Chapter Text
The next week is inexplicably awful.
The alarm was sounded by a newer employee, wandering the halls out of curiosity and startled by the infestation. Everyone upstairs had quickly evacuated, but not without a few small casualties, the former employ included.
Elias, unfortunately still very much unharmed, has given him orders to rest. Whilst he finds new employees, he says, Martin has been given express permission to stay home, take care of himself, and take a break.
New employees. As if they were soldiers on the front lines of duty, tossed to the waves of the dead and filled in with new able bodies as soon as they were rendered useless. As if he’s ever going back to that stupid Institute. He can’t even think of the Archives without feeling the need to toss up whatever breakfast he could bear to stomach.
Jon and Sasha are dead. That much he knows.
Sasha, of course. There was no doubt about that. But Jon had just been unconscious before. According to the medics, he had been dead before he even reached the building for treatment. Martin held out hope for a solid few hours, waiting by the phone for something. Anything.
The news wasn’t good. In retrospect, he should have known. Him and his stupid optimism.
His apartment is a mess. Not that it’s ever particularly spiffy in the first place, but it certainly isn’t ever dirty, the way it is now. He’s barely had the energy to make himself some sort of instant dinner without it exploding somehow because he’d forgotten to set his timer. Everything felt just slightly off, just inconvenient enough to chip away at his spirits and send him back to bed, to lay and think and grieve.
He’s in the middle of that routine now. A hot pocket lies in the bank of the spinning plastic microwave, a faint metallic buzzing filling up the unbearably quiet surroundings. He holds a mug of cold water, hoping he can heat it up next. Another bag of tea should cure his nerves. His eyes weigh on themselves with their puffiness, having gone through the third cry of the day. God, he needs a therapist badly, he thinks.
Until, without knocking, a door opens.
Martin yelps, startled. His microwave beeps, and a figure enters.
The static has been building behind his eyes for some time now. His vision flickers, because of the tears and because of who stands in front of him. What stands in front of him.
“Hello,” it says, warmly, “former assistant to the Archivist.”
He thinks it wrinkles its nose, though it looks more like paper crumpling in on itself. The stench of the Corruption was not, to it, a friend. It had ruined many of its plans, and it lingers, unwelcome, in this apartment.
“You,” Martin murmurs, half-sedated from shock.
“Have I already introduced myself?” It laughs. “Please, excuse me if I have. Time and place is a funny matter.”
“No.” He turns to face him fully, mug trembling in his palms. “I- I know you. Michael, I think. From, the, uh… the statements.”
Sasha’s statement, namely. He is torn from his stunned stupor into the awful reality he’s been facing for seven terrible days. He stands unsteadily. Even fully upright, he does not come close in stature to the towering figure before him.
“What do you want from me? I’ve already lost everything,” he mourns aloud. “I think I’m going to die. I… I feel like it. She’s still out there, somewhere. Prentiss. She could show up and kill me. You could kill me.”
He wavers.
“ Are you here to kill me…?”
“Not,” it suggests with an unfurling finger, “if you come with me.”
A door.
He can’t believe he didn’t notice it before. The monster before him points directly to an impossible, dandelion yellow door, wedged between the wall behind his kitchen table and the cabinets, frame melded in with the uniform beige of the walls. Open. Waiting.
“If you’re trying to trick me, you don’t want to.”
“Really?” Michael raises it’s eyebrows, another curious gesture. Martin’s just a little surprised it doesn’t tear him in two at his defiance. It doesn’t seem like that would be totally uncalled for, at this point. “Why?”
“Because… because my friends are dead, and… and I can’t leave. And I’m a mess. If you’re going to kill someone, pick someone who cares about an escape for himself.”
Michael pauses. Perhaps it did not adequately measure the level of despair Martin would succumb to so easily. Instead, he does what he does best, and laughs at him; a pealing, rippling laugh that sounds more like someone’s sigh into an echo chamber.
“That is where you misunderstand,” it hums, “this does not have to be real. The Archivist can escape, and all taken with him. His death has been an inconvenience of sorts.”
Martin starts to listen. He repeats his question.
“What do you want?”
“Your assistance,” it lilts, “that is part of your title, is it not?”
“Not to you.”
“Then to who? Who requires your assistance?”
Martin refuses to answer. He looks down, guiltily, at the cup growing colder in his hands.
“I can help you,” Michael points, “help them, if you help me.”
“What can you possibly do to help me?”
Michael wanders the room, eye contact no concern of it in making this deal. Martin can’t help but feel a little self-conscious of another person (or at least something that looks like one) judging his poor circumstances lately, especially given the fact that it seems to be frowning.
“I can help you rewrite what happened the day Prentiss seized your institute.”
That interrupts his melancholy.
“What?”
Michael reaches toward a flower vase, the stems bending and twisting as the tips of its nails scrape their surface delicately.
“Don’t! Please.”
Michael, surprisingly, removes its hand, albeit slowly. It tilts its head for an explanation.
“Ah…. Um, please, don’t mess with those. Those are supposed to be for my mum.”
He feels quite silly urging a monster, who could easily hurt him very badly, not to ruin his bouquet. Michael furrows it’s brow.
“They are dying.”
It pokes a single browning petal and frowns further at the crunch. Martin doesn’t even have to look.
“I know.”
“Mm,” it responds. As if it understands.
The silence with two in the room is much worse. He works on changing the subject.
“Will I die, if I trust you? How do I know you’re not lying to me?”
“How should you know, even if I tell you you won’t?” It walks - glides through air, more like, stutters through space - to the door it’s left standing in the midst of the mess. At least it’s away from Martin’s belongings.
“You cannot trust me. I am, by all definitions, constructed of lies. The very definition, if those who wrote it had known me. But I do need your help, you may follow me, and, I insist,” Michael pauses to choose it’s words, “that you to do so. If you want to see them alive again, that is.”
He does. He really, really wants to see them alive again. Perhaps against his own will, Martin steps toward the door, mind still numb and wracked with days upon days of nerves so taut they could play a violin in tune. The bounds of his world have been stretched by supernatural fingers, farther than even he could have expected he would handle.
“How am I supposed to help you?”
“That is simple,” Michael nods. “I need a tape.”
“A tape?” Martin asks, puzzled. “That’s all you need me for?”
“Yes,” Michael repeats, only a touch of impatience painting it’s words. “A tape.”
That doesn’t seem too bad.
“Do I have another choice?”
“I suppose. You could move forward with the life you have now. But then, the Circus would prevail, or another unlikely suitor for the end of the world would tip the scales in their favor. Neither of which, I assume, you or I would prefer.”
He pauses for but a moment, considering Jon. Jon, who is surely dead. Jon, who does not know how far Martin is willing to go save them. To save Sasha, and him, and everyone he’d failed to warn faster on the surface of the Institute.
Oh, god, he didn’t even think about how the others are doing. Right now, right here, he had a chance to change their fates, too. In some capacity, he knows Michael is right. Something awful lurks beneath everything he knows, and he could be waltzing right into its maw, another stupid human fallen prey to whatever all evil serves. His stomach stirs with anxious energy.
Now, he had a choice. An honest choice. Even if it led him somewhere awful, wasn’t it his choice? He had to take it.
Martin’s knuckles are white with how tightly his fists are balled, having set down the cup somewhere in his paces. He didn’t even notice he was so tense until he started swallowing back waves of red and liquid grief from breaching his cheeks. He presses forward.
Michael smiles. “Right this way.”
It enters the hallway, and it waits courteously for Martin to step through its corridors before shutting the door on the past of the deceased Archivist, his missing friend, and his similarly dead assistant forever.
And yet, something is still very deeply wrong.