'in another life' on loop in my brain 24/7

[ID: A drawing of Martin Blackwood in pajamas, standing in a red beam of light, surrounded by fog, clutching a corkscrew. Disembodied eyes peer over his shoulder, a spiderweb is in the corner of the rectangle of light, and three worms lie at his feet. End ID]

No… [THE STATIC GROWS LOUDER.]

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He’d approached Daisy, then, her vision more pastel than she’d remembered it being before (and also swaying, slightly; she’d written that off as just disorientation) and bent down, just enough to meet her eyes. “I do hope you’ll at least keep any rodents out of the Archives, hm? Or at the least any insects. We’ve had problems with that in the past, as I’m sure you remember.”

He’d winked, then—winked, the bastard!—and straightened, inclining his head behind her.

“We’ll do it properly,” half of the thing from the circus—couriers, he’d called them, why couldn’t she recall their name?—had said.

The fae in charge of the court leans forward on its garish throne, eyes still as blank as he remembers as it laughs harder, mouth still as static as it was all those years ago. “What do you mean you want Sasha back! You already have Sasha back!”

“I’m not a fucking idiot,” Tim snarls. “That thing in her house is not Sasha. Nor has it ever been Sasha.”

It tilts its head, smile still frozen-painted-carved as wide as ever. “It’s the real Sasha! Didn’t you want the real Sasha back?”

“You made me come down all those damn stairs for a corpse?” Melanie makes a noise of disgust, but Basira hears her footsteps’ approach behind her all the same. “Georgie, are you getting anything?”

“Uh, one moment.” Basira takes the torch passed back to her from Georgie, watching as she raises a hand towards the body. “Safe.”

Basira passes the torch back before approaching the body herself. Crouching, she frowns down at—what she’d thought—were ropes around the arms. “Tied with strips of cloth. Seems like he did it him—“

A hand grabs her wrist.

She finds herself disappointed to let out a small gasp of alarm, barely stopping from dropping the torch. Shaking faintly, she follows the hand back up the arm of the creature, and to the head—

The corpse is staring at her with glowing eyes.

They’re a sickly viridian, and despite the flickering of the torchlight, their shine doesn’t waver.

She can’t break her gaze away from them.

“Georgie, I thought you said it was safe!” she hears Melanie hiss, as if from underwater.

“Whatever it is, it’s not undead!”

“Regardless of your doubt, you will be fine.” Elias sighs, massaging his temples. “You’ll still be doing some amount of cataloging, anyway; we prefer to keep our primary sources on file. And I’m sure that Mr. Stoker and Ms. James would be happy to show you the ropes. Now. Any genuine concerns?”

“I’ve never even fired a gun,” Jon says, voice small, in a last-ditch attempt. Elias only levels him with an unimpressed stare.

“See you soon, boss,” Tim had smirked, squeezing fondly. Despite himself, Jon had smiled in return.

“Only if you don’t call me that.”

As he’d headed to the lifts, Tim had called after him, “No can do, boss! Gotta remind you you’re in charge now.”

Jon had met Rosie outside the elevator, and had followed her into the Archives. He’d been a bit miffed to have the rumors confirmed that the lifts in the Institute didn’t go all the way to the basement. Something to do with interference from things in Artefact Storage, if the rumors were true on that front, too. Rosie had neatly sidestepped further questions about it, instead pointing out that there was a small exterior door at the top of the stairs down to the Archives, so Jon and his assistants could use that during the workday if needed.

“Once someone’s in here to open it up, at least,” she’d added, smiling in a way that Jon figured was probably meant as an attempt to ease his—likely visible—growing distaste. “No handle on the outside. For security reasons, of course.”

“Fighting the geas more than usual, hm? I thought you’d learned by now that was use—“

“Fighting against the damn bruised rib, Elias!” Jon regrets it almost immediately, gasping as his chest protests further, but at least Tim or Martin—or, gods forbid, Sasha—isn’t here to bring the migraine back. This time, he only has to fight one source of nausea.

