And If Thou Wilt, Forget

“So is there a recording of this somewhere that I can listen to when I need to let off some steam while you’re at work?”

“Gerry, I am begging you to shut the fuck up.”

“Come on, you know the kind of music I listen to. You know my whole…aesthetic. You can’t expect me to not think there’s something at least a little hot about my boyfriend, the feral wolf man.”

It was late enough to qualify as early. Tim had done his best to convince Martin to spend the night, using everything from logical arguments to appeals to emotion to Rowlf, but Martin was equally if not more stubborn than he was and had insisted on going home. He’d at least conceded enough to stay for dinner and allow Tim to give him a ride home afterwards, and he’d only protested a little that they’d had to hold it because Gerry had a portrait sitting that ran late. Since Gerry had sort of left things a mess in the studio, he’d cleaned up down there while Tim ran Martin home, then taken Rowlf for his evening walk. Once both were back, they’d started on several days’ worth of dishes while Tim told Gerry what had happened at the Institute.

And, okay, yes. Admittedly, it was probably not a great sign that Tim had started growling at people. But, come on, the idea, devoid of any kind of context, was kind of hot.

Tim plunged a bowl almost viciously into the soapy water in the sink. “Feral means something formerly domesticated that’s gone wild. Wolves cannot, by definition, be feral.”

“Semantics, semantics,” Gerry said lightly. “Feral dog, then.”

“Don’t think I count as feral. I haven’t tried to leave the Archives.”

Gerry snorted and turned to place the glass he was drying into the cupboard. “Should I go out and get you a collar and lead?”

There was a loud, sharp crunch from behind him that sounded rather like somebody abruptly slamming a hard plastic dish against a solid surface so hard that it cracked, which was a pretty good sign that he’d maybe taken things a little too far.

He turned around, prepared to either defuse the situation with a backtrack or add a little extra humor into the situation, but the words died on his lips at the sight that met his eyes. Tim was bent over the sink, shoulders hunched and head hanging, arms perfectly straight and almost up to the elbows in dishwater. Gerry couldn’t see his face, but he could guess what the expression probably looked like. What really caught his attention, though, was Rowlf. The dog had been lying in the corner with a green bone-shaped treat that was supposed to help clean his teeth, as he usually did in the evenings, but was now on his feet, his own head lowered and his ears back, staring fixedly at Tim. There was no growling, but there was a sense that there could be growling, if pressed.

Gerry had never, in the entire twenty-one months they had owned the dog, seen him go on the defensive. He usually greeted the world with a joy and openness that spoke to his firm belief that everyone and everything in the world was his best friend and loved him unconditionally, and Tim was his favorite person in the world. It would have been more expected for the dog to attack him for upsetting Tim than for him to be poised and seemingly waiting for Tim to spring.

“Tim?” he said carefully. “Babe, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have joked about it. Calm down, okay? You’re scaring the dog.”

“I can’t—” Tim’s voice crackled with the same energy it had when he told Gerry—had it only been the day before?—that they could trust the Archivist but not necessarily Jon. He tensed, then lifted his head and looked at Gerry. His eyes glowed a bright yellow, not lit from within, but like a dog staring down the headlights of an oncoming car. “It prowls the streets in the darkness in search of the Archivist.”

“But it hasn’t found him.” It was important not to show fear, not to look or sound or act as though he thought there was a threat here. While Gerry was reasonably sure Tim wouldn’t actually hurt him, if he showed the slightest bit of worry that he might, it was not without the realm of possibility that Rowlf would attack. And while that would snap Tim out of whatever was going on…maybe…he’d also feel guilty about it for the rest of his life, and Gerry was not prepared to have to talk Tim out of leaving, or worse, wake up in the morning and find that he’d just quietly taken all his things and left nothing but a note saying he couldn’t be trusted to stay. He stepped carefully closer to Tim, hoping he was projecting a sort of la la everything’s fine aura. “He’s safe, at least for now. He’s hidden, and he’s marked by your protection. The detective won’t go after him tonight. She’ll wait until you’ve forgotten, or she thinks you’ve forgotten, and then you can be there waiting.”

Tim turned away from him. Gerry couldn’t tell if he was staring at the sink or the window or something only he could see, and he decided it didn’t matter. He did the only thing he could think of to do and closed the last few steps between them, then wrapped one arm securely around Tim’s chest and clapped the other hand tightly over his eyes.

For a split second, it was like grabbing hold of a live wire. Then Tim gasped and sagged slightly, and the weird tense energy that had been building up around them died away abruptly. Something sloshed around in the sink, and he began shaking faintly.

