Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first thing Michael feels is pain. 

Gut wrenching agony boiling its blood, pops and crackles, heat surging through every inch of it until it is certain this is what immolation must be. Its what being crudely crushed back into its who, but the pieces are too misshapen to fit the right way. They have been chewed on and spit back out and now the edges are worn and warped and the whole puzzle can never be the same way it was to begin with - even if all the pieces have been given back. A dog-eared mistake of a book with its pages stapled together. Then, all at once, Michael is cold and that at least is familiar. 

Michael knows the cold, the way it bites at the skin. Frigid snow caught in eyelashes. Ice crunching beneath boots. The sound of a frozen ocean sings like a piano wire wound too taught, finally snapping. 

Cold and more cold. 

The ceiling overhead is dusty beyond repair, humming fluorescent lights swaying gently until The Archivist’s ashen face blocks the glow and Michael doesn’t remember how it even ended up sprawled across the floor. Above, Jon says something it cannot hear through the ringing in its ears - but he looks so scared. When its head lolls to the side, Helen is staring down at it with shock writ across her face. She isn’t Helen anymore, not really. 

It brings a hand up, pressing hard into its chest where something suffering flutters and Michael realizes its a heartbeat. 

~~~~

From beyond the chipped bathroom door, Gerry hears only the faint drip…drip…drip…of the bathroom faucet. The quiet is eerie, wrong, when Michael has been in the bath for over forty minutes and he’s not heard a single peep. No splash of water, no tub being drained. Just…silence. By the time a full hour has passed he’s been pacing the hall of his apartment like a caged animal and finally succumbs to the pit of worry in his stomach. 

“Michael?” He calls, not expecting an answer. Michael does not speak often, these days. Struggles to get a word out, like taffy in his throat, but it’s been a week since he came from the institute with Gerry and had to be gently reminded that bathing is a thing human beings have to do. Gerry had thought it might make him feel a little better, too. Now he wonders. “I’m coming in, okay?”

He finds Michael sitting there in the tub, knees held up to his chest and hair damp - little beads of sweat rolling down his pale, freckled, face. Beneath the still steaming water Michael’s skin has gone very red and when Gerry dips his fingers in he finds it scalding hot, yanking his hand away with a hiss. Michael does not react, staring off into the distance with nothing at all behind his eyes. What he sees, if anything at all, Gerry cannot say. 

“Hey.” Gerry takes his hands, encouragingly, urging Michael from the bath. “You’re hurting yourself.” 

With wobbling steps Michael ambles from the tub, clinging to Gerry’s forearms with trembling hands as his eyes slowly come back into focus. He’s all pale and freckled, gangly limbs with fine blonde hair on his arms and chest and Gerry absolutely does not look anywhere past that. Catches only the out of focus blur of his knobby knees, a patch of darker skin along his left leg - like a giant birthmark or scar. Water dampens the sleeves on Gerry’s tee-shirt, but he just guides Michael over to the bath mat and must wrench one arm free from his grip to snag a towel off the rack. 

“Cold.” Michael says, very softly, watching Gerry pull the towel around his shoulders. All wide blue eyes, frightened and lost. 

“You’re gonna melt your skin off in that bath.” He counters, wryly, ruffling the towel against Michael’s back until he’s able to manage for himself. Gerry turns to drain the tub, trying to give him some semblance of privacy even if Michael seems unconcerned with it. “It isn’t cold in here. I promise.” 

“No.” He pleads, tucking the towel around his hips and bringing Gerry’s palm to the center of his sternum. “It's in me.”

With one palm to his chest, Gerry cannot feel whatever it is Michael is certain to be there - but even so he trusts what the other man feels to be true. If Michael says there is cold inside of him, then there is. 

“You’re here now.” He says carefully, feeling the sluggish crawl of an impossible heartbeat beneath his palm. “You’re in my flat and you’re with me.”

“I…” Michael pauses, that terribly distant little frown across his face as his eyes wander the bathroom as if seeing it for the first time. 

“You remember, don’t you, Michael?” Gerry takes his face between his palms, guiding him to meet his eye. Brown and blue. “It's Gerry Keay, you’re home with me. Jon brought you here a week ago.” 

“I know you.” Michael says, softer than a breeze. Leaning into Gerry’s touch, searching his face. “You were there, in the archives. A looooooooooong time ago.” 

“I was.”

Then, with a lopsided smile that shows the gap between his teeth, Michael lets out a little breathy laugh. “I thought you were so cool.” 

Michael has no clothes of his own, but both Jon and Martin have sacrificed enough for him that he’s now got three shirts, two pairs of sweatpants, a single pair of obnoxious chino’s, and a pair of trainers half a size too small. All of it a mishmash of sizes, necessities given when he had no other choice. Gerry will let him take anything he wants from his own closet and has done a rush job shoving all his clothes in the wash, not knowing when the money from the institute will come in and not wanting Michael to be stuck in Jonathan Sims’ spare work trousers for another week.

They’re calling it reparations, Gerry knows it’s hush money. Payment for Michael being a good boy and letting Elias’ chosen doctors pick his brain and prod his body. Michael knows it too, even while he struggles to keep up with the way his mind must fit back into a body too human for it. A body that has been left twisted, now that the distortion has abandoned him. The doctors gave him a plain, sterile looking, metal cane to use when the gnarled twist of bone in his left leg could not be fixed - but the thing is too short by several inches and makes the pain worse than not using it at all. 

Gerry resolves to take him in and find one better, when Michael is up to the task. There is… a lot. A lot of suffering, a lot of stress, a lot of nuances to fitting a person back into a world that has moved on without him. Even so, as Michael sits by the window, in a pair of Martin’s sweatpants folded thrice at the cuffs, peering out at rain slicking down the glass, Gerry is foolish enough to believe it will work out. Somehow. 

~~~~

“You’re good at that.” Gerry waves a hand at where Michael sits on his knees surrounded by piles and piles of books. “The organization and stuff.” 

“It was part of my job, once.” He hums, glancing sidelong at him with something very impish in his smile. 

Michael is wearing one of Gerry’s old band tees, so faded and bleach stained that the logo is a mess of faded smudges, but something about the sight of him in his clothes makes Gerry a little rosy. Michael is taller than him by a not insignificant margin and a bit heavier only due to the fact Gerry is scrawny to a worrying degree, accustomed to surviving off energy drinks and crisps, yet somehow his shirt hangs loosely around Michael’s shoulders. As if Michael himself has shrunk in the wash. The overall effect is a charming one, particularly when he must pull his hair back into a long ponytail or else get a face full of curls. 

Mostly, Gerry’s just happy he’s been feeling well enough to be doing any of this at all. That first week Michael had stumbled around insisting his legs did not work the right way and his hands were too small. While Gerry wasn’t precisely certain what any of that meant, he still understood enough to know that the experience was an unpleasant one. He suspects most of Michael’s experiences are unpleasant lately. Which is why the simplicity of watching him slowly begin rearranging the shelving downstairs in the shop feels so monumental. 

It makes him think of all those quiet moments many years ago, when at first they only ever saw each other in passing and fumbled their way through awkward smiles like shy teenagers. Eventually they started inching nearer outside the walls of the institute; Michael spending his lunch break with Gerry at the diner down the street or tagging along when he had something benign to investigate at the library upstairs. None of it often enough to be a date, but it could’ve been. The potential was always there, this warm simmering thing that used to make Gerry laugh and Michael cover his face. 

Once, the week before Michael left for Russia, he’d stopped by Gerry’s flat with a package from Ms. Robinson and stood just at the threshold like he was scared to come inside. Like he knew if he crossed the line into Gerry’s space they’d never be able to go back again, that they’d do something more than stand around blushing like idiots. Gerry isn’t sure if he regrets not grabbing him by the collar then and doing all those things churning in his head, or if he’s grateful they never got that far before Michael…

He still wants to grab him by the collar, but this time Michael is in his home and this time he is fragile in ways that make Gerry feel sort of like a creep. Particularly when his heart does something funny as he looks at Michael now, sunshine splashed across his pretty face and his nose scrunched with an airy laugh. It isn't fair, none of it is. Then Michael turns towards him, something in his eyes that makes Gerry think he’s able to hear every thought in his head and he has to look away like a guilty child caught with their hand in the cookie jar. 

“I feel funny.” Michael chirps, bewildered. 

The soft rasp of his voice, where he’s gone a bit lisping, is so beautifully familiar it sends something sweetly aching right through Gerry’s chest. He always liked the thick way Michael’s words tangled together, just a little. L’s that pressed a bit too hard at the roof of his mouth, those moments where Michael’s voice rises in puckish delight.  

“Where?” Gerry drops his chin atop his palm, scooting himself this way and that way on the swiveling stool behind the counter. He thinks it's good to let Michael try and parse where the sensations are in his own body, relearning how it all works. 

For a moment he sits there on the floor, gazing off into the distance with his brow furrowed in thought. Then touches his own stomach in consideration. 

“Here?” He says, hesitant, then more confidently. “Yes.” 

Checking the time on his laptop, Gerry could just about kick himself for the thoughtlessness. It's nearly two in the afternoon and Michael hasn’t eaten anything more than a nibble off a breakfast bar this morning. Most of the time Gerry doesn’t exactly prioritize his own wellbeing, and his body has shifted to accommodate him eating whenever he remembers he’s supposed to do that. Now he has Michael - who has not quite gotten down the fact he also must eat and sleep regularly to keep chugging along. If he cannot do something to take care of himself, he will do so for Michael. 

“Shit, yeah it’s later than I thought. We should get lunch, come pick out something.” Gerry tugs open the squeaky drawer behind the desk, the one absolutely loaded with takeaway menus that stick and jamb in the corners. He has memorized the phone numbers of most of them. 

Michael wobbles to his feet, awkwardly hefting himself up with the support of his shiny new wooden cane - picked out from a little shop downtown that Gerry didn’t even know existed until that very day. Run by an older man who went on rather proudly about inheriting the business from his late mother, enthusiastic to help Michael figure out which configuration might be best for his needs, all while Michael looked flustered by the attention. In the end he came home with what the shop owner called a derby-handle in a pale ash wood with swirling notches in the grain and Gerry finds it oddly suitable. 

Unaccustomed to standing with the cane, Michael ends up putting a hand on the shelf to steady himself for a moment and Gerry fights the instinct to reach out and take his arm - knowing how goddamned insulting it would feel no matter what the sudden clench of his heart tells him when he watches Michael struggle. Before he can think about that overly much, Michael is sliding behind the counter to sit himself atop it. His long legs crossed at the ankles, sleek and coltish. Gerry does not stare. 

Or at least he tries. 

“I don’t know what I want.” He admits in a small voice, the same he uses when pleading with Gerry that he isn’t being difficult on purpose - preemptively apologizing for things he never needed to. 

“I can pick something for both of us and we’ll see if you like it.” Gerry offers, scanning the menus for something he thinks is the safest bet. The most basic ‘even your ten year old would eat it’ kind of food. 

That ends up being two takeaway orders of fish and chips, which Michael does seem quite keen on if the way he shoves the chips down is any indication. Michael discovers he doesn’t like vinegar on any of it, but he does like the warm grilled lemon wedge squeezed over his crispy fish and a pile of salt to dip his chips in. The tartar sauce made him gag and Gerry was happy to take it from him, earning a wryly disgusted look from Michael at the sheer amount he drenched his own fish in. 

It feels normal, sitting at his little dining table with Michael nibbling away across from him. The television going in the other room, muffled reports about the weather and sports and some local residents who saved ducklings crossing the street. Mundane and domestic and soft enough to cup in his hands. Normal, but extraordinary, because Michael is here and he is…he isn’t the same. Nobody could be, but he is here and he’s laughing at the sight of some alley cats zipping across the fire escape. Smiles this crooked thing that shows the little gap in his front teeth.

Normal and extraordinary in equal measure. 