“I can’t honestly tell you I’m sorry, Jonathan, but I do wish it hadn’t come quite to this ext—“

“Bull…shit.” He glares at Elias. “If so you would’ve– you would’ve—“

Thursday morning comes, and with it, the third of Jon’s panic attacks related to the Meeting With Tim.

They’d started the same day he’d texted Tim, agreeing to meet—so really, he’s the only one to blame for this, because he could have just said no, or not answered, or hell, even blocked Tim’s new number as Tim had with his old one—but he’d met with Laverne Wednesday afternoon, only an hour after the second of the panic attacks, and she’d talked him out of texting Tim to call the whole thing off, and told him several platitudes about how brave he was for moving on and trying to reconnect with old friends, with people he’d lost to Elias contact with, and he’d believed himself to be all that she said and more, and capable of doing it, besides.

Now, of course, in the light of the morning on a day when he hasn’t just had the therapist equivalent of a pep talk, he’s able to see the truth.

He can’t do it.

He can’t.

“You’re Silco's daughter?” Caitlyn says at last, and Vi can’t deny the smothering, angry loss she feels at the question. Powder is not Silco’s anything, she is Vi’s and their parents’ and Vander’s and Ekko’s—

“Yep,” she says, and Vi can’t breathe, not with the way Powder pops the p in something that feels like acid splashed against Vi’s ribs. She can’t move as Powder turns, one of the braids slapping against the spandrel with the momentum as she slings an arm around Vi’s shoulder. “And Violet here is my lovely sister. But Silco’s not her dad. Funny how that works out, huh?”

“Powder,” Vi says, voice wounded animal-soft, “we really need to go now, okay? I’ll explain everything to you once we’re—”

“Her name is not Powder.”

Vi feels everything within her seize up, even as she turns, as if caught in a slow nightmare. Silco makes his way down the staircase, lip curled into a sneer as he adjusts the cuff of his sleeve.

Jinx immediately drops her boots from the desk and scoots her chair closer. She leans closer, propping her chin up with a hand. “So. I can go now, yeah? Now that the resident ogre’s gone?”

Vara clucks in disapproval, and Jinx's gaze snaps to her. The jay on her shoulder looks up, too, claws tightening slightly. Jinx doesn’t seem to notice the way the tips of them dig further into her skin.

“You two are still grounded, Jinx.” Silco leans back against his chair with a sigh. “Speaking of—which will it be today? Name-wise?”

Jinx casts an uncertain glance at her dæmon. “I dunno, she hasn’t even told me—“

“Powder,” the jay says, readjusting her wings. “I’m Powder.”

The crooning sound that comes from deep in Vara’s throat isn’t unfamiliar to him, but it’s certainly not a common one. The raven takes a step forward, and Powder flutters down from Jinx’s shoulder to meet her. Just as she hits the desk, she’s a fish crow, still smaller than Vara but much closer in appearance. Vara smooths her bill over a few ruffled feathers on Powder’s back, and Jinx finally manages to tear her gaze away to look him in the eye then.

“You should still be able to make it up to him, somehow. I mean, it’s not honorable to expect you to do the impossible—”

“Mandalorian honor is different from Sith honor,” Leia scoffs, crossing her arms and turning away. “It’s not something you’d understand.”

Helping. Yes. Luz can help. She can find his…his staff.

Like a wizard staff?

She gets to her feet, sketchbook dropped haphazardly on the crooked old steps, because as much as she loves her movie!Azura redesign—come on, the latest book had mentioned her dress being the same shade as Hecate’s cloak at least six times, how hard was that to miss?!—her brain is finally catching up with the events around her—notably that this is a portal, an actual, real-life portal, and she’s going to help this boy from another actual world, and then maybe he’ll offer to show her around his world in thanks, and—

To give Tristan some sign that he isn’t…what? That he isn’t a kept dog for the Empire? That Fourteen isn’t a weapon to point and shoot, destroying everything in his wake that’s so much as implied to be a mission objective?

He wonders if this is how it had felt to the Jedi in Nur’s butterfly case facsimile, in the brief moments alive before they were trapped, stuck with pins to the Empire’s ever-growing list of accomplishments, of names crossed out.

