Chapter Text
There were two reasons that nobody used the floral print mug in the Magnus Institute archives. The first was that no one could identify whose it was. This didn't make it mechanically less desirable, but something about its rococo pattern did imply an owner who might come seeking revenge if it was left out of place for too long. It was unsettling to look at in the same way that a very poisonous animal is. Even now that he was the Archivist, Jon had a sense of foreboding when he approached it, and a definite feeling of triumph when he actually used it for the first time.
The second reason was that the mug held 30 ounces of liquid, and that was simply too much tea for anyone to want in one sitting.
Anyone, of course, except for Jon left to his own devices at 1:30 in the morning.
As often as it might feel otherwise, Jon was rarely alone in the Archives. It was a comfort more often than not, but it came with the instinct that he needed to be ready in case anyone needed him for something. In case Basira decided to clue him in on whatever plans she was working on. In case Melanie was feeling comfortable enough to actually speak to him. In case Daisy needed company. In case Martin… well, Jon wasn’t sure what it would take to get Martin to come find him, but he wanted to be ready for it all the same. Tonight, though, the Archive was empty. The only person Jon had to attend to was himself.
To celebrate, he had draped himself over the break room couch with a stack of statements and the unreasonably large mug of tea. Having the place to himself provided a lot of little benefits. Talking to himself (and any supernatural entities he imagined were listening) as loudly and inarticulately as he liked; lying across the entire couch, wriggling into a different, more comfortable position every few minutes; shirt untucked, shoes discarded, glasses pushed up onto his head; ambient rain noises blaring from his phone, which was on the floor just barely in reach. He didn’t like music while he read, but he’d salvaged enough of his romantic sensibilities to appreciate the drama that a good thunderstorm added to the experience.
These were all things he could have done any time at all in the comfort of his own home. At least, they would have been, if his home had been at all comfortable anymore. These days he got restless if he was away from the Archives too long. Even if he made it home by a reasonable hour, he found himself waking unexpectedly in the night worrying for the safety of the place, and frankly for himself outside of its protection. He just felt more at home there than anywhere else.
Which was why he was paging through his fourth statement at 2:23 AM. The lineup wasn’t selected for any traits in particular, though he did tend to avoid anything that smacked of the Web. These were statements that he’d been drawn to during his usual investigation, but realized at the last minute weren’t actually relevant to it. Essentially, junk food.
“What do you suppose happens when I run out of these?” he asked the tape recorder lying next to his head. “I haven’t exactly counted them. I’ve just been taking it for granted that they’re all genuine, all the ones in my office, at least. Do I just… what, go rogue? Can’t have an archive if there’s nothing to archive. Maybe I’ll move to China. They’ve got statements there. Decent food. Not the most convenient addiction I’ve ever had, if I’m honest.”
He closed his eyes and leaned back into the sofa with a sigh. “Take Martin, fly to China, blow the place up on my way out for old time’s sake. It’s what Gertrude would have wanted. And Tim. Probably Sa-” He clinked the tape recorder with his mug for emphasis, knocking it onto the floor. “-ahhh, hell.” Blindly, he reached out to pick it up.
The recorder was nowhere to be found. Neither, for that matter, was the floor.
Jon’s eyes snapped open and were immediately met with darkness. He swore loudly. This couldn’t be an attack on the Archives, he would have seen that coming. When he reached out for the rest of the building, he came to the nauseating realization that he was no longer in the Archives. There was a staticky hole where the information should have been when he tried to orient himself. As far as he could tell, he wasn’t anywhere at all. His feet dangled into open air below the bottom of the sofa.
“Hello?” he called out. The sound was eaten up by the darkness, reassuring him that he wasn’t trapped in an enclosed space. That reassurance helped more than he liked to admit. He tried to focus on what he did know, Beholding powers or not. He could feel the sofa, but he could tell that it was still back in the break room, detached somehow from the inky expanse. Jon was struck with the image of a Pepper’s Ghost, a staple of cheap haunted houses used to project apparitions into thin air. Only, in this situation, Jon was the ghost being projected elsewhere.