If anyone at the institute really believes there's no magic left in Michael, they’re dumber than he already thought. Gerry can feel it simmering there like thick summer heat, just beneath the surface. Maybe it’s not the same as it was when Michael was more fractals than man, but it’s still real. Still there. He doesn’t mind waiting for Michael to be ready to show him. 

~~~~

“I don’t know what clothes I like.” Michael confesses, standing in the department store with his nose wrinkled and a furrow at his brow. “I don’t…I forgot.”

“You…forgot what you like?” He asks, hands in the pockets of his black jeans. Gerry is very sure of himself in this, has his identity pinned down and perfected in his chipped nail polish and combat boots. 

Michael envies him. Always did. 

“I forgot what I am.” 

None of the clothing on the rack feels…correct. It is all polyester and sleek. When Michael, as it had been, wanted to change clothes it simply thought of what it wanted to look like and it did. Now he must try on jeans and trousers and tee-shirts that don’t fit quite right. He misses the freedom of intangibility. Misses a lot of things he isn’t supposed to. 

The physician who inspected every last embarrassing inch of him last week did not comment on what he is, but the psychiatrist insists he is a human being and Michael revolts against it like a dog with a muzzle. Wrong. They’re wrong. The psychiatrist had felt more invasive than the physical did. So, he expects Gerry to tell him the same thing, to encourage an acceptance of humanity Michael doesn’t feel. Isn’t certain he even wants. 

“I think…that means you get to decide.” Gerry scuffs his boot on the too-shiny tile, glancing up at him through his sleek dark hair. “You always get to decide who you are, what you are. Nobody can take that from you, anymore.” 

They end up at a thrift store, the one Gerry says he gets most of his wardrobe from. Full of the sort of stuff two decades out of date at the very least, nothing on the racks has a Primark tag on it. Michael remembers favoring flared trousers and corduroy, button ups with paisley or pullovers that looked like the carpet in a bowling alley. The sort of stuff which seemed appropriately chaotic. He still likes them, some of them anyway. In the end he finds a checkered wool sweater that is very soft, Levi's with a bit of a flared leg. 

He tries not to just…mimic a creature he isn’t anymore, but cannot help finding similar appeal and wonders if that's a bad sign. At least he finds shoes that fit. Black loafers, brown boots, some low-top Converse with little flowers embroidered around the trim. None of this really matches, but he likes them and he’s smart enough to get very plain stuff as well. Undershirts and tees in solid colors, button ups as if he has an office job to go back to. The secret is he doesn’t want to stop stealing well-worn tees from Gerry’s laundry, or give up the too-large hoodie with a sparrow drawn from bleach across the back. 

Gerry said he did it himself when he was trying to learn ‘bleach art’. 

They go to the grocery store for the sort of very basic necessities people take for granted and Michael did too. Shampoo, soap, deodorant and the like. He can’t keep using Gerry’s shampoo without his own hair going knotty, but it makes him feel high maintenance about it. Growing up his father had no idea what to do with Michael’s great wild fluff of hair, often trying to brush it out in a misdirected attempt to tame it all. By the time Michael was old enough he learned to take care of it himself, but he misses the herbal smelling oil his grandmother used to buy. The kind that made his hair shiny and soft and that they don’t sell anymore according to the apologetic clerk. 

He never had to worry about it in The Spiral. All he had to do was think himself a certain way and it would be so. Clean, filthy. Twisted, human. Didn’t have to worry about the way the bones in his leg were healed into spirals or the knotted scars pulled at his skin. Michael stares at the shelf, worrying his lip between his teeth while Gerry lingers unobtrusively but decidedly there in a way he appreciates. 

“Try a few.” He suggests, depositing two boxes of black dye into the shopping basket around the crook of his arm. 

Gerry’s got this sandy brown hair growing out at the roots, fair enough the black will take well but not nearly as pale as Michael’s wheat-blond. Sometimes he wonders what he might look like with hair that dark and chains around his jeans, too. Absurd, probably. Gerry has confidence in places Michael never did. 

He ends up snagging three different bottles of oil off the shelf, each swearing by all natural ingredients good for his hair, because the institute has paid him well enough and Michael knows more will come if he continues showing up to appointments. He isn’t certain it's worth it. 

“Wish I had hair like that.” Gerry glances enviously at the long curls down Michael’s back, looking very much like he’s interested in touching but does not. 

Michael’s hair was only just long enough to skirt his shoulders when he…left. Remembers getting a haircut specifically for the occasion, going on a work trip somewhere so unique. So special. It had been a little shorter than he preferred, but he left for Russia feeling excited and sort of handsome for once. Now, his hair is down to the middle of his back - just as it was before Helen and…

And

Michael stops thinking about it. 

“You dye yours.” He points out, trailing alongside him down another aisle where Gerry snags a family pack of twelve boxes of mac & cheese off the shelf. 

“Thick, I mean. You have that thick, pretty, hair but mine is so fine. I’ll be balding by forty or something.” He runs a hand through his own sleek, straight, hair while sending Michael a playful little smile. Roughish and dashing. Gerry always was a beautiful man. 

“You’re already thirty-four, best enjoy those six years I suppose.” Six years, he realizes, is how long it’s been since they declared him dead. 

By technicality, Michael Shelley is thirty-four as well. If one stops counting based upon time of death. The institute delineates between his life, death, years as The Distortion, and whatever amalgamation he is now. Mostly because they cannot decide if he is still dead or not. Whenever he gets poked and prodded for a physical, they linger on the fact Michael has a heartbeat so slow it takes thirty seconds or more between weak thumps of his heart. For all intents and purposes, this should not be keeping him alive. 

Which means something else is. 

If he confessed this to Gerry, would he be frightened? Would the admission of monstrosity break the generosity of this man, who lets him live out of the flat above the bookstore and wear his borrowed clothes even when Michael has enough of his own? Impossibly, he doesn’t think so. 

“I don’t know what to do about it.” Michael takes a lock of his hair, inspecting it as they walk beneath humming fluorescent lights. The squeak of Gerry’s clunky combat boots. “People keep mistaking me for a girl.” 

They did that even before, when Michael was a child or a baby-faced university student. Even at thirty, when he’d shave the sad excuse for a sparse beard which barely bothered showing up. His hair is simply too blond for it to even matter if he tried growing one properly. Even Michael’s eyelashes are fair and he’s been told it’s eerie. Uncanny somehow. Maybe he should call up Nikola and see if she’s got a job for him taking tickets or something. 

The uncanny and the insane are not so different. 

“Is that a bad thing?” Gerry asks as he holds up two different bottles of fizzy drinks, looking to him questioningly. Michael points to the cherry Pepsi. 

Is it? 

No. Because the truth is he liked the ambiguity of what The Distortion is. Of people not knowing if he was a man or a thing or sometimes even a woman. The confusion felt good. Correct. Michael doesn’t feel like much of a person anymore, but doesn’t mind being a man again. Just…maybe he doesn’t mind if people thought he was a girl, too. Or nothing at all. Once you’ve had your who torn from your what and spent six years as a nothing, it’s rather impossible to go back again. 

Maybe the secret is Michael was always this way deep down, hidden in some corner of his brain he didn’t understand was even there. Helen is quite assured of herself, chastising others for calling her an it - not understanding that’s just what Michael was. Is? This lack of identity seems unique to himself, is what he’s realized. 

He knows what he looks like to others; six and a half feet tall and willowy, wearing a paisley blouse and faded denims with all that baby blond hair. Michael always had a soft sort of face, just on the edge of girlish even well into his thirties. Now he’s got hair long enough to swing down his back with each tap of his cane as he tries to remember how to use it in tandem with the step of his left leg. Queer in just about every sense of the word and people wouldn’t be wrong. 

“No.” Michael confesses, very shy, nicking a grape from the bag as he deposits it in the basket. “I don’t…I don’t mind.”

Gerry sends him a look of profound understanding, so much so that Michael cannot bear it. 

~~~~

The light above the bathroom sink flickers, hums softly, and Michael cannot stand the confines much longer. He snags a hand mirror off the counter and sits by the living room window with one of three bottles of hair oil and makes an attempt to reach the back of his head with it smeared between his palms. If it were shorter he could, but must awkwardly bend his arms to get at the ends. He feels stupid and childish, trying to grasp the faded comfort of something once so mundane. 

He has forgotten what it feels like to eat actual food and not taste the fear in it. What his clothing feels like against his skin. Standing beneath the shower, because he must obey the rules of having an actual body. Michael gets tired, now. Sometimes falling asleep curled up on the sofa without meaning to, unaccustomed to needing rest and no longer tuned into the signs his body gives. 

“Let me try.” Gerry calls as he nudges his laptop aside, motioning Michael over to where he sits on the sofa. 

Michael sits himself between the man’s knees, folding his own to his chest as he gets comfortable on the rug. It feels very intimate, makes him sort of fluttery and red. A very long time ago he remembers meeting Jane Prentiss, early after The Spiral gobbled him up then spat him back out, and she had reached out to take a curl of his hair. Michael, the thing he was then, didn’t mind because it was the first time it had been touched by anything else in the whole world. 

He doesn’t think they liked each other, probably more akin to tolerating, but when he thinks about any of the others it makes him sad. Like he’s left something behind. A connection, no matter how twisted and unwanted, was all Michael had for years. A recognition between like forces. The only other people in the whole world who would really understand. 

Sometimes he wishes he could talk to Helen. 

He’s so lonely. 

“You don’t have to.” He says, eying the YouTube video Gerry has pulled up. Something about… mothman?

“Yet here we are.” Gerry teases, pulling the length of Michael’s hair back and carefully using his fingers to undo the tangles. 

The way Gerry touches him is very careful, gentle but not fragile. He wonders if they could’ve done something like this before, back when he was still an archival assistant and Gerry was running absurd errands for Gertrude Robinson. Many times Michael had wanted to tell Gerry he had loved him then, because it is true, but if he says that now it feels like giving a burden to someone who doesn’t deserve it. Gerry never says why he stepped up, immediately and with greedy claws, to take in Michael before the institute could stop him. 

Never says why he lets Michael keep wearing that big hoodie of his all the time, even when he doesn’t ask permission anymore. 

It feels just like it did six years ago, before Michael got on a plane headed for Russia; this quiet unspoken thing which lives between their hands brushing and the ease of being in each other's orbit. Gerry with his big black trench coat, even in the summer heat, laughing delightedly when Michael told him of finding a fattened rat living off scraps beneath the canteen fridge. Maybe there’s a grandchild of that rat still there. Just a whole lineage of Magnus Rats nibbling on forgotten crisps and chocolate bars. 

He watches Gerry drip a little oil from the bottle into his palms, before pulling it through Michael’s hair and the careful scratch of his blunt nails makes him shiver. It occurs to Michael then that he has not been touched with gentleness in far longer than he can remember. The physicians handle him with clinical distance, blue latex gloves between their hands and his naked body. It catches uncomfortably in his hair when they run their hands to the back of his skull, feeling for abnormalities. Little blond strands pulled out, clinging to their gloves. 

Michael thinks they know he is lying to them. 

Once a liar…

Gerry rakes his fingers through from nearly the root all the way to the ends, then back again. Rhythmic and soft and Michael swallows a sob. The last person to do this for him was…when he was twelve, getting his picture taken for some school event and his mother had spent all morning on his long hair while his father ironed Michael’s uniform until it was practically pristine. He remembers her touch, the lilt of her singing, what it felt like to be loved by someone else. 

He went to school feeling good about himself, his hair in a little ponytail at the back of his neck. The boys in class said he was the prettiest girl in the whole school and called him poppet for a month and a half until their teacher put them in separate classes. Michael wouldn’t mind if Gerry called him pretty, though. None of his family are left that he knows of, his dad died a year before he joined the institute - taken out by a drunk driver who also died from the impact of slamming into a giant oak tree. Michael used to hate that driver, but he has no space left for it anymore. 

If his mother was alive she’d be sixty-one, but she isn’t and he misses her. Misses the scarf she knit him for the trip, the little wool hat with tassels down the side and fur lining. He doesn’t know if it all got eaten by The Spiral, chewed up and spat out into the void, or if it was in his suitcase left somewhere to rot. It turns out it's very hard to come back from the dead and Michael doesn’t know he likes it. He misses his parents, his flat, his orange tabby cat named Mrs. Muffins because he found her eating a package of chocolate mini-muffins from the dumpster. 

He misses how nothing felt bad in the hallways. How he could twist into anything he wanted. He misses the rush of someone looking at him and being frightened, the way it tasted on the back of his tongue. He misses the startle of Jonathan Sims whenever he’d appear from some impossible door, The Archivists wide eyed surprise going wry and suffering. Jon isn’t like Gertrude, so he liked him. But Gertrude is still there working in artifact storage and that means there's always a chance Michael might see her and that's scary. 

What is even scarier is Gerry might still be working with her and he’s too afraid to ask. 

“…Michael?” Gerry calls, hesitating, and wipes the oil off his hands on his ratty jeans. 

He tries to say something, but realizes he did not hold that sob in like he thought and has been sitting there crying. Somewhere along the way he has leaned his cheek into the side of Gerry’s leg, and now this is embarrassing and awful and it makes him cry even more. Michael tries to say I’m sorry but it comes out like the sound of a dying animal. 

Slowly, spreading across the walls and windows, frost inches its way around the room. Crawling up from the floors to the ceiling, fractals of ice which creak and sing. A frigid cold hand around his heart, their breath beginning to puff out in little clouds. This secret thing he has tried to keep inside. 

Gerry ends up on the floor with him, a hand around the back of his neck, and Michael cannot help it now. He sobs and he wails and his hands grasp into the back of Gerry’s tee-shirt as it all pours out of him. This great well of misery with nowhere to go. Gerry just holds him there, Michael half in his lap, trembling and aching until there is nothing left in him but something hollow. It might feel good, but it might not. Like most things, Michael isn’t sure yet. 

“What if she’s there?” He asks nonsensically, frightened of an old woman who could be knocked down by a strong breeze or taken out of commission by a bad hip. “What if she finds me and makes me go back?” 

“Who will make you go back where?” Gerry doesn’t plead with him to make the cold stop, just rubs his hands up and down Michael’s arms as if it isn't all his fault the windows are covered in a sheet of ice. “What can I do?”

When the frost begins to reach the edge of the rug, Michael forces it back. Puts his fists around the cold inside himself and tucks it away into a single yellow door he has been too frightened to admit exists. Tucking it all back where it came from, returns it to that impossible island, until he can breathe without tears frosting in his eyelashes. If Gerry is surprised, disturbed, by this inhumanity in him he doesn’t show it.  

No matter how hard he tries, the words to explain just won’t come. Luckily, there is a second option. 

