his throat, and he almost coughed, but he put one hand over his mouth.

Another bird sang. A breeze kicked up, spinning a curl of leaves into the air, and then died, letting them fall again. Two squirrels tore through the upper branches of a pine. Needles showered down in their wake. One needle dropped onto the yellow door, wavering on its lintel before another faint wind knocked it off. It cast a thready shadow across the yellow door as it fell.

The yellow door should not have been there, but it was. 
 

There was no proper way to react to a surprise door. Nevertheless Michael couldn’t comprehend the swell of fear that rose in him, blocking his throat and tunneling his vision. His fingernails dug into the soft skin at the corner of his mouth, and the yellow door continued to do nothing but exist where it shouldn’t have.
 

With the whisper of a creak, the yellow door tilted open. Just an inch or so. Its frame stood thin and unsupported and steady. In the gap, where the rest of the gray-green plot should have been visible, was color: a rainbow. An oil slick. The surface of a bubble. It stung Michael’s eyes. He couldn’t remember ever seeing such bright colors; nothing like these had ever graced his diary. It repelled him and it drew him. The pain was like the pleasing burn of muscles in use, the burn before a breakthrough. If he was only a little closer.
 

Michael shifted forward. He didn’t even lift his foot, just leaned in, tilting away from the anchor of the pasture fence.
 

The door blew wide open and the oil slick gushed free. The ground dropped out from under Michael’s feet and the forest beyond the pasture stretched like candy, and then it wasn’t stretched at all and it was normal again, and so was Michael, except that something itched, itched, itched under his skin in his marrow, and his head was splitting open from the inside out, bones peeling from bones. 
 

“Michael...” someone sighed from the inside of his ear and the pit of his stomach and right before his face.
 

His fingernails ached and where his fingertips had been blue the day before now they were red, bright and shimmering as oil on a fire or the reflection in an owl’s eye. There was a hot wetness in his mouth that strangled his panicked voice, not that he knew or cared what he was saying or yelling or screaming. He was being butchered from the inside out, and it was letting him watch. 

--until someone shoved a piece of ice into his mouth.
 

“Bite down,” a voice commanded, and something about the shock, and the pain in his scalp where they had grabbed him by his hair, and the icy stab to the insides of his mouth, made him obey. 
 

More pain, this in his teeth when he bit too hard and the ice didn’t give and it felt like his teeth had shattered, but this pain was normal, furiously human. It wasn’t the oily fire or the silent, interior horror of seeing his bones sliced thin and rearranged. This pain made him curse out loud, garbled around the chunk of ice. 
 

As if satisfied, the hand released its handful of hair near the base of his neck, and Michael sagged forward, holding the ice in his mouth with difficulty. Then he looked up.
 

It was the bookseller. She wore trousers and a well-fitted blouse, and must have once been wearing the jacket and vest that were now crumpled in the grass a few feet away. In one hand she held a stack of books, in the other a medicine bottle full of orangey liquid.
 

The yellow door was still there, just beyond Ryan’s headstone. Michael jerked backwards, throwing himself against the fencepost.
 

The bookseller, with an iron calm, walked up to the yellow door. It was still wide open, still shimmering with oily color, and Michael knew it was laughing. Laughing. Laughing like the dry hinges of an ancient gate. The bookseller must not have heard it because she stopped nearer than a yard away, then tossed the books at the door’s base. 
 

The oil slick still clung to Michael’s extremities - his brain, his shoulder blades, the tiny bones in the backs of his hands. He crunched harder on the chunk of ice, wishing he could look away from the yellow door and the bookseller before it. He couldn’t, and so he heard its laughter sharpen. Turn flat. Turn desperate. It was ready to take her, too.
 

But before it could take her, she smashed the bottle on the ground, chucking it hard at the books at the base of the yellow door. The books were drenched and the doorframe was splattered and the oil slick beyond recoiled and Michael realized its laughter was screaming, might have always been screaming, and it sounded like--
 

“Try harder next time,” the bookseller said, taking something from her trouser pocket. At this angle, from this distance, Michael could hardly tell what it was until she made a quick jerk of her hand and a flame flared to life between her fingers. A match from a matchbox. “If you can spare the focus.”
 

It didn’t understand the flame until it was too late. It almost loved them anyway, they were made of such chaos and nonsense. They would have been better if they were pink and yellow and purple and blue as well as orange and red and toothy.
 

The ice dropped from Michael’s open mouth as the door burned. He scrambled to his feet, clinging to the fencepost, and watched gray crawl up the yellow paint, chipping it from the grayer wood beneath. Under his skin the oil slick was still. Dead, gone, asleep?
 

The bookseller reached through the flames and pulled the door shut, firm and final.
 

Then the oil slick died. It laughed as it tore through Michael’s bones, ripping them through his skin after it on its way to its dying yellow door. Michael screeched and the fencepost under his hands went wetly red. He couldn’t look at them, couldn’t stand to look at his fingers. It would be a mess and he couldn’t stand it. Beyond the bookseller, the yellow door collapsed in on itself like so many yellow sticks.
 

The bookseller lunged for the doorknob, a heavy brass thing, but it was gone in the ashes, and when the bookseller kicked the ashes apart, it was gone from them, too.
 

Michael clung to the fencepost. The sky was gray and bluer than the blue velvet of the book at the fair. The trees were gray knives pointed at him. The fence rippled like waves on the water. His fingers bled and bled and bled.
 

He realized the laughter had been Ryan’s.
 

“No,” he said, struggling. “No. I - no.”
 

The bookseller turned, her breathing labored, the corners of her mouth lifted in satisfaction. Her hands were gray with ash.
 

“I wouldn’t--” she began, but a moment too late. Michael had already looked at the mess of his hands. She was right: he shouldn’t have. He slipped down the length of the fencepost and didn’t feel himself hit the ground.
 

Chapter Text

It wasn’t the Shepards’ dray. Michael knew how it felt to lay on the sun-warmed boards of Ryan’s family’s cart, with just the wooden boards between himself and the moving ground beneath. This wasn’t it.

a green sky that melted in strands of burnt syrupy saliva

Michael half-screamed and struggled to stand, and immediately hit his head on the roof of the vehicle. This fresh pain, atop two or three others, sank him back into the seat and he slumped forward, face in hands, until his shredded fingers made him lift his heavy head again.

It hurt, apparently, to move, so he tried to sit very still, conscious of a slow and noxious sensation down one side of his body.

He was in a close, dark old carriage, moving at a clip through a slate-and-brick city, the sky full of rain (gray, cloud-studded, nothing but normal) past the rooftops. The movement only made the growing sick sensation worse, so he focused on not losing his stomach in the enclosed space.

Through the front window of the brougham, the bookseller cast a rapid glance backwards at him. Her mouth made the shape of a swear and the carriage picked up pace. Michael’s stomach complained and he slumped sidelong, his head thumping against the tepid window.

He was glad they were close.

thin wooden door opening like the long thin peel of a lemon into the pith of forgettances and the refusal of repentance

A stab of pain through his temple like an icepick and he groaned again. “I,” he said, meaning to call to the bookseller, but with no true idea what he’d say. He didn’t know her name or where they were, mostly, until he did, but then it slipped away - and he didn’t know why he hurt or why his hands were bleeding or why, oh, why, it felt like he was opening up, crooking outward on a hinge with his insides slowly slipping out onto the seat beside him, which was nevertheless clean of blood and viscera, even though he could see it, he knew--

The carriage stopped. A thrum of dread twisted Michael’s stomach again. Could he run? Why would he run? He wanted to run. Away from the tall, toothy-looking building of dark stone and heavy iron fastenings outside, all the windows shuttered and barred. It looked like it was trying to exist as a cold and invisible force, the way a January wind is the meanest thing you’ll never see biting you.

The bookseller opened the carriage door and Michael spilled out, a collection of limbs and aching nerves. Ignoring the fall and his noises of pain - even Michael barely heard himself - the bookseller heaved him upright, if not on his feet, and dragged him towards the building.

Something in Michael revolted. He found his feet and dug them into the stone of the street, but she dragged him onwards anyway, up the steps until she could rap the door knocker with one hand, the other holding him by the back of his shirt.

“Wait,” he said, trying to hold himself closed, “wait, I don’t - what are - the Shepards, Ryan, are they--”

The bookseller hammered the door knocker again, four crisp raps that made Michael’s headache waver like a harped chord. “The Shepards know,” she said without turning her head. “They understand.”

“Under-- understand?” Weakly, Michael wriggled in her grasp, but his head and his hands hurt too much to bother for long. “I don’t understand.”

“Shocking.”

He stared at her. He was bleeding on her, he was sure, from where he still hung ajar, from the crown of his head to his knees. Probably lower. He couldn’t look that far down without falling.

She turned yellow as a canary and Michael screamed. The bookseller just tightened her grip and knocked at the door again. On the street, a passing man and woman shot them knowing glances.

“Where in hell--” the bookseller grumbled, and resorted to kicking the door with her heavy boot. “They hemorrhage assistants almost as quick as Leitner but for God’s sake--”

“I think I’m going to die,” Michael said, at some distance from himself, and then the door to the cruel building opened like a mouth beneath a dozen stoppered eyes.

Michael laughed helplessly in the second before his vision cleared.

In the doorway was a small, slim man who had just moments before been wrapped in the soft, fragile wingstuff of a moth, chrysalised in it. It was gone now, leaving just the tidy little man, in clothes that were a little too big. They weren’t ill-fitting as much as they were cozy, in shades of brown and burgundy. There was a smattering of scars down one side of his face until they disappeared beneath the collar of his shirt, pale purplish against brown skin.

What had been so funny? Michael couldn’t remember. He almost grabbed at the man’s face, bodily seizing the lost memory.

The bookseller said, “About time.”

The man, eyes wide and mouth twisted, stared at Michael for a heartbeat before turning to the bookseller. “What are you doing here? With… him?”

His voice was a bucket of disgust. Michael felt himself shrink.

“You know him?” the bookseller asked, curiously vindicated. “Never mind, it’ll keep. We had an emergency.”

The man didn’t move from the door, or even open it wider to allow them in. Michael found himself staring at the hinges, the places where the nails burrowed deep into wood, and sympathizing. “But why you? It’s usually… someone else.”

“I was on hand. So to speak. He’s getting heavy, Mr. Sims.”

The man hesitated a beat longer. His attention was like two hummingbirds, darting between the bookseller and Michael, colorful, blurred with speed, quite pretty. Again Michael would have reached out if he weren’t so loaded down with weariness.

“I’ll take him,” the man decided, and stepped past the threshold, reaching for Michael. His hands were unbloody. “You can wait.”

“Not very hospitable,” the bookseller said, without sounding surprised. “Fine. I’ll stay to take him back.”

“You’ll stay outside.”

“Yes, yes. Hurry, he’s...” The bookseller gestured vaguely to Michael’s hands. “...leaking.”

She had no idea. Michael giggled faintly as she passed him to the man - Mr. Sims? - who pushed his shoulder under Michael’s arm to support him without having to haul him like a bag of loose bones, which was close to what Michael felt like, give or take a tear in the bag or two.

“I’ll have someone come to bill you,” the man said, and then kicked the door shut with a thunderous clap before she could respond.

Abruptly, the world was dark and cool: thick swathes of brownish-gray, near to black, coated this entryway and the hallways Mr. Sims guided Michael down. None of the windows were open and the air had a stale, sealed-in flavor. Sometimes Michael heard the flutter of wings and would jerk in Mr. Sims’s grasp to follow the sound, but there was always nothing, never anything but shadows in the shelves across the walls.

“Empty,” Michael murmured, reaching out one throbbing hand to a shelf that oozed past. A drop of blood fell from his fingertip to the cold floor.

Mr. Sims said nothing. Once in a while, Michael felt the man’s eyes on him. It was so hard to focus on anything, but feeling that gaze made him try, and then the pain came back, breaking through the giddy clouds that had softened the world around him. He hurt and he was open and a yellow door had called him by name with Ryan’s throat, a yellow door with something in it.

By the time Mr. Sims had pulled Michael into a small, comfortably furnished room, thick with rugs and years’ worth of tea fumes, the clouds had dispersed almost entirely, and Michael could feel himself shivering, his jaw set against the pain in his hands. Only now did he realize they were wrapped in shreds of handkerchiefs, which must have been why they did so little to stem the bleeding.

“Mr. Shelley,” Mr. Sims said, lowering Michael into an overstuffed chair, “I know you need to be bound, but I think your hands should be taken care of first. The pain might… remind you, once the binding is complete.”

“Bound…?” Michael gripped the arms of the chair, leaving bloodstains on the burgundy upholstery. That was where she’d brought him. She’d mentioned it at the fair. Thinking he’d been before. “No, it’s a mistake, I didn’t--”

He jumped up again, trembling harder, and tried once more to pin himself back together, to keep from bleeding onto the chair from his ribcage and throat. Mr. Sims backpedaled, wary.

The whole room sucked in yellow, suffusing itself with a sunflower shade that hurt Michael’s eyes. He pressed his bloody hands to them, digging the heels of his palms in until that hurt even more.

It hadn’t been so strange, had it? A yellow door, left in a clearing in the woods, couldn’t be that bad. Someone renovating their house. An eccentric old rich man who didn’t care to dispose of his home’s accoutrements in the usual way. Michael didn’t need to be bound. She couldn’t bring him here like this, drop him in a binder’s lap like his soul meant nothing. He didn’t need to be bound. He’d never been bound, shouldn’t need it now, it was just a door, just a door, just a yellow door.

Tentative, hopeful, Michael lowered his hands, and saw everything through a haze of dripping, breathing gold.

He sank back into the chair, silent and shaking so hard he thought the chair’s carved wooden legs would rattle against the floor.

“Mr. Shelley,” Mr. Sims said cautiously.

Michael looked up at him. He held a small tray full of basic medical supplies, all of which were melting into a single oozing mass of metal and fibers. It smelled like burning leather.

But when he met Mr. Sims’s eyes, the supplies turned into supplies again, shifting back in Michael’s peripheral vision, and his sense of smell cleared.

He dragged in a shaking, damp breath and nodded his permission.

Mr. Sims drew up a stool beside the chair and took Michael’s left wrist in hand, holding it light but steady as he peeled away the bloody scraps of handkerchiefs. A curl of disgust lifted his lips, but his voice was as professional as ever as he said, “Ms. Robinson’s methods are nothing if not consistent.”

Michael wasn’t sure what that meant, but he was focusing too hard on Mr. Sims’s face to reply. When Mr. Sims started cleaning the wounds in Michael’s fingers, his cheeks went a little green, but he didn’t ask what had happened; Michael was as relieved as he was confused, since he wasn’t sure he’d be able to answer. Splinters, he imagined saying, which set free the nervous laughter again, and he had to resist the urge to cover his mouth and thereby yank his hands from Mr. Sims’s grasp. He pressed his chin into his shoulder instead, for as long as he could manage tearing his attention from Mr. Sims. When the room started to bubble at the corners, like it was a smoldering photograph, Michael swallowed his nerves and looked back.

Mr. Sims didn’t so much as raise his head as he worked, leaving Michael free to focus on his face. He wasn’t literally unhinged when he focused on the slight bump in Mr. Sims’s nose, he wasn’t bleeding from his whole ribcage when he counted the number of pockmark scars around Mr. Sims’s cheeks and jaw (twenty-seven), and nothing was melting or burning or slowly, slowly, slowly swelling in size when his attention was on the messy, overlong strands of Mr. Sims’s dark hair, already sparsely silvered.

When Mr. Sims was done, Michael thought he could have painted his portrait from memory, if he’d had any artistic talent. Though the idea of having memory in the first place seemed like a tall order.

“All right.” Mr. Sims set the tray of bloody fabric and soiled tools aside, then stood and reached for his own handkerchief, doused in something that smelled clinical, factual, clean. Wiping his hands with it, he went on, “I think you should be ready.”

“Ready,” Michael repeated, and his nerves returned. He looked down at his fingers, the clean, snug bandages. They itched already, edged with yellow. His stomach flipped and he snapped his attentions back to Mr. Sims. “I - I don’t know. I’ve never…”

Mr. Sims gave him a quick glance, almost entirely expressionless. The edge of the expression he did have made Michael stop.

“I’ve never,” he repeated, and heard the question in his voice.

“Every binding is the first, Mr. Shelley,” Mr. Sims said, which sounded like canned lies if Michael had ever heard one.

Michael squeezed his knees together. “The bookseller… she mentioned…”

Mr. Sims’s mouth made that curling shape again and he turned away, towards a table near the smoldering fireplace. Had Michael noticed there was a fire in the grate until now? He hadn’t noticed that his left leg was burning up. He shifted away from the fireplace and its bright yellow coals and said, “I thought I would have remembered.”

“That is the point of the binding.”

