Chapter Text
The Archives were quiet, with her gone. Not that they'd been terribly loud before, but they'd been... busy. She always had something going on, some new person or plan to pull her attention away from the dusty shelves and endless documents, and it had given the place an air of life.
When she was there, at least. When she was gone, for long stretches at a time, he'd wandered aimlessly and alone through the silent halls and offices.
Now she was gone for good, and he did not know if he missed her. She had never paid him much mind, after all, once she had learned what he was and judged him nonthreatening.
But at least she'd seen him.
There would be new people coming, he knew, soon enough, and they would fill the place with life once again; perhaps more so than she ever did. She was almost as alone as he was, in those last days.
He wondered if they would see him, too.
~~~~~
Jonathan Sims had a headache. Not terribly unusual for him, all things considered, but still deeply unpleasant.
He sighed, pushing his thumb against the bridge of his nose in an effort to dispel the building pressure, and reached for the tape recorder that sat at the edge of his desk. Tim and Sasha had uncovered it in a storage room a few days prior, and it had been niggling at the edge of his mind ever since. He finally had a moment free to test it, and even though it was - he checked the clock: christ, almost nine pm - he was still going to take advantage of it before whatever avalanche of new work would come tomorrow buried him once more.
He popped open the tape compartment for a moment, checking that there was one inside, then clicked it on.
“Test… test… test… one, two, three… right.” The tape seemed to be running smoothly; Jon cleared his throat, and began his introduction. “My name is Jonathan Sims. I work for the Magnus Institute, London…”
This was approximately the fifth time he had tried to record the statement of Nathan Watts, and he found his introduction rambling a bit more than he intended; still, he got through it well enough, and when he finally shut the recording off and rewound the tape to check the quality it played clearly, which was more than he could say for any of the digital files he had tried to make.
He breathed a sigh of relief, and then quickly tried to stifle it when it turned into a yawn. Half-past nine, now, and the exhaustion was weighing him down far more heavily than it had before he tried recording. He still had so much to do, though: there was a whole stack of statements that had refused to record digitally, and now that he knew the tape recorder worked he needed to get through the backlog as soon as possible. He reached for another, pulling it across the desk toward him and reaching for the box of fresh tapes Tim had left with him when he dropped off the recorder.
“You really should head home, you know,” a voice said, whispered and breathy. “Get some sleep.”
Jon froze, hand hovering over a tape. The words had come from behind him, just over his left shoulder, as though someone were standing there watching him. The back of his neck prickled under a phantom gaze, the same as it had while he was recording the Watts statement, the same as it did when he read any of the difficult statements, the same way he tried to ignore whenever it happened.
No more words came; the prickling feeling faded, slowly, away.
Jon let out a heavy breath, drawing his hand back from the box of tapes, and closed his eyes for a moment.
Then he set the problem statement to the side, grabbed one that he had been waiting to record digitally, opened his laptop, and got back to work.
~~~~~
“Hey, Jon, coming out with us for drinks tonight?”
“What?” Jon paused halfway across the office and glanced over to find Sasha giving him an expectant look from where she sat at her desk. It took a moment for him to process what she had asked. “No, I don’t- I don’t have time for that,” he said, already turning back to continue across the room. “There’s far too much to do.”
“Jeeze, it was just an offer, chill out.” This was murmured by Tim, bent over a file on his own desk and pretending he wasn’t eavesdropping. Jon scowled, opened his mouth to snap back in response - he didn’t need to chill out, he was perfectly calm - and then reconsidered. It was, he realized, quite possible that his harried stress was coming across a bit more aggressively than he intended. Tim and Sasha had done him a huge favor by transferring to the Archives with him; he didn’t want them to think he was ungrateful for it.
“I’m-” sorry, he planned to say, and was cut off by a sneeze before he could.
“Bless you.”
“Thank you,” Jon said thickly, holding his hand to his nose and looking around for a tissue.
“Oh, yeah, bless you,” Sasha said absently, glancing up from her laptop for a moment before turning back to the screen.
Jon froze. She had already said that, hadn’t she? Or Tim had…?
He looked over. Tim had picked up his phone and was focused on dialing, checking back and forth between the file and the keypad to make sure he was entering it correctly. He hadn’t even noticed Jon had sneezed.