“I gave a statement to The Archivist.” Is all he can manage. The nearest Michael can go before the cold will eke out again, forcing open the last door Michael has left and fears not being able to close. 

~~~~

When Gerry sits across from Jonathan Sims and asks for the tape, the man looks grim. Afterwards, he understands why. 

The office Gertrude occupies in artifact storage isn’t quite as posh as what she’d had as The Archivist, but if her downgrade ever bothered her it never showed. Most things that bother Gertrude Robinson do not show, but they exist all the same - neatly compartmentalized within her mind utilizing a filing system nobody else would ever understand. Nobody is in it at this hour. There’s a silver compass on her desk, though the markings do not seem to indicate cardinal direction as its needle zips wildly at where Gerry stands in the empty office. He wonders if it's to tell her where the angriest person in the room is. 

Reaching out, Gerry knocks it to the floor with a satisfying thump and that begins to unlock all the fury and grief inside. The table lamp snaps in half when he cracks it over the edge of her desk, remaining held together only by the cables running through and flickering pathetically where it lands in a heap of shattered glass. There is something childish about his destruction; pens thrown across the room where some stick out of that outdated wooden wall paneling like darts, drawers overturned onto the floor leaving little scattered piles of post-it notes and paperclips. 

He thinks of Michael Shelley’s sweet round face, the shy smiles he gave when they crossed paths in the hallway. Sharing a sleeve of biscuits in the canteen. Telling Gerry how excited he was to visit a place like Russia, somewhere truly unlike anywhere he has ever seen. Weeks of existing only as passing strangers turning into months of something more, friends or…The day Michael stood just outside Gerry’s flat, a great spark of tension in the air. I should’ve kissed him, he thinks as he stands among the destruction. Unsatisfied. 

Books are ripped off the shelf and crumple in corners as he throws them with wild abandon. He thinks to send them through the glass square on her door, and restrains himself only just. 

A thought for each scrap of paper he rips apart, a memory of a life they almost had, until the entire office is in a state of wild disarray with Gerry at the epicenter. Somewhere along the way an assistant comes running at the noise, he takes one look at Gerry and bolts again. Gerry didn’t care and still doesn’t, even as he stomps his way from the wreckage of Gertrude’s office. His mind is a sack of buzzing static, this distant emptiness in his chest that makes each step feel as if his feet are never quite touching the ground, mindless - until he catches the baffled frown of Gertrude Robinson coming down the hall with that young man at her heels and all his anger sparks flinty again. 

“Gerard?” She says sternly, disapproving. It reminds him of his mother. 

By and large Gerry is not in the habit of trying to knock the shit out of a seventy year old woman, but he is adaptable above all else and willing to compromise where needs must. All he is thinking of when he looks into her face, familiar and nearly motherly, is how very much he hates her. Making a dash to snatch out at her goddamned ugly cardigan, thoughts of making her head bounce off the floor stark in his mind, he may have done so if Jon didn’t desperately drag him back with a plea. 

“Let go.” He snarls, because even now he isn’t quite ready to hurt Jon. Not if he can avoid it, but Gertrude scrambles back into that baby-faced assistant of hers who cowers anxiously behind her clutching his little clipboard. “She’s a cunt.” 

“Excuse me!” Gertrude sputters, a look of indignation in her steely eyes, and while Gerry never mistook their friendship as something maternal on her part - he thought of them as friends. Didn’t imagine her capable of…everything. Which is the whole point, he figures. 

Nobody looks at Gertrude Robinson and sees fangs. 

“You took him.” He spits, Jon scrambling at his jacket sleeve - sliding a little on the carpet with the force of holding Gerry back. “You took him and fed him to that thing.”

“Gerry, please.” Jon begs, hands on his shoulders as he stands between them. “Don’t do this here. Go home, I can…I can come over and the three of us can talk.”

“She fed him to it, Jon. You heard…” Not crying is maybe more difficult than not pushing his way through Jonathan Sims to get a hand on her now. But he tries not to do either. He tries. “I loved him. I loved him and she fed Michael to it. She told me he died out there. I’ve seen his grave, they made him an empty grave for fucks sake.” 

It has been a vivid moment in his mind ever since, seeing that plain little tombstone sat flat into the grass. 

Michael Francis Shelley 

1976-2010

That was all he got and more than most ever receive from a place like the institute. From Gertrude Robinson. He remembers standing there in the shade of a great oak tree hanging heavy across the path, trying desperately to parse the sight of a grave at his feet and felt no shame in crying over it. It isn’t shame he feels now, like he hadn’t then. Grief for someone he had come to care for in a way he rarely got the chance to even consider. Mourning the potential for what they might’ve become, so close to making it. So close. 

It had never felt real to him, even as months went by and the space in the hallways where Michael once occupied remained empty. Years where he always felt an itching in the back of his head, expecting Michael to be there waiting. Never finding connection the same way, no matter how far he traveled. Running errands for the person who  

s t o l e 

M i c h a e l 

f r o m 

h i m

Now they are here, over half a decade later, and Michael is there for real. A ghost in so many ways and Gerry loves him still. 

Jon’s face does a funny thing, this pained sympathy that makes his stomach drop and Gerry doesn’t need to See to know who The Archivist is thinking about. Who it is this man thinks of when nobody else is around. How easy it is to take for granted someone you think will always be there, slipping into the falsehood of; next time, for sure it will be next time. There may not ever be one and he hopes that Jon does not hesitate to seek for himself, hopes he won’t regret like Gerry had. 

“Did you know?” He wheels around on Gertrude. Always so stoic and straight-faced. Pragmatic to a fault, to a deadly degree. 

“What?” She asks, level. Unshaken. Gerry hates how she scares him the way his mother did, the way just a look makes him feel like a child again. Slinking home after a weekend of running away and returning with his tail between his legs. No wonder she got along with Mary so well. 

“What we were. Michael and I. Did you know?” 

It is only by a fraction, but her shoulders ease. A concession. It isn’t guilt, she doesn’t know how to feel it anymore. Tucked that away so far inside of herself she cannot remember the taste of it, buries it beneath the graves of everyone she has laid to rest atop it. A mass burial with Michael Shelley somewhere near the top, maybe even near enough to see the sky. 

“No.” It is honest and that is almost worse. “Not the extent of it.” 

“Would it have mattered at all, if you did?” Gerry swallows around the stone in his throat, but it burns. Not a stone, but coal. Embers singing his tongue, leaving burns behind - gnarled flesh in the back of his throat. When he breathes, Gerry is surprised not to see the smoke. 

“No.” 

A great part of him wants to put terrible hands into her, suffering for suffering, and there are surely many people who wouldn’t object. Another, the half which knows it won’t make anything better, just feels…cold. Empty with it. I thought she was my friend. Hollowed out on the inside as he stands there with shaking fists and his eyes trained on his own heavy boots. He understands what Michael means, at least a little, about the cold coming from inside. 

He thinks of walking into the institute this afternoon, as he does once a week when Michael must succumb to being physically or mentally prodded at on a rotational schedule. Come on down to the Magnus Institute where in exchange for being monitored like a lab rat, you can receive a suspicious amount of money in the form of cold hard cash. Each week Michael looks chillingly miserable about it, and this time Gerry was daring enough to put a hand just briefly along the back of Michael’s neck in encouragement. 

Michael had looked so grateful for it. 

Now Gerry is here, realizing he’s probably never going to be allowed to set foot in the building again and if not for Michael he wouldn’t care at all. He doesn’t regret any of it, only that he’s going to have to confess it all to Michael and that is what stirs his shame. Sorry I can’t walk you five feet into the building, I had a temper tantrum and wrecked the place. 

“Gerry?” He tenses at Michael’s voice, searching and curious, echoing from down the hall. 

Michael had sent him down here to Jon, of course this is the first place he’d come looking, but the stairs are narrow and winding and Michael is still getting used to taking the ones in his apartment. Funny how suddenly Gerry becomes hyper aware of the places around them which are less than accessible for a man with a cane. All the little nooks and crannies in the world which would give Michael problems on the best of days. Maybe it's good, just this once, that he isn’t going to be making it down those stairs because Gerry isn’t certain what Michael would do if he ran into Gertrude right now. 

Gerry sends a withering look at where Gertrude and her vaguely terrified assistant stand, a warning spark in his eyes - as if she’s going to go up and invite Michael for tea. Her eyes are flat, as they always are, like his fit has been no more interesting than wondering if she’s left the stove on. He isn’t certain what he expected, it’s not as if Gertrude has some…some obsessed vendetta towards Michael. The truth that makes it hurt the most is Michael himself wasn’t ever important, he could’ve been anyone. He does not, did not, matter. 

When his eyes slide to Jon, he finds more softness than expected. More than the man likely intended to show. 

“I’m coming.” Gerry is already halfway down the hall, leaving Gertrude Robinson behind. 

It’s warm and rainy when they step outside, Gerry holding the umbrella as they avoid puddles along the sidewalk. Today Michael has his hair in a thick braid, looking a bit like a six foot tall Rapunzel in his yellow raincoat. The sky is gray as he confesses to not wanting to go back again, an uncomfortable look on his soft face. Michael doesn’t like the questions, insistences of humanity he doesn’t feel - like they need him to be a person so he can act as evidence others could be brought back from the brink. Doesn’t like his skin being pinched, blood being drawn that comes out in swirling diaphanous light instead of red. They keep taking his cane away and measuring how far he can walk before his knee gives out, tallying if he gains or loses steps as time goes on.

Michael really, really, doesn’t want to go back.

“Then don’t.” He insists, emphatic and nearly pleading. 

“I don’t have any other way to get money.” Michael laughs, but it’s hollow and echoes in places it shouldn’t. “I can’t mooch off you forever, you’ll get sick of me in your apartment eventually.” 

The green canvas awning over the bookshop has a little torn corner water spills through as they duck beneath, shaking out the umbrella Gerry watches the way Michael’s reflection in the shop window is nothing but shards of color. Paint swirling down a drain. It only happens when Michael isn’t looking, like his own reflection is frightened to exist. His shadow does it too, twists in on itself at his back. Impossible fractals. 

“You can, though.” Gerry takes his free hand, threading their fingers together when Michael doesn’t pull away. “Mooch off me forever, that is. I don’t care about the money, Michael. Stay with me.” 

Color flashes across Michael’s face, blends the freckles across his nose into the rosy pink as he blinks down at Gerry with this owlish surprise. His laugh is warbling this time, a little too shrill at the edges. 

“I was…I was going to tell you, when I came back from Sannikov.” Michael breathes it out like cigarette smoke, where it curls around them in the rain. He looks down at their joined hands, his own freckled knuckles and Gerry’s flaking black nail-polish. “I had this whole corny letter and everything, wrote it down on the plane so I could practice.” 

“What did it say?” It feels equal parts tender and devastating, watching Michael’s downturned eyes - the fan of his pale lashes against his cheek. 

“That I loved you.” He admits it with this little lopsided smile, sweet as anything. Sadder than Gerry has ever seen. “It feels wrong to say it now, not because it isn’t true, but because I am not…I’m not. I’m not something people should love or want to be loved by.” 

“Christ, Michael. That’s not true.” Gerry scrambles at Michael’s shoulder, a furrow at his brow as he tries to push this grief away. Turns him so he can get both hands around Michael’s fair face. “Whatever else has happened to you, whatever else you might be, that doesn’t matter. We can figure it out as we go, I just don’t want to lose you again.” 

The little noise Michael lets out is a pitiful thing, some desperate animal keening in a trap, but he ducks down and kisses Gerry so carefully it nearly hurts. Michael is soft, real, and tastes of his sugary morning coffee - something strangely tingling against Gerry’s skin. A hum of unnatural life deep down inside of Michael that leaves his mouth sensitive. Not unpleasantly so, more like drinking cold water after chewing minty gum. It is strange and lovely and he threads his fingers back into Michael’s hair, drawing him nearer. 

Michael’s hand on his hips is big and warm, tucked beneath Gerry’s long coat as they stand outside the shop with rain soaking their shoes. When they part, he remains near enough to drop his forehead to Gerry’s and lets out this airy laugh that tickles the dark hair around his face. 

“I might be banned from the institute.” Gerry blurts out, caught by the hazy blue of Michael’s eyes and feeling giddy as anything off just one kiss. 

“You…what?” He squawks, tilting his head as Gerry fumbles the keys from his pocket. 

“I visited Jon, listened to your statement and then fucked up Gertrude Robinson’s office.” Gerry mimes a vicious throw off into the distance, unable to stop the great bubbling laugh that bursts out of him - twirling his keyring around one finger. “I broke so many things and then she just stood there with that look on her face and went ‘Gerard!’ all…aghast.”

All bright and giddy energy, Gerry swings the bookshop door open, turning to Michael in the doorway to find him positively bewildered. A slow blink, then Michael lets out this choked off sort of sound before he devolves into a fit of laughter so bright it leaves sunspots in Gerry’s vision. This great heaving giggling as his face scrunches beautifully and his smile breaks and Michael cups his face and kisses Gerry through it. Through his laughter and all the way through the front door until Gerry must fumble around Michael’s hip to lock it behind them. 

From every corner, Gerry would swear the grains of wood in the floor have begun to curl. Bent and twisted with their shared laughter, caught between the press of their lips. 

~~~~

The rooftop of the bookstore and flat is sparse, barren in comparison to some of the posh restaurants populated by tourists and wealthy families that drop more on a single night out than Michael has ever had in his bank account. Which he has one of those, again. It’s weird and one more thing on the growing list that attempts to integrate him into society and he doesn’t know if he likes it. If he wants it the way it is expected of him. Aren’t you happy, Michael? Aren’t you happy not to be a beast? Martin gave him an old mobile phone he had collecting dust in a drawer, the gesture was too kind to decline even if Michael shirks from the idea of it. From a lot of these little trivialities trying to inch him closer and closer to an existence he cannot fit into. 

Real people have mobile phones and bank accounts and social media and emails. 

Michael has memories of what death feels like and knows how to twist his body out of shape until it isn’t a body at all anymore. 

Blessedly, Gerry helped him get the damn thing activated and registered over in Michael Shelley’s name then immediately started texting him photos of cats around the city. That makes it worth the discomfort Michael feels about the whole thing. Little videos of Gerry crouched in a back alley with his hand outstretched to a wary looking moggie flicking its tail about, an encouraging little ‘pspspsps c’mon kitty’ murmured under his breath as the sound of traffic rushes by. Maybe that can be Michael’s new line of work; cat wrangling. 

From where he sits, legs hanging above the fire escape, this little pocket of London stretches out into the morning haze. A languorous Saturday filled with sleepy people making their way into cafes and bookshops, the hum of a television from someone's apartment across the street just barely audible over the rumble of cars below. Michael strums on the fairly beat up guitar Gerry had stashed in the closet, it needs tuning and new strings but it’s been ages since he’s been able to play. Ages since he remembered this was a thing he liked doing. 

Playing David Bowie out in his parents backyard, trying to fit his scrawny hands around a too-big guitar. Gerry’s is almost too small for him, now, and he’s pretty certain he wasn’t always quite this tall. That his hands weren’t always this big. It feels like his fingers can reach across the neck of the guitar farther than they should, but he struggles to get them in the right places again. Like he’s piloting a body both too large and too small. Sometimes he stands in front of the mirror and tries to think very, very, hard that he would like to be taller, or shorter, but nothing happens other than his reflection breaking into whorls. 

Humming out the tune, Michael forces himself to play past the missed chords. He’ll get the hang of it, eventually. You like bands when they’re playing hard, you want more and you want it fast. The fire escape creeks with Gerry’s weight as he clambers up the steps, settling at his side. He’s got his long hair in a ponytail this morning, sleep-mussed and sweetly drowsy in his pajamas. This old band-tee and flannels, wooly socks on beneath his trainers. He’s so beautiful and Michael flubs the next chord, distracted, earning a sleepy laugh from Gerry at his side. 

“I didn’t mean to wake you.” Michael says quietly, afraid to break the morning hush as he plucks out the chords. Rebel rebel, you’ve torn your dress.