“Well - well - yes…” Michael let his attention slip from Mr. Sims’s face and the fire began to spread, out from the grate with golden fingers and creeping up the leg of his chair, burning through his pants cuff. Michael managed not to scream but still made a puff of panicked noise, scrambling from the chair and swatting at his clothes, the chair, everywhere it burned--

Mr. Sims seized his wrists again, and the fire vanished, except where it still burned lowly, sanely, in the grate.

Michael looked down into Mr. Sims’s eyes. Mr. Sims was, comparatively, short, but he held himself like a cat would, with puffed fur and impeccable posture to make up for everything else.

“Mr. Shelley,” he said without letting go. “You have had an experience with a Power that you can’t understand. This particular Power contaminates your mind, specifically, and… and mimics the effects of, or fully causes, madness. I can take that memory from you, and store it in a book, and you will be able to think clearly again. Without being bound, it’s hard to say exactly how long you’ll be… functional, but it won’t be long. Now, I realize the reputation the Magnus Archivery has obtained, but you can, at least, consider us the lesser of two evils. With a binder’s help, you’ll be able to survive.”

Michael stared at the hands wrapped around the base of his own.

“It was just a yellow door,” he whispered. “It shouldn’t have…”

Mr. Sims drew back. Michael couldn’t look away from the pink stripes where Mr. Sims had held him still, already fading as he watched.

“Take a seat, Mr. Shelley,” he said, a shade too competent to be gentle. “I’ll need your consent before we start.”

Michael remembered seeing his body fall open the way a door tipped wide in a breeze, the way the yellow door had opened onto... something... without a hand to explain why. The skin of his left calf still stung, though the fire had never existed to touch him.

You smell like the Archivery, the bookseller had said, as the Archivist’s apprentice’s book had stained his hands blue. Was Mr. Sims the Archivist, or the apprentice?

Michael sat one more time, and this time, Mr. Sims must have seen the acceptance on Michael’s face, because he pulled up another chair - thinly upholstered, upright and stiff - close by, close enough for the arms to touch, if Mr. Sims’s had had arms.

“All right,” Michael said with a tear in his voice. “You can take it. I don’t care what it does to me. If you can make it stop… make it stop.”

Mr. Sims nodded calmly. “Then I’ll take your statement for the binding,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

+

A woman with iron-gray hair was there to take him home.

“The Shepards sent me,” she explained, when Mr. Sims led Michael out. “Come along. They’ll be waiting.”

“Be very careful,” Mr. Sims said tersely, and it took Michael a moment to realize he was talking to the old woman, not to Michael.

The old woman smirked and guided Michael to the door of the brougham. “Aren’t I always, Jonathan.”

Mr. Sims looked like he’d sucked on a lemon. It made Michael want to smile, but he was too tired to do much besides pull himself into the carriage. The old woman had to close the door herself; his bandaged hands, sore as they were, sat like useless lumps in his lap. He wondered what he’d done to them before remembering what Mr. Sims had told him on the way out of the parlor: “You burned them. A mishap with the oil lamp.”

Of course.

He remembered watching through the carriage window as Mr. Sims bothered with the cuff of one immaculate sleeve, holding eye contact, his expression too distant to read. And then Michael was asleep, and nothing touched the still darkness of his thoughts until the old woman woke him, back at the Shepards’.

Chapter Text

Michael was ill again by the next morning. It ran its course as usual: he was almost insensible for most of it, the two weeks or so passing in dark blotches, very occasionally stabbed through with an agonizing brightness in which he heard his own voice, incoherent and too loud. Then one of the Shepards would come and administer... something, he wasn’t sure what. Wasn’t even sure whether or not he swallowed it until the brightness faded and he was submerged again.

The wounds on his fingers wouldn’t heal. The few times he could see when he woke, he saw blood on his hands and on the blanket. He’d have to buy a new one; when he was well again and washing his bedclothes, the stains wouldn’t come out. It wasn’t ruined, and he still could have used it, but the stains stayed red as cherries, instead of darkening to dull brown, and the vividness of the color made him uneasy. He didn’t even put it in his color diary, which had, again, been subject to a blurry ruination. The last color he’d noted was gone.

He spent almost an hour with the diary in his lap, considering the grayed-out blob on the page and the saturation of the blood on his blanket. The idea of transferring the red, writing down where it had come from and why, made him so tired he was almost nauseated again.

On a whim one afternoon, he burned both the blanket and the diary, and stood over the fire warming his sore, bandaged fingers. He spent the hour considering the bandages, trying to recall what he’d done. Something about tools, he thought, which seemed logical, since he was on a farm.

He should have been satisfied, but he was still too tired for that much emotion. At best he was relieved. God, he hoped he didn’t get sick like that again soon. It felt like it chipped a piece off him every time. He wasn’t sure he’d have anything left to give, soon.

A month or so later, Michael was tidying his room, dusting and sweeping and otherwise making himself scarce from the rest of the house, when he pushed the broom underneath the bed and heard paper rustle.

His whole body went stiff. There was almost no paper in the house whatsoever; Mr. Shepard had a particular hatred of anything in the area of books. That was why he’d stowed his diary in such a terrible spot.

He blew a stray strand of hair from his face and slowly straightened, bringing the broom head out from under the bedframe. The scrape of paper against wood continued the whole time, until a single page was revealed, smutty and faded from the dust and ashes that had collected beneath the mattress. As soon as he saw it, Michael relaxed: it was a piece of paper from his color diary. There were no illicit books being stashed in his room he didn’t know about. His diary had never been of a particularly high quality; no surprise that a page or two fell out every once in a while.

He unfolded the page in one hand, leaning on the broom with the other, and studied the colorless smudge with its illegible notations. It had the faintest green tinge, sage-adjacent. It was a lovely color, insofar as Michael could see it.

I shouldn’t have burned it, he thought, touching the dim little blurb of almost-color.

He set the page beneath a vase beneath his room’s only window, and determined to buy a locket the next time he was asked to go to town.

There was a bookseller’s stall in the town market, almost two months later. Michael felt his mouth twist when he saw the slouching stacks of books, all in poisonous colors like evil little frogs. They hurt his head to look at.

The bookseller was an old woman who flicked an iron glance towards him once and then returned to her book, reading a soul like it was hers for the consumption. Mr. Shepard snapped Michael’s name and Michael jerked his attention back to them, Mr. Shepard and the other two hands who’d come to town.

The scrap of paper in Michael’s pocket crinkled with each step, but so softly that only Michael could hear its sage-green whisper. When he, along with the other men, passed through the thicker parts of the market crowd, though, he lost its sound among all the other, louder ones, and when they were getting ready to leave, burdened down with supplies, Michael felt the pocket for the texture of the note, and found nothing.

“Wait, wait,” he mumbled, mostly to himself at first, digging for the paper now, but his pocket was empty. “Wait, I lost--”

“This is yours, I think.”

Michael spun around and looked directly into the face of the bookseller, her hand outstretched to him. The other two farm hands’ conversation dropped off a cliff and Mr. Shepard stiffened, his face turning the same shade of dangerous as hurricane clouds.

Michael’s gaze dropped down to her proferred hand, in which sat his wrinkled, dirt-stained diary page, folded crisp and tidy. He took it without looking at it again, stuffing it into his pocket. “Thanks,” he said, and added unnecessarily, “I must have dropped it.”

Her fingers were cold and dry, which could also be said for her expression. “Must have,” she said.

“Come on,” Mr. Shepard said, and Michael felt fingers close around his upper arm, yanking him backwards between the two farm hands. “Home’ll be waiting.”

When they got home, and Michael was safely squirreled into his room, he unfolded the page to study the blot of almost-green, and, though something else fell from the page’s folds, onto the mattress, his attention was on the page. The faded blob of color was full green again, brightly sage, almost too vivid to be real. They reminded him of the bookseller’s wares, but this was better, natural, real. Michael touched the scribbled color, but it was just pencil, or whatever he’d used to copy it down.

After catching his breath, Michael turned to the thing that had fallen from the page. It was a card: fine quality, creamy white with a single, horizontal golden line, across the center. Above the line was the name, in spiky capitals, THE MAGNUS ARCHIVERY. Beneath it was JONATHAN SIMS, in more modest size and style.

Michael felt the thump of his heart in his skull. It didn’t hurt at first, but the longer it went on, the more it did. He tossed the card away from him and it landed somewhere on the floor, he didn’t care where, and sank down on his bed.

Something is wrong, he thought. Once, twice, a hundred times, a tattoo keeping the beat with his headache.

“Two of them are gone,” Michael said, raking a hand through his hair and ripping through tangles in his curls. “I can’t find them, I’ve looked, I’ve counted, but I can’t--”

The farmhand cut him off with a grunt. “They’re all here.”

Michael stared at him, then out at the small flock of sheep, grazing content and unbothered. Michael knew how many there were supposed to be, and two were missing. He’d counted three times, more panicked each time.

The farmhand counted out loud, so Michael could watch his finger bob between the sheep and hear the correct number at the end. The last two sheep weren’t even out of sight, just wandered off together near the bottom of this valley.

“It’s fine,” the farmhand said, unable to disguise the impatience in his voice. He’d been the first one Michael had found when he’d discovered the missing sheep. “They’re all here and that’s what matters. Just... look closer next time. Something wrong with your eyes?”

No, there wasn’t.

Jonathan Sims’s card showed up everywhere. Michael had tucked it under his mattress after he threw it - at least he thought he had - but it would flutter to the ground out of nowhere, no matter where he went, as if he’d slipped it into his pocket insecurely, and it’d finally wriggled free.

The third time he hid it under his mattress, he said out loud, “I am putting this under my mattress. I didn’t think I did but forget, I didn’t mean to but never get around, I didn’t let it slip out. I’m putting this under my mattress.”

It calmed him for a full day before he found it in the stables, pristine amidst the muck.

Every time he found it again, the throbbing headache came back, and the fear of Mr. Shepard finding it came back, too. The Archivery name was too big not to notice, even for someone whose reading skills were as basic as Mr. Shepard’s.

Michael tried to rip the card once. It shredded satisfactorily in his hands, and he looked at the pieces in his palms, trying to be relieved and failing. Then he went to sleep, woke up, and found the card atop one of his boots. He yanked away from the boots so hard he fell over. “I did,” he said to himself, remembering so clearly the feeling of tearing the card into pieces. How it had hurt the still-tender scars on his fingers. It happened, I did do it, it’s--

He didn’t know what it was.

Michael was in and out of bed with a mild form of his sickness, too lethargic to work even though autumn was a busy time for the Shepards. He would have felt worse about it if he didn’t seem to do his work wrong most of the time anyway. At least in bed the only thing he ate was scraps from the table, too nauseated most days to keep anything else down.

On the first day of October, Michael was done with his room, his bed, his body, his headaches, and Jonathan Sims’s card. He staggered out of the house before dawn, bundled in both of his coats, a scarf, and a hat, and went wandering, idiotically, through the near-dark of the farm, the cold stinging at his throat and lungs. The card was in his outer coat pocket.

It felt dangerous, and Michael, shivering, watching his breath puff up in front of him, didn’t dislike it.

His feet took him to the graveyard. By the time he got there, the headstones were barely visible, limned with the thinnest promise of dawn. Michael thumped down in front of Ryan’s stone and caught his breath.

Then he took out the card. “You need to keep this,” he said, feeling silly and serious all at once. “I can’t get rid of it otherwise. It keeps coming back when I throw it away or hide it or...” He sighed. “Doesn’t matter.”

He sat a while, turning the card over and over in his hands. It didn’t matter, did it? Not really. So what if it kept coming back to him. So what if he was just that stupid, or that damaged in the head. So?

“I miss you,” Michael said quietly, and looked up to see his own name on the headstone.

He sat very still. The hard edge of the card cut into his fingertips. The pain made him blink. The headstone said Ryan Shepard.

“See?” he said, slowly reaching out to lay the card on the ground, just beneath Ryan’s proper name.

He wondered if Ryan had ever felt like this, before Ryan was gone.

How had Ryan gone again? Horrified, Michael realized he couldn’t remember. What was the last thing they’d said to each other?

This - this was too far. Whatever was wrong with him, it could take whatever it wanted - up until it got to Ryan. Then - then--

“What are you doing?”

Michael scrambled to turn, scuttling backwards at the same time to evade the owner of the deep voice behind him. He’d expected someone bigger, but in the dim pre-dawn light, the man was small, portly, with gangly limbs; his wrists thrust awkwardly from the too-short coat sleeves, though his clothes themselves seemed fine enough.

Michael didn’t recognize him. Had never seen him in town, or on the road. Did that mean anything, or was it just one more thing Michael was losing?

Uncertain, Michael said, “Excuse me?”

The man didn’t repeat his question, smiling instead. His skin was pink and shiny, as if he’d exerted himself to get here. How had he gotten here? This was a family plot. Maybe he was a member of the extended Shepard family. Michael hadn’t been around the household long enough lately to know if they were expecting--

“Don’t let me stop you talking,” the man said cordially, moving to another of the headstones, a small-ish one. “I just came to check in.”

“Check in...?” Michael blinked, but forced his limbs to relax. Check in on a lost relative, no doubt. Odd time to do it, but if he was family...

“It’s following you, you know,” the man continued, conversational as ever. He patted the little stone and suddenly it was yellow, the fake, unreal color of a child’s toy. Michael went rigid again. “A lovely corkscrew all around this area. It may be the lost boy’s influence, who am I to say?” He drew his hand away from the stone and yellow followed like a sticky, oozing candy, lingering in the air. “But it does want you.”

Michael tasted something sour, metallic, and raw shifting on his tongue, and his fingers ached. When he shifted backwards an inch, it was in the wrong direction, and Michael was suddenly at the man’s feet, his hands dirty as if he’d crawled through mud to get there. The man smiled down at him, the way Michael imagined a father would, if a father had been turned inside out like a puppet being sewn together. The fingers of his left hand were bleeding again.

“Mmm, not ready yet,” the man said, passing a clump of yellow from hand to hand as it leaked all down his forearms, slicing his coat sleeves to ribbons and sewing them up again with the opposite of fabric. Michael wanted to be sick. “Not for joining us. But good enough for a snack--”

The final word came on a kind of hungry gurgle, as the man’s teeth sharpened and his tongue and gums and lips turned to teeth, too, though Michael couldn’t pick out details: they were just a sharpened white blur in the darkness. It seemed correct and proper, not odd at all, for a single, blinding second, and then Michael was himself again, and there was blood all over his left hand.

The card. He’d gripped it so tightly it had sliced into the scars on his fingertips. No cardstock should have been that sharp. Michael didn’t question it, with so much else to question: he thrust his fingertips into his mouth instead, tasting the flat, earthy taste of blood.

He tasted green, too. The sage green from his journal page. It tasted like... generosity. And kindness. And safety. The Archivery. Jonathan Sims.

It wasn’t the same as having the Archivist’s apprentice there, but Michael remembered how the apprentice’s gaze had cleared the madness, and for a heartbeat, he remembered the color of the apprentice’s eyes. And the blood was just blood, the man was just a man, and the tombstone was just a tombstone, and Michael was capable of running from them, so he did.

Behind him, the man laughed, gurgling and yellow.

Michael didn’t stop running at the Shepard’s farm.

Chapter Text

Michael didn’t knock, just grabbed the heavy door handles and heaved. Nothing happened; the Archivery was, apparently, locked from the inside. He threw himself backwards anyway, the edges of the metal handles digging into his sore hands. The heels of his shoes crunched in the grit of the stone landing.

Footsteps behind him? Michael spun, the handles digging into his spine as he pressed backwards. No one was behind him except the passersby on the street, the ones he’d seen before. Before. The last time. At least the last time. There had been... something. Yellow. His hands. Before. Ryan had been there.

Ryan--

A door! There had been a door. Michael felt the handles of the doors behind him like the barrel of an enormous gun. He leapt away, almost fell down the steps. The door was normal - bleak, iron-barred, gray in the late autumn evening - but so were most things before they weren’t. Before.

The bookseller--

Everyone he knew was trying to kill him. Or involve him in this. Doors, melting, senses not making sense. Memories out of place and altogether gone. Ryan’s death a blank, the yellow door like the glare in his eyes after staring at the sun. Blinking just made it worse. He felt like he’d be sick on the steps of the Archivery.

How had he gotten here? His knees wobbled and he almost sat there where he stood, between the street and the doors that might turn yellow at any second.

Instead, the doors opened like... doors.

“I thought I heard someone,” someone said. Michael scraped sweaty hair away from his face and looked up, one scratched hand still covering his mouth.

A woman heaved one door open, propping it that way with a booted foot. She wore her hair in a dark braided crown. Deep brown eyes, a curious smile, a fire iron in one hand, a half-eaten pastry in the other. A heavy wrap, though it wasn’t that cold out.

“You’re here for a binding?” she asked, lifting the pastry to her lips. Then she lowered it again quick, as if she hadn’t realized she was about to eat it.

Michael stared at her, then beyond her into the building. He still felt sick - still heard his brain crashing around his skull like it’d been stirred - but he recognized the inside of the Archivery, and he could remember how it felt to stand on its floors.