It took him a moment to notice that he also knew where the tape recorder was. Sort of. He at least knew that it was somewhere he could reach safely if he left the couch. Somewhere very, very far from the Archives.
The thought came to him that he should retrieve it. He opened his mouth to argue, then closed it again. It wouldn’t just fall on deaf ears, he thought, but no ears at all. The recorder wasn’t listening. Neither was the Eye, not here. It was just him. Of course, this meant that the opposing argument - an increasingly sharp need to know where the tape recorder had fallen to - was just him, too.
“No. No, it is my night off,” he protested. The darkness was silent. Jon straightened his papers, sighed again, and took a swig of his tea.
The darkness waited patiently.
“-the Eye sees through me. The Eye sees me, the Eye sees through me,” chanted Nicholas Waters. “The Eye sees me, the Eye sees through me.” He consulted a little notebook palmed into one hand. None of the verbal components to this ritual were complicated, but that made him even more paranoid of getting careless. “The story is ready for the observer. The story is waiting for the observer. The storyteller asks for the observer.”
There was no response from the empty parking lot. Nick studied the summoning symbol he’d scratched onto the asphalt in chalk. It had been mercifully simple to draw, a lens shape just wide enough to fit a circle in the middle. A crude, childish representation of an eye.
“That’s it, right?” asked Morgan. She and Static Man were standing on the other side of the circle. “We didn’t skip any steps?”
“This is fine,” said Nick, “It’s more of an invitation than a summoning. The entity can take as much time as it wants to decide how to answer.”
“Kind of a dick move, though,” said Static Man. “Like, I’m sorry, but if you went through all the trouble of becoming a sanity-bending rip in the fabric of reality, you gotta play the part just a little.”
As someone who had himself gone through the trouble of becoming a sanity-bending rip in the fabric of reality, he had some strong opinions about it. There was a point at which bad behavior from other eldritch entities started to reflect poorly on him.
“Making us wait does add to the suspense,” said Nick. “Morgan, you said you'd dealt with this thing before?”
"Sort of," said Morgan. "I’ve heard of the Beholding, but nothing about an Archivist. I found a shrine to it once, when I took a wrong turn in the library at my old college. It didn’t take much asking around to find out what it was. The way people talked about it was almost like a god, something you’d worship and gain favor with. Not the kind of entity you’d summon in the parking lot of a mall. Even before the accident, everyone knew it was dark, darker than most of us wanted to mess with.”
“Accident?” asked Static Man.
Morgan frowned and went quiet for a second, staring down at the circle.
“Someone went missing,” she said softly. “Rumor was that he kept using it to cheat on tests, and eventually it just… devoured him. Some of its followers kept their distance after that. The ones that still could. They warned the rest of us to do the same.”
“Which is why we’re using a conduit,” said Nick. Morgan glanced up, and he gave her the most reassuring smile he could offer. “This thing, the Archivist, it’s supposed to be an aspect of the Beholding. Like an avatar. Not the whole thing.”
“How did you hear about it?” Morgan asked.
All three of them jumped as a tape recorder fell to the ground from empty air. Nick leaned in to investigate, careful not to cross the border of the summoning circle. The machine was still running.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding,” he muttered.
The angle that Nick had positioned himself at meant that, when the Archivist appeared in the circle, Nick went from staring down at his socks to up at his stern, incredibly irritated face. Looking into his eyes made the hair on the back of Nick’s neck stand on end. He was reminded of a trip he’d taken to the zoo once, when he was very small and there was nothing but a few centimeters of plastic separating him from a hungry, pacing jaguar. He straightened and took a step back.
“Right,” said the Archivist. “There had better be a spectacular explanation for this.”
“Um,” said Nick. “Greetings! Are you the Archivist?”
“Yes, that’s me,” said the Archivist. He looked Nick up and down with a puzzled expression, as though Nick was missing something he’d expected to find. “Who are you with?”
“No one,” Nick said immediately. It wasn’t what he’d intended to say, but it was the correct answer to the question. “I mean- I did bring my companions with me. We’re kind of a package deal.”
The Archivist turned around, took one look at Static Man, and yelped “What the hell?!”