“Nah, you didn’t.” Reaching up, Gerry tucks the fall of hair behind Michael’s ear and the touch is so easy and soft that Michael cannot help but lean into it. “You been up long?”

He wants to be touched so badly it feels pathetic, leaves him shaking at night beneath the blankets as he wraps his arms around himself and cries tears that look like motor oil. They’ve stained the pillowcase, he doesn’t know how to tell Gerry.

“A bit.” He admits in such a way that makes Gerry frown suspiciously. “I told Elias I’m not coming in anymore and he used his Voice with me, got tetchy when I called him on it and then I hung up.”

“Maybe we can go back and I’ll fuck up Elias’ office, too.” Gerry offers, dropping against Michael’s arm with a particularly cheeky grin. 

You’ve got your mother in a whirl, she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl. Michael sets the guitar aside, wondering if it would be invasive to buy replacement strings and try to buff out the scratches in the wood. It’s not his guitar, he’s only borrowing it. He puts his hand over Gerry’s where it rests on the ledge between them, Gerry’s got these little tan lines around where he wears chunky rings and heavy leather bracelets. It’s cute, Michael thinks.

“Elias thinks I’m dangerous.” He says instead of a hundred other things like ‘good morning, Gerry’ or ‘I love you’ or ‘I think I am hungry but I am not sure, can I make us breakfast?’. 

“He what? ” Gerry sits up, an angry frown on his face. “Why can’t anybody over there mind their own damn business.” 

“Gerry…I ate people.” Michael points out not unfairly, his smile crooked and awkward. “I am very much a dangerous thing, just…not in the same way. I don’t think.” 

Taking his hand, Gerry turns it over in his own - tracing the lines of Michael’s palm as he thinks. What he says must be carefully considered, wording this the wrong way could do more harm than good but Gerry has had many years of grief under his belt to have come to this decision. He made it before even taking Michael home months ago. Has it really been that long? Has it really been that little?

“I already know what you did.” He says, slowly, gently. Feeling that same tingling hum beneath Michael’s skin. “When I say ‘I don’t care’ it isn’t because I’m ignoring that or pretending it isn’t true, but that I love you more than I care about anything else. There’s stuff you aren’t ready to tell me and it’s okay, because I’ll be here when you are. Hell, we can take turns; a bit of traumatic quid-pro-quo.”

Then he brings Michael’s palm up to his lips, grinning as he presses a kiss there and the bright fondness in his eyes shines between Michael’s splayed fingers. The urge to kiss Gerry is a simmering thing and it must show on his face, because he tips up his chin in invitation and Michael is not stupid enough to refuse. It’s just a little thing, like all their others have been, and it feels like they’re teenagers on a first date every time, but it's sweet and it's real and they’ll figure it out as they go. 

“Like…right now?” Michael clings to his hand, keenly aware of how his own swallows Gerry’s right up. 

“I can go first.” He offers, knocking the heel of his shoe against the steps on the fire escape. A little metallic twang as he hums in thought. “Alright, I’m gonna just break the ice and say that my mom killed my dad when I was around…two.” 

Michael’s sudden laugh is hysterical, sharp, and cuts off abruptly like it was punched out of him against his will. “WHAT?”

“Yeah.” Shrugging, Gerry leans back to peer up at the blue sky dotted with great fluffy clouds. “She was obsessed with the power of those books, Leitner's. She killed my dad to practice this ritual and tried it on herself a few years ago, but she died before finishing it all.” 

“That's…Gerry that’s insane and awful.” He sputters, plucking at the loose thread of his worn pajamas. 

He laughs humorlessly and tips his head to catch Michael’s eye with a wry smile. Gerry’s got these soft brown eyes, fawnish, catching the light until they go whiskey bright. There’s enough mirth there not to leave Michael nervous, and it occurs to him they’re sharing in something morbidly intimate. Gallows humor to the most extreme. 

“It really is, but I think you just get desensitized to stuff after a while. Like you have to laugh so you don’t cry, y’know? I don’t remember my dad so I don’t exactly miss him, but I feel bad for him.” He reaches out and lightly pinches Michael in the side, just enough to make him huff a laugh and shuffle back. “Your turn.”

“Alright, alright.” Michael thinks through the great long list of things he’d like to talk about but is too afraid of. Settles on one. “I miss it, The Spiral, sometimes. Not the eating people part, but the things around it.” 

“Like what?” Gerry shuffles closer, shoulders brushing, but the judgement Michael expected isn’t there. 

“I could be whatever I wanted to be, even nothing at all.” Still, that isn’t quite enough to explain in words how he feels, but must be close enough because Gerry makes an understanding hum of acknowledgement. “It felt…like being part of something, like I mattered.”

“Michael…”

“Just, let me finish. Please? If I don't now, I-I never will.”

Gerry nods, watching him with soft intensity. 

“At the time it felt suffocating, I made it have an identity…it. I- we.” He ruffles a hand through his shaggy hair, frustrated by the limits of language. Of explaining the unexplainable. “We didn’t want to be each other, but being like this is suffocating. I miss The Spiral because I don’t know what I even am anymore, but with it I could be anything. Even nothing.” 

Gerry sits thoughtfully beside him, watching the sunrise go from morning to early afternoon as they sit atop the roof with their hands laced and Michael’s heart in his throat. It is quiet and peaceful, even with his head full to bursting. Too much stuffing in a doll, now it all pops out of the seams. 

“I don’t know what any of that is like.” Gerry says at length, something in his eyes as he watches a flock of pigeons scatter away from the pavement. The sound of their cooing birdsong. “But when my mom died…I felt like there was this sudden room to breathe. Like I could be free for the first time in my whole life and even then-”

Hesitating, Michael turns to him with one leg tucked under himself so he can put a warm hand around the back of Gerry’s neck. He listens and Gerry leans into the touch. A smile, small and grateful, on his dear face. 

“Even then, I felt suffocated. I couldn’t figure out who I was without her looming over me, without her voice in my head all of the time.” He lets out a tremulous breath, a weak laugh, tilting his face up to meet Michael’s too-blue eyes. There’s a little smudge of yesterday's eyeliner caught beneath Gerry’s lashes, smudgy black kohl at the corners. “So I think…I think you shouldn’t let anything decide for you what you are and I know it isn’t the same. I know, but I think it’s still true.”

“Even if I can do monstrous things?” Michael whispers it like a prayer, like he’s begging. Someone, anyone, not to leave him alone to flounder. “Even if I can’t go back to being who I was?”

When he was something else, a thing which was and was not Michael, it didn’t want to know itself at all. Now, all he can think about is what that makes him. Two contrary minds clashing in his skull; Michael and Not Michael and neither of them knows which is right or which is wrong. If there is a wrong or a right to begin with. A man who isn’t a human being anymore and can never be, who summons ice when he’s upset and bleeds liquid light when pricked with a needle. He wants to be somebody. He wants more than anything to be nothing. Then feels so childishly capricious for the indecision. 

“Even then.” Gerry says with utmost conviction. 

“I don’t think I’m a person.” He leans forward, cheek atop Gerry’s mussed hair, feeling the inhuman thrum of life inside himself. “But it doesn’t bother me, it only does when others want me to be. I don’t feel like a man, or a woman, or anything and I can’t tell if that’s because of what happened or how I’ve always been.”

“It can be both.” Gerry hums, a smile in voice as he fishes a cigarette from his pocket and bops it against Michael’s nose before lighting it with a matchstick. “The influence of The Distortion doesn’t make your feelings less real.” 

He accepts the cigarette Gerry offers, drawing from it still balanced between the man’s fingers. When Michael exhales, the smoke curls in iridescent twists and whorls above their heads and Gerry skims his fingers through in curiosity. 

“You know, sometimes I really wish I could ask Helen. Just to see what she feels about it.”

“YOU CAN!” Abruptly, a rectangle swatch of the brick rooftop swings open with a crash - as if someone pulled the lever on a trap door. Within are familiar twisting hallways, no hint of the shop below. The effect is particularly evocative of a Looney-Tunes cartoon, especially so when Helen pops herself out of said door to rest her elbows on the edge of the frame. It remains unclear what, if anything, she is standing on to do so. 

“Jesus fucking hell.” Michael grips the edge of the roof before he can startle right over the edge and find out just how constrained to human laws of physics he currently is. “Helen?”

Gerry startles and swears as he fumbles his cigarette, watching as it tumbles away between the beams of the fire escape. Sighing, he wipes the ash off on his pajama pants. 

“Michael!” She flops her arms out across the roof, looking absolutely delighted. “You haven’t died. Jon said as much, but wouldn’t tell me where you’d gone and then said; ‘Helen, no peeping’ so I didn’t. Buuut he didn’t tell me not to find you at all. So I did. I found your door.”

The look on Gerry’s face is a strange mixture of bewilderment and indigestion when he glances sidelong at Michael. “Door?”

“Oh! Yes…” Michael steadfastly avoids his eye, suddenly finding the chipped brick just to Gerry’s left very fascinating. “I, and this was some time ago really, left a door here just in case you needed one.”

“Yes.” She nods sagely, hoisting herself up to sit upon the doorframe with her legs dangling within. An uncanny mirror to how Gerry and Michael have been sitting. “Michael left it when they became…or unbecame, I suppose. Well. I don’t think there’s a word for what you are, but it's very exciting to learn new things. So anyway, I thought I would return your door to you and say ‘hello’ because I did really think you died and I didn’t mean for you to die.”

“You were peeping on us.” Gerry points a second, accusatory, cigarette in her direction before realizing he’s dropped the matchbox as well. “You lied.”

Feeling both brave and a little frenetic with Helen around, Michael pinches the end of the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. It sparks it alight, earning a little ooohhhhh from her. He didn’t even think about it, really, just wanted it to happen and so it did. Like believing it was possible was all he needed. 

“I was waiting for a lull in conversation.” She argues, a haughty look on her pretty face. “You’re quite cute, it’s like watching a coming of age romcom but for thirty-somethings.” 

“Helen. You’ve said several things at once, let's pick one to start with: you wanted to give me back my door?” It’s surprisingly easy to follow her wild train of thought, as if Michael’s own mind reacts on muscle memory. Picking up where she leaves off. “Aren’t they yours now?”

“Oh, no. The hallways are, but the doors were there before you or I. Michael gets a door, Helen gets a door, any other Spiral-related disasters get a door. Presumably.” She taps her sleek manicured nails on the door frame, head tilted as if listening for something and huffing in disappointment when she doesn’t get it. 

“I see.” He agrees and doesn’t find himself welling with distress at the fact he does still have a door. Even if that confirms the already obvious reality he is not truly departed from The Spiral. It’s probably rooted too deeply in his frontal lobe or something. “Then thank you, for returning it to me.” 

“Yeah, well.” Helen sniffs a little, picking at invisible dirt beneath her glossy red nails. The many long braids of her dark hair twisting about at the ends as she glances up at them beneath her dark lashes. She might be the picture of perfect demure innocence, if not for everything else she also is. “Felt sorta rude to maybe kill somebody while accidentally taking over their job and then going ahead and stealing their door.” 

“To be fair, it is also rude to trap real estate agents in your doors.” Michael concedes, accepting another puff from Gerry’s cigarette. “You didn’t know what you were doing and The Spiral wouldn’t have let it happen if it didn’t want you to.”

“You’re both basically talking in another language.” He says, knocking into Michael’s leg with his own. “S’weird.” 

Helen waves a dismissive hand, grinning widely in his direction. “Is what it is. Or, it is not what it is? Don’t ask me, I’m new here. Anyway, Michael, you were in the middle of a crisis.”

He sputters out the next exhale of cigarette smoke, which turns sort of square and boxy like even the smoke doesn’t know what to do with itself. 

“Yeah, I was.” He coughs, knocking a fist into his chest. “You…Do you feel like yourself, or not yourself?”

Gerry makes a fairly bewildered sound, glancing between the two of them as one might watch two similar but opposite species of wild cat share a watering hole. 

“Oh, I feel like me.” She nods in understanding, now taken to flicking little loose pebbles off the roof and down to the alley below. Little pings and plops over the edge. “I feel like Helen, I am Helen. I am her and she and Helen. Got rather snippy with Jon you see, he called me an it and then had to tell me that is what you were and then I felt bad about that. Are you still?”

“I…” Michael hesitates, fingers inching near Gerry’s knee. Seeking some grounding force. He gets it, a hand atop his own while Gerry simply listens and observes with a faintly amused look in his eyes. “I don’t know just yet, but I don’t mind. He, it. S-she, maybe? For me, it feels like being nothing and everything all at once. Not for you?”

She shakes her head, dropping backwards to peer up at the clouds overhead. Helen lets out a thoughtful sort of noise and Michael knows it's a great generosity on her part to be forthright with him at all. Though, perhaps, they cannot lie to each other to begin with. Like knowing like. 

“Not for me, no.” Helen finally says, flicking a little stone in Gerry’s direction just to be a menace. Like she’s forgotten that's half the point of being what she is and just wanted to remind everybody about it. Then she pops back upright, shaking the little bits of debris from her hair as she does. “Anyway, enjoy your door and your identity crisis and your not being dead.” 

“I will do my very utmost.” He agrees, watching as the rooftop closes back over her with the sudden snap of a door shutting.  

A stretch of silence settles over them, punctuated only by Gerry’s drag from his cigarette and the beep of cars below. 

“She seems…interesting.” He says at length, warily amused and trying very much not to show it. 

Michael does end up making breakfast, a great fluffy pile of scrambled eggs with sausage that is only a little burnt at the edges and both he and Gerry eat more than either are normally prone to. Sitting out on the fire escape with their coffee and tea just…people watching. Schoolchildren complaining of their weekend homework and businessmen cursing on mobile phones, an older couple with a dog so large it looks more horse than canine. Michael drops a little wedge of sausage off the edge and watches a massive orange tabby cat scamper away with it, disappearing into the alley behind the bookshop. 