Someone had said that, though. The voice had been clear and distinct, like whoever it had been was standing in the room with them. Far clearer than that whispered murmur from a week ago, when Jon had stayed late to record statements…
He left the room quickly. There would be tissues in the breakroom.
~~~~~
Fucking Leitners.
Jon set the statement down with shaky hands, drawing in a deep breath through his nose and letting it out in a heavy sigh. It was an unusual case, to be sure: Sasha had been unable to find any records of Ex Altiora as an extant book, which went against common knowledge of how the cursed tomes usually manifested, but everything else about the statement pointed to it being a true encounter. And Jon wasn’t all that inclined to trust common knowledge of the books, anyway. No scholarly records listed any children’s books as Leitners, either.
He pushed back from his desk, standing up and quickly shoving the statement back into its folder. He’d drop it off in Research later, in the current project file, and then talk to Elias about getting the project prioritized. For now…
He reached into the bottom drawer of his desk, pulling out the packet of cigarettes and the lighter he had secreted there a few weeks before. He’d been quit for years now, since shortly after joining the Institute, minus a few… stress related relapses… but after that statement he needed something to hold onto, to anchor him away from the nauseous lurch of fear that had been left in his stomach from that tale.
Jon flicked the lighter on and off a few times, a nervous tick that he’d never been able to fully beat, and then selected a single cigarette from the packet to bring outside with him. Both it and the lighter fit into the palm of his hand, and he curled his fingers around them in the hopes that Tim and Sasha wouldn’t notice it when he passed through their office. He put the rest of the pack back in the drawer, and headed for the door.
“Those things’ll kill you, you know,” a voice said, and Jon stopped in his tracks, closing his eyes for a moment and taking a deep breath.
Then he chucked the cigarette in the trash, and the rest of the pack with it. The lighter went back in the drawer. He twisted the ring around his right middle finger, a plain black band he’d bought shortly after he quit smoking as a replacement for fiddling with a lighter.
He’d drop off the statement now. Not much point in waiting.
~~~~~
Bringing work home with him was probably not a healthy plan, but at this point Jon didn’t really care. He’d fallen behind even more since finding the tape recorder; each statement that refused to record digitally left him exhausted after he put it to tape, emotionally and physically drained from the palpable fear that leached out of the words and the itching, watching sensation that prickled at the back of his neck when he read them. No matter how much he dismissed the contents of the statements when summarizing their research, it was getting to him.
He sighed, reaching across his kitchen table to draw his laptop closer to him. He’d left the tape recorder in the Archives, but he could still get a head start on the normal statements over the weekend in the comfort of his own home.
“Statement of Laura Richards…”
His mind wandered as he read. Tim and Sasha had gone out for drinks again that night, keeping up the regular Friday tradition they’d had since they first became friends. They hadn’t invited Jon, this time.
Which was a good thing, he reminded himself. It wasn’t like he would have had time to go with them anyway, and he always felt guilty turning them down, so this just spared everyone a lot of trouble. He’d be able to join them again sometime soon, once he had a handle on all the work he had to do and he wasn’t constantly falling behind schedule.
“...Statement ends. Tim contacted Ms. Richards to check some of the details of her account…”
They were boring, banal research notes. The statement was very obviously false; even without leaning into the more aggressively skeptic side Jon put on for dealing with the difficult statements, it was pretty easy to see that Ms. Richards’ friends had been pulling a prank on her.
He stopped the recording, set the statement to the side. Soft footsteps approached as he was renaming the audio file, and he reached back over his shoulder to grasp at the hand he knew was being stretched toward him.
His fingers found only empty air.
Jon paused.
The room was silent around him. His hand still hovered, awkwardly, in the air behind him, waiting to hold another that was not there.
He closed his eyes, letting his hand fall again. He didn’t look behind him. He didn’t fight the tears that pricked at the edge of his eyelids.
He waited for a long moment, breathing shakily, feeling the emptiness of the space around him.
Then he reached for his phone with a sharp, decisive movement, and pulled up a number from his contacts.
“Dr. Williams,” he said, when the voicemail message finished. “My name is Jonathan Sims, I was one of your patients a couple of years ago. Um. I thought- I know we worked through a- through a lot, and I was much better, but I, uh. The hallucinations have started again. I'd like to schedule an appointment, when you have time. Call me back.”