Static Man rumbled like an oncoming freight truck. The Archivist tensed and clutched his mug more tightly, apparently ready to stare him down until Nick interrupted. “We’re not here to fight,” he said with a pointed look at Static Man. “I summoned you here to make a bargain. I was told that you can give information in exchange for a story.”
The Archivist turned back, eyeing Nick warily. Something that he saw put a startlingly hungry look in his eyes. “That depends on what you want to know, Nicholas,” he said.
Morgan and Static Man exchanged nervous glances behind the Archivist’s back when he said Nick’s name. Nick, for his part, thought this was an excellent sign. He’d chosen this being specifically because it - he - was supposed to be nearly omniscient. It would almost have been disappointing if he didn’t have that trick up his sleeve.
“We need a guide,” Nick explained. “There’s something I want to retrieve from a labyrinth - a list of things, actually - and we need someone who can get us through safely. Someone who can know where each item is, and take us to it through a changing landscape.” He pointed across the parking lot towards a distant building. It looked like a normal warehouse store, except that each end of it extended out towards the horizon as far as the eye could see. Right in the center was a line of sliding glass doors under an enormous pink and green neon sign that blared out into the night: THE ARCADE
“You need help with your shopping,” the Archivist translated. “Really. You abducted me in the middle of the night to help with- Where even are we? How is that building so endless? Do you just... have these, in America?”
“We’re not exactly in America, for one thing, and-” Nick started to say, cutting his answer short before it could continue on its own. “Look, would you mind not doing that? With the questions? I’m not a fan of mind control, when I can avoid it.”
“I would mind, actually,” said the Archivist. “I’ve very little reason to cooperate with you. I do want to stress that you kidnapped me.”
“Is that why your shoes are missing?” asked Morgan.
“And my phone.” The Archivist gestured at her, grateful for the support. He took a couple steps back out of the circle so that they were all facing each other.
“I’m truly sorry for the misunderstanding,” Nick said coolly. “We didn’t expect it to be an imposition. If you’re not interested in our deal, I’m sure we can find a way to send you back.”
The Archivist looked at Nick in a way very similar to how Static Man usually eyed Nick’s leftovers at the end of a meal. He sighed, and knelt down briefly to retrieve the tape recorder. “What kind of deal,” he asked.
“One story per stop,” said Nick. “And another after we’re all out safely. There are three locations we need to visit, so I’m willing to promise you a minimum of four.”
“Four,” the Archivist murmured under his breath. “Good lord. How are you still alive?”
“Because nothing has ever wanted to kill me as badly as I want to survive,” Nick answered. He knew he was being compelled, but the words were fierce between his teeth. It felt good to have that strength uncovered. “Do you need proof that I’m good for it?”
The Archivist hesitated. “People do tend to find the experience draining. Perhaps your ‘companions’ could help split the difference. They certainly have it to barter.”
“Leave them out of this,” Nick snapped. “They’re under my protection. If you so much as think about them too hard, I’ll show you what it looks like when I intentionally kidnap someone.”
“Alright,” the Archivist said placatingly. “Just trying to be transparent. I don’t suppose I have much of a choice in this deal of yours?”
“There’s always a choice, Archivist,” said Nick.
The Archivist made a face as though he’d heard that phrase one too many times. “I mean, could you send me back, if I did ask? Is that something you’re capable of? I don’t mean to be condescending, I literally have no idea.”
Nick kept his austere composure with no small amount of effort. “Neither do I.”
The Archivist rubbed a hand over his eyes. “Do you at least have a phone I could use?”
“Oh,” said Nick, deflating somewhat. “Uh, sure. Does this mean you’re-”
“I’ll help,” said the Archivist. “I’m just not keen on being trapped here once it’s over with. There won’t be anyone in the Archive to call for several hours yet. Fortunately for both of us, this is easily the most productive thing I have to do until then. Four statements in exchange for everything you need from the not-America shopping complex.”
Nick grinned and held out his hand. “Great! Good to have you on board.”
The Archivist looked genuinely startled by this development. He shook Nick’s hand anyway.