He still doesn’t know who, or what, he is - but finds himself a great deal more okay with that than before. If there’s words for what any of this means he doesn’t know it and doesn’t feel bereft for that. 

~~~~

It starts on a Wednesday afternoon no more special than any other. Mundane, so abjectly boring that Michael has taken up the task of once more sorting through a different bookshelf - curtains drawn over the shop windows and the sign flipped to; out to lunch . Gerry had, by miracle alone, not been banned from being within 5 blocks of the Magnus Institute and instead began going through Jonathan Sims for things relating to Leitners and burning them. Michael, however, has steadfastly been avoiding the building at all costs. 

Reasonably so, he’d like to think. 

So it happens on a Wednesday, but really starts with a text message and is the first time Michael is truly thankful for going through with getting a mobile after all. 

It’s Jon. 

Fire at institute, cannot find Gerry. 

There are many things Michael Shelley was once afraid of; going to the dentist, very noisy dogs, getting mugged on the tube, all sorts of mundanity most people are generally wary of. Now, though, Michael is frightened of losing the things he’s gained. The little wardrobe of unique oddities he’s accumulated at quirky thrift shops, Gerry’s guitar that he has been slowly putting to rights, the nice wooden cane he’s picked out with Gerry downtown, but most importantly Gerard Keay himself. He wonders, distantly, if this is something close to what Gerry felt when lied to about what happened on Sannikov. A peculiar mixture of panic and grief. 

Michael pockets his mobile, standing there in the empty bookshop with ringing in his ears. When his mind darts out, following the faint trail of where he can feel Gerry out in the world, there is a vivid spark of life that still does little ease the frantic rush of his heart. It has been many long weeks, months by now, since he even considered the possibility of using a door - but Helen had given his back and he reaches for it now. Tries to remember what he used to do when he once had so many of them he couldn’t count each in turn. 

Bring me to Gerry, he thinks as hard as he can. Focuses every last arcane inch of himself into the thought, demands it to be true, until his hand fits around the shape of a doorknob and Michael turns it with a click. There, pasted crudely into the space in front of him, is a yellow door. Freestanding, attached to nothing, with groaning hinges and a brass knob that hums pleasantly beneath his palm. This is me. This is part of me. It feels like reattaching a limb he hasn’t known he lost. Fitting back some innate piece of himself, an organ dropped back into his body cavity. 

He pushes through, letting it shut behind himself, and finds the very familiar office space of the archives stretched out before him. Alarms are blaring, little red emergency lights flashing out in the halls, but the building is old and safety protocols are far past out of date. It lacks the modern architecture designed around life threatening things like fire hazards or accommodating mobility aids. Not that anything short of actual hellfire could take out the institute, but it sure as shit can take out the people inside of it - particularly when the scent of smoke is thick and cloying in the air. Michael reaches behind himself and swings open his new, returned, door which pops open into the sunlit sidewalk outside the building. Pulling out a great puff of smoke with the sudden existence of it, sending a plume of gray out into the sunlight, and he leaves it open in hopes of culling more. 

Maybe some poor panicked office worker will see it and leave of their own accord, but he pushes through the abandoned desks leaving it there for now. Instead following the sound of arguing, familiar, voices and the smash of metal-on-metal. Michael recalls the archives are accessed through a single tiny hallway with a door at the top of the stairs. A door which is currently wedged shut and being crudely manhandled by Tim Stoker and an empty fire extinguisher. 

“Why the hell aren’t there more exits out of this shithole!?” He curses, knocking the heel of the extinguisher into the door handle with little success. 

Sweat beads down the back of Tim’s neck, pooling on the rumpled collar of his shirt. Sasha is crouched on the first step with her head between her knees looking sort of seasick, a cardigan tied around her waist. She makes a miserable sound at the next crack of the extinguisher against metal, her long hair plastered to her forehead and drooping around her shoulders. 

“Because it’s a shithole.” Sasha isn’t wrong, outdated building codes aside. 

For a moment Michael wonders if he should fuck off and just go look for Jon, surely neither of them are going to be particularly keen on him showing up right now, but the heat in the air and smoke eking in from beneath the door makes him reconsider. He thinks about the day Sasha almost went down into the tunnels by herself, how he had gone with her in warning that worse things that she could ever know were lurking. It would’ve been very easy then to leave her to her own devices, but he hadn’t and at the time Michael didn’t quite know why. I want to be friends, it had told her once. 

Michael comes to crouch on the heels of his sneakers, balancing awkwardly with his cane planted firmly in his left hand, keeping an arms length between himself and where she sits on the bottom stair. 

“Sasha.” 

Her head snaps up, a look of plain bewilderment on her face before her brown eyes go very wide and Sasha scrambles to her feet. Above her, at the door, Tim drops the extinguisher and lets out a faint holy fuck.

“Michael!” Sasha laughs disbelievingly, then sputters an unpleasant sounding cough before bringing the sleeve of her blouse up to her mouth - trying to filter out the sting of smoke. “Oh, Michael. I’m glad to see you.”

“You are?” He blinks once very slowly, standing awkwardly as Tim hovers at her shoulder. That is something to unpack later, when everyone is not stuck down in the archives and even deeper still. “Ah, well. Your Archivist messaged me, I’ve got a door out.” 

Tim lets out a faintly disgruntled sound, a wary look on his handsome face that Michael does not fault him for, yet both follow to the open door standing there like a child's drawing pasted among the desks and shelves. Bright sunshine streams through, the sound of birdsong just beyond. 

“How did you…” She glances up at him curiously and he suspects if Sasha had all the time in the world she would be keen on picking his brain. Less invasive than the therapist had been, more earnest curiosity. Sasha wants to know because it is interesting, but won’t press because she’s polite enough not to. 

Michael understands why she was once expected to take the position of Archivist. 

“Magic.” Michael says flatly, leaning on his cane with perhaps more flourish than necessary and it gets him a friendly huff from her. “I’m looking for Gerard Keay, he was with The Archivist today. Please…if you’ve seen where he went I need to find him.”

“Why?” Tim squints over her shoulder, not quite judgmental but pouting and suspicious until Sasha nudges him in the stomach with her elbow. 

“Gerry invited Michael to move in, remember?” She offers what is a very generous version of Michael being half out of his mind and taken in by the only person in the whole world who could handle him. Still, he appreciates it greatly. When Tim goes to open his mouth again, it is her withering look that makes his jaws snap shut hard enough his teeth clack together. “He and Jon went to artifacts, there were some new interns training today…”

Wonderful! Spectacular! A whole host of new faces now stuck down in the basement sweating their brains out and potentially suffocating on smoke inhalation and of course Gerry would go looking for them. Of course Gerry wouldn’t leave a bunch of 20-somethings to their own devices. Of course. Of course. Michael isn’t surprised, he’s scared and he loves this man beyond reason and now he is going after them too. 

“Thank you.” 

Reaching out, he places his palm to Sasha’s fevered brow and sends a little rush of cool chill down from the top of her head that makes her breath come out in a sudden little puff - as if she is standing out in the snow. She lets out a startled laugh, watching as Michael turns his eye to Tim who stands looking as if he’d rather sink through to the molten center of the earth. All the same, he doesn’t shirk away from Michael putting a hand around the curve of his shoulder where the arch of his throat begins. Lets Michael pool a relieving chill through him and looks unhappily grateful about it. 

“Neat trick.” He murmurs, grabbing Sasha’s hand - encouraging her towards the open door. “Sasha, time to go. Martin might be back by now and he’ll have a cow when they don’t let him rush in to save the day.” 

She hesitates, a look of concern on her face as she eyes Michael appraisingly and he knows that he must seem so much frailer than she remembers. Smaller, reserved, and Sasha isn’t precisely wrong - but she isn’t precisely right either. 

“I need to find Gerry.” Michael says again, herding them both out the door. They do not have time for whatever this is. Then, before shutting it behind them as he knows full well at least one of them will just rush back in to play hero, he encourages them to- “Stay put.”

Down through winding hallways, Michael goes room-by-room calling out. Gerry. Gerry, please. As he goes, he leaves a little trail of frost wherever his hand touches along the walls - chasing out just a little of the oppressive growing heat until another familiar voice catches him. Down the hall Jonathan Sims is on his knees, apparently trying to shove what appears to be pillow cases between the crack of a door in an attempt to keep the smoke out from the hallway beyond. His graying hair is frazzled, sticking up wildly in the back, and his glasses tilt dangerously on the tip of his straight nose. Sweat has soaked the back of his dress shirt, rolled at the sleeves with his suspenders hanging off around his hips as he curses. 

Michael places a cool hand at the back of the man's neck, getting a great startled yelp from Jon. 

“Good lord, Michael.” He stands on wobbling feet, plucking his glasses off to swipe the sweat-damp hair from his face before depositing them back once more. “How did you even get down here?”

“Archivist.” Michael knows he sounds desperate, that he must look it too, by the way Jon eyes him with concern. His eyes flick down in curiosity to the ash wood cane only briefly, but Michael doesn’t mind. It is simply in The Archivist’s nature to be curious. “I’ve brought a door, Tim and Sasha are already out but I can’t find Gerry.”

“He’s gone to collect everybody who's left.” Jon says as Michael brings a hand to the back of the man’s neck, watching him startle at the initial chill of the touch and sending Michael a puzzled look. “What was that?”

Grinning, a crooked thing that feels familiar and mischievous, Michael hooks his cane around the crook of his arm and reaches out to cup Jon’s face between his palms. He lets the chill spread, laughing as Jon goes a little rosy and sputters, politely stepping out of his grasp. 

“Handy, that.” Jon rubs his face, bewildered and bashful. “You’ve a door?”

Nodding, Michael reaches out once more into the nothingness around them and fits his hand around a doorknob which absolutely should not be there and only flickers into existence with his touch. From that point of contact, the door seems to spread to life forming itself into the middle of the hallway. From the other side, Tim and Sasha are arguing on the pavement and squawk at Jon’s face popping around the doorframe.

“I’m going to find Gerry, take anyone else out with you.” Michael instructs, nudging the pillowcases out of the way with the toe of his shoe before delving deeper into the hallways and offices. 

It is an agonizingly tense search through empty rooms and storage closets, peeking into the restrooms just in case. The longer his frantic text messages go unanswered and his calls go directly to voicemail, the greater Michael’s fear grows until the sound of Gerry’s angry cursing sends his heart skyrocketing. There, in the back hall, is a larger office lined with heavy bookshelves and display cabinets, with a small window at street level shining with sunlight. It has been pried open while Gerry balances on an office chair to lock it ajar and allow at least some semblance of fresh air to filter into the room. Half a dozen frightened, young, faces look up in alarm when Michael pushes through the door and Gerry startles enough he nearly tumbles off the chair. 

“Michael?”

Michael catches him quick as anything, an awkward one-handed shuffle and he is already halfway to tears at the sight of Gerry in a plain black tee and ripped jeans to match. A familiar long leather coat has been tossed off to the side, hanging limply across a desk. Gerry’s long hair is pulled sloppily back from his face, little strands caught in the glint of his earrings, and Michael thinks nobody has ever looked so damn beautiful. 

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” He says, wobbly and choking as he clings around Gerry’s waist. “You weren’t picking up the phone and I couldn’t find you.”

“It died ages ago. I’m sorry.” Gerry clutches a fistful of his blond hair, chin hooked over Michael’s shoulder. “I didn’t know you’d come.”

Stepping back, he takes Gerry’s face between his palms just to see that he is here and he is whole and this is going to work out. It will be okay. It will. He has a door again, the same one he’d once left at the shop ages ago just in case. Before, when he was something else that knew Gerry as a source of painful heartache and could never quite bring itself to approach. Fearful of its own violence in proximity to Gerard Keay. 

“Of course I came for you.” His laugh is reedy, twisting in the air. “Jon told me you got separated and I just…I wasn’t going to sit around and wait.” 

“Uhm.” An intern fiddles with the pristine lanyard around her neck, blushing something fierce. 

Each of the six interns look no more than twenty-one at the most, and several younger than that most certainly. What a start to their career this must be and it’s about to get even weirder as Michael pops a door open in mid air with a smooth gesture, finding the more he does it the easier it becomes. Second nature to summon a door from nothing. There comes six startled gasps and murmurs, but Gerry just watches with a great swell of fond amusement. 

“Okie dokie, all the kiddies out of the pool.” Michael gestures sweepingly to the door, three familiar faces waiting put on the sidewalk among a growing accumulation of institute workers who have found their way from the building and chatter warily at the door’s appearance. 

If he listens closely, Michael is fairly certain he hears Elias muttering something among them. 

“One at a time if you please.” He encourages when none of them are willing to be the first through the door. Which, well, is fair enough. 

As none of them seem quite brave enough to be the first to test the safety standards of conjured doors, Gerry steps up himself - sending Michael a look so fond it is nearly explicit. Certainly warm enough to make Michael feel a blush spread down his throat. 

“Boyfriends first, then.” Gerry teases, reaching up to playfully pat along Michael’s cheek before going right through the door. He does so unquestioningly, with utmost trust in Michael and any…supernatural extensions of his person. 

It does, however, now leave Michael with the abrupt realization he has a boyfriend and thoughts of this fact spiral eagerly through his head. Would Gerry introduce themselves to others that way? Could Michael say; ‘This is Gerard Keay, my boyfriend.’ at dinner parties. If they went to any, that is. Just when he’s starting to feel like a giddy idiot about it, a sheepish hand touches his sleeve. 

“Sir?” The young woman pipes up in a shy voice, her name tag reads Gwen and the demure dart of her brown eyes reminds him very much of himself a lifetime ago. She doesn’t look a day over nineteen, round-faced with youth, and exceptionally awkward. “The department head went into the tunnels. I think for some important artifacts or…something, but hasn’t come back yet.”

“I’ll look.” Michael agrees gently, watching her tense shoulders droop, then directs her towards the door. “But out you go.” 

“Wait a sec’.”

Gerry looks very much like he’d like to argue, one hand around the frame of the door like he plans on coming right back through. Ducking down, Michael speaks softly for their ears only. 

“Please stay.” He says, imploring. “I’m not a hero, Gerry. I am here for you, so stay and I’ll be right back. Give me fifteen minutes, tops.” 

“Alright, alright.” Gerry agrees with great reluctance. “But you owe me later.” 

“Certainly.” Michael laughs, lilting and airy. 

The door shuts, fizzling away into motes, and he snatches Gerry’s coat off the chair before he can forget it, draping it over his arm as he delves deeper down still. Following two sets of memories to weave his way through as the building shakes and groans above his head. Michael knows he’s on the right track when he damn near goes ass over teakettle on a storage box left out in the darkened hallway, steadying himself with a curse. The air is thick with smoke down here, filtered through ancient ductwork designed to draw it out from office spaces occupied by employees and send it billowing below to less lived-in spaces. 

“Hello?” He calls into the dim halls, the eerie flash of emergency lights still shining. 

These dark hallways are the oldest, narrowest, leaving the air heavy with sooty dark smoke, but he avoids the pitfalls of another box haphazardly shoved out of its proper place. Then pauses, listening intently as the ominous rumble and creak of floorboards overhead echoes through the artifact storage. When a greater, louder, crash rings out and rattles the ceiling Michael draws forth a door with the intent to promptly fuck off in the next thirty seconds regardless of anyone else who may be stuck down here. He has earned his merit badges for the day already and is not keen on dying a second time, particularly not in the goddamn Magnus Institute. 

“Everyone’s got thirty seconds to get out or I’m leaving!” Michael shouts, hearing nothing in return until the thunk of another box. 

Really, he isn’t certain what he was expecting to find down here and feels absurdly foolish for it now. Out of everything the universe would give him, of course it would be Gertrude Robinson hunched over some ancient storage bins rifling around like a squirrel in a dumpster. Little strands of gray hair falling from her bun, sweat damp against her forehead as her glasses hang from the chain around her neck. She is just an old woman, on the wrong side of too-thin, with the lacy collar of her blouse unbuttoned against the oppressive heat. 

She looks the same, he thinks. A tiny scrap of a woman. Yet Michael feels a shock of fear so dense the floor beneath his feet turns to ice in one swift rush. A little island of frost in an uneven radius around where he stands, but the cold ekes out and up through the suffocatingly narrow hall and causes both his and Gertrude’s breath to exhale in little puffs. It startles her, makes her gasp as bits of frost creep up the wall. When she sees him there, hobbling to her feet with a box in her arms, there is a quiet resignation on her face. Stoic acceptance. For a moment he gets the feeling she believes he is going to hurt her, and not so long ago he very much would have, but…that’s not quite right. No. She thinks Michael is going to leave her. 

The way she left him. 

He could. It would be the easiest thing he’s ever done to turn his back on her and pretend Gertrude was never there and when they find her later, maybe dead from smoke inhalation or alive by chance, Gerry won’t even ask about it. Another discouraging creek of the floor above and Michael crosses the distance between them, takes ice with him upon each step - leaving the imprint of his boots etched into the wood with ice warping it beneath his feet. Michael watches Gertrude flinch when he reaches out, this little uneasy wince she quickly tucks away. If he was going to hurt her now, there is nothing she could do to stop him. 

“Michael-”

“Leave the damn boxes!” He says and finds her wrist is terribly small in his hand. Bird-boned.

This…tiny, fragile, weight between his fingers. Gertrude Robinson is seventy years old, she has no reason to still be working here - regardless of the circumstances. Surely the institute has no more use of her, surely it could release one elderly woman by now. Michael once thought her frail and was proven wrong for it, but she was fragile then and is more so now. The stark blue of veins beneath the skin of her hand, the feel of her knobby wrist bone against his palm. He could so easily twist just a little in the wrong direction and bits of her would shatter. So, so, easy. 

He doesn’t. Michael just drags her to the door and forces her out into the sunlight, doesn’t wait to see her stumble into the concerned arms of her frightened little assistants, but hears Gerry call out sarcastically from the sidewalk

“You should’ve left her.” 

Michael snags the box she’d been so damn keen on, hoisting it under one arm with a huff, and walks through his own door out onto the street. What greets him is a gaggle of frazzled office workers and two vivid red fire engines idling on the curb. He spots Martin cradling Jonathan’s face, discarded take away bags settled at their feet, and looking rather like he’s about to burst into tears in spite of the man’s reassurance of; it’s alright, we’re all okay. Unsurprisingly, Gertrude is in a heated exchange of words with Elias and their conversation involves a great deal of wild gesturing back-and-forth. 

He gets little time to parse the scene before Gerry is wrenching the box from his arms, depositing it unceremoniously onto the stoop where the contents rattle ominously, then barrels into Michael so strongly they nearly topple right over onto the sidewalk. 

“Don’t do that again.” He croaks, arms looped around Michael’s shoulders - face turned into his shoulder. 

“I’m sorry.” When Michael tucks his arms around Gerry’s middle, he realizes he’s still holding onto his coat and separates long enough to pull it over Gerry’s shoulders. Something about him without a leather coat sweeping the floors always makes Gerry seem a little too vulnerable. “But you have to promise not to get locked in burning buildings.”

“That part wasn’t my fault.” It’s a fair defense, but Michael doesn’t care and the wobbly distress must show on his face because Gerry leans up to kiss him. 

It’s not something they’ve done much of in public and the newness of it is such a thrill. A bright spark of excitement in his belly, all because a handful of office workers can see; this one's mine. That silly enthusiastic thump of his heart, childlike and giddy over kissing. Distantly, he catches a little suggestive whoop from Tim among the worried chatter of employees on their mobiles and the heavy stomp of firefighters trudging in and out. Whatever he and Gerry are doing is far less important than a building on fire, it would seem. Though, even that ends up as an exaggeration when the melted husk of a microwave is carried out. 

As it turns out there are, in fact, still very healthy rats making a hidey hole out of the break room. Which inevitably led to the wire on the microwave getting nibbled in and fraying, sparking into ignition when a cup of coffee tipped over and leading to a very destroyed canteen. Most of the damage remains contained to the surrounding rooms, those which shared walls with it, though the horrible crashing Michael had heard was from the refrigerator toppling over and nearly falling through to the floor below. 

Really, the damage was a fraction of what it all felt in the moment. With fire alarms going off and the flash of emergency lights, heavy smoke in the air from uncleaned and out of date ventilation systems. Not good by any means, but hardly the raging inferno Michael imagined. That doesn’t change the way he’d felt, searching and searching for Gerry while phone calls went unanswered. Wondering if he’d end up with a scant seven months of good fortune in this fragile life he’s been handed before it went to hell all over again. Dramatics? Perhaps. Not unwarranted, considering. 

“We should-”

“Mr. Shelley.” Gerry is interrupted by Elias’ smooth voice calling out, an easy and affable look on his austere face as he makes his way through the throngs of frazzled workers. “I am told you saved my employees.”

“That’s an exaggeration if I’ve ever heard one.” He frowns, glancing over Elias’ shoulder at where those anxious interns now fret over dear old Ms. Robinson. Jon and Martin are sitting at the curb, hands clasped and heads bowed as they murmur together, while Tim and Sasha appear to be accosting the firefighters over if one may keep the charred microwave. “What do you actually want?” 

Elias smiles and it’s all teeth. “You got in and out very easily, that’s a useful skill.” 

“Absolutely not.” Michael bites out and at his side Gerry bristles, catching on to what Elias is getting at. “I told you already I’m not going back for anything, not for the medical shit and not for a bloody fucking job.”

“It wouldn’t have to be official, per se. No paperwork required.” He offers, looking the perfect picture of quiet disappointment. A handsome pout. Frankly, Michael doesn’t think the institute would even accept official employment from him anyway. His contract broke when he die, it cannot have him again. 

Michael offers his hand, watching the surprise flicker across Elias’ face for just a moment before accepting the gesture, then letting out a startled huff at the shock of icy cold that shoots up his arm. Tugging, just on the side of cruel, Michael brings himself down to lean very near the man’s ear. 

“Fuck off, Jonah.” 

Stepping back, Elias shakes his hand out with a disgruntled sort of look on his face before composing himself adequately. Runs his opposite hand through his graying hair as he steps politely back from Michael and Gerry, gathering himself into the affectation of benign gentility. 

“As you wish. The offer remains, Michael.” 

“Home?” Gerry pulls on his sleeve, eyeing Elias with a sour look. “Please for the love of God can we get out of here.”

Nobody notices the two of them slip away through an impossible door. 