He eased closer, pushed one hand into his pocket, then held out the card the bookseller had given him. “I need to speak to him,” he said, impressed with how coherent he sounded.

The woman took the card with the same hand as the fire iron. Scanned it. Raised her head again, shifting her foot against the heavy door, and squinted at him. “Oh,” she said, and looked like she would have snapped her fingers if her fingers hadn’t been occupied. “What’s your name?”

God, he didn’t know. It was all yellowmelt and blurred tasteless color up there. He shook his head and said the first name that came to mind: “Ryan. Wait. No, no, no. Jonathan. No--”

For the first time, her smile faltered. Handing the card back to him - she eyed the cuts on his hands as he took it - she said, “Come in. You can wait in his office.”

The heavy warm darkness of the Archivery settled on his shoulders as soon as he stepped through. The woman put her crumbling pastry on a nearby shelf, resettled her grip on the fire iron, and said, “It’s this way, you can follow me.”

“Thank you, I know,” he said, though he didn’t, though he sort of did - an overlay, a memory of sand. She paused, glanced back at him, and reached into the pocket attached to her skirt for a pair of glasses. Settling them on her nose, she made her way from the entrance of the building down a hallway, down another hall, took a turn down another hall...

A yellow door. A yellow door. A golden throat. Down into a glistening sunflower stomach.

“This isn’t it,” he heard himself whispering. “This isn’t it,” again, as the shelves shifted, imperceptible but unmistakable. “Where are you--”

The squeak of hinges brought him back to himself, the hallway to the cozy set of rooms he remembered now, he was sure, the carpet and the chair and the fire and the--

“Here he is,” the woman said, waving the iron in the direction of the door that had just opened, the normal one where a normal man was waiting, a normal man Michael recognized incontrovertibly. His knees almost gave out from relief.

The man in his cozily ill-fitting clothes was hard to see in the ill-lit corridor, but his expression was still uncertain in the gloom as he looked from Michael to the woman. “Sasha,” he said, “you could have called.”

“I... hmm,” the woman - Sasha - said, setting her iron-occupied fist on her hip. “It felt like a Situation.”

A Situation. Michael laughed weakly. They both looked at him - unfathomable binders’ thoughts in their heads, no doubt - then turned back to each other.

“I thought,” Sasha said, carefully casual, “we just--”

“It’s very recent,” Jonathan Sims agreed, his brows beetling, “but then, Robinson was involved last time, so there really is no telling what’s gone wrong.”

Sasha wrinkled her nose. She reached out to Michael but he shied away, and she raised both hands in apology, including the iron in the gesture. “Well,” she told him, taking an extra step away, “here’s Jon, he’ll take care of you. Maybe. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

“Yes,” Jonathan Sims said, sounding very sure of himself. “Mr. Shelley.”

Shelley didn’t sound right, but Jonathan Sims was looking at him, so he went like a moth to the flame. It sounded more right the closer he got. When he was almost too close, he saw Mr. Sims’s eyes. They were green. A particular green. He’d held onto the green of Mr. Sims’s eyes.

Michael relaxed for no particular reason, except the din in his head was quieter now. He turned to thank Sasha over his shoulder and barely heard his own voice, but Sasha smiled at him, waggling the iron in a wave.

“Be nice, Jon,” she said. “And be... careful.”

“Aren’t I always?”

“To a fault!”

She turned and moved back down the corridor, soon lost in the gloom. Mr. Sims cleared his throat and gestured into the study, which Michael remembered, though he couldn’t remember getting there last time. Before. “After you.”

Michael shuffled into the study, holding onto his fear. Without it, he felt foolish. It was, suddenly, too easy to think he’d been overreacting, oversensitive, now that his head was quiet and the man in the cemetery seemed like a bad dream. He was almost frighteningly lucid. He was Michael Shelley and he had snuck onto the back of a cart heading into the city to get to the Archivery and--

Before. He had been here before. Because he’d lost his head before.

“Mr. Sims,” he said, turning to face the binder again, “I - I have your card.”

Mr. Sims blinked once. “Ah,” he said. “Mr. Shelley, you--” Another quick blink, and then Mr. Sims went to the fireplace, poking at it with an iron that matched the one Sasha had been protecting herself with. “This is... out of the ordinary.”

“A Situation.” Michael started to wring his hands, then realized that to do so would hurt.

A flicker of amusement crossed Mr. Sims’s scarred face. “Yes. You’re alone, for one thing. Most people in line to be bound don’t come alone.”

Michael couldn’t keep his hands still. He wasn’t sure if he was allowed to sit yet. Even though it hurt, he started kneading his scarf between both hands. “Last time the bookseller brought me,” he said. “You recognized me.”

Mr. Sims gave him a quick glance, unreadable. “It’s against policy to discuss hypothetical previous... engagements with the Archivery.”

“No, no, I remember - I remember, you bound me, Mr. Sims, I was here for a binding, you took something from me--”

Mr. Sims winced slightly.

“--and the bookseller brought me because it was...” Michael trailed off. He heard Ryan calling to him again and jerked, listening close - maybe Ryan was outside in the hall - before realizing it had been a memory of the yellow door. “And I’ve been before that. I remember, Mr. Sims, please, just - just tell me.”

Mr. Sims, fully frowning by now, must have realized they were both standing. “Here, sit,” he said, half distracted as he waved to the plush armchair Michael had sat in last time. The idea made Michael uneasy.

“You can’t bind me without consent,” he said, glancing down at his scarf. He expected to see blood on it by now, but the cuts were staying clean for now.

“What? No, of course not. It’s just - you’re very pale. You don’t look well.”

“I - I don’t feel well, so I guess it suits,” Michael said, trying for another laugh and sounding absolutely wretched. Mr. Sims’s attempt at smiling back was equally so. Michael went to sit with the last of his dignity intact, and instead collapsed like the muscles in his legs had been slashed.

Mr. Sims set a pot over the fire, presumably water for tea, and Michael took a second to wonder at the setup before Mr. Sims asked, “What happened? The binding - it was close to the one you’d had before, but it should have held. It’s only been a few months. How can you remember anything about it?”

Michael tried to explain the series of events - the color diary, the bookseller, the man in the cemetery at Ryan’s grave - but even when he went very slow and picked out each word with obsessive care, it still sounded like gibberish. It sounded like the account of a hypochondriac, someone needlessly paranoid, not someone in any real danger. The farther Michael dug himself into his statement, the more the feeling of foolishness returned, intensified, took over. By the end, Michael couldn’t look Mr. Sims in the eye.

Mr. Sims, for his part, was silent the whole way through. He was silent for another solid minute after Michael finished and the only sound was the fire crackling, the water beginning to boil, and Michael worrying at his scarf.

“Following you, it said,” Mr. Sims said under his breath, as if to himself.

Michael nodded.

Mr. Sims raised his head, looking surprised to see that Michael was still there. “This,” he said, and paused before finishing, “isn’t an isolated incident. Anyone can be bound, for any reason, but the Magnus Archivery tends to attract... subjects like you.”

“Like me? People chased by... by doors that aren’t doors?”

“People who are chased,” Mr. Sims said, “by any number of... ah... phenomena. Like the doors.” He stood and went to a desk in the darkest corner of the room. Michael hadn’t noticed it before. Rifling through one of the lower side drawers, Mr. Sims asked, “Are you sure that you give consent to discuss previous bindings? Something’s broken the last one, so our privacy policy doesn’t technically stand any longer, but you don’t remember... any binding or bindings before that, so I have to ask.”

“Yes.” Michael leaned forward, digging his fingernails into his knees. “Please, Mr. Sims. Something’s chasing me and I don’t know why or what to do about it. It’s - it’s been doing it for months.”

Mr. Sims’s face made that non-expression, the tightening of impassivity, and Michael’s heart sank.

“How many?” he asked, barely able to lift his voice above a whisper. “Please.”

Mr. Sims straightened and nudged the drawer shut with his knee. Whatever he cradled in his left hand was too small for Michael to see from so far away. “You don’t have the most bindings that the Magnus Archivery has seen - not even close,” he said. “But you have the most bindings that I’ve done for a single person. I think the last time you were here with Rob-- Ms. Robinson - the bookseller - was the thirteenth.”

Michael absorbed the number, unsure how else to respond. Thirteen. Thirteen bits of his soul gone, according to the villagers, or thirteen promises to the devils of hell. Thirteen experiences drawn from his head like thread on a spindle.

“Were they all the... the yellow door?” he asked when he could find his tongue again.

The kettle over the fire didn’t whistle, but steam began to plume from its spout. Mr. Sims tucked whatever he’d taken from the desk into his pocket, then moved to the fireplace, taking the kettle from the hook with the fire iron. “Most. All but the first.”

“The first?”

“Mr. Shelley, I really shouldn’t say anything else.” Wrapping the kettle’s handle in a towel, Mr. Sims poured the water into a waiting teapot nearby. “Not without speaking to my - ah - supervisor first. I... this may have happened before I came here but it hasn’t before. I’m not sure...” Frustration pinched his features before his professionalism smoothed it over again. Michael almost missed the little inhale Mr. Sims took before splashing water from the pot into two cups. “We need to avoid causing more damage.”

“Oh.” Michael licked his lips, uncertain. “All right. Of course. I’m - I’m sorry.”

Mr. Sims’s frustration shifted into discomfort. “Apologies are hardly necessary.”

Michael didn’t know what to say to that besides another sorry, which was Hardly Necessary. He took the cup and didn’t ask for sugar, even though he hated tea without it. Mr. Sims didn’t touch his tea, either, and didn’t take his seat, hovering around the room like a silent, uncertain moth.

“But what do I do?” Michael asked, a little louder than he’d meant. Mr. Sims jumped, turning back to him. “I can’t just - bind it away again, it’ll come back. It’s going to come back every time, isn’t it?”

“It does seem like it.”

Michael felt himself start to tremble again. The tea sloshed over the edge of the cup and burned his fingers; he hissed a curse when his jerk of pain made more tea spill. “Dammit,” he repeated, hating the lump in his throat that made his voice sound weepy. He wouldn’t cry now. “Do I just - j-just go back and wait to go out of my mind? I almost didn’t make it here. I can’t go back, Mr. Sims, I can’t go back and wait.”

“Of - of course not,” Mr. Sims said, surprised through his discomfort. He set his cup aside and, matter-of-factly, took the cup of spilled tea out of Michael’s grasp. Michael’s hands hung in the air, useless and empty. “No, we have rooms here for... Situations like this. I think I mentioned before, you’re not the first.”

“...Oh.” Michael felt his panic deflate a little, like it’d been poked with a pin.

“Yes,” Mr. Sims said, carefully not looking into Michael’s warm, blotchy face. “We can let you stay at least a week, if it takes that long to sort out the...”

“Situation,” Michael whispered.

“And you’ll be much safer in the meantime. You live several hours out of the city, don’t you?”

Michael barely remembered the name of the village, but ‘several hours away’ was close enough, so he nodded. He felt incredibly foolish again, but this time with relief. He’d thrown his temper tantrum, gotten what he wanted.

“Not close enough to hold a proper investigation,” Mr. Sims went on, setting Michael’s untouched tea back on the table by the fireplace, “not with the Situation still ongoing.” Another hesitation, a shift of the voice into something a shade less professional, more genuine: “You’ll be quite safe, Mr. Shelley. The Archivery - all binderies, but this one especially - is built for this kind of thing.”

Michael didn’t understand, but it was a single brick in an entire house made of his lack of understanding, and he was too brain-weary to ask more questions.

“I can’t go back there until it’s gone,” he said quietly, tucking his hands under his thighs. “I... it’s done something to me. I can’t think, or - or remember. Everything... moves, changes color... hurts.”

Mr. Sims listened, quiet and patient, the same way he had for Michael’s last binding. It made Michael nervous for a moment, but he hadn’t agreed to a binding, and Mr. Sims knew the part about needing consent for one.

“It’s - it’s like--” Michael struggled for the words. “It’s trying to get the world to eat me. But only in my head. But I’ll still...”

“Be consumed.”

Michael blinked, raising his head. “How did - oh, my God, you know already. How many - thirteen. You’ve had to listen to this thirteen times. I’m sorry, I’m so - oh, my God.”

“It’s my job. I’m used to it.”

“Still.” Michael tugged one hand free and covered his face with it. “I... I think I just... would like to sleep. If that’s all right.”

Mr. Sims dipped his head. “Of course.”

It wasn’t that Mr. Sims was gentle, exactly. He was careful, and respectful, and gave Michael just enough space that Michael felt he wasn’t being given a suspicious berth, but the breathing room he needed. And the soft sagey green of his eyes was still, in some color-starved part of Michael’s mind, the color of safety.

So when Mr. Sims offered a polite hand up from the voluminous armchair, Michael took it, rising on unsteady colt legs. He was almost half a head taller than Mr. Sims and felt every inch.

Mr. Sims released him and led the way to the door. “It’s late and my mentor is out,” he said over his shoulder, “so we can get started on the investigation tomorrow. We’ll handle it for the most part - the assistants and Mr. Bouchard and I - but we’ll need to get your statement. Your non-binding statement, of course.”

“That’s fine.” As long, he thought, as I don’t have to leave.

“You won’t have to leave the Archivery for any of it,” Mr. Sims said, as if reading his mind. “You can if you want to, but... we find most people who stay don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to.”

“We’ll take care of food and anything else you need, except clothes.” Mr. Sims went in the opposite direction they’d come from, towards a flight of stairs at the end of the corridor, lit by flickering electric lamps. “It’s preferred that you stay on the hall you’ve been assigned to.” Then he paused just before the stairs, giving Michael a quick, unreadable glance. “But if there are... complications with your Situation, you can find one of us. Or come to my office. I’m usually there.”

Michael felt like a blundering troublesome giant clomping up the steps just behind Mr. Sims. “I think I’ve been enough trouble. I’ll try to stay in my rooms.”

“Don’t,” Mr. Sims said, this time looking straight ahead. “Not if you need help. It’s better for us to have all the information we can.”

“Of - of course.”

Michael couldn’t tell if this was professional instruction or genuine kindness on Mr. Sims’s behalf. But it had been so long since someone had shown even formalized generosity that it felt like kindness regardless. “Thank you, Mr. Sims. I - I appreciate it.”

Mr. Sims gave him a look Michael couldn’t read: tension at the corners of his mouth, a slight furrow to his brow, a heaviness in his eyes. If Michael wasn’t mistaken, it looked almost like a strange, uncertain grief.

But, given the Situation, Michael was probably mistaken. He lowered his head again and focused on making it to his new room.

Chapter Text

Sleep without dreams felt odd. Michael hadn’t realized he’d dreamed every night since he’d recovered from his last illness. (Was that related to the yellow door, too? All those times he’d been ill...) He couldn’t have described the dreams, didn’t remember them enough, but when he woke in the Archivery’s guest bedroom - covered by the quilt that had a blue, lonely smell, sunlight squeezing through the gaps in the curtains - his first thought was, I actually slept this time.

 For a long time, he contented himself to lay under the quilt, a peculiar silence in his head. It had been so loud before, hadn’t it?

There were a few well-patched hand-me-down clothes in a chest at the foot of the bed. None of them fit particularly well, but they weren’t so much bigger than he was. He’d make do. A small mirror hung above a plain, scuffy dressing table; he avoided looking into it by instinct. Just in case, he thought, though in case of what he couldn’t guess. He tidied the shirt collar and the waist of the trousers and his tangled hair as best he could without it, then went in search of breakfast, which Mr. Sims had said would be downstairs somewhere. The binders and assistants made it themselves, due to the Archivery employing as few servants as possible. 

The halls were winding but exact, somehow straighter and more navigable than any building Michael had ever been in. It almost seemed to help him remember where he’d been, which stairs to take, which turns to make, without him having to think at all. The old, fusty wallpapers left a fuzz of dust on his fingertips when he held out one hand, drifting his fingertips along it as he passed. A tickle built in the back of his throat but he didn’t sneeze. 
 

It was the smell of hot bread that drew him deeper into the Archivery, probably towards the back of the building. He passed by Mr. Sims’s office; light shone from under the door, and Michael almost stopped, but stopping would have been ridiculous, not to mention rude, so he went on.
 

Chatter from the kitchen. Michael hesitated when he saw it at the end of a hallway, a golden-orange rectangle from which the yeasty scent and the sound of good-natured bickering drifted. His stomach growled - he’d fasted for over a full day. Mr. Sims had told him to help himself to breakfast, but maybe he hadn’t meant when other people, actual employees of the Archivery, were there.
 

His stomach growled again. Michael chewed the side of his mouth. He couldn’t just stand in the hallway like a stalker until they left. And anyway, meals at the Shepards had always been chaotic, and he’d never let his nerves starve him before. Well, almost never.
 

Summoning the old breakfast-time spine, Michael crossed the hallway to the kitchen door and peeked inside. 
 