He’d only seen it happen once, as his master was taking him through to observe an interrogation, but once was more than enough.

Fourteen’s been stuck in those few moments before encasement and silence for years now. He doesn’t quite recall what a lack of apprehension is.

He’s so, so tired.

“What happened to you?” Tristan asks. He knows that it can’t have been more than a few seconds, but this conversation feels stuck, stuck with pins against a wall proclaiming the Empire’s holiness. Fourteen wants to tear the skin from his bones, if it will keep him from feeling this again.

Ezra shudders in his sleep, at first just a twitch before a full-blown, full-body shake, almost as if he’s trying to shed a skin that no longer quite fits but isn’t yet ready to come undone alone. Tristan finds himself fascinated, the way his attention had been magnetized to a dying bird he and Sabine had found in the woods once, too young to put it out of its misery and too old to know that it was leaving the world anyway.

Ezra isn’t having death spasms, though. He hopes.

He continues to shake, though, and Tristan reaches to touch his shoulder, biting his lip—this will help, right?—only for Ezra’s eyes to flash open then.

The gold eye, the blue eye, both stare up at the ceiling blankly, the rest of him eerily still compared to a moment ago. Tristan stands, making to leave.

Ezra grabs his wrist, grip ice and fire and death and life and burning all at once, and he’s drawn back into Ezra’s mismatched gaze again.

“You don’t want to see your own death,” he breathes out.

Tristan’s brows knit together, even as a spike of banal terror shoots across his spine, lightning quick.

Something blocks Caleb's line of sight toward the bodies. It’s blocking his line of sight to the singed helmets and the scorched armor, the too-still quiet that's settled over them.

It’s Depa. She’s the one blocking his vision.

She’s speaking, but he can’t tell what she’s saying. The buzzing grows louder, louder, louder—

Blaster smoke fills his lungs as he gasps and she grabs his arms, helping him sit.

“They’re– they’re– they’re all turning—“

She crushes him in a hug, forcing him to focus on breathing, on the way the phantoms of shots already fired still linger in his ears, on a smoke-stained iron odor filling his nose.

Hunter nods. It takes another minute to remind his vocal cords that he is, in fact, something like a witch, rather than just the wood he’d been once. “I would with Willow, of course, but…but she’s…it’s harder. To get her to understand.”

“Yeah.” Amity sighs. “Like, I love Luz too, and of course I love Camila and Eda and Dad, but it’s hard to explain stuff she did that wasn’t even textbook bad? Or at least it’s harder to explain that to Luz than, well, to you.”

Sam has been a tool of the empire for a long time now, and until recently, he hasn’t minded.

So why should it be this specific instance, this specific revelation, that threatens to upend him?

“Bailey? Did you find any—oh. You’re, ah, cryin’.”

Scratch that. He already is upended; this is just the aftermath.

Amity blinks in surprise, tail lashing as her eyes narrow. “A bodyguard?” she echoes. “Your Highness, why is your…guard speaking so freely?”

He’d approached Daisy, then, her vision more pastel than she’d remembered it being before (and also swaying, slightly; she’d written that off as just disorientation) and bent down, just enough to meet her eyes. “I do hope you’ll at least keep any rodents out of the Archives, hm? Or at the least any insects. We’ve had problems with that in the past, as I’m sure you remember.”

He’d winked, then—winked, the bastard!—and straightened, inclining his head behind her.

“We’ll do it properly,” half of the thing from the circus—couriers, he’d called them, why couldn’t she recall their name?—had said.

The fae in charge of the court leans forward on its garish throne, eyes still as blank as he remembers as it laughs harder, mouth still as static as it was all those years ago. “What do you mean you want Sasha back! You already have Sasha back!”

“I’m not a fucking idiot,” Tim snarls. “That thing in her house is not Sasha. Nor has it ever been Sasha.”

It tilts its head, smile still frozen-painted-carved as wide as ever. “It’s the real Sasha! Didn’t you want the real Sasha back?”