“Easy, Tim. Easy,” Gerry said soothingly, letting his hand fall away from Tim’s face. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Rowlf had relaxed, which was probably a good sign.

“Oh, God,” Tim said in a soft, broken voice. He yanked his hands out of the sink and gripped the edge of it, but his knees had given out. The only thing keeping him upright was Gerry’s arm around his chest.

Gerry decided the best way to deal with this was to lean into it. He pulled Tim away from the sink and guided him to the floor, where he knelt beside him as he crumpled, holding him as best he could. He felt woefully unqualified for this, but he was the only one here, so he’d have to do his best. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” Tim choked out. “It’s, it isn’t—”

“Hey, hey, shh. Shh. I’m here,” Gerry said. He tried to modulate his tone of voice to match the way he remembered Tim using when he’d broken down after his surgery. “I’m here. I’ve got you.”

He shifted his grip and maneuvered Tim, who resisted a little, but eventually got him more or less on his lap and held securely against his chest. Tim’s hand came up slowly, almost hesitantly, and found purchase in Gerry’s shirt, and then all at once he was clinging and trembling, his face buried in Gerry’s shoulder. Gerry rubbed his back awkwardly, hoping he was in any way, shape, or form helping. He wasn’t even sure what the problem…well, okay, yes, the problem was that Tim had reached a point where he could no longer pretend the Eye didn’t have a serious hold on him, and that it was taking over him in ways he’d never asked for, and that Gerry had been talking like it was no big deal. But he wasn’t as good with…people, and emotions, as Tim was. He couldn’t just sit and immediately skewer the heart of the issue and reassure Tim that his concerns were valid and talk him through them, like Tim had for him.

“Would it help if we sat on the floor of the shower for this conversation?” he muttered.

Tim somehow heard him and shook his head against his shoulder, as if it had been at all a serious question. “No. No, we—we can stay here and—fuck.”

“Not in the state you’re in, Stoker.”

That got a laugh, albeit a small and broken one, out of Tim. “Sorry. You—you didn’t sign on for a breakdown.”

Gerry snorted. “And you did? What makes you think you can’t ever break down or fall apart?”

“This is—that’s different. That only affected you. This—”

“Only affects you as much as me potentially dying of brain cancer only affected me,” Gerry interrupted. “And your breakdown is as much about me making unwelcome BDSM comments as my breakdown was about the hospital giving me a drastic and unwelcome haircut. That might be the trigger, but that’s not the cause. And I’m here for you.” He risked a kiss to the top of Tim’s head. “Just like you were there for me, okay?”

“Okay,” Tim whispered, then repeated a bit more strongly, “Okay. I…thank you. I don’t…”

“If you’re about to say anything remotely related to I don’t deserve this, unless by ‘this’ you mean ‘whatever is happening to you’, I will drown you in the remains of the dishwater,” Gerry said sternly. “You didn’t ask for any of this.”

“I chose it, though,” Tim said softly. “I could have walked away. Elias—Jonah—who the fuck ever I was talking to—he said that with Gertrude dead, I could have walked away from the Institute without consequences or harm.”

Gerry shook his head, even though Tim couldn’t see it yet. “No. He told you that you could walk away. He didn’t say there wouldn’t be consequences or harm. And, babe, if you didn’t have the Institute’s protection, meager as it is, I think you’d be dead by now. Besides, just because you physically could have left doesn’t mean you emotionally could have. Or would have.”

“‘My Chief Rabbit has told me to defend this run and until she says otherwise I shall remain here,’” Tim murmured.

“I’d have put you more as Captain Holly than Bigwig, but yeah, no, in retrospect, I think you’re right,” Gerry allowed. “Especially now. And just think how much worse that attack on the Institute would have gone for the others if you hadn’t been there.”

“Can’t say me knowing anything about the Fourteen did all that much to protect them. Jon and Martin would have got to safety without me. Probably.”

“Okay, but what about Sasha? You saved her from the worms, right? She’d have gone down to them if you hadn’t…” Gerry trailed off. “Okay, maybe that’s not knowledge of the Fourteen, either, that’s just brute force.”

“It also doesn’t matter.”

Gerry frowned down at Tim, who had, somehow, curled himself into an even smaller ball. “Wait, what?”

Tim gave a soft, bitter laugh. “It doesn’t matter. Corruption or Stranger, Sasha wasn’t surviving that attack, was she?”

Gerry blinked. “Tim, what are you talking about?”