To his relief, it was just two people, and one of them was Sasha. She and the man were on the other side of the kitchen, huddled near the oven, smearing jam on thick slices of bread. Sasha already had jam on her face, and was trying to push the man’s hand in such a way as to get jam on his face, too. He was batting at her hands, wearing an exaggeratedly pompous expression. “Not my precious face,” he was saying, “I’ll have to go out and source another--”
 

“Michael!” Sasha exclaimed when she noticed him in the door. “Good morning! We have breakfast.”
 

Michael opened his mouth, but the other man, turning to look where Sasha was, had dropped his guard, so Sasha pushed his bread directly into his chin. Ignoring the sputtering and accusations of being underhanded and unrepentant, Sasha put her own breakfast down and went to pull Michael fully into the kitchen.
 

It was a cozy place, low-ceilinged and narrow, so the heat lingered comfortably. The windows, at street height, were for the most part shuttered, but the electric lights were on here, and the warm-gray glow and the buzzing sound, plus the crackle of smoky-smelling fire in the oven, made the kitchen sound like a soft blanket. On a nearby counter were bread, jars of jam, cheese, even bacon. Steam still curled from the spout of a teapot.
 

“Have some,” Sasha said, leading Michael to the spread. “Jon said you’d be down sometime. Tim and I were waiting to show you. Michael, this is Tim Stoker. Tim, this is Mr. Michael Shelley.”
 

“Just Michael, please.”
 

Mr. Stoker said, “Just Tim, then,” and peered closer as he shook Michael’s hand. There was still a trace of jam on his chin. “So you’re the famous Michael.”
 

Sasha swatted him in the upper arm. “Come on.”
 

“What? He said it wasn’t a bound-up secret anymore.”
 

Mr. Stoker - Tim - wasn’t taller than Michael, but he was more substantial, took up more space. Michael felt a little like a ghost, standing so close to him. He glanced between Sasha and Tim, a bit of his appetite fading. “What... what does that mean?”
 

Sasha gave Tim a sour look. “So much for ‘the most emotionally sensitive,’ ‘basically a psychic’--”
 

“To be fair, I was talking about dogs--”
 

“Oh, dogs!” Sasha said, snapping her fingers. “What did Jon say about dogs?”
 

“Jon didn’t say anything about dogs,” Tim said, staring at her. “Did he talk to you about dogs?”
 

Michael almost jumped through the ceiling when something bumped his ankle. “No, no,” he said, finding himself suddenly very much in Tim’s personal space but unable to retreat, “no, he said it was safe here--”
 

But then Sasha was crowing, “The cat! Not a dog. Michael, it’s fine, it’s not the Sp-- it’s not your - it’s all right, it’s just the Captain.”
 

“You all right?” Tim asked, gently pulling Michael off the counter, where he’d pushed himself in his frantic escape attempt. He thought he’d sat on the bread, but he couldn’t see quite straight yet, even as Sasha continued to speak soothingly, though not necessarily to him. She went to where he’d stood, bent, and straightened up with a skinny bundle of black fur, small ears, and very bright teeth when it meowed, stridently mournful.
 

Michael stared at the cat, and the pounding in his temples slowly went quiet again.
 

“Oh,” he said softly. His ankle still tingled where the cat had brushed him.
 

“Now I remember what Jon said about the cat,” Tim said. “Not a dog, Sasha.” Sasha made a face from behind the points of the cat’s ears.
 

The kitchen righted itself, but Michael still felt unsteady, so he went to the small table in the corner and sat with a thunk. “I’m - so sorry,” he said, but the cat was wiggling in Sasha’s arms. When she let it go, it ran up to him, meowing that sharp-fanged little meow again. It couldn’t have been more than a year old.
 

“Don’t apologize,” Sasha said, overly breezy, brushing it off with a wave of her hand. “It’s Tim and I who can’t remember a single thing with both our heads together. He brings me down to his level.”
 

“Excusez moi,” Tim said. 
 

Michael smiled weakly, though he might have jumped a little, again, when the cat jumped up into his lap. Its little claws worked at his upper legs, needling him and making him wince. “Hello,” he whispered.
 

It meowed at him again, its fluffy tail curling into itself when he petted its head with one fingertip.
 

“Captain Werewolf,” Sasha said. “Jon named him the Captain, Tim was responsible for the Werewolf bit.”
 

“It’s because he looks like a werewolf,” Tim explained.
 

There was a gray, wolfy ruff around the cat’s neck, and there was a certain wolfish length to its snout. Michael scratched its forehead, and its eyes closed as it started to purr, still poking tiny holes into Michael’s legs. He was aware the kitchen had gone silent, but, at the moment, he didn’t know how to fix it, so he just petted the cat and assumed Sasha and Tim would take it from there.
 

What he didn’t expect was Sasha saying, in that same forced cheery tone: “He remembers you every time, you know. That’s why Jon told us to warn you about him. He - the Captain, that is, of course, not Jon - he likes climbing up your leg. Or he did when he was smaller, and we’re not sure if he’s grown out of the habit.”
 

Michael jerked his head up. “What?”
 

Sasha exchanged a look with Tim, who shrugged and raised his hands.
 

“Well,” she said, “you’ve been here a few times, you know.”
 

“I... yes.” Michael looked down at the Captain again. “It’s just... it still feels like the first time. Or the second.”
 

“Yeah,” she said, politely. “We got the Captain around the... oh, eighth time? He was in Jon’s office. Took to you as soon as you came in. If you ever found weird scratches on you after a binding, he’s why. Like I said, climbing up your leg and all.”
 

All those illnesses - they must have been after every binding. Michael didn’t know why, people had themselves bound all the time and didn’t get ill, but he must have been an exception. The scratches must have healed up before he was well.
 

Michael scritched under the cat’s chin and wondered if he had ever liked the cat back, or if he’d been in too much of a state to even notice. “Sorry,” he murmured to it. “Maybe I’ll remember you this time.”
 

Captain Werewolf purred.
 

“Well,” Tim said.
 

“Yes,” Sasha said, clapping her hands and making Michael jump again. “We have work to do. We’ve shown you the breakfast spread, completely forgotten to do the one thing Jon asked us to do, and now we actually have to make ourselves useful. You all right here, Michael? Jon should be down soon. Trying to get to Elias about your...”
 

“Situation.” The Captain bumped his nose against Michael’s collar bone.
 

“Exactly.”
 

Michael nodded. “I’m fine here,” he said. “I’ve got company now.”
 

Sasha and Tim both gave the Captain pets before leaving. They were completely in each other’s space, like one person split into two bodies, still unused to moving separately. The adoration on Tim’s face was obvious, though. If Sasha noticed, she was probably too used to it to be moved, at least this early in the morning.
 

Michael turned back to the cat, relaxing into the new silence, but then, back in the hallway behind his chair, he heard Tim say, “Morning, boss,” and a more familiar voice make a more muted reply Michael couldn’t quite hear. 
 

He sat up a little straighter as the Captain continued the painful kneading, and the conversation went on behind him. Now that he thought about it, the cat’s eyes did seem familiar.
 

Some footsteps approaching his chair, and then, still behind him, Mr. Sims said, “They told me he found you. I hope it wasn’t too... traumatic.”
 

Michael gave a nervous little laugh. “He, ah, startled me. But it was fine.”
 

Mr. Sims moved around to give Captain Werewolf a gentle scratch behind one ear. Michael glanced up at him. His longish hair was tied back, neater than the evening before, and his clothes less comfortably rumpled but still soft, faded, over-large. The grayish-brown of them was more warm than cool. Like Mr. Sims himself, actually. He was still mostly gray to Michael, but less so than before.
 

When Mr. Sims looked up, he realized then that he was staring, and also that Mr. Sims’s eyes were still very green. That hadn’t been part of last evening’s... oddness. It was nice.
 

Mr. Sims turned away and went to the teapot, chafing his hands as if they were cold.
 

“I tried to speak with Mr. Bouchard,” he said, as he poured a cup. “The director of the Archivery. With cases like yours, we’re equipped to investigate - I told you last night. He’s not in yet but I’ll get hold of him later on.”
 

“Investigate,” Michael repeated. “What are you going to... to look for?”
 

Mr. Sims leaned back against the counter, holding the cup between both hands. “It depends,” he said, and irritation pinched his brow, “but in this case, we’ll most likely get a statement from Gertrude Robinson.”
 

“The...” Michael’s head hurt when he tried to remember, but he did remember. “The bookseller.”
 

“Yes,” Mr. Sims said sourly. “The bookseller. And your family as well, of course--”
 

“My employers, really.” The Captain leaned up, putting his paws on Michael’s chest, and Michael, obedient, intensified the scratches, especially between the Captain’s shoulder blades. “My friend’s family.”
 

“Of course.” Mr. Sims almost continued, seemed to think better of it, and sipped his tea instead. “Then see if anyone else in town has... seen anything. Had odd experiences. And we’ll go through your old bindings.”
 

Discomfort rose in his stomach, and he turned back to the cat. It was purring like a much bigger creature, deep and rumbling. 
 

“We have a strict privacy policy,” Mr. Sims said. 
 

Michael made a noise without looking up. He wasn’t worried about Mr. Sims sharing the experiences in those books, whatever they’d been, however bad they’d been. But he couldn’t think of Mr. Sims reading them in the first place - reliving that witness - without his appetite turning upside down. 
 

“No,” he said quietly, “no, it’s... I’m not worried about that, Mr. Sims. I trust you. The Archivery, that is.”
 

Mr. Sims glanced at him sideways, sipping at his tea again as if to stop himself from speaking. But when he’d lowered the cup as well as his gaze, he said, “Jon. I know you don’t remember, but we have - interacted before. I feel...” Another hesitation, a slight straightening of the shoulders. “It seems pointless to stand on convention at this point.”
 

Michael didn’t think he was physically capable of using Mr. Sims’s first name out loud. “All right,” he said anyway. “And... same. To you.”
 

The small smile, weary at the corners, made Michael add, morosely, “How often have you heard me say that?”
 

“Not very often. The bindings usually didn’t take that long. There were just a few exceptions.”
 

“Oh.” Michael considered that, not sure if it’s better or worse or just a different flavor of embarrassing. “Were the exceptions... out of the ordinary? I mean, obviously, that’s what an exception is - I mean - is it out of the ordinary for the Archivery?”
 

Mr. Sims glanced up at him again, and Michael wondered if he’d asked his real, honest question before, and so Jon knew it was lurking behind roundabout vagueness: Is there something wrong with me?
 

“It’s,” Jon said, and ran his finger around his teacup again, “not unheard of. It’s not as common as someone coming in for a single odd sighting, of course. Most people encounter... strange things, have it bound away, and then the strangeness is done with them.”
 

“The strangeness,” Michael repeated. “Like the door. And the man.”
 

Mr. Sims - Jon - nodded. 
 

“Or,” Michael said, “it eats them.”
 

Jon hesitated, his silence uncertain and calculating. Deciding how to respond. The answer must have been simple: “Yes,” he said. And after another hesitation: “Or the third option. It follows them.”
 

Captain Werewolf must have felt Michael’s tension rise. He jumped down without preamble, leaving Michael’s hands empty where it had been. Breaking into a trot, it went to Jon’s feet and sat, gazing up at him with begging eyes.
 

Without a word, Jon handed down a small chip of bacon. The Captain took it and carried it to the corner, where it ate with a gusto that sounded like it was crunching on bones.
 

“A... a friend’s cat had kittens,” Jon said quietly, as he watched the cat and Michael watched Jon. “She thought we’d want one. We don’t have mice but we pretend, so Mr. Bouchard lets us keep him. He probably knows anyway.”
 

“Why do strange things follow some people?” Michael asked, hugging both arms to his chest. “What do they want with - some people? What makes some people incapable of getting away with a quick bind and a normal life?”
 

“We don’t know for certain,” Jon admitted. “It can be various factors. Personality. Past trauma. Mental health. Connections - family, friends, romantic--”
 

“Connections?”
 

“Or a combination,” Jon said, studiously ignoring Michael’s echo. “Or none of them at all. It can be pure chance. Sometimes a person is just... suited.”
 

Suited. Michael shook his head slightly and looked down again. The kitchen still smelled faintly of breakfast but now the smell just made him feel ill. 
 

“Do they ever get away from it?” he asked, wishing he was home, with Ryan, and could pull his feet up on the chair, curl into as small a ball as he could wind up his ungainly body, warm by the fire. But Ryan had been eaten long ago. Eaten, like the cat ate the bacon. His hands clench against his ribs. “Does the binding ever... take? Finally?”
 

Jon gave Michael the dignity of looking at him directly, without pity or condescension. His eyes were still green, the only color Michael could name that wasn’t gray. “Not that I’ve seen,” he said. 
 

Michael pinched his lips together tight, then nodded. “Well,” he said, turning away again and trying to sound like fear wasn’t squeezing his throat nearly shut. “In that case, Mr. S-- J-Jon, are you sure that’s all right?”
 

“Yes. Of course.”
 

“In that case, Jon, I don’t want any more bindings unless I just - until I can’t function without them. No offense intended but I’d rather... know. When it gets me. Whatever ‘it’ is.” He snuck another peek at Jon, hoping the fear didn’t show on his face, either. It probably did. Ryan had always called him an open book. Funny, in hindsight. “Have I said that before, too?”

Jon hastily turned to the tea service, picking out a spoon and swirling it around the cup, even though he’d already drunk half of it and surely the sugar was dissolved by then. There was a scar on his hand that Michael only just now noticed, an awful burn scar that didn’t match the little freckled scars on his face and neck. Where the little ones could have been mistaken for odd, pretty little birthmarks, this burn mark was obviously a scar, obviously the product of pain. The sight of it made Michael's heart seize briefly.
 

“No, actually,” Jon said, watching the tea swirl in its cup. “That’s a new one for both of us, I think.”

Chapter Text

“The least we could do is talk to Robinson,” Jon insisted. “It doesn’t have to be a full investigation, but we have proof of something stable enough--”

“I seem to recall that Mr. Shelley’s statement - or whatever it is, technically, without a binding at the end of it so far - included Ms. Robinson killing the avatar.”

The way Mr. Bouchard said it wasn’t cruel or pointed. He was calm and authoritative, without a trace of condescension or brusqueness. It was almost too sympathetic. Michael didn’t understand why he bristled at the man’s tone, but he did. Jon certainly wasn’t pleased. 

The office, too high-ceilinged for good lighting, wore its shadows heavily; they bore down and made Jon seem much smaller than he was, while the un-shaded lamp on the desk cast his face in chiaroscuro tones. It fell easier on Mr. Bouchard’s features, somehow, but it made Jon seem like a fussy cat.

“She might have just wounded it,” he said. “And we should at least get her version of the story.”

Mr. Bouchard looked amused. “Yes, let’s get Gertrude Robinson to tell us her story. I’m sure she’s anxious to add it to the shelves of statements she’s willingly given in the past.”

Jon looked sour. Michael glanced between them, hands knotted tightly in his lap.

“All the ridiculous stories we’ve researched,” Jon said, “and the time wasted on rich fools who can afford to pass off their own petty misdeeds on nonexistent ‘ghosts’--”

“Which does remind me,” Mr. Bouchard interrupted, steepling his hands. “Don’t you have other appointments today?”

“The investigation could start tomorrow.”

Mr. Bouchard sighed. He wasn’t a tall or broad man, but the way he held himself suggested, to Michael, that he was fully comfortable in his own authority. He turned to Michael for the first time since they’d entered his office. “Mr. Shelley, your recent traumatic experiences are truly regrettable and I hope you take advantage of Mr. Sims’s actual talents as a binder before going home. You’re in no rush - we have no other boards at the moment and the assistants are always eager to talk to subjects before they leave - but even if the... creature... you’ve encountered still exists, it has posed no larger threat, and it has always been weak enough for you to escape.”

Ryan, Michael thought, and, Weak.

“Therefore,” Mr. Bouchard continued, almost cheerfully, “I’m afraid we can’t look into your situation any further, especially since our Jon has begun to take on more responsibilities outside the amateur detective arena. Not as much time for gallivanting about, you understand.” 

Michael opened his mouth, though he had no idea how to respond to such a wall of refusal. Thankfully, Jon interrupted. “This entity has appeared thirteen times,” he said, leaning forward slightly, “and it was dangerous the first time. It had a prior victim.”

“How many?” Elias asked blandly.

“One,” Jon all but spat, “but it’s clearly got a level of - of - sentience that we don’t usually--”

At that point, the argument devolved into Archivery jargon which Michael wasn’t in the frame of mind, or the mood, to follow with much attention. He understood what was happening, anyway. His case was being thrown out. Mr. Bouchard wasn’t going to let Jon investigate it. Michael was going to leave the Archivery at some point, after some arbitrary week or so, with nothing but his memories to protect him. If he was so lucky.

He watched Jon gesticulating from an emotional distance, like his brain was, once again, submerged underwater. Once he’d seen Jon’s scar, pink and shiny and horrible, he couldn’t unsee it, couldn’t stop seeing it. 

If Ryan had lived through whatever had killed him - even now, Michael couldn’t remember, just that the yellow door and the little man had something to do with it, or one of them did, or they worked for what was responsible, or were part of it, or--

His head started to hurt again. 

Would Ryan have come out scarred, if he had survived? Would Michael live long enough to be scarred by the mess he was in, or would he be gone soon, too? Ryan’s family had barely missed him once the funeral was over. Too odd, too twitchy, Ryan had been. Unreliable except, usually, with the sheep. And the weeding, if Michael was there, too.

He didn’t remember what Ryan had looked like. He knew how the warm black earth had felt under his knees, between his fingers, smudged across his chin or nose or cheek, and he could recall the timbre of Ryan’s laugh. But not what he’d looked like. There were no colors, of course, but even the shape, the size, the texture of him were gone. 

And Michael had woken up so enthusiastic this morning. It wasn’t even lunchtime and his previous hopes felt like foolish naivety, the product of too much rather than too little sleep. Maybe he would get Jon to--

“Fine,” Jon spat, and suddenly he was grabbing Michael’s arm in that scarred hand, ignoring the startled jump in response. He rose and, despite the height difference, dragged Michael up, too. “Then we’ll let it eat a small village and only take care of it once some rich man comes in with enough gold to move you. Come on, Michael.”

He didn’t give Michael room to acquiesce on his own, heaving Michael towards the door. Too caught up in his own distress, Michael followed. It would be nice to get out of that office, no matter how it happened. Jon’s hand was warm around his lower arm, almost too tight except that the twinge of pain was grounding. Michael resisted the urge to look over his shoulder, to see what Mr. Bouchard was--

“Oh, Mr. Shelley, can I have a moment? Before my prize archivist kidnaps you any further?”

Michael stopped before Jon did, resulting in a little yank of his arm. That must have brought Jon to his senses, because he stopped and, visibly embarrassed, muttered, “Sorry.”

Michael fluttered a hand - don’t worry about it - but his voice wouldn’t come. Neither would a smile. He turned back to Mr. Bouchard’s desk.

For a moment, the three of them hung in limbo, Mr. Bouchard smiling until Jon took the hint and ducked out, reluctant and irritated.

Mr. Bouchard folded his hands atop the desk. “You have a way with memory,” he said. “And a good mind for the unusual, once you’re somewhere... safe.”

Michael stared at him. Maybe no one had told the director about the last time Gertrude Robinson had dumped him on the Archivery steps. Stupid and gibbering. Useless.

“Oh, you’re useless out there,” Mr. Bouchard added, and Michael twisted a little, almost touching his temple to check for holes Bouchard could see through, “but you could make something of your... predilections here.” He tilted his head. “If that family of yours decides to cut their losses, we might have a place for you.”

Michael laughed like the jolt of someone’s knee when struck in that particular jumpy nerve. “I don’t think,” he began, and then trailed off, because, in the face of Mr. Bouchard’s unreadable amusement, all his responses fell to pieces. Michael Shelley in a binding archive - it was wild to consider, even to try to picture. It wasn’t even the kind of joke Michael could find funny. 

“No,” Mr. Bouchard said at length, “you don’t, much. Ah, well. Worth a shot. It would have set off Robinson, anyway. You can go. I’d recommend sending a message to Ryan’s family before you’re bound. They’re bound to worry.”

They weren’t. Michael mumbled something in half-hearted acknowledgment, and then backed out of the room.

For all of Mr. Bouchard’s reminders that Jon had a busy schedule, Jon seemed free to lurk outside the office, waiting. As soon as Michael emerged, his arm was seized in that same perfectly-too-tight grasp. This time he didn’t even have the wherewithal to jump.

That must have been odder than a show of fear, because Jon yanked back again. “Sorry,” he repeated. “What did he say?”

Michael blinked, feeling dazed. Animals played with their prey or with toys this way: cats batted mice and balls of yarn, horses kicked buckets, dogs flung dead birds. Michael felt new kinship with the dead birds. “He offered me a job,” he said, “and then took it back.

That took Jon off-balance. He was speechless for a moment, taking Michael in, and Michael was reimpressed with the absurdity of it. The practical joke of it all. He finished the interrupted thought from earlier: Maybe he did want Jon to bind him again.

“I’m glad he took it back,” Jon said at last, and cleared his throat. “You don’t need to be here any longer than necessary.”

It had been a couple days in his role as The Fool, but hearing it so baldfacedly from Jon stung more than Michael wanted to admit. His shoulders hunched and he looked away. “Mm. Maybe... maybe you should just - just bind me, Mister--” He couldn’t bring himself to say ‘Jon’ but felt too awkward to go back to surnames, so he pretended to drift off, zone out. Act the simple fool.

Jon looked like something had hit him. “What? No. We agreed. We’re going to find it.”

“Oh, I’m sure that won’t be hard when I’m not here any longer.”

“We’re not using you as bait,” Jon said, heated. Between the intimation that Jon wanted him gone and Jon’s use of ‘we,’ Michael couldn’t figure out how to respond, so he settled for pretending he had no feelings. It wasn’t hard. “Look, Sasha and Tim are in the upper library. I asked them to collect some... basics. You can go back to your room if you really want to - to give up, or you can work with us.”

Michael looked back at him. Jon’s eyes were so green they nearly glowed in the dark, desaturated hall. Why were they so-- 

Jon looked almost hopeful.

“What about Director Bouchard?” Michael asked. “He said not to.”

“He knew I was going to ignore him,” Jon said. “It’s his fault for not scheduling more bindings.”

The corner of Michael’s mouth twitched. 

“All right,” he said. “I’m here anyway. What kind of basics?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Sasha said, aggressively dunking a shred of toast into her tea. “The time between each binding has been shrinking exponentially ever since the first one. It’s a clear pattern of increasing hostility.”

“But also increasing survivability,” Tim pointed out. “It opened with a murder. Sorry, Michael.”

Michael winced. “It was a long time ago.”

“Not long enough,” Sasha said, and threw a crust at Tim. “Behave.”

“But continue,” Jon said.

The upper library was better lit than the office. The books here weren’t real books, weren’t bindings - just hunks of dead trees with information in them - but there were more in the library than Michael had seen in his whole life. Three times as many as Gertrude Robinson had in her stall, at least. He wondered if she’d ever seen this library. 

Now, about a dozen of them littered the table where the four of them were seated in various levels of disarray. Jon looked like the interview and their subsequent twenty minutes of round-table catchup had roughed him up in an alley, unbuttoning his shirt cuff sleeves and tangling his formerly tidy ponytail. If Tim hadn’t been fighting a creature made of smoke and ashes that had belched all over him, Michael couldn’t guess what he’d been doing, unless it was taking a turn as chimneysweep. Alarmingly, Sasha sported a cut below her eye, and her glasses were missing.

“Oh, it’s fine,” she said cheerfully, waving off Michael’s horror at the state of them. “Someone donated a Leitner binding to our private collection and it was a little--”

“Spirited,” Tim finished, and coughed into a handkerchief again. “Some arsonist with anger issues.”

“We drowned it,” Sasha said, before adding swiftly, “The book, not the arsonist.”

“Not around to drown, is he?” Tim asked.

Michael didn’t understand at all, but it must have been a normal enough occurrence at the Archivery, because Jon only took a moment to make sure they were fit for working before moving on to the Situation.

Once they were all caught up to the meeting with Mr. Bouchard, Sasha produced the calendar she had sketched: a timeline of Michael’s bindings, the small vertical marks clustering closer and closer together the more time went on. It seemed so obvious, now that it was laid out in front of them - him. He should have realized. He should have noticed. It might not have done anything, but maybe--

“Elias knows this,” Jon said, jerking an irritated hand at the timeline. “This fits what we’ve seen before when entities start growing stronger.”

“Should I show it to him? As proof to get him to reconsider?” Sasha asked, flipping the timeline back to face her and studying her work. “No, it wouldn’t help, would it.”

“Doubt it.” Tim rubbed at a smudge of ash on his knee. “This is how he got about Martin.”

A gloomy silence fell. Michael glanced at them all. “What?”

“Fellow assistant,” Sasha said grimly, as Jon busied himself with a nearby stack of books. “He had a lot of the same patterns you did, actually. Different entity, of course. That’s how Bouchard hired him, because he kept showing his face.” 

Michael felt a slight chill. Dread replaced his curiosity about ‘entities.’ “...Oh. What... what happened?”

Tim snapped his fingers, and Jon jumped. Giving Tim a cutting glance, Sasha said, “Disappeared. Just... gone one day.”

“Gone?” Michael repeated, and all he could think of was Mr. Bouchard telling him that, if he needed a place, the Archivery would give him one. It hadn’t been a joke. “What do you mean, gone?”

“Gone,” Jon said, and dropped a slim book onto the table. “Michael, this is your assigned reading. A breakdown of what we’re working with. Some pages are marked. It’ll--” He paused briefly, his expression fixed and oddly business-like. “It’ll be more to bind if that’s the choice you make later, but I think it should help in the present.”

Michael took the book. Professionally constructed, but without a title on the cover, and the single name on the inside cover page was handwritten: Keay . It was less than a hundred pages long. Michael held it uncomfortably. “Thank you.”

Jon didn’t respond. “As for ourselves,” he went on, mostly to Sasha and Tim, “I think our best chance is to go to Michael’s hometown, visit the Shepards and Robinson. Read through the bindings, try to find any recurring locations or objects. The usual.”

Michael’s fingers tightened around the Keay book. It had been bad enough knowing Jon would reread the bindings. Now Sasha and Tim? He wouldn’t have to wait for the yellow door and the little man to kill him; he’d just die of shame.

“I doubt Elias will let me go,” Jon said, “but I can try and make a case for it if neither of you want to make the trip.”

Both assistants shook their heads. 

“Be nice to get out from under the roof,” Tim said, glancing sidelong at Sasha. “Breathe some fresh country air.”

“Wear sturdy walking boots,” Sasha said, smiling at him.

“Get our hands dirty.”

“Anger some locals.”

“Get chased with pitchforks.”

“My favorite.”

“Try not to make too much of a scene,” Jon said dryly. “But do what you have to do. Especially for Robinson.”

They both nodded. “We’ll plan the trip the rest of today,” Sasha said, holding up her pointer finger, then raising another as she went on, “and then catch up on the bindings tonight.”

“Long day,” Tim said cheerfully. “Been a while since we had this much to do.”

Michael wanted to apologize, but that would require speaking up, so he didn’t, returning his focus to the Keay book instead. There was an introduction, and then a list of fourteen items in bolded uppercase. Something about the list made Michael nervous. He closed the book again.

“We’ve all got our assignments,” Jon said, pushing his chair back from the table. “Unfortunately, I’ve probably kept Lord Whatshisface some minutes over his appointment time.”

Sasha checked a clock. “No worries, you’re just sixty-seven minutes late.”

“Damn.” Jon stood and smoothed one hand over his frazzled hair. He glanced at Michael. “If you have trouble with the book, or if you have questions, Sasha and Tim can help.”

“All right,” Michael said, suddenly desperate and not sure why. The idea of Jon leaving felt like watching a rescue ship sail right by his water-flooded rowboat. “Ah - have fun.”

Jon blinked at him. Flashes of green. Michael felt his cheeks flush with warmth.

“It’s my job,” Jon said. “I mean - that is, of course. Right. Thank you.”

Michael wished the yellow door had eaten him. Then Jon’s mouth made an odd expression, and he said goodbye to Tim and Sasha, and then he said goodbye to Michael, and then he was gone.

Michael found reasons not to read the book with its spiky, forbidding font while Sasha and Tim were in the upper library with him. He asked questions - “Have you read the bindings before?”, “What will you ask Ms. Robinson?”, “Why do people donate bound books?”, the like - and their subsequent tangents kept his mind from the growing certainty that he’d run from the mouth of one trap into the teeth of another.

He didn’t ask what entities were, how a bound book would have punched Sasha in the face and cut her with her own glasses’ edge; didn’t ask if they’d ever heard of a yellow door trying to kill you, or if the things he’d come to the Archivery to have bound away all those other times were truly frightening events, or if he was just a coward. He didn’t ask to see the books with his own eyes, read his old bindings.

The tangents eventually dried up, and Sasha and Tim left to plan their trip. The thought that he wasn’t going with them was so low on Michael’s list of concerns, he released the oddness of it immediately. He stayed in the library, the slim book still on the table, though a maid came in later and reshelved the other books they’d been reading. He offered to help, but she crisply informed him that she had special training, insinuating that he would only be in her way. He subsided to another table, in a darker corner, and watched the hands of the clock tick slowly towards evening.

It had been a while since he’d seen sunlight.

VI. IT IS NOT WHAT IT IS.

The name of the entity chasing him felt especially cruel, considering the state of his memories. He didn’t even remember enough to know what it wanted him to think it was, much less what it actually was, or wasn’t. There were just pieces, impressions, the green of Jon’s eyes, the little man in the graveyard. What was the opposite of that? What was the antithesis of that?

Well. Besides Jon’s eyes.

He hadn’t gotten around to undressing yet, though the clock on the bedroom wall read sometime past eleven. He wasn’t sure where the time had gone. After dinner - Jon hadn’t shown up, and Tim and then Sasha had melted away to put the finishing touches on their travel plans, leaving Michael alone at the table with the Captain - he ended up back in his room by necessity. That had been hours ago.

And he was still looking at the same title, underlined in delicate pencil.  

The knock at the door came without warning. For a heart-stopping moment, the simple, worn old door looked yellow, and Michael wasn’t sure if it really was - or wasn’t but looked it, or... something - or if he was imagining it. But the impression was gone even before he’d processed it, so he stood, leaving the book upside-down to mark his place (as if his place wasn’t just the table of contents). “H-hello?”

“It’s me. Sasha. Are you decent?”

Michael was halfway to the door before hesitating. “Are... are you sure?”

“Sure? About what? Sure that I have questions for you, yes.”

He blinked, then set propriety aside and went to the door. 

Sasha was still fully dressed, too, and she held a small basket between her hands. She smiled at him, and it was clearly meant to look cheerful, but there was a tiredness to her eyes that made it look strained instead.

“We keep strange hours,” she said, like that explained why she was visiting him at nearly midnight. “Can I come in?”

He stepped aside, wordless. She swept in, commandeered the chair he’d been squirming in for the past few hours, and set the basket down. When she saw the book, she picked it up, flipping it over to see how far he’d gotten. “Huh,” she said, then replaced it carefully, as if she could find the exact place he’d lain it, as if it mattered. “Having a hard time with it?”

“Oh,” Michael said, still hovering near the door. If he could keep an eye on it, maybe it would behave. “There’s so much already to think about, it’s just...”

She tilted her head, waiting for him to finish. No one ever did that.

He blinked again. What had he meant to say, anyway? “It’s just hard to imagine,” he said. “A... a certain thing. Knowing what it is. Or isn’t. Maybe it’s easier for... for people with other... entities.” He sounded foolish, using their jargon. He was just a victim, not one of them, no matter what Elias Bouchard said. “But mine is - isn’t - what it is, it’s... Yes. I’m having a hard time with it.”

Her smile turned real. The fake one hadn’t highlighted the lines beside her eyes, Michael realized. When she really smiled, her eyes crinkled. The left side of her mouth lifted a little more than the right side. 

“I know you think you’re our most pathetic case,” she said, tucking one foot behind the other, daintily, “but that’s how we all were. Tim, me, Martin, even Jon. All of us at the Archivery are here because we couldn’t... deal with things the right way, on the outside. That’s what I came to talk about, actually.” 

“Really?” He moved closer, finally, though at an angle, never turning his back completely on the door. Just in case. There was only one chair, but he took a seat on the trunk at the foot of the bed. 

Sasha turned to face him, bringing the basket into her lap. “Well,” she said, and withdrew a small collection of what looked like white-painted newspaper scraps, “the first thing is - I wanted to know if you had some message to take to the Shepards.”

The Shepards. Michael rocked back slightly, then caught himself on the trunk’s edge. “I forgot about the Shepards,” he said, almost to himself, and then snapped his attention back to her. “That sounds wretched - I didn’t mean--”

She was already shaking her head, though she’d bent her attention down to the pad, so he couldn’t read her face. Was she disgusted? “No,” she said, “not wretched. Again: completely normal. It’s a lot to deal with, especially without being bound. But you remember, now, and don’t take that for granted.”

Hesitating, Michael considered it. The many-headed hydra of the Shepard family felt even more distant, untouchable, than ever. Would they even want to hear from him?

“I’d like them to know,” he said, carefully, “that I’m sorry for - leaving without warning. I appreciate all they did for me. And I hope, if I come back soon, they’ll be able to...” Take him back in? That seemed presumptuous. “Forgive me,” he said, picking at his sleeve. “Or see me.” 

“Or?”

“Forgive and-or see me. They’ll understand.” Or not. He would handle it either way.

She nodded without raising her head. She made a quick, squiggly mess of shorthand on one sheet, which she ripped off and tucked into the pocket at her hip. As soon as it was out of sight, Michael felt a little better, less like a prodigal son.

“I’ll deliver it to them,” Sasha said, tucking the paper and pencil back into the basket, “and reassure them of your best intentions.”

“Thank you. Really.”

“You’re welcome. Really.” She pulled out a fabric-wrapped bundle, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. “Now the second thing.”

Couldn’t deal with things the right away. Was it some kind of cure? Michael leaned forward, failing to suppress how curious he really was.

Recovering her smile, Sasha placed the bundle into his hands. “This might seem... weird,” she said, as Michael undid the twine around the bundle’s wrapping. “I know it feels like we just met. But - well. Anyway. One of the reasons I’m here - at the Archivery, I mean - is that I found a Leitner - he’s another binder, a rubbish one, awful man - and it... changed me, a little. Did you see the Stranger in your book? The name, at least?”

Michael nodded as the wrapping fell away. Beneath it all was a small doll. The face and body were wooden, worn smooth and shiny; the clothing was rough and clumsily made, but the shades of it were light and clean, and the smile on its little face was happy.

“Once I’d read the book, no one remembered me, out there.” Sasha’s hands clasped tight over the basket. Her voice had lost a little of its strength. “I... I got replaced. I’d gotten bound before for - other things, nothing odd, just human problems - so I came here, when… when I didn’t have anywhere else. Jon helped me.”

Michael stared at her. “Replaced,” he repeated, stroking at the doll’s soft, frizzy hair.

Sasha bit the corner of her mouth, her gaze on the doll, not his face. “No one in my family remembers me anymore,” she said, and her mouth spasmed like she was trying to smile out of force of habit. “The... the replacement is gone, but I’m still... erased, I guess. I don’t make much of an impression anymore. It’s... all right, here in the Archivery. You won’t completely forget I exist. But I’ll probably go hazy.” A forced, self-deprecating laugh. “I’m vain enough to admit I don’t want you to forget me.”

He clutched the doll tighter. It did look a little like her. “No,” he said, “I don’t - I don’t want that, either.”

Relief played across her face. “It’ll help me remember you, too. It’s... it’s an odd thing, I know. You don’t have to keep it on you. Just... somewhere you’ll remember it. And then we won’t have to have reintroductions when I come back.”

He smiled faintly. “Been enough of those already, haven’t there?”

Genuine cheer replaced relief. She met his eyes for the first time since she’d taken his note. “Hopefully we’ve had the last one.” She nodded to the doll. “That was my childhood favorite, so be careful with her.”

Michael unwrapped his fingers quickly, smoothing at the doll’s dress. “Maybe I shouldn’t take her--”

“Oh, I was joking.” Sasha prodded at his shin with her shoe, very lightly. Michael didn’t even jump, for which he was very proud. “I mean, she was my favorite, but she’s just a doll. The memento is the important thing about her.”

“I - thank you.” Daringly, he nudged her foot with his, a self-conscious mirror of her previous movement, but, he hoped, not an altogether unwelcome one. “I... I’ll take care of her. Thank you, Sasha.”

He hoped she understood what he meant. He was mostly out of words to explain himself, at least of words that made sense. But she leaned back in the chair, her shoulders relaxing, looking like a weight had been taken off her shoulders, and he thought she might.

It was late enough that it seemed laughable at best, rude and alienating at worst. But his conversation with Sasha circled Michael’s head, stalking him wolf-like. She’d been forgotten, replaced in her own life. Ryan had been eaten alive. Jon and Tim had their own stories, apparently. And Michael was one of them, now. 

He had to understand, but he wasn’t making progress on his own. 

The Keay book in hand, Michael knocked on the workroom door.

It was almost one in the morning. He’d debated doing this for half an hour before screwing up the last shreds of his courage. Even as he waited, second thoughts dashed through his head. Turn around. Go back. It’s too late. Even if he is awake, he’ll be annoyed. He’ll think you’re needy. He’ll think you’re stupid. He’ll think--

The door opened. Jon, exhaustion written on his features, looked up at Michael, and, unmistakably, his eyes brightened. 

“Michael,” he said, his voice roughened by sleeplessness. “It’s late - is something wrong?”

For a moment, all Michael could see was green. His insides warmed; he felt brighter. It wasn’t a peaceful, tidy feeling, but it wasn’t bad, either. Definitely not bad.

He held out the book, trying to steel his spine the way he’d seen Gertrude Robinson do, the way Jon had earlier in Mr. Bouchard’s office. “I just,” he said, “need help with... all of this. I - obviously it doesn’t have to be tonight, but... but sometime. It’s...”

He licked his lips, uncertain how honest to be.

Jon took the book. It was so slim, so small. Like a children’s book. 

“It’s terrifying,” Jon said. “Alone... isn’t the way to do it.”

Michael swallowed. “No,” he said. “I’d... I’d rather do it with you.”

Jon’s little start made Michael’s face burn, and he added quickly, “The - the Archivery staff. You. All of you. Generally, you know.”

Jon gazed up at him, silent for an interminable moment. Michael could almost see the thoughts running, like mathematical equations, behind his eyes. 

“I’m awake,” Jon said, and, stepping away from the door, he gestured Michael into his workroom. “If neither of us can sleep, we might as well get something done.”

Chapter Text

“It doesn’t leave out anything?” Michael asked, racking his brain. “Nothing. No one comes in with anything to be bound that... that you can’t figure out where it should go?”

“Not since I’ve been here,” Jon said, pushing the plate of bread and cheese towards Michael. “I’ve always found a place for the bindings.”

The words were boastful but not the tone. A little charmed, Michael reached for a piece of cheese sans bread. “So Director Bouchard is right.”

“Unfortunately, often.” Jon rubbed his eyes. “About what?”

Michael hesitated. “You’re a very good binder.”

The flush touched Jon’s cheeks again, but he said, “Yes,” without much inflection before picking up the Keay book again. “I’ve read reports where previous binders had trouble placing a fear. I’m sure they didn’t have the resources we have now.”

“Are they color-coded?”

“What?”

“The books. So you know what entity you’re dealing with, when you file the books away. Or do you title them?”

“No, no titles.” Jon tilted his head. “I... sometimes,” he said, and his brow furrowed. “Sometimes they’re color-coded. We... we just use the materials we come to first. But...”

As Michael watched, Jon’s attention slipped past him and towards some other place, digging through memories, putting pieces together. His mouth remained open, just a little, and Michael took this time to eat his cheese at last. He wondered if Jon was about to fall asleep. It was very late. He felt a little like falling asleep himself.

“I’ll have to check,” Jon said at last, coming back, at least partially, to himself. “I think they are, though. By accident.”

“Probably not as much accident as...” Michael wiggled his fingers. “You know.”

“Maybe not,” Jon said, drawing the plate back to himself. He hadn’t eaten anything; Michael wasn’t sure why he was keeping up the charade. He repeated, under his breath, “Have to check.”

When Michael woke up, he had two blankets draped across him, to accommodate for his height. There were no windows in Jon’s office, but the clock on the wall said it was some time after eight, presumably in the morning. The fire was dead and Jon was flat on his back on the cot in the corner, snoring softly.

One of the blankets would have been sufficient. Michael extricated himself from them, warm, and folded them as best and as quietly as he could. Jon never stirred, though he mumbled, and Michael tried not to listen. He was sore in some places and stiff in others, and he felt the creases of the chair upholstery and his own hair on his face. And his brain was completely full of fears, books, theories, things to remember, names, things to be wary of, things to run away from, things that could never be run away from in their inevitability...

He’d never felt so... prepared. For anything.

When he stepped out of Jon’s office, easing the door shut behind him, the Archivery was as quiet as a country church, though as grand and resounding as a city one. He wondered if Director Bouchard was here or if he and Jon were the only ones in the building. It gave him a little shiver down his spine. So much spaced narrowed down into two.

When he went to his own room to change clothes and do what he could to freshen up, he almost jumped when he caught sight of the doll on the bedside table. It took several wild heartbeats to remember, but then it clicked - Sasha - and he relaxed. You won’t completely forget I exist. But I’ll probably go hazy, she’d said. He hadn’t expected the effect to take so quickly.

He gave the doll a supportive pat on the head - her yarn hair was aged soft - then went about his business.

Jon found him in the kitchen an hour later, making tea and trying to put together breakfast without rummaging too much. There was plenty of bread and jam, but he didn’t want to disturb anything in the hunt for meat or cheese, so he stuck to that for another morning. He would have done unspeakable things to visit a coffee shop - he’d gone once or twice when the Shepards came to the city, and he loved the smell - but he had no money or suitable clothes. All he had was a stabbing fear at the thought of stepping outside the Archivery again before they’d... before he was fixed, somehow. He couldn’t bear the idea of screaming in public again.

“Thank you for the blankets,” he said as Jon shuffled in to sit at the table, the Captain at his heels. “And I - I’m sorry for falling asleep like that. I didn’t mean to...”

Jon waved a hand. Aside from the sleepiness still clinging to him, he was perfectly presentable, neat, tidy. “You had,” he said, and paused to consider before finishing, “a lot to deal with.”

Michael set a cup of tea down at Jon’s elbow before sitting on the neighboring side of the table with his own. Jon took the tea with an absent nod of thanks, his thoughts obviously elsewhere again.

They sat quietly for a long while, stirring and sipping their tea, while the Captain strayed back and forth across the table top, accepting pats and scratches from both of them in equal measure. He liked nose bumps, Michael discovered. One bump landed more like a headbutt and Michael yanked back, touching his sore nose, and he saw a flash of a smile cross Jon’s face.

“Violent little monster,” he commented.

“Oh, no,” Michael said, leaning back in for another bump. The Captain purred. “It got me.”

Michael didn’t see Director Bouchard again, but he heard from Jon that, while he wasn’t pleased about Sasha and Tim running off, there would be no serious repercussions. Except, of course, that Jon’s schedule was now fully taken over by bindings.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to use the library,” Jon said, coming back to the office after his chat with the director. “Apparently I have to use my office for work all day.”

Michael, sitting in front of the little fire with the Keay book again, looked up, then frowned at the weary creases around Jon’s eyes. “Is... is that bad?”

Jon hesitated, draping his coat across the back of the chair Michael had slept in the night before. He was, just for a moment, almost horribly still, and it seemed that the green in his eyes grew brighter, making everything around him that much grayer.

“No,” he said, and he was less Jon and more binder than he had been lately. “That’s what I’m here for. I’ll come up to see how far you’ve gotten after everything’s been put away. Read whatever you can of the list I made.”

The list had been a product of last night’s study session. Ill at ease and not sure why, Michael took the list from the table, where they’d left it before falling asleep, and tucked it into the Keay book. “Yes, of course,” he said. “Can I - can I bring you anything?”

Jon shot him a sideways look. “Of course not. You don’t work here, Michael.”

“You’re helping me,” Michael pointed out. “And your assistants are gone because of me. The least I can do is... is food. Or notes, or binding supplies, or whatever else they do--”

“You can’t touch the binding supplies,” Jon interrupted. “Binding patients aren’t allowed in the supply rooms or Storage.”

“Well. All right.” Michael glanced at Jon’s hands, his fingers beginning to curl into fists. Not good. He held the Keay book closer and moved past Jon towards the door. “I’ll... be in the library, then. If you... if you need anything...”

“Of course,” Jon said, without looking away from the empty tabletop. “Don’t leave the Archivery.”

“Not on my to-do list,” Michael said. “But if any doors turn yellow inside, I’ll - I’ll interrupt your session. You might lose a customer, though.”

Jon didn’t smile, but one corner of his mouth twitched, and he started moving again. Seemed to start breathing again. “No yellow doors inside. Director Bouchard wouldn’t stand the insult.”

Michael didn’t think Director Bouchard had much chance against whatever was behind the yellow door - the Spiral, he reminded himself - but the idea that he did was comforting, in a way. “I’ll see you later, then.”

Jon made a noise of assent, and Michael withdrew. He lingered outside the closed office for a moment, but could hear nothing inside, and he didn’t want to explain if Jon came out before he left. Didn’t know how he’d explain, really. He just didn’t want to be alone again.

It felt childish, but he took Sasha’s doll to the library. Sometimes, when he’d read too much about fears and victims and curses, he set the book aside and touched the doll’s little fingerless hand. It grounded him.

There was one word Jon and Sasha had used the day before, one Jon hadn’t explained, and none of the books he’d assigned discussed it. Michael hunted, skimmed, and used the indices in the few books that bothered with them, but they were all theory on the entities that caused the problems, only rarely information on the subjects except for death and fallout, like Sasha’s problem. But they’d mentioned something else. Something about avatars.

It felt like prying, but eventually, Michael stood up and went book-searching in the stacks.

There were too many to look through thoroughly; it would have taken days. So he tried to find patterns in the organization instead. Many of the books didn’t even have titles on their spine, so he navigated by the titles he could see, a book or two representing the cluster around them. It took a while to even get that much of a system in mind, but he was good at adapting. He’d worked at it for years, to be as good a friend to Ryan as he could be. And it had been a survival skill after Ryan’s (murder, from a voice in his head, and sacrifice) passing. Especially once his colors started going. And his memory. And...

Michael shivered and covered his mouth with one hand. He’d been so close to going the way Ryan had. It would have taken even less time. He wasn’t even the Shepards’ real family. They wouldn’t have done anything. All they would have done was watched.

Was that what he’d done? Had Michael just sat by and watched? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember.

He was leaning against a shelf, fingernails digging into the side of his mouth, and all he did remember was pain in his fingertips, blood on a blanket. Nothing about Ryan. Not even the sound of his voice.

But he’d been bound after Ryan’s death. The first of thirteen bindings. The memory of all those encounters, every last one he’d had, every time the yellow door had opened its jaws on him - all those were in thirteen books somewhere in the Archivery.

The empty Archivery. Assistants gone, servants few, Jon busy and distracted, director always in his office.

It wasn’t just the yellow door and the little man that had been bound away. All the pieces of Ryan that had been gobbled up by the Spiral, Ryan-in-Spiral, he was bound, too. His friend. The books had given him peace of mind at the expense of his friend.

Michael was half out of the library before he stopped himself, horrified. He’d ask Jon first. Maybe Jon would, at least, tell Michael what was in the books for him, and maybe it would give Ryan back. Not the bad things, not the fear and not the Fear. Just Ryan. Michael owed him that much.

A maid came to the door, cleaning supplies in hand, and stopped there, staring at him. Michael, hand still clamped over his mouth, stared back. Looking resigned, she shifted her supplies and left without a word. It was only after she was gone that Michael realized that his face was wet.

Jon lifted his head like it was as heavy as a boulder. “I told you, you’re don’t have to do this,” he said, just barely over the upper edge of his chair.

Setting his tray on the table, Michael said, “The maid doesn’t bring food. So I’m not acting like I work here. Technically.”

“Loopholes,” Jon muttered, and dragged himself a little further upright in the chair, though it looked like it hurt his back. “Maybe you should work here.”

It was a joke, but it reminded Michael of Bouchard’s offer, and what Sasha and Tim had said about the third assistant, Martin. It must have reminded Jon, too, because he didn’t smile, either.

“I don’t think the job’s for me,” Michael said at last, trying to sound lighter than he felt. “Not much of a reader. Or a... someone who talks to people. Or. You know. A binder.”

“The Archivery takes all kinds,” Jon said quietly.

It was late in the evening, and, even without windows, the office felt darker than it had in the morning. The fire was just darkly thrumming embers and an odd smell clung to the air. Paper, Michael thought. He’d never known paper to have such a smell, even in the library. However many books Jon had bound that day, they were all gone from his office, and every trace of them, too - except for the exhaustion that hung on Jon like curtains, thick and heavy and blocking out the light. He looked smaller, wirier, harder. When he reached for a slice of some kind of meat pie - Michael hadn’t tasted it - his hands quivered. And his eyes were so, so green.

Michael wanted to ask how Jon’s day went, but he could very obviously tell how it had gone and wasn’t sure Jon wouldn’t be offended by the asking, so he pretended that they were both normal people sitting down to a normal supper.

“I did the readings,” Michael said after a moment. He wasn’t particularly hungry, left most of the eating to Jon, but Jon wasn’t exactly tucking in, either.

Jon wasn’t very present at all. He nodded, slumped slightly sideways in his chair. “Good.”

“I want to read my bindings” wasn’t what Michael intended to follow up with, but it was what came out. In for a penny, he supposed. “To find Ryan.”

Startling, Jon sat up straighter. “You what?”

“Or maybe not read them,” Michael added hastily. “Maybe, if you could read them, and tell me what was in them--”

“Why?”

“Ryan is in there. Somewhere. Not in here anymore.” With the heel of his hand, Michael thumped himself in the temple. “I - I can’t remember him. After he - after the Spiral killed him, I couldn’t even mourn him properly. I’ve been - forgetting. Even - even colors are gone. I’ve got so little left of him, Jon.”

“Michael, it’s not--”

“I haven’t got much left at all.” Michael almost marveled. The truth of it came with the speaking. He hadn’t realized it himself. “It’s been taking bits of me away since he died. I don’t even remember when it happened. How long he’s been gone. It hasn’t killed me yet but it’s eating me a memory at a time and I don’t know how much more of me I can afford to lose.”