“You made me come down all those damn stairs for a corpse?” Melanie makes a noise of disgust, but Basira hears her footsteps’ approach behind her all the same. “Georgie, are you getting anything?”

“Uh, one moment.” Basira takes the torch passed back to her from Georgie, watching as she raises a hand towards the body. “Safe.”

Basira passes the torch back before approaching the body herself. Crouching, she frowns down at—what she’d thought—were ropes around the arms. “Tied with strips of cloth. Seems like he did it him—“

A hand grabs her wrist.

She finds herself disappointed to let out a small gasp of alarm, barely stopping from dropping the torch. Shaking faintly, she follows the hand back up the arm of the creature, and to the head—

The corpse is staring at her with glowing eyes.

They’re a sickly viridian, and despite the flickering of the torchlight, their shine doesn’t waver.

She can’t break her gaze away from them.

“Georgie, I thought you said it was safe!” she hears Melanie hiss, as if from underwater.

“Whatever it is, it’s not undead!”

“Regardless of your doubt, you will be fine.” Elias sighs, massaging his temples. “You’ll still be doing some amount of cataloging, anyway; we prefer to keep our primary sources on file. And I’m sure that Mr. Stoker and Ms. James would be happy to show you the ropes. Now. Any genuine concerns?”

“I’ve never even fired a gun,” Jon says, voice small, in a last-ditch attempt. Elias only levels him with an unimpressed stare.

“See you soon, boss,” Tim had smirked, squeezing fondly. Despite himself, Jon had smiled in return.

“Only if you don’t call me that.”

As he’d headed to the lifts, Tim had called after him, “No can do, boss! Gotta remind you you’re in charge now.”

Jon had met Rosie outside the elevator, and had followed her into the Archives. He’d been a bit miffed to have the rumors confirmed that the lifts in the Institute didn’t go all the way to the basement. Something to do with interference from things in Artefact Storage, if the rumors were true on that front, too. Rosie had neatly sidestepped further questions about it, instead pointing out that there was a small exterior door at the top of the stairs down to the Archives, so Jon and his assistants could use that during the workday if needed.

“Once someone’s in here to open it up, at least,” she’d added, smiling in a way that Jon figured was probably meant as an attempt to ease his—likely visible—growing distaste. “No handle on the outside. For security reasons, of course.”

“Fighting the geas more than usual, hm? I thought you’d learned by now that was use—“

“Fighting against the damn bruised rib, Elias!” Jon regrets it almost immediately, gasping as his chest protests further, but at least Tim or Martin—or, gods forbid, Sasha—isn’t here to bring the migraine back. This time, he only has to fight one source of nausea.

“I can’t honestly tell you I’m sorry, Jonathan, but I do wish it hadn’t come quite to this ext—“

“Bull…shit.” He glares at Elias. “If so you would’ve– you would’ve—“

Thursday morning comes, and with it, the third of Jon’s panic attacks related to the Meeting With Tim.

They’d started the same day he’d texted Tim, agreeing to meet—so really, he’s the only one to blame for this, because he could have just said no, or not answered, or hell, even blocked Tim’s new number as Tim had with his old one—but he’d met with Laverne Wednesday afternoon, only an hour after the second of the panic attacks, and she’d talked him out of texting Tim to call the whole thing off, and told him several platitudes about how brave he was for moving on and trying to reconnect with old friends, with people he’d lost to Elias contact with, and he’d believed himself to be all that she said and more, and capable of doing it, besides.

Now, of course, in the light of the morning on a day when he hasn’t just had the therapist equivalent of a pep talk, he’s able to see the truth.

He can’t do it.

He can’t.

“You’re Silco's daughter?” Caitlyn says at last, and Vi can’t deny the smothering, angry loss she feels at the question. Powder is not Silco’s anything, she is Vi’s and their parents’ and Vander’s and Ekko’s—

“Yep,” she says, and Vi can’t breathe, not with the way Powder pops the p in something that feels like acid splashed against Vi’s ribs. She can’t move as Powder turns, one of the braids slapping against the spandrel with the momentum as she slings an arm around Vi’s shoulder. “And Violet here is my lovely sister. But Silