Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In the crawlspace beneath the porch, not four yards from the South Quarter fountain, he wants to cry in frustration. Not here. Not now. Not like this.

His eyes crawl over the space between the boards of the porch and the dirt below, searching for some way to stop the coming seizure, some way to hide the Eye, anything. But there's nothing.

As it grows closer he thinks of muffling himself, trying to evade detection, of running now in the hope that he can place the Eye before this happens, but he can't. All he can do is shelter here and hope he can get through this without being found. He tucks the Eye deep into his cloak and, burning with fear and shame, wads up the loose end of the cloth to stuff into his mouth.

"This is a mistake, Garrett."

The voice belongs to Artemus and he does his best to ignore it. The keeper is dead. It no longer matters what he thinks.

"You will only suffocate yourself." The voice is patient, no less so than it was when he lived. "You need to give yourself a fighting chance."

He's all but in tears. What chance? The chance for them to find him? The chance to let Gamall cement her powers forever? The chance to watch her destroy everything before she kills him?

"The chance to do what you do best."

He presses his face into the balled-up cloak, curling into as small a shape as he can manage.

"Garrett."

What does he want from him? It's over. Artemus is dead. The keepers aren't coming, because when have they ever, and how many are left? He can't stop what's coming. It's over.

Artemus is dead.

He hates how painful it is to realize that. The keeper was the only person he's ever known who cared whether he lived or died, and of all the people who've used him as a tool--Constantine, Victoria, Karras, Basso--Artemus was the only one ever to stay and see the damage. Every time, with one awful exception.

He's never forgiven Artemus for leaving him alone and wounded in the trickster's mansion, and yet he still wants him here, wants the calm, soothing hands to help him lie down, wants the eyes that will watch out for him, wants one of the only people who has ever protected him.

"Garrett, you're out of time."

He knows. He can feel it coming, the nausea, the vertigo, the weakness.

“Lie back. Put the cloak beneath your head.” When he does, because he’s already wasted too much time, the voice says gently, “Good boy.”

He bites back a sob, and then it’s over.

Chapter Text

In the end it is a wordless, unconscious moan that draws their attention. The stone men batter the porch into bits to get at the thief but he doesn’t run or speak or react. The way his body jerks is familiar—she remembers the seizure he suffered the night he brought the Keepers the Chalice and the Paw. It makes her laugh and laugh. He came close to his goal but was undone by his own body.

Gamall shifts forms, a smug smirk the only constant. Clever, she thought, but a fool in the end. As the stone men drag him from his hiding place she tries to decide on a suitable form to show him. Orland, perhaps, the man whose spite was so strong he damned himself by damning the thief? Artemus, the one form that might offer him a bit of comfort only to gleefully yank it away again? An enforcer—less personal, but something he fears beyond measure?

In the end it is her own form that she settles into. Two stone men drag him upright, granite hands locked around his forearms, and they carry the thief to her. His head hangs down. His body still seizes.

One of her gargoyles locates the Eye, hidden in the folds of the thief’s cloak. It is larger than she expected; the human eye—the thief’s eye—is swollen beyond reason. The stone is cold in her hand.

“I’ve waited so long for this moment,” she tells the Eye, begins to crush it in her fist.

She would destroy it there, but the thief suddenly goes limp in the stone men’s arms. His breath comes hard, but the seizing has stopped.

When she slips the Eye under his chin his breath catches, and when she tilts his face up both eyes are open, dazed, struggling to focus on her. He tries to raise his head. He doesn’t have the strength to sustain it. As Gamall steps back his head falls forward and his eyes fall closed.

“Thank you for the Eye, Garrett. Now, will you tell me what you’ve done with the others?” He doesn’t respond. “Come now, you know I’ll kill you either way. Make it worth my while and I’ll make it as quick and painless as possible.” He barely seems to understand what’s happening. For a few minutes she toys with the idea of killing him now, taking his form for herself, but it is true that she will kill him either way, and if she can convince him to divulge his little secret it will save quite a headache later.

So she waits, turning the Eye over and over in her hands, as the thief comes back to himself. She watches him stiffen and then fall to trembling. He cries, she realizes with amusement. Perhaps he’s beginning to understand that it’s over, that he’s lost. No tears fall. There are only quiet, shuddering sobs.

“You little fool,” Gamall says to him. “Can’t you see how useless this is?” She lets him be for a moment, and just as he is beginning to grow still she allows a stone man to shatter his wrist.

He lets out a choked sob and weakly tries to pull away.

“I will find them eventually,” she tells him. “Even if I have to take this City apart brick by brick. So why don’t you tell me where you’ve put the other sentients and allow yourself to die with some dignity?”

In her hand the Eye seems to pulse. It whispers, but unlike the thief all those years ago she is skilled enough to ignore it. She watches as the thief struggles to breathe through the pain, exactly as Keeper Artemus did a few short hours ago.

“Artemus was so certain you would succeed,” she tells him. The thief does not react. “‘He will stop you.’ If only he could see you now, little thief, all but handing me the Eye. He gave his life to protect you. He gave his life for less than nothing.”

The thief suddenly finds it in himself to struggle. He yanks his broken wrist free, and just for curiosity’s sake she allows the other stone man to free him. He stumbles forward, struggling to keep his footing, and staggers toward her. When she sidesteps him he goes down. He barely catches himself on the edge of the South Quarter fountain.