Jon stared at him, horrified, one hand slightly raised as if to cover his mouth or maybe to cover Michael’s. But it was all bubbling up and Michael couldn’t stop. “All those books - those are Michael. This--” He gestured at himself-- “is just a - a placeholder. What good am I in those books? What use am I here?”

“Michael, enough, you answered my question,” Jon said as soon as Michael stopped to think. He was leaning forward, a distressed crease between his brows. The green acidity of his eyes had softened and Michael took in a quick reflexive gulp of air, slightly dizzy between the ears. “I’m sorry, I - I shouldn’t have...”

He trailed off. His hand was outstretched on the table, and Michael looked at it instead of the expression on Jon’s face.

“It’s all right,” he murmured, tonelessly, out of habit. “I’m sorry. I... I don’t know where that came from.”

Jon didn’t respond. Maybe disgusted. Michael didn’t check or ask.

“I need to get something back,” he added, even quieter. “From... it.”

“You won’t get anything from the bindings,” Jon said. He sounded like he was trying to be gentle but wasn’t practiced at comfort, like an automaton comforting a child. “The memories you gave up... they may be tied to your friend, but they’re tied to the Spiral, too. You can’t get back one without the other.”

“And it’ll eat me for good if I try.”

Jon hesitated again, and something about the silence made Michael’s skin prickle.

“Jon,” he said, “am I an - what you all were talking about earlier - am I an avatar?”

“No.”

But the response was too quick. “It could make me one, though,” Michael finished.

Jon drew his hand back, clasping them both in his lap. “We won’t let that happen.”

“But it does happen.”

“Not to us.”

“I’m not a part of the Institute.”

“I didn’t mean...”

Michael looked up. “What do you mean, then?”

Visibly struggling, Jon drew his teacup towards him and took a sip that could only be described as ‘frustrated.’

“The yellow door isn’t the whole of the Spiral,” he said instead of answering the question. “And it’s the yellow door which is interested in you. If we can get rid of the door - for good, instead of whatever Gertrude Robinson did to it - then you’ll be free.”

“Mm,” Michael said. Between the two of them, Jon did have the expertise, but he wasn’t so convinced.

“And you’ll be able to leave the Archivery,” Jon finished, taking another sip of his tea. “Safely.”

“Will I be able to read the bindings?”

“You wouldn’t want to.”

“They can’t be so bad,” Michael said, “that, even if my life wasn’t in danger anymore, I’d still sacrifice Ryan to avoid them.”

“You don’t--” Jon cast him a quick glance. “You didn’t sacrifice Ryan.”

“You don’t know that.” Michael stood up, unaware he was going to leave before he was in the middle of it. “And I certainly don’t remember. I’m going to bed. Good night.”

“Michael, don’t - look, it’s not--”

Michael didn’t listen. Back in his room, he sat at the edge of the bed for a long time, watching his hands tremble. There were still scars there, just beneath his fingernails. Blood on a blanket. It was so easy, forgetting. A hundred-and-one normal, every day ways you could end up with bloody hands, scarred fingertips, a grayscale world. When was a lie not a lie? When it was better to believe. You didn’t sacrifice Ryan, Jon had said. Michael wondered. The candles in the fixture guttered and hissed. The shadows were always new, always changing; the room was always different. Even the dimensions shifted. Even the door never stayed quite the same--

Michael managed not to scream. He blew the candles out instead, so the door was no color at all, and lay down to wait for the Spiral to get it over with.

Chapter Text

Ryan was screaming Michael’s name from behind the yellow door. Michael flung it open, stepped inside, and heard Ryan still screaming, still behind the yellow door. He opened it and ran through. There was a yellow door in front of him, Ryan behind it, calling.

When Michael opened the thirteenth yellow door, he kicked his blankets off, sat up in bed, and reached for the candlestick.

He wasn’t sure what time it was until he passed an elegant grandfather clock just past the second-floor landing: nearly one in the morning. Sleep was the last thing he wanted. It felt like he’d never slept in his life, or maybe that he’d been sleeping for years.

When he’d come to the Archivery, he hadn’t been given a tour, and so the size of the building surprised him. He found Jon’s office first and started his search from there, but as he worked out and around the hallways from there, he realized he was losing track of exactly where he was. Many of the hallways only had one door, with presumably massive rooms behind them, while others were lined with doors. A handful had etched bronze plates bolted to them, but most didn’t. Michael didn’t open any unlabeled doors; he saw nothing helpful such as Binding Storage or otherwise helpful directions, though, so he didn’t open those, either. 

He was almost ready to admit defeat - which would, he was certain, include sitting against the wall and waiting for someone to find him, rather than making the interminable walk back to the elusive second-floor staircase - when he came to the end of a hall, where an unpainted door with a plate that said Basement Storage kept guard.
Michael glanced around himself, at the dark walls, the ceilings so far above him they kept their designs secret in the shadows. Then he looked over his shoulder. The carpet runners were thick enough to hold his footprints, like a record. 

He thought, I probably should have told Jon about this, then turned back and opened the unlocked door.

The weak flickering of his three candles threw light down a set of wooden stairs; it went straight down a few steps, then turned, then turned again, then a third time, spitting him out directly into an enormous room, this one with ceilings low enough to make him feel the need to hunch. It might have felt spacious otherwise but for the rows upon rows of upright shelving that took up the entire middle of the room. Along the walls, leaving just enough room for one person to walk between them and the stacks, were crates of varying sizes, some simple wood, others reinforced with iron, some painted with symbols and alphabets that Michael couldn’t read. At eye-level, ringing the entire room, was another shelf, shallower and simpler, holding an enormous assortment of items that were definitely not books. Vases, daggers, jewelry, plates, cups, tools, cloth - from fabric scraps to entire garments tied up with black ribbon - sketches and paintings, cooking implements, children’s toys, a glass jar of lemon candies, even a taxidermy mouse posed on a ceramic tree branch.

All of those extra items were incidental to Michael’s investigation. After a brief examination demanded by his curiosity, he turned to the stacks, which were full of books.

These weren’t like the library books he had browsed upstairs, the dead books written by authors and printed by machine. The storage stacks shivered with what they held: thin chapbooks with odd, unlabeled covers, as vividly dyed as flower petals or as dark as the sky on a winter night. The spines were rounded - not enough paper in them to flatten them - and every one was tied shut with the same black ribbon. There were hundreds, maybe even thousands, on each shelf, and there were dozens of shelves, extending down the hall into obscurity.

Michael swallowed the lump in his throat. Ryan was here. Somewhere.

He almost started searching at random, but then he saw the plates screwed to the shelves, longer and thinner but otherwise identical to the ones on the doors upstairs. He might have expected the bindings to be sorted by entity, but the bindings’ covers came in thirteen tints, and the colors were jumbled together on the shelves. Instead, each plate bore a name, followed by two sets of dates.

The plates came at random intervals. Some names only signified a single shelf; a few shelves were nearly empty, their bindings stacked flat instead of stood on edge, and in those cases, the two dates were very close together, separated at times by less than three months. In other cases, a whole stack bore a single name, and the dates on the plate encompassed years. None of the dates, however, spanned longer than a decade or so. Short career, Michael thought, being a binder.

The dates started back over a century. Michael looked closely at first, but slowly began to skim, letting the names and dates wash over him as he made his way down the long, long line of stacks, watched over by crates with eyes painted on them, by ceramic dishes that shimmered like they still contained wine or soup or water, by paintings that very much did not change when he looked away from them but felt even more eerie for their stillness. 

He wished he could ask Jon about the items that weren’t books, but of course he couldn’t tell Jon about this. Not unless he found something in his own bindings that would help. 

After a minute or two of walking, Michael found the last full stack. Beyond it, the next stack was mostly bare, but the second shelf was labeled Jonathan Sims. It was only inscribed with one date, which had been about… Michael struggled to remember. Three years ago? About three years ago. Already there were five and a half shelves full of bindings.

Only a handful, however, were yellow. Michael scrounged up his memory of Sasha’s timeline, then counted back from the last yellow binding cover. Thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten… When he reached the thirteenth - one of the first yellow bindings Jon had made - Michael pulled the binding out. It might not have been his first, or his at all, but he had to start somewhere, and this seemed to match the pattern suggested by Sasha’s calendar. He set the candlestick on a shelf so he could hold the book in one hand and untie the ribbon, his fingers trembling. The ribbon slithered to the ground, and the cover sprang open of its own accord.

I should have seen - I should have known - I should have known—

   Mr. Shelley, what you’ve seen is—

I didn’t see! I didn’t - couldn’t - it’s not - he’s gone, he can’t be, there was no way, oh, God—

   Start from the beginning, Mr. Shelley. Before you saw it.

I didn’t see it, it wasn’t there, it didn’t exist, it can’t have! You don’t understand, there was nothing, nothing, no one… no one. He’s gone, he can’t be gone, there was nothing… there’s nothing…

   Before, Mr. Shelley, before. Where were you?

The - the - the - house. House. Field. My head hurts.

   Sasha, we need bandages, please. And a handkerchief.

      Of course, hold on.

Field. In the… grass. Sheep. There were sheep. There were.

   I believe you.

There might not have been. I don’t know.

   There were.

Sheep. I… we… who?

   I was told his name was Ryan Shepard.

Was. Was. What? He’s gone. He’s gone… he can’t be, there was nothing to take him… oh, God.

   You saw him taken.

No. Yes. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t - aaah!

      Here, bandages - here, Mr. Shelley, tilt your head back.

   Let me help.

      Thanks. I’ve never seen one of them bleed this—

The field, the sheep, the door - there was a door, a door, a yellow door, it opened, it shouldn’t have - been - it had - a mouth - Ryan. Ryan told me to close it.

   Did you?

I couldn’t - it wasn’t there - I couldn’t see it - it was yellow. I couldn’t…

      There, is that better? Can you see?

I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see it.

   Thank you, Sasha. I’m sorry, could - could you stay? I don’t know…

      ‘Course. Don’t worry about it.

I couldn’t. Close it. It took him. He wasn’t Ryan anymore. I couldn’t close it. I didn’t do anything.

   I’m sorry, Mr. Shelley, but I have to ask: was there a body?

A what?

   A body. Remains of… of your friend.

      Jon…

   I have to ask.

I - I - I don’t know, I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t see anything, there was too much. Nothing. I don’t know.

   All right. We’ll ask the Shepards.

Oh, God.

   When the door closed—

Nothing. There was nothing left. Nothing. I don’t think anything is left.

“Michael! Michael, stop, let me have that.”

If his eyes were open or shut, Michael couldn’t tell. If his heart was still beating or his blood still flowing, he wasn’t sure. He barely felt the binding slip out of his fingers. A second later, something warm and wet dripped onto his wrist.

“Oh, hell,” the faraway voice said. “Come here - come out of the stacks.”

The world was trying to resolve itself in the light of the candles, but it was still obscured by a red haze. Everything looked and sounded as if he were under crimson water. After so long without the color red, it was almost beautiful, in a sickeningly mesmerizing way. When someone pulled his arm, he followed, focusing as hard as he could on simply keeping his feet underneath him.

He was urged into a sitting position, and Michael obeyed again. A soft cloth was pressed to his face, and at first Michael jerked back when it came near his eyes, but someone caught the back of his head. The hand was slight, gentle but firm, and the voice said, “Michael, I know what I’m doing. Let me.”

“Jon,” Michael said. He breathed out. “It’s - it’s you.”

“Yes, it’s me. Can I—?”

Michael held himself still and let Jon press the cloth to his eyes, to his upper lip, his chin, and then around to his ears. His hand remained a steadying warmth at the back of Michael’s head, fingers weaving into his hair. When Michael blinked his eyes open again, gummy with something that smelled unsettling, the first thing he saw was Jon’s face, and the greenness of his irises.

Michael had questions, and he knew Jon did, too, by the dissatisfied twist to his mouth and the bunch between his dark brows, but they both were silent as Jon worked. He couldn’t have put words together in a straight line like this anyway, not yet. It didn’t, however, take much more time for him to realize that the substance on the handkerchief in Jon’s hand was blood. The red haze - the drip on his wrist - the flavor and scent that sat on his tongue—

“I told you not to read your own bindings,” Jon said quietly. He was scrubbing in a line down from Michael’s ear to the curve of his jaw. “And yet here I find you.”

Michael swallowed. His whole mouth was raw, from the roof to the back of his throat. “Had to know,” he said. “Ryan…” He remembered the obliterating panic of it all, felt it almost as freshly as he had back then. The door that wasn’t there which wasn’t a door. And Ryan, the realest thing Michael had had, gone.

Jon withdrew; he made an absent-minded move to put his handkerchief back in the pocket of his dressing gown, then grimaced and dropped it on the floor instead. Michael watched the little square for a moment, waiting for the red to return, but it was just dark grey. Without Jon’s hand holding him in place, Michael felt unmoored in the dark and the panic, vague and floating.

“It was nothing you didn’t know already,” Jon said, still frowning.

“Knowing isn’t the same,” Michael said. He started to press his fingertips to his eyes - his bleeding eyes - because, all expectations to the contrary, they didn’t hurt. “You can know a thing all you like but it’s not the same as - as - feeling it. Up here. I told you." He thumped his temple with the heel of his hand, just as he’d done hours ago. “This isn’t me.”

“It’s all the you that matters,” Jon said, leaning forward. Michael only then realized he was sitting on the basement stairs, Jon crouched a step below him. The way he leaned in brought him up against Michael’s knee. “You don’t know this - this process the way I do.”

“That’s the problem—“

“Let me finish,” Jon said, and Michael shut his mouth, clenching his jaw until the roots of his teeth ached. Jon made a faint abortive noise, then went on stubbornly, “Thirteen times you’ve come to the Archivery to have the - the entity erased from your mind. I’ve seen you thirteen times. Every time it’s attacked you, you’ve been afraid of it to the point of - of hurting yourself, of nearly killing yourself over it. It gets into you. All the entities do, but especially for people like—“

Michael blinked and saw Ryan. The shape of his face, the color of dirt under his fingernails. Then he was gone. Just once, and the door had taken him. And Michael had held out thirteen times.

“For people who are prone to that kind of attack,” Jon corrected himself. “It makes you… not you. The memories of yourself in the bindings are something that the Spiral creates. They’re weapons, not part of your identity. I swear, you are safer and better off without them.”

“I can’t see colors,” Michael said, pressing forward, too. He’d never been this close to Jon, not that he remembered. “I don’t know what my best friend looked like - I don’t not remember, I don’t know. Sometimes I’m, I’m sick in bed for days and no one knows why. Is that better? How can living like that be better than—“

“Than what,” Jon retorted, “dying for the truth?”

“Maybe!” Michael threw his hands into the air. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. It’s empty, up here. It’s made me empty. I… there’s nothing left.” He’d said that before. The first time. “I don’t think anything is left that’s worth saving.”

“There is always something worth saving.” Jon gripped Michael’s knee, his thin fingers digging past the fabric of the dressing down like pencil points. The sudden, ferocious contact made Michael start. “I swear, Michael. That’s what I’m here for.”

Michael stared at him. “Thirteen times,” he said. “How many more times can - can I stand it?”

“You don’t have to. We’re going to take care of it.” Jon squeezed his knee again, as if in punctuation. “Sasha and Tim are out there hunting for more information now. You’re learning - finding out how to resist the Spiral, here, where it can’t find you. Unless you open your bindings, which you have been informed is a bad idea.”

Michael ducked his head. 

“And those are only memories of it,” Jon added. “It’s not the real entity. Just… echoes of it, in your mind. It can’t hurt you here unless you let it. And we won’t let it, not until we know how to fight it.”

Michael slipped his arms around himself, hugging them tightly against his ribcage. “I let it have him,” he said. “Why shouldn’t it have me, too?”

For a few long moments, Jon was quiet. Too quiet.

For people like—

“I think it wants you,” Jon said finally, slowly, “as an avatar. Not as a meal.”

Michael clenched his eyes shut. If he cried now, would it come out red and thick and coppery? He didn’t want to find out, so he decided he wouldn’t let himself. 

“Mr. Bouchard doesn’t agree,” Jon said, “but I… never mind, it doesn’t matter. But we’re not going to let it have you, Michael, please understand.” He seemed to realize where his right hand was and let go of Michael’s knee. “That’s what I’m here for,” he repeated. 

“Of course,” Michael whispered. 

Another silence fell between them. Michael didn’t have the energy to lift his head; he barely had the energy to breathe. Then Jon exhaled and pulled himself up to the step beside Michael.

“In thirteen visits,” he said, placing his hands flat atop his own knees, “we have never made this kind of progress in finding the yellow door, or the man behind it. You’ve… you’ve never been able to hold out against it like this. I know it - I know it hurts, but it is, possibly, a good sign.”

Michael glanced sideways at him. “…D’you think?”