“Sasha’s gone, Ger.” Tim pulled himself out of Gerry’s arms so fast he didn’t have time to react enough to stop him, backed across the floor a bit, and pressed himself against the cupboard under the sink, hugging his knees tightly to his chest. His face was pale and his eyes were wet, but he wasn’t actually crying yet, and his voice shook with something between grief and anger. “Tonner said nobody’s seen her since the morning of the sixteenth. Elias didn’t expect her to turn up to be interviewed, which he would have if he’d known it was just about where Jon was. There was a table that got delivered to Jon in care of the Institute last spring that turned up in an early Stranger statement, about a woman whose friend was taken over by a being that everyone but her recognized as that person—she was the only one who remembered the original. We’re pretty sure the table was somehow tied to the…the Not. And Sasha wound up in Artifact Storage after she and Elias got separated by the worms during the attack. It took her, Gerry, it killed Sasha and replaced her and I didn’t know. I’ve been, I’ve been friends with it for months and I didn’t even guess something was wrong, I believed it when it had explanations for every oddity and anomaly, I let it into the Archives…”

“Whoa, whoa, hey.” Gerry scooted across the floor and pressed his back to the cupboard next to Tim, putting an arm around his shoulder but not trying to manhandle him completely into his space. Yet. “You’re not—there’s no way you could have known what she—it—was. I’ve heard of these…things. I guess a Not is a good name for them. But that’s what they do, they…they take over your memories. If it didn’t let you remember, it’s because you weren’t its victim. And you did know something was up, you told me yourself you’d been living with a sort of low grade anxiety about the danger everyone in the Archives was in. And…fuck, my memories are all scrambled, too, so I don’t know if you actually told me about this back when you met her or what, but you recognized that she’d been Marked by the Stranger, you’d just never talked to her about where that mark came from. If the real Sasha wasn’t, the Not-Sasha probably gave you that memory to explain why you sensed the Stranger on her. And as long as she wasn’t actively hurting anyone in the Archives—” He paused as realization hit him. “She attacked Jon yesterday, didn’t she?”

“I—I think so? Martin said he saw something that he thought was almost a woman chasing Jon into the tunnels and…” Tim trailed off and uncurled, just a little bit, picking his head up off his arms and staring across the kitchen floor. “Fuck. That’s why I got the sense that I had to get back to the Institute right away. Jon was in danger. The Archivist was in danger. And then it petered out because they went down into the tunnels…”

“Or because she—it stopped chasing him. Found something more exciting to play with. Either way, there you go. You’d know if he was in active danger right now. And since you didn’t leap out the window and go bounding across rooftops looking for him, he’s probably fine.”

Tim’s eyes went slightly unfocused. “He’s…too far from the Archives, I think. Or he’s just not being the Archivist right now. I dunno. But you’re right, I…if it was that bad, I’d probably be able to find him.” He took a deep, shaky breath. “I should have known, Gerry. About her being…not Sasha. You told me yourself, remember?”

“I did?”

“When you went down to Dover to talk to her godmother. They were talking about moving her to a memory facility. Remember now?”

Gerry sucked in a sharp breath. “She said someone stole all her pictures. She remembered the real Sasha. So at least everything we got from her was accurate…well, seems like the Not didn’t do anything about her childhood, at least. And, hey—still doesn’t change the fact that you knew something was up. That’s probably why you were so insistent on trying to look into her past, why it felt so important to you. The Ceaseless Watcher was warning you about her, but because she wasn’t an…active threat, I guess, you didn’t need specifics, just to be on the alert when Jon and Martin were around. And probably your connection wasn’t strong enough to get really good knowledge from it.” He paused. “Yet.”

Tim snorted. “Yeah. That’s the kicker, that yet. Probably I wouldn’t have even got that much if it hadn’t been the Stranger. The Eye knows I hate it worse than probably any of them.”

“And also the Unknowing is still coming up.”

“And also that. God, we’ve got to get back into looking into that.” Tim tugged at his hair. “Maybe we should do that this weekend.”

Gerry shook his head. “No. I’m putting a hold on that. You’ve had a hell of a couple days, between the storage unit and the dead body and the showdown with the Hunter and the whole…Not thing. You need a couple days of rest.”

Tim eyed him. “I’m not sure that’s a luxury I really have.”

Gerry considered the problem from a few angles. On the one hand, Tim was right; they’d been trying to find out about the Unknowing for more than three years now, and every second it drew closer. On the other hand, they’d been looking into the Unknowing for three years without any sense of when it was happening. The likelihood of it going off in the next three days was slim to none. They didn’t even really know what was needed for the Unknowing, only what it wasn’t going to look like. And they hadn’t gone back to the storage unit to figure out what, exactly, Gertrude had in there that would stop the whole thing. They didn’t know if it had anything to do with the statement Tim had found shortly after joining the Institute or if it was something she’d had together before that point—more likely the former. For that matter, how long had Gertrude been looking into it before she brought either of them on board? She’d already been investigating the Circus of the Other before the day he’d met Tim.