~~~~

Standing there in Gerry’s flat, hands laced as a great well of frenetic energy bounces around his head. An afternoon of sweating down in the lowest corners of the institute has left both of them practically vibrating right out of their skins. Coiled and tense and Michael is so grateful for Gerry being the one to reach out and drag him in with a fist in his hair. A kiss that is all heat, so clumsy their noses knock awkwardly at first as Michael presses him up against the front door. Holds Gerry there, like an insect pinned beneath glass, with a hand along his pale throat and a knee between his legs. 

“I’m going to attach a door to you at all times.” Michael says against his reddened mouth. “You won’t even notice it's there until you need it.” 

The huff of Gerry’s laugh is warm and soft, his hands pulling testingly through Michael’s hair as he arches against the door. Rolls his hips against the knee between his legs and even through those black denims Michael can feel the hardness of him. Both of them smell of smoke, twin bonfires.

“You’re going to become a peeping tom, are you?” 

“Yes.” Tipping his head back to feel the sting of Gerry tugging on his hair, Michael finds a great molten pool of heat has gathered low in his belly. “You’d like it.” 

Gerry lets out a pleased sigh when Michael nudges up the hem of his tee-shirt, hands around his narrow hips, encouraging Gerry’s slow rocking against his knee. This isn’t the first time they’ve touched like this, but it is only the second and both are full of a great deal more roiling energy than the first. 

Before it had been slow and languorous. Watching some absurd nature documentary on the television became Gerry sitting in his lap, straddling Michael’s thigh as they kissed. Eventually that had progressed to Michael slipping a hand down Gerry’s sweatpants to give him something worthwhile to grind into. 

The little jerk of his hips, Michael’s hand warm around his cock until Gerry had cum with a groan - face burrowed into the side of his shoulder. Michael hadn’t done it for reciprocity, but Gerry very eagerly followed with a touch of his own. His breathless laugh when getting Michael’s jeans down enough to get a hand around him; ‘Christ you’re big’. When Michael had sputtered, red faced as anything, Gerry just kissed him again. 

It was sweet and fumbling, but so is this and a great deal more. 

Gerry makes a little eager sound, as if the thought of Michael legitimately playing the part of possessive observer does something for him and that tantalizing tidbit gets stored away for later. Right now Michael is very focused on shucking Gerry’s tee shirt off, fingers pressing into the divot of his hips before skirting up along his ribs  - feeling the play of muscle beneath his hands. Soft, warm, skin littered with the occasional little silvery scars. The tattoo across his chest, where Michael traces his fingers and wonders distantly if Gerry is claimed enough for The Watcher to play real peeping tom. 

When Michael dips down to nip along the curve of Gerry’s throat, his head knocks back into the door with a little whump and it earns a burst of raspy laughter from both of them. Gerry nudges him back enough to take Michael by the hands and walk backwards through the hall, drawing him in with a series of long, deep, kisses that distract enough that Michael doesn’t notice being led directly to Gerry’s bedroom. 

It’s the one part of the apartment he’s never truly been in, not counting popping his head ‘round the frame to ask if Gerry wants meatloaf for dinner. Which was a yes and turned out very well, for the record. Somehow it has always felt too sacred, intimate, with the knowledge of shared affection between them. Now they’re there among Gerry’s faded band posters and piles of books scattered across the dresser, a great plethora of black shirts waiting to be put away still sticking from the hamper. 

Michael’s own pullover joins them, once Gerry pops it over his head and deposits it in the pile. Being in Gerry’s room, both of them a fair way to undress, has him feeling very warm all the way down to his throat - but all that frenetic energy they feed each other propels them forward enough to haphazardly kick their shoes off. Gerry curses the zipper on his chunky combat boots until shoving them off and dropping to his own bed, bringing Michael down with him. 

He is maybe expecting things to remain here; perched between Gerry’s knees with his hands pressing into the space beneath the man's ribs, kissing along the sharp lime of his jaw. It is where they have always stayed, so Michael fairly stares as Gerry begins shimmying out of his jeans and takes his boxers down with him. He’s felt Gerry, touched him within the confines of his sweatpants, but having him sprawled out naked across the bed has blood rushing in Michael’s ears. 

Gerry is pretty, he’s always been, but it’s different now because Michael is allowed to look at touch. Allowed to hold one hand beneath his ribs and smooth the other along the crook of his thigh very near where Gerry enthusiastically wants him to be touching. The hardness of his cock, all red and wet at the tip when Michael barely swipes his fingers across, is enticing enough he doesn’t tease for very long. Beneath him Gerry rocks eagerly into the touch, stomach rolling as he moves, and drapes an arm across his face whilst letting out a little groan. 

It’s going very well, until all that heightened adrenaline eases away and Michael hisses at the sudden throbbing pinch in his leg from crouching there on the mattress. A sharp tense knot gripping the muscle, kindly informing him that running around the archives has consequences. Gerry sits up in his elbows, all mussed hair and reddened face as he soothes a hand against Michael’s knee. 

“Lay down.” He encourages and takes the opportunity of Michael’s little awkward shimmy to snag on the man’s belt. 

“It’s…a bit grotesque.” Michael warns, now laid out against the pillows as Gerry fiddles with the button on his jeans, his hands folded embarrassingly across his bare stomach. 

“I’ve seen your cock already. It’s very lovely, I’ll have you know.” It’s said with soft teasing as Gerry begins tugging the jeans down Michael’s long legs. 

His laugh is a bashful wheeze, scrubbing his hands across his face. “My leg, Gerry. The scars on my leg.” 

The first thought Gerry has is he is right, Michael does have a lovely cock and he’s inordinately pleased to be involved with it again. The second is oh, because the scarring on Michael’s leg is a stark reminder of suffering. He has known, at a distance, that something happened when Michael went into the hallways. Something which twisted the bone in his left leg so profoundly out of sorts it would be impossible to fix, turning the bones into corkscrews. It’s different to see the great gnarled scarring spiraling up Michael’s leg than to merely be aware the damage exists. 

The scarred flesh is…oddly puckered, looping from ankle to thigh in a ribbon of pink scar tissue and Gerry has a very clear image of how it must’ve happened. Of some monstrous force taking Michael by the ankle and twisting until the bones snapped and reformed in on themselves. How flesh would have collapsed. The Distortion straightened itself out by technicality, forcing Michael’s leg back into position with no regard for it being anything other than a utilitarian necessity. 

With the odd direction of scarring, it gives the illusion Michael’s leg is on backwards. 

“Oh, Michael.”  With careful fingers Gerry follows the twisting path of scar tissue, feeling Michael shiver beneath him. “Am I hurting you?” 

“No.” His voice rasps as he stares up at Gerry not quite sitting in his lap. “It’s…it’s nice. There’s parts where I don’t feel much, but I can feel you’re warm.” 

There sprawled out on his unmade sheets, sandy hair a sprawl of little tangles and twists across the pillows, Michael is so soft and so lovely a great fist tightens within Gerry’s chest. All that heady adrenaline has fizzled into something delicate, easy, and he cannot help but smooth his fingers down the center of Michael’s chest following the very pale line of fuzz to his navel. Lower than that, dragging his thumb along the underside of Michael’s cock - earning a gasp and a little sensitive wriggle from him. 

“Can I have you in me?” Gerry blurts out, inelegantly. 

Michael goes very red in the face and lets out a wheezy sort of laugh, covering his face as Gerry laughs along with him until dragging Michael’s hands away. They have gone breathless and blushing, touching nearly in the right places but not quite enough. It feels…easy and languorous, unhurried, like they’ve got all the time in the world. 

“God.” Michael’s laughter is so bright when he reaches up and threads his fingers through Gerry’s dark hair, pulls him down until their foreheads brush and it is not quite a kiss but very near it. Flushed and bashful, Michael closes his eyes against the heat rising up his cheeks. “Yeah, yes . Do you, ah…”

Reaching across to the bedside table, Gerry snatches a little squeezy bottle from the drawer. A particularly unsubtle squeezy bottle with a label Michael is distinctly familiar with. Somehow, that being one of the few unchanging things in the world must be poetic. Bad poetry, but there nonetheless. 

“Don’t look at me like that.” Gerry defends, situating himself right back on Michael’s lap, slender and handsome with the fall of his dark hair over his shoulders. It’s impossible not to touch, so Michael does - palm sliding up his ribs just to feel him squirm. “You’ve been sleeping two doors down from me for months and I happen to be very interested in you, if that’s not obvious.” 

“You got this when I moved in?” He hums, the twitch a smile threatening to break as Michael plucks the bottle from his hands. Rolls it between his palms, ostensibly to warm it but mostly because it makes Gerry blush very prettily to watch him with it. 

“No, when I got that hair dye.” 

“That was…four months ago?” Michael holds the bottle up to the light, giving it a little shake for emphasis. “It's half empty.” 

“Well you see, there’s this certain someone I’ve fancied for half a decade who decides to walk around in his bath towel every morning.” The red across Gerry’s face spreads down his throat, blooming nearly to his chest, but he doesn’t look even a little bit ashamed and Michael doesn’t want him to be. 

“So you hide in your room and touch yourself about it?” When Michael warms the drip of oil from the bottle across his fingers, Gerry follows the motion with pointed interest. 

“Sometimes I hope you’ll hear me.” He admits, breathless as Michael strokes along his cock - warm and slick now. 

“I do.” At Gerry’s sputtering look, Michael pointedly rocks forward then back on the bed, which creaks and groans unmistakably loud - like something out of a cheesy porno. 

“Well, I guess we can make embarrassing bed sounds together now.” He huffs, then gasps when Michael’s hand delves down past his cock and lower still. 

Michael finds it difficult to ignore the fact that rather than tensing, Gerry relaxes into the touch - melting across his chest in a sprawl of inky hair and grasping hands. The prettiest little keening sound bubbling up from between his lips, still stained with yesterday’s black lipstick, when Michael presses very carefully just barely inside of him. Testing and seeking as Gerry rocks with little coordination along his front, pressed together from chest to hip. For a very eager moment they remain like that; moving against each other inelegantly, Michael crooking his middle finger deeper inside of him. Haphazard and uncoordinated and lovely. 

He manages to fit two fingers pressed tightly together, earning a punched out little noise as Gerry pushes back against the pressure. The dark ink against his skin looks fresh and slick in the lowlight as Gerry grapples along his hip, stroking along the ridge of Michael’s cock until he’s making the same sort of reedy sounds and starts to worry that he won’t be lasting long at this rate. It would seem they're in agreement, because Gerry tugs pointedly on his wrist and lets out a shaky breath when Michael withdraws from him.

When Gerry sits up on his knees, one hand flat to Michael’s shoulder, he’s all angles and shadow. Dark hair dripping across his cheeks, down his shoulders, swaying as his chest heaves. Black ink on his fair skin. Tells Michael ‘hold yourself for me’ and that alone could be enough to get him to finish on the spot, but Michael obeys and cannot decide where to look most - the pretty flutter of sooty eyelashes lined with day old kohl, or where Gerry has started to take Michael’s cock into himself as his knees tremble. 

Michael does his very best to be good, offering little shallow raises of his hips as he clutches around Gerry’s waist and tries to remind his body that shooting off immediately is not his goal today. It’s a near thing when Gerry is taking him so well, soft breath huffed out between them while he sinks down more and more until he’s flush in Michael’s lap and lets out a satisfied groan. 

“ Michael. ” Gerry arches back in his lap, head tilted to peer up at the ceiling, with one hand on Michael’s right thigh as he just breathes through the bone-deep satisfaction of feeling very full and very warm. When he hears the soft sound Michael lets out, he finds himself being looked at so desperately it’s nearly a physical touch. 

Beneath him Michael grips his waist, watching him with eyes blown dark and mouth parted - a softly needy look on his face and Gerry understands. This feels like something impossible handed to them, the kind of second chances people just don’t get in the real world. The very definition of a miracle where it’s impossible not to think of all that time demurring to one another over lunches that were almost dates, wanting and wanting until it was torn away. Michael is here now, lovely and warm and Gerry has him like nobody else can. 

He reaches down, smoothing the curls from his freckled face before leaning in to take Michael in a kiss. For a long moment that is all they do; kiss and hold and touch while Gerry keeps Michael inside of himself, until they begin to move together. With his right foot planted on the bed, Michael rolls his hips up to meet the way Gerry grinds down and rocks slowly on his cock. This languorous pace set between them, slow and deep and easy, like they’ve done this a hundred times before and will do it a hundred times more. 

They keep it that way, unhurried, until Michael lets out a reedy sound and pulls Gerry down a little rougher than he meant to. Earns the prettiest gasp from him above, Gerry’s hand tightening in the sheets beneath them, and things get desperate. Less the slow movements of bodies together and more the seeking up and down of Gerry in his lap, a pleased keening when Michael starts to stroke along his cock with oil-slick fingers.

“So pretty.” He murmurs, not even meaning to. Caught by the little furrow at Gerry’s brow and part of his black-stained lips. “You’re so pretty.” 

It’s so earnest, so gentle, he laughs into Michael’s shoulder. A breathless thing pressed into his skin. He wants to say you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen or I love you so much I might cry about it, but what he manages is a kiss and hopes Michael understands what it means. Michael tastes of his morning coffee, bitter and sweet, the scent of embers still in their hair. When Gerry leans back in his lap, one hand resting on the bed behind himself, the steady touch on his cock turns rougher. More intent behind the way Michael twists his wrist. 

“Can you...” Gerry grits it out on heavy breath, half embarrassed to even ask but mostly thrilled by the potential. “The cold? Not there, but uh-”

Michael latches onto the threads of his implication, bringing his left hand up to trail from Gerry’s wrist up to his shoulder - a rush of tingling chill wherever he touches. The sound Gerry makes is abjectly embarrassing, something whining and desperate that would get him a stern talking to from his neighbors if there were any, but it just encourages Michael even further. His airy laugh, choked out as Gerry rocks astride his cock a little rougher than he meant to. The touch moves from shoulder to chest, the swipe of Michael’s thumb across his nipple then the other. A place Gerry isn’t normally particularly interested in now given a great deal more worth when accompanied by the gentle chill of Michael’s hand on him. 

“Oh my.” Michael coos, rosy cheeked and impish. He glances down to where his right hand still strokes along the length of Gerry’s cock, a very unsubtle implication. “Just a little?”

“…Just a little.” He agrees, doing a poor job of hiding how it thrills him. 

It ends up thrilling him a great deal more than anticipated, the slightest hint of Michael’s touch cooling has him bucking up into his hand and back down on his cock in one eager motion. Whatever he says next is nothing but frantic babbling, a warning maybe that he’s very close, but it doesn’t stop Michael at all. With a reedy sound pushed out between his teeth Gerry cums in Michael’s hand, down his stomach, tensing and arching. When Michael seems intent on pulling out like some gentleman, he plants both hands on his shoulders and very pointedly grinds down in his lap. 

“No. In me.” Gerry insists, a little punch-drunk off it all. 

With a faint twinge of discomfort, Michael plants both feet flat on the bed and takes Gerry around the waist - draws him down into the jerky thrust of his own hips. Fucks him that way, sharing an open-mouthed kiss that is more an exchange of panting breath and ignores the soreness growing in his leg that he knows is going to punish him later. Gerry bids him inside and so he does, grinds up into him when he cums and feels the answering moan Gerry lets out against his throat. 

They remain that way for perhaps longer than is strictly comfortable; Gerry making a little upset noise about rising off his cock, Michael stretching his leg with a grimace. It’s alright, though. Better than alright. Perfect, actually, because it's Gerry that pulls him over until they are on their sides and he has ducked under Michael’s chin like he belongs there. He does, Michael decides. Distantly, he thinks to suggest they shower and certainly they will, but right now he cannot fathom moving an inch. 

Without conscious thought, his breathing evens with the staccato beat of Gerry’s heart beneath his palm. A feedback loop of easing into one another, the soft press of hands on heated skin, touching with no destination. Just to feel the other is there. Reaching around his shoulders, Gerry begins pulling apart the little tangles of Michael’s hair where it was mussed against the pillows. The weight of Gerry very close, legs tangled as they lay on their sides and the twinge of soreness along his left side is not nearly a punishment. 

“Michael?” He says, voice rough and low. Muffled against his sternum. “I missed you.” 

“I missed you, too.” 

It's true in a way there aren’t words for, but Gerry understands him anyway. He always does. 

~~~~

The thing that hurts Gerry the most about Gertrude Robinson is that he really did like her, thought of her as a friend. What makes it even worse is he knows she likes him, too. It’s hard not to think of their time spent in shitkicker motels, sharing a breakfast of mediocre coffee and gas station snacks at sunrise. How it didn’t escape notice there was an implicit trust in him, for this scrawny wisp of a woman to sleep one bed’s length away from a man half her age and a head taller. The absolute pair they must’ve made to everyone else. 

There was a certain domesticity to passing her in the bathroom studiously applying mascara, while Gerry settled on his own bed to pull the tangles out of his hair while rock music played on his smartphone. It always felt like being on some bizarre vacation with his own grandmother, for how easy it was to trust her, too. To like her sharp-eyed disapproval whenever Gerry propped his boots on the dashboard or the casual comrade in sharing a cigarette at rest stops. So, looking at her now, standing among the bookshelves like any other customer at Pinhole Books, Gerry cannot draw up that flinty anger like he did the last time. 

All he feels is grief. 

I thought you were my friend. 

Something in his face must show, because the tension in her shoulders drops and it feels like one of those loaded moments when his mother knew how hurt he’d been, but still couldn’t make herself apologize. Before either of them can speak, Michael does. 

“Oh, is that my suitcase?” 

He’s got the length of his hair tied back loosely at the base of his neck, little blond tufts falling freely around his face as Michael sets a new book on the pile gathered along the counter. He blinks a little bewilderingly at the dingy suitcase in Gertrude’s hand before meeting her eye. 

“It is.” She says, remarkably calm. Gerry can see how she watches Michael with a restrained curiosity. He is an unknowable variable, potential danger shrunken to size. Familiar, but not. She looks at him like he’s a ghost. 

Michael hums in acknowledgment and sits himself at the little stool he’d been using earlier, hands clasped around the head of his cane resting between his knees. It tap tap taps an uneven rhythm against the chair legs. A beat of awkward silence passes where Gertrude seems to debate what the least dangerous thing to say is and Gerry sort of wants to cry in sheer frustration. 

“Gerry, could you…” Michael turns to him, soft and pretty and imploring. 

“No.” Its petulant and he knows it, but all Michael does is laugh in that lilting voice. 

“Gerry.”

“Yeah, yeah.” 

He stands with a huff, stretching out his back in a show of how actually very unbothered he is. Do not look behind the curtain to where Gerry is shaking like an anxious chihuahua and doesn’t like being out of sight-line from Michael. Doesn’t like leaving him with Gertrude. It takes every last ounce of effort to duck around the door and give Michael privacy, but Gerry’s certain everybody involved is well aware he just lingers there in the stock room eavesdropping.  

Another beat of loaded silence passes, now that it’s just himself and Gertrude Robinson. She takes the lead by hoisting his suitcase up onto the counter with surprising ease for how heavy the thunk of it sounds. How he ever thought her frail might be funny, in different circumstances. She is sharp and strong, despite how her heavy cardigan swallows her up until she looks so small. Michael’s suitcase is the sort with a handle on the side, solid leather and vinyl with four locking snaps on the sides. More like an oversized briefcase than anything convenient to travel with but, well, he wasn’t meant to be in Russia for very long, was he?

The following stretch of silence is making his head buzz with static. 

“Am I taller?” He asks abruptly and Gertrude blinks up at him in open bafflement. Then he gestures above his own head, pantomiming ducking under a door frame. “I swear I didn’t have to watch my head so much.” 

“I-“ She eyes him from top to bottom in consideration and he gets the impression the absurdity of it all makes this easier. “Yes…half a foot or so. You were always quite tall, however.” 

There's this awkwardness to her that is so unfamiliar, so out of place, that Michael doesn’t quite know how to parse it. This human uncertainty which rebels against the stoic cruelty he has thought of her as encompassing until nothing else was left, and so he does laugh then, because it's all he can do. 

“You think you should apologize, but can’t because you won’t mean it.” He says with laughter trailing off into a sigh. 

“Not quite.” She counters. “But near enough.” 

“Can I ask you something?” He turns away, watching sunshine drip in through the shop windows. Mid afternoon stretching out the day in a slow crawl. 

Muffled traffic out on the street, the cooing of pigeons waddling down the sidewalk after crumbs. They were going to visit this new Indian place in the neighborhood that Jon swears by, if Gerry and himself are still up to it later. Michael remembers that psychiatrist telling him it's a good thing to get out of the house more, even if he feels bad, so maybe they still will. An arms length away, Gertrude makes an answering noise of encouragement when he’s been silent too long and he suddenly finds a great spike of grief lances in his chest. 

“Why did you hate me so much?” Michael asks, fervent and aching. Desperate for an answer he doesn’t want. “What did I ever do that was so wrong?” 

Gertrude’s face does something funny at that, this flicker of confusion and pity before she can mask it away. Her gaze searches him as if he’s said something truly devastating and Michael thinks he’s finally seen the place where sorry lives, even if just for a moment. Whatever she was expecting, all her careful consideration for this conversation, he has surprised her. Suddenly, Michael feels very small. 

“…Michael.” Gertrude starts, then stops, gathers a breath that sounds less punched out and he doesn’t get it. “I don’t. I never hated you, there wasn't anything you did.” 

Brows furrowed, he gets the sense there is very much something he’s missed. A vital understanding. It occurs to him at last what it is, what it’s always been; Michael would never have thought to use people the way Gertrude does. On a fundamental level they are simply different people, one incapable of considering the cruelty and the other incapable of considering anything else. It would not have been an option to Michael Shelley, therefore he must have done something truly horrible for it to have been one to Gertrude. 

Something to have deserved it. 

A deep, dark, morbid thought has roosted somewhere rotten. The fearful what if that maybe Gertrude had seen into him and knew the way he sometimes looked a little too wistfully at the ladies skirts in shop windows, or did not actually mind the times he was called Miss by colleagues before he opened his mouth and that smooth lilt came out. There are many things Gertrude Robinson is, but that is not one of them, yet the thought still existed in the corridors of his mind - some shameful reason for why she sent him off to die alone. Punishment for transgressions which existed only in his head.  

“I-I don’t…” He draws in a breath that chills all the way down to his lungs, ice and snow. I liked you, I cared about you. 

Distant recollections of office meetings where Gertrude passed him cups of coffee from the café ‘round the block - knowing his order well enough to remember it. Emma Harvey never got one, he remembers. Maybe she was smart enough not to take anything from Gertrude to begin with, maybe those little niceties meant nothing, but he still felt them at the time. Those afternoons when she’d ignore the longer lunches he took whenever Gerard Keay was around, letting him off early when the snowfall threatened to shut down the roads and he knew full well Elias wouldn’t have given a shit. Maybe she didn’t either, but she gave at least one more than he did. Not a high bar by any means, yet Michael had thought he was liked by this woman. 

That he mattered.

He had, in the end. Just not the way he thought. 

“I didn’t bring you to Sannikov because you are a bad or evil person, Michael.” That’s the thing, he supposes. He wasn’t bad, he didn’t hurt her, he hadn’t deserved it. 

Michael existed in proximity to Gertrude Robinson and that was enough. What she doesn’t say aloud, but which lives between her words, is she did what she felt was right and the cost to him was inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. What was Michael Shelley’s worth, comparatively? Nothing . Sitting here now, the blooming spike of pain in his leg that warns him of looking at memories too long, what makes him the most discomfited is if she’d told him the truth he would’ve gone anyway. Poor, disposable, Michael. He would’ve done it thinking of Gerry, of making the world safe for just that one person. 

He would’ve gone. 

The places where Gertrude Robinson and Jonathan Sims are similar have grown in number, their differences lay within how each responds to those similarities. Gertrude became vicious, whatever softness is innate to her whittled away into nothing but sharp edges and isolation and pragmatic cruelty. Jon has had his sharpness worn smooth, a jagged stone dropped into a pond to be eroded down by gentle currents until all the dangerous corners are softened. It makes him wonder what sort of woman she might’ve been, if she’d had the sort of people in her life that Jon does. Anchors. Might she have turned into that quietly wise and gentle person Michael once believed her to be, or was she like this before the institute ever came for her?

Without his permission, she becomes very human to him then. When he looks at her now, Gertrude no longer frightens him as she once had. There is only an old woman, the ropey curl of her wrinkled hands and wisps of gray hair. Her stern mouth, terribly human in the eyes. Michael has thought of her as such an otherworldly force for so long, it is a jarring thought that she is not. To realize he is the one with all that power, not because of The Spiral but because of what he has that she does not. 

“Oh.” He says, unable to think of anything better. Then, just to have something else to focus on, he pokes at the rusty hinges on his old suitcase. The last time he’d seen it was on Peter Lukas’ boat and some part of him simply assumed it gone forever, maybe tossed into the sea or lost in fog. That she had it for nearly seven years is a miracle that Michael does not look too deeply into. “You brought me my suitcase.”

“I have no idea what’s inside.” Gertrude offers, primly folding her hands in front of herself - accepting the subject change for what it is. “So it may not be anything of value to you.” 

He wants to ask if she knows what happened to everything else he once owned. The things that vanished into some unknown charity shop or ended up in his mother’s basement and then a storage locker. Does she know where his favorite bowl went? The one with little cartoon cats painted and chipping along the sides. His collection of vinyl records, which once belonged to his father? The best spoon from the lot in his too-small cutlery drawer? Michael hasn’t been ready to look into these things, but Gerry said he knows where some are when Michael is prepared for the task. If he ever will be. He misses the plotted plants on his kitchen windowsill, but cannot remember what they used to be. 

“Thank you.” Michael says, absurdly. 

Somehow this doesn’t feel like the last time he will see Gertrude Robinson, but it feels like the most important one. When she turns out the door it is the chime of the little bell above it and he watches until she has passed the window and is out of sight, uncertain as to what he’s feeling anymore. Mostly just very sad, but in a way that feels good. The breath he lets out is a frosted thing and Michael realizes where his hands grip the handle of his cane a fine frost has spread. Just a thin layer, nothing awful really, and it makes him sort of feel better he didn’t turn the whole shop into an ice rink. He does his best not to add anything even more supernatural to these books, after all. 

“You can stop brooding, now.” He calls out and Gerry comes huffing out of the stock room, the unhappy click of his boots as he comes around the counter to insert himself within Michael’s immediate space. An arm around each other’s hip, soft touches, but no words come for a long time. 

In the end both are feeling up to it enough that they make for the restaurant, just in case Michael’s bravado wanes and he opts for the comfort of curling up under the covers and crying about it all. He’d like to think it counts as progress that he manages to restrain the urge to hide. The restaurant is only a few blocks away, near enough his leg doesn’t kick up a fuss, and Michael is unsurprised to discover four others are waiting inside. Gerry is not as subtle as he thinks and besides, if Michael minded the extra company he could’ve said as much far sooner. 

He doesn’t mind, though, has always been bizarrely fond of this ragtag group Jon cobbled together, but still cannot figure out why these people want to huddle at a narrow table in a cramped little restaurant with Michael of all people. Entities. Whatever. Martin is soft spoken, a bit fidgety, but so very earnest when saying he’s glad Michael is feeling better today and demurs at any attempt to thank him for things like the mobile phone in Michael’s pocket. Tim eyes him with something like begrudging acceptance, but eventually it melts into eager interest once finding out Michael can play the entire T. Rex album on the guitar. Sasha laughs until her eyes crinkle and Michael knows she believes she owes him for keeping her safe in the tunnels, but he can’t figure out how to tell Sasha that it's fine. 

It wasn’t exactly The Distortion’s altruism so much as its curiosity that made the choice, after all. 

Michael eats in slow, small, bites that are easy to stomach when he still feels like real food settles oddly and finds this mirrored in Jonathan. The two of them are now a great deal more alike than ever, he knows it and so does Jon. A hunger for things that are too abstract to put words to, but not so consuming as to make a monster out of you. He cannot taste fear in food, but knows it's there like he knows where a door can open. Innate instinct. It’s nice all the same to nibble on lamb korma while Tim nearly tips his chair backwards in a heated, if friendly, debate with Martin over the validity of using salt lines to keep out entities. 

“It doesn’t work like that.” Michael offers, starting a new set of theories nobody can agree on. 

“What if-”

“Silver, really?…you’re thinking about werewolves, Tim. Horror movie werewolves!” 

“Wait, Michael. What did you actually do to the thing with me in the tunnels?” 

“We ate it.”

“You what?”

“Not literally with our mouth, Gerry. Think of the halls as a…Venus fly trap.”

Sasha, finally succumbing to her scientific curiosity, asks where the ice comes from. ‘It hadn’t been there before, right?’ So he tells her honestly: it comes from Sannikov. 

“The…the island from that one book? Sannikov Land?”

“Mhm. The best way to explain it is…I am pulling Sannikov to me. Like the doors - I pull them into existence.” 

Which, of course, only gives her a hundred more curiosities that she just barely manages to keep behind her teeth. He can see Sasha practically vibrating in place with the effort it takes not to hit him with a barrage of questions. 

“Maybe another time.” He offers, deciding that Sasha’s interest is guileless enough he wouldn’t mind her asking. 

When Martin sheepishly offers to take a photo together, Michael naturally stays where he is sat at the end of the table assuming of course not me and is very surprised to be dragged into frame. It earns him one very bewildered looking photograph of himself sent from Martin’s mobile; Gerry with his head propped against his shoulder and grinning cheekily into the camera, Sasha and Tim fighting for space at their backs to fit into frame, Jon’s reserved smile as he glances sidelong at where Martin sits close enough their arms are pressed together to hold his mobile phone high enough. 

“You certainly look comfy, don’t you, Archivist?” Michael teases, something very fuzzy and very warm doing laps inside his chest as he peers down at the photo. 

Michael Shelley had been an…isolated man, perhaps as good a reason as any to be hired into the institute to begin with. Someone who was willing to come into work a little early and leave a little late, because there was no one waiting for him at home aside from potted plants and a chubby tabby cat he popped in on during lunch breaks. At the time, he’d thought of Emma Harvey as something akin to a work friend. He doesn’t, anymore. Until Gerard Keay came along that was largely all Michael had.  

Once out of university, there were no afternoons out at hole-in-the-wall restaurants or theater nights. Nothing like this and the truth of how he even got here is a strange one, shouldn’t work at all. Not half as well as it does tonight, with the setting sun a shock of gold across the horizon and lively voices around him. Some little part of Michael had feared for how these people might’ve tried to make him out to be something he isn’t, a thing more human than is wise, but that they don’t makes it matter more. 

“Jon.” He corrects, offering a sneaky cigarette passed beneath the table that Michael takes a surreptitious drag from.

“…Jon.” It feels strange on his tongue, like he shouldn’t be allowed the name at all, but it makes the other man smile in that small way of his. Maybe Jonathan Sims just needs more people in his life who see him as more of a person than a title. 

The whole evening feels surreal and nice. Exchanging phone numbers while Tim pouts over Sasha’s shoulder like he’s been terribly jilted, but seems rather more good spirited about it than expected. It’s so exceptionally normal it hurts, just a little. The way a yellowing bruise does, something raw and healing but smarts to put pressure on. 

Later, when they’ve made it home and Gerry helps wrangle his old suitcase up into the living room, Michael will finally let the tears come. Will sob and shake and cover the windows in sheets of ice as he plucks the knitted scarf his mother made him from the luggage. A good luck charm for a safe trip to a far away place. His gloves are there, the red trapper hat with creamy fur lining and little pom-poms dangling from the ends. A kitschy airport magnet with the price tag reading 400₽ still stuck on it. Michael will find the cheap spiral ring notebook he wrote a confession on during the long flight out to Russia, lines scribbled out and rewritten over and over. Trying to find the right words for the sweetness in his heart. 

Then he will hand the notebook off to Gerry, who himself will match the scale of Michael’s grief with the sort of tears that feel impossibly huge and heavy against the skin. 

Crystalline. 

When they have nothing left inside to cry for, they will put on their pajamas and they will brush their teeth together in the cramped bathroom - knocking elbows for how close they insist on being, and crawl into Gerry’s bed which has become their bed. Michael still trembles, but the ice is gone and that is good. Gerry still sniffles, but his hands are steady enough to stroke up the back of Michael’s shirt and trade warmth. In the dark, lit only by the occasional flash of headlights far down on the street, they will whisper together of things they would’ve said many years ago and regrets of not being brave enough at the time. Maybe the universe will hear them and be kinder for it, the way they are kind to each other. 

For now, though, Gerry offers him a sip from the overwhelmingly mediocre beer he’s ordered and laughs boisterously when Michael wrinkles his nose at the taste. Their hands find each other’s under the table, the press of Gerry’s silver rings gone warm with body heat. 

Everything else is later. 

~~~~

October 16th, 2010

Gerry, I know it hasn’t been all that long since we’ve known each other

Gerard. You’re my best friend and I need to tell you

Dear Gerry, I love you 

Will you go out with me?

I saw a snow fox today. It was running about outside the fence around the airport, jumping into the snow and chasing voles. I can just barely see it from where we’re still stuck on the plane. It was all white, but for its little black nose, I’ll try to get a picture for you. You told me not to get anything while I’m here, that souvenirs are corny and you don’t need one, but I did anyway because I know you’ll like it. It’s just a magnet, but it’s got the same sort of fox on it and I don’t know why it reminds me of you so much. I think a lot of things remind me of you, like loud music and black coffee and snow foxes. You know, I just might find anything could make me think of you because I’m pretty sure I do that already. 

I’m not sure if I am going to save this to give you when I come home, or if I’m going to mail it out once I get to the hotel with Ms. Robinson. I might be too much of a coward and never give it to you at all, but I hope not. When I’m home, if I’m not already, I want to tell you I love you. Because I do. Love you, that is. So if I am not back yet, this doesn’t count. It has to be in person. If I am back and you are reading this I am going to feel very silly standing around waiting for you to finish with it, but I’ll say it anyway and maybe you’ll let me take you out on a proper date and you can tease me about it then. 

There’s another fox, but it’s our turn to dock and after that I won’t have time to write. A captain, Peter Lukas, is taking us further out tomorrow very early in the morning. Maybe I can get pictures then, too. I spoke to him briefly on the phone and he sounds the terse sort, but we’ll see. I miss you a lot and I wish I was back home, but I won’t be long in Russia so I guess it’s not so bad. 

Michael. 

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