“Oh, have I struck a nerve?” she teases. The stone men advance. “It is the truth. You allowed all this to happen. You brought the pieces together, and in the end you handed me what I wanted on a silver platter.” Her form, ever shifting, moves closer. The thief slips to the cobblestones. He curls over his broken wrist and the sound of his tears mixes with a desperate struggle to breathe. His body retches but isn’t strong enough even to vomit. “What a disappointment you are. Your weakness set this in motion, and now you’re too weak to do the one thing he needed from you. It’s good that Artemus is dead, because having to face your worthlessness would have killed him anyway.” Her eyes, all of them, close. She can feel her army of stone men still searching for the other sentients. “Now, why don’t you do what your kind always does and…”

The words trail away as she notices the change in him. The thief is no longer crying or retching.

He’s no longer breathing.

A touch on his back doesn’t stir him. Neither does a blow to the side. There is no resistance as she turns him onto his back, only his limp weight.

She takes in his almost closed eyes and motionless chest and then clamps a hand down over his nose and mouth. Though she holds it there for a few minutes there is neither breath nor the struggle for it.

She will have to find the other sentients the old-fashioned way.

But never mind. He is nothing but another face to wear. It isn’t much to look at, covered as it is with dirt from hiding beneath the porch, streaked with tears, hair disheveled, his clothes stained with blood from wounds she and her stone men did not inflict. His right eye is red and swollen—it will be an interesting experiment to replicate his mechanical eye. She tucks  the Eye beneath her arm and takes hold of his face just beside the prosthetic eye. This will be a good enough place to begin tearing the skin from the body.

As she rips open his flesh one larcenous little hand reaches out and grabs the stone eye.

He stabs the eye back toward the fountain but misses the place built for it. This should be the moment Gamall rips him open before snatching back the eye, but for the length of that moment she doesn’t understand. His breathing stopped. He still isn’t breathing…

As he writhes on the ground she hears the slightest clink of glass on stone and sees the small vial he has spit out. A breath potion, she realizes. She hasn’t seen one in years and where he managed to find one she doesn’t know.

Her stone men converge, but even on the heels of a seizure the thief is too fast. His shaking hands find the indentation in the fountain’s stone and he presses the eye in.

A perfect fit, she thinks.

Chapter Text

The Betrayer claws long, deep gashes into the Thief’s face, but though he flinches he does not tear his eyes from the Eye or the flare of light that grows from it and shoots into the sky. The light finds its way to the Heart and Crown, to the Paw, to the Chalice. It writes the Final Glyph, and it unwrites everything.

All across the city Keeper passages and storerooms close and the Chapel appears suddenly to everyone. The Betrayer’s forms slip away from her one by one until all that remains is her own. The stooped, sunken-eyed old woman traces glyphs into the air, one after another after another vanishing even as it is drawn.

“No,” she whispers.

All around the square her stone men stand frozen, reaching out to the Thief. He lets go of the Eye and slumps back, struggling to bring air to his lungs. And from the shadows that ring the courtyard come Keepers.

“Old, so old, ruined…” The Betrayer sobs as heavy tears roll down her face. As the Keepers draw closer she gestures another glyph toward them and they reflexively draw glyphs of their own, all of them meaningless. “Back! Back with you!”

The Thief, his part in this played, doesn’t watch what comes next. He turns away, curling over his broken wrist, carefully breathing through the pain. He looks at nothing, sees nothing, but he whispers a single word. He whispers, “Stay.”

As the Betrayer is led away a single Keeper, barely a novice, breaks from the ranks and comes to the Thief’s side. “Garrett?” he asks.

The Thief turns toward him sharply, his eyes wide and bright, but as he fully sees the young man’s face his gaze turns dull. He turns away. He closes his eyes tightly.

“Are you alright?” the Novice asks, a simple question without an answer. He draws a glyph over the Thief’s wounds, now only a meaningless gesture, before crouching down and applying pressure to the gaping slashes the Betrayer left in his face.

The Thief tries to pull away before the pain freezes him in place. “Get lost,” he mumbles.

“Are you sure? You look in bad shape and I…”

“Let go of me.”

The Novice looks down at his hands, now covered in the Thief’s blood, and backs away, holding his hands in front of him. “I’m sorry, I…”

“I don’t need your sympathy.”

And this Keeper, this Novice, accepts that. He slips back into the shadows. He leaves the Thief alone at the foot of the fountain, and there the Thief lies, unmoving, for a long time.

In time the City guards will come and the Thief eventually stirs. One hand grips the edge of the fountain, and he notices for the first time the mark of the key, burned by the Glyph into the back of his hand. He studies it for a long moment, then draws deliberate breaths until his trembling stops. He forces himself to his feet.

From the ruins of the porch he finds his cloak, discarded by the stone men, and wraps it tightly around his broken wrist. Then, like the Keeper before him, he fades into darkness.

There the story would end but for a single small shape that sees and follows. It keeps at some distance, and when he pauses in the Old Quarter, his face strained with pain, a small hand reaches into his pocket and withdraws a Keeper ring engraved with the same mark burned into his hand. In one smooth motion he grabs the pickpocket’s wrist and says sharply, “That is not for you.”

Anyone else might break the weak, shaking grasp, but the wide-eyed waif of no more than nine who stares up at him is half-starved, her ribs all but meeting her spine.

“Please,” she whispers, trembling. “Sir, please, I’m hungry. Don’t tell the guard.”

“You have talent,” he tells her. “It’s no easy thing to…” and here he gives a weary chuckle, shakes his head. “…to see a Keeper. Especially one who does not wish to be seen.”