“First of all,” he said finally, “what’s all this I bullshit? You aren’t the only one involved here. If rest is a luxury, it’s one we may or may not have.”

“You’re not Marked by the Stranger,” Tim said quietly. “Not yet. Not really. All the scars and marks you’ve gotten from the Fourteen—most of them aren’t that deep, and I know you know that. The Eye because you chose it, the End because you used it, the Spiral because you were too young to not be afraid when you encountered it. Everything else you’ve encountered, you were too jaded to really be afraid of what it might do to you. My Stranger Mark is because it threatened someone I loved, and then took him away from me. I think Gertrude probably saved my life hiring me and introducing me to you, because I was prepared to shut off enough parts of myself that the Lonely could easily have come after me, too. So when I say I’m not sure I can rest, Ger, it’s because I’m afraid that if whatever is running the Unknowing calls, I’ll have to answer. Unless I know enough in advance that I can prepare for it.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Gerry said fiercely, fighting down the sudden surge of—yes—fear that rose up in his chest at that possibility. He would not lose Tim to the Stranger. Not like that. “First of all, you belong to the Eye and the Institute, and you’ve got guarantees. It’s not saying nothing else can hurt you, but nothing else can claim you without your consent. You’re not going to end up in the Unknowing unless you walk into it of your own free will. And second of all, anything that wants you is going to have to go through me first.”

Tim managed a smile. “Even a guard dog needs a keeper, I suppose.”

“Or, if you want to look at it another way, what’s a captain without an Owlsa?” Gerry smiled back. “I’ve got your back, Tim. I told you that, and I meant it.”

“Thanks.” Tim, finally, leaned into Gerry, resting his head on his shoulder. “And second of all?”

“I—already did second of all.”

“You did ‘second of all’ to the reasons why I’m not getting Unknown. You didn’t finish whatever you were getting at with the ‘what’s all this I bullshit’ part.”

Gerry had to flip back several lines in the conversation before he recalled where he was going. “Oh. Right. Second of all, I think we’ve got more time than you think we might. There haven’t been enough…incidents of the Stranger lately. You remember, before the Dark made their attempt, we came across all those recent incidents? The Stranger probably hasn’t built up enough power. And…we don’t know what they need.”

Tim pursed his lips momentarily. “I think you’re right. I think they might have just had a setback, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“The delivery guys—they’ve shown up in a few different statements, two nondescript delivery men mentioned in the background as hauling off a piece of furniture or dropping off a coffin or whatever. Like a really shitty version of Where’s Wally.” Tim looked up at Gerry without taking his head from his shoulder. “They might be the Stranger, might not. I think they are. But they dropped off the table, and it let the Not out…and sent it down to the Archives. I think they delivered it as a test, maybe to send a spy into the Archives. Trying to find out how much we knew, trying to find out about any potential Beholding rituals, I dunno. I think it’s the former, though—the last few months, Sasha has seemed even more nosy and curious about what I’m doing than usual. Maybe she was always like that, I dunno, and that’s going to give me a headache if I think about it too much, but the point is that she—it—was trying to figure out what I knew, what Jon knew. Maybe how close we were to stopping the Unknowing. And honestly, we probably had information that might help them. But it’s gone.”

“You’re sure of that?” Gerry hated to ask, but he didn’t want to go off on a faulty assumption.

There was no hesitation in Tim’s voice, though. “Yeah, I’m positive. It might still be in the tunnels, might come back to attack us—I’m really worried about Martin—but it won’t come back pretending to be Sasha. It can’t. We Know It, and the last thing it wants to be is known. Especially not by us. So no, they maybe didn’t lose an ace, but they definitely lost a high card they weren’t expecting to lose and it’s going to take them a couple more rounds before they have a good enough hand to play again.”

“Let’s hope we can get Gin before they do, then. So, did I convince you to take the weekend off?”

“Yeah. Yeah, you did. Or at least to take it to breathe and relax.” Tim sighed deeply. “Thanks, Gerry. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Well, you’d probably be a lot more celibate for starters,” Gerry said teasingly, hoping to lighten the heavy mood that had settled over them a bit. “Speaking of, I can think of an excellent way to get your mind off of work and the Unknowing. You have seventeen seconds to pick a level surface before I pick it for you.”