“Occasionally,” Jon said without apparent humor. “In this case, a bit harder than usual. I hope it shows.”

Michael certainly didn’t have the energy to laugh, but the giant tangled knot in his chest unraveled a bit. “It does,” he murmured. “I think.” He resisted the urge to lay down on top of his knees, to make a pillow of his arms and go to sleep on the steps. “How… how did you find me?”

Jon’s fingertips fiddled together, thumb-wrestling himself. “I was going to apologize for how our conversation… ended, earlier tonight,” he said, a trifle stiffly. “Apparently I should have been more stern rather than less.”

“I’m sorry.” Michael rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I just… I had to know, Jon.”

“I know,” Jon said quietly. “That’s what the Archivery does. Of all people, I can’t condemn you for it. But… but please, while I’m - while we’re figuring out how to protect you, be careful. I said I know what I’m doing, and I do. I know how dangerous the entities are, and how tempting they can make themselves.”

Because of Martin, Michael thought, but decided against saying. He hadn’t liked how brisk and cold Jon had become when Sasha and Tim brought up their late fellow assistant.

“And how did you get past the door?” Jon demanded suddenly. “The basement storage is supposed to be locked.”

Michael blinked at him. “It wasn’t locked.”

Jon stared back. 

“Oh,” he said. He blinked, too, which made Michael realize that Jon wasn’t wearing his glasses. It made the green of his eyes seem less vibrant. “That’s… abnormal.”

“Yes,” Michael said numbly.

Jon looked at him again, squinting, then said, “You’ve still got blood there - on your… let me see.”

Before Michael could twist away, Jon lifted a thumb to the corner of his right eye, pressed down, and gently rubbed at a dry, clinging fleck of blood. His knuckles rested against Michael’s cheekbone, which felt warm beneath Jon’s cool skin. 

When Jon pulled away again, Michael’s breath sat at crossways in his lungs.

“I said I can’t see colors anymore,” he said on impulse.

Improbably, Jon pulled a second handkerchief from the other pocket of his dressing robe. “I’m… sorry.”

“That wasn’t completely true.”

“No?”

“I can see green,” Michael said, and realized his voice was wavery. 

If Jon understood, he didn’t show it, head still bent over his handkerchief. “Strange. You’d think you could see yellow.”

“Well, sometimes. If it’s the - the door. But… yes. Green.”

“Green is related to yellow. Probably why it’s stayed. Hopefully we can stop the Spiral before your greens are gone, too.”

“Yes,” Michael repeated softly. “Hopefully.”

Chapter Text

The Archivery was different now. A few of the front rooms - the entrance hall, Jon’s office, the corridors between them - held details that Michael hadn’t noticed before, and wouldn’t have, except that he had noticed them during that first visit after Ryan’s abduction, and now he had the memory of noticing, so they no longer escaped him. A patch of wood in the entrance didn’t quite match with the panels around it; the wallpaper in Jon’s office was marred by a pale shadow where a framed picture or portrait had once hung; a single board in the floor in the first hallway off the entrance made a low, froggy croak when stepped on.

Far from being neutral and random, these details carried a vague sense of malaise. His mind now remembered what his body had known for however many years it had been since the first binding. He hadn’t been safe or sane when he’d heard the floorboard croak, and he remembered the blank spot where the portrait had been taken down as an empty eye socket, blinded and weeping thick, opaque tears. Ridiculous, of course - Jon said that the Spiral couldn’t reach him here, and he believed Jon - but the memories still came tied to his recovered memories of Ryan’s loss, or at least what had happened afterwards.

“Take things slowly tomorrow,” Jon told him on the walk back to Michael’s room. “Recovering bound memories is never as easy as it sounds. We have sleeping aids, if you need them.”

Michael grimaced. “I might. I was already having nightmares before.”

Jon duly changed course, leading the way to the kitchen. Michael offered to help with the preparations, but Jon waved him away, and Michael sat at the table, relieved that he wasn’t needed. He placed his hands flat on the tabletop, trying in vain to still their trembling. His mouth still tasted of sour copper.

The tea or tisane or tincture that Jon produced didn’t taste much better. Michael hadn’t noticed how it was made, too preoccupied with his new memories, and also with the Captain, who had prowled his way into the room and up into Michael’s lap. Jon didn’t smile, exactly, at the sight of the cat, but the set of his mouth did relax as he set two cups on the table and took a seat as well.

They drank their tea and gave the Captain generous head-scratches in silence for a few minutes. Jon held himself somewhat awkwardly, but Michael found that it didn’t bother him, the nervousness of it all, as enervated as he felt. It was all he could do to lift the cup to his lips.

“You said that I’ve never held out against it like this,” Michael said at last, halfway down his cup. “Through thirteen visits, this is the longest I’ve managed to go without a binding. Has it been… like the first time, every time, or have I been… I don’t know, building up an immunity?”

Jon considered the question, staring into the Captain’s enormous eyes. “It does seem like you’ve been building up an immunity,” he said. “I’m not sure that’s as good a thing as it sounds. But it has gotten us here, where we can fight it.”

“It hasn’t all been… bloody orifices,” Michael said, managing to keep the revulsion down in his stomach where it belonged.

Jon almost laughed at that. “No,” he said. “The first handful of times, perhaps. Not as much after that.”

Nodding, Michael returned to his tea.

“You’re not the only one,” Jon said after another few moments. “Who’s had such a violent binding. If that’s what you’re worried about, that is.”

It was, in a way - not the complete reason, but close enough for Michael to feel truthful when he nodded. “I’m not sure I want to be the Archivery’s most dreaded patient,” he said.

“Not at all,” Jon said, still staring at the Captain’s face as the Captain toed his way back into Michael’s lap. “You should hear the things I’ve had to bind for rich old aristocrats with too much money and time on their hands. I can’t say, obviously,” he hastened to add, “but if I could, you might be less… ashamed.”

Ashamed. Michael gave him a startled look. He had hoped his guilt wasn’t so plain on his face, that he could retain the same level of professionalism that Jon could. Then again, Jon had already had to wipe blood out of his eyes and ears like a little child coming home from a swim in a deeply unfortunate pond, so those bridges might have been burnt already.

Jon must have caught his look, because he went on, more quietly now. “We come in two modes, Michael. Sink or swim. When we’re… picked out by the entities, we either give up and become what it wants us to become, because the power it offers in exchange for surrender is so great, or we sink under the weight of holding out. But either way, we’re stuck in its waters.”

“But you said—“ Michael inhaled to steady his voice, gripping the handle of his teacup so tightly that the shape pressed white lines into his skin. “You said you think we can get the Spiral to leave me alone.”

“Yes, of course,” Jon said quickly. “We’ll find out how to make it work for you.”

It might have been the sleeping draught, or the lateness of the hour, or how peeled-raw his mind felt. Whatever it was, it made Michael bold enough to say, “The way it didn’t work for Martin?”

Jon went cold and still. But he still responded, after a few seconds had passed. “Yes.”

He didn’t leave, or grow angry. The question clearly hadn’t made him happy, but he was still there at the table with Michael, drinking his draught. Michael took another sip from his own cup, to steel - or maybe blunt - his nerve. “Did I meet him? Martin?”

Jon’s fingers had started tapping an arrhythmic dance across the lip of his teacup, and he watched the ripples across the pale liquid. “I don’t think so. He didn’t work closely with the binding process. He… didn’t like it much. He worked more in the library. If he’d been here when you came in, he would have gone there, not come to meet you.”

Nodding, Michael stroked the top of the Captain’s head. The cat had started to purr, its eyes drifting shut in bliss. The sound made Michael’s mind hum in response. “I… I don’t ask to be cruel, I promise. I just want to know what kind of thing I’m dealing with. The dangers of it.”

“I understand,” Jon said quietly. Michael hoped that was the truth. “The Lonely - the entity that took him - is one of the hardest ones to escape. It doesn’t present the way some of them do. Sometimes entities can be warded off with charms or chants or rituals, but sometimes there’s just… nothing to be done.” 

Michael nodded again.

Briefly, Jon’s fingers tapped even faster, before his hand curled around the cup and brought it to his lips, though he didn’t drink. “You have to want to get free,” he said, even more lowly. “It doesn’t matter how much others try to free you themselves. You have to take their hand. And sometimes you’re too tired from treading water to do even that much.”

“I’m sorry,” Michael said. It was wretched that there wasn’t anything else to say. But Jon looked so depleted suddenly, so drained. “You… must have been close?”

“I suppose,” Jon said without inflection. Then he shook himself and looked back at Michael. “But that was several years ago. And we’ve learned more, even in that time. And there are records of people finding their way out from being a - from being eaten by the Spiral.”

“There are?”

“Mm. I doubt any of the methods will work for you, but at least we know it can be done, and it can give you an idea of what does work against the entities.”

“Tomorrow’s lesson plan, then,” Michael said.

“Exactly.” Jon drank the rest of his draught, then took Michael’s empty cup  and put it aside with his own. “We should get to tomorrow, then. It’s very late and I have bindings to do in the morning.”

They walked back to Michael’s room. He watched for other flickers of memory, but of course he hadn’t been this far back into the Archivery on his first binding. Had he been here any of the other times? He almost asked Jon, but he was very tired, and so was Jon, so he tucked the question aside for later.

When they’d reached his door, Michael turned to Jon. “Thank you again. For finding me. I… I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t.”

Jon didn’t try to wave him off, which meant, whatever would have happened, it wouldn’t have been good. “You’re welcome. I did - mean what I said, you know.” He didn’t squirm, exactly, but he was uncomfortable. “The… apology for being uncharitable.”

Michael felt himself smile a little, surprising himself. “Sorries all around.” 

Jon blinked at him, and Michael just caught himself before he patted at his own hair, at his face, or at the front of his dressing gown to search for whatever he’d said that was so stupid as to render Jon responseless. Instead, he turned back to his room. “Well, then. Good night.”

“Good night, Michael,” Jon said, after a heartbeat’s pause. “Stay safe.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Then Jon reached out and briefly gripped Michael’s forearm, near the wrist, so briefly that even as Jon was drawing away and walking back down the hall, Michael wasn’t sure that it had even happened. He moved into his room, staring at his wrist, and locked the door behind him before sitting down on the edge of his bed, still staring. 

During that split second of contact, he would have sworn the entire world had found its colors again.

Jon did, in fact, have bindings to do in the morning, and was thus locked in his office even before Michael had dressed and emerged into the Archivery, uneaten by the bedroom door or anything else. But when Michael had had his breakfast and gone up to the library, he found a small stack of books on the table, with a note atop it.

      Michael - 
      Some records we have of people escaping the Spiral - bookmarked - and another Keay book that might be interesting.
           Jon

Michael slipped the note into his pocket and set to work. 

There were, in fact, three whole stories of people who had connived their way out of the Spiral - for good, if the stories were true and complete. One was too simple to even consider, since it involved following a dog out of the Spiral’s maze, and Michael disliked dogs. The other two, however, Michael read over and over. They were brief, five or six pages at most for each, but no less intoxicating.

Both stories ended with the death of its subject - not through the Spiral or some other murky, mysterious cause, but of old age and a perfectly normal illness, respectively. Michael realized he had given up on seeing out another year, much less an average human’s lifespan, when he reached the end of the first story and found himself reading through blurry eyes. Had he even wanted to live that long, since Ryan’s death?

Once again Michael found himself avoiding the skeptical gaze of the cleaning maid, swiping at his eyes when her back was turned. I’m sorry, he thought in her direction. It’s hard to think about wanting to live again.

Setting aside the Spiral-related books, Michael opened the Keay book. There was no title or author page, and he realized that it had been bound by an amateur; the pages had been ripped from another book and covered with handwritten notations and marginalia, which explained the page numbers that jumped up and down and the chunks of the previous book that had been excised. The annotator must have been this Keay who had been following Michael about the Archivery library.

The mangled book was older than the notes were, but its old-fashioned type was eons easier to read than the notes, which must have been dashed off in a frenzy of urgent thought. Jon hadn’t bookmarked any piece of the book, so Michael skimmed here and there, moving between the pages with the most legible notes. The book was about the entities, and seemed to be the source of the names that the Archivery workers used to refer to them. Keay, whoever they were, was skeptical of the hard lines that the previous author applied to the Fears, and, whenever the previous author made a particularly certain claim, Keay would underline it heavily and scratch in a surname or a date or an enigmatic reference to something that Michael didn’t understand. Chilcott expedition. Brittany coast prehistoric villages 1796. Sannikov sighting. Cape Horn, multiple. Bone Garden. Montague.

Michael considered fetching supplies to take notes on the notes, but it seemed a shame to untwist Keay’s bewildering, frantic, earnest handwriting. It would be profaning the thought process that went so counter to the original text’s rigid taxonomies. Michael would just have to remember his most pressing questions later on.

By the time he finished flipping through the Keay book, he was too stiff to consider staying sat in the chair. It was time for lunch, anyway. He headed down to the kitchen; by now the route there from the library was second nature, but the silence and the lack of people still occasionally sent his skin crawling. It had always been loud at the Shepard farm, full of people and chaos, especially after Ryan’s death. The way colors bled out of the world had left Michael further unsteadied, especially during the flares of his illness - the result of his forcible bindings, he was sure. All the colors, of course, but a bright, acidic green, and the blue of the book bound by the Archivist’s assistant. 

The memory of the bright blue book in Gertrude Robinson’s stall, seeping dye all over his hands, distracted Michael from his trek down to the kitchen until a hearty voice boomed from somewhere nearby, muffled by distance but close enough for it to startle him. He blinked, looked about him, and realized the voice originated near Jon’s office. One of the wealthy men who had a binding appointment, most likely. Michael started to walk on, but hesitated. It wasn’t his business - not Jon’s other duties as Archivist, not the other people he bound. But Jon had seemed so frustrated over his appointments, the types of clients he was made to bind for. It was already afternoon and they were still coming out of his office. Knowing him, he wouldn’t have even eaten.

Michael nodded to himself and went on to the kitchen to make a pot of strong tea.

Half an hour later, Michael settled his tray against his hip to support it as he leaned around the corner of the hallway, checking to see if anyone was still there. The hall was empty, and there were no voices that he could hear coming from the office. Finally, he thought, lifting the tray again and carefully balancing it to accommodate the heavier weight of the teapot against the plate of messy sandwiches he’d made.

As he drew up near the door, though, he realized he had been wrong: there were voices coming from inside, though quiet and muffled. Michael stopped dead in his tracks. It wasn’t his business, he reminded himself. But he found himself creeping forward anyway, straining to pick apart the blur of voices into something he could understand.

He had no idea how binding worked, nor what it looked like or felt like to have one’s memories bound. It most likely wouldn’t help them find how to beat the Spiral out of his life, but maybe he could think better if he knew. It was just knowledge-gathering, wasn’t it? Not spying, not eavesdropping. In a way. He slipped closer, easing his feet through the thick carpet runner.

The voice on the other side of the door wasn’t Jon’s; it was Bouchard’s.

“…haven for hard-luck avatar cases,” the director was saying. “We rely on men like those. If they become unhappy with your work, we lose the ability to support your hobbies, like your pet madman. Robinson was right about that, at least.”

“I did what I was supposed to do.” That was Jon. “It’s not my fault that we’re a bindery instead of a quaint country inn staffed by giggling barmaids.”

“Now, now. That’s beneath you.”

“It’s beneath me to act like binding their petty crimes and adulteries is an honor and a pleasure. I did what was asked, and smiling for the portraitist was not a specification. Now let Sasha and Tim come back.”

“I can assure you I have nothing to do with their delay. I’m hurt, really, Jon.”

Jon sighed loudly enough that Michael heard it. “Then tell Robinson to stop interfering and let them come back.”

“This isn’t what I came to discuss. I’m not omnipotent. Your pet madman, as I said—“

“Please.”

“—would be better put to use as Robinson requested.”

“No. No, that won’t happen. I can’t believe you’ve gone behind my back with her—”

“Once more, Jon, drawing it out one more time, and we can seal the Spiral away for - how many decades? Even centuries, perhaps. You could know, if you wanted, if you weren’t too afraid the answer would be compelling. Would you really put a single life before the saving of scores of men like him?”

Silence. Pain stabbed Michael’s hands: the ornate handles of the tray, its countless metal edges biting into his skin. The teacups were rattling delicately in their saucers.

“You can’t seal it away on your own.” Bouchard sounded almost gentle now. Paternal. “No matter how hard you and the assistants try. You can rescue a victim, but that’s not what he is. Is it?”

Michael didn’t want to hear the answer. He wanted to turn and leave and pour the tea down the drain and burn the sandwiches in the fireplace. He took a step closer to the closed door instead.

Jon’s voice was so soft that, even that close, Michael barely heard him say, “No. I know. But—“

“The most humane thing you could do would be to let it end sooner rather than later,” Bouchard said, and dread dripped like ice water down Michael’s spine. “I won’t force you to do anything. But do think about it. False hope is worse than no hope at all. You can save many more people if you give this one up. If you tell him that, he might even go through the door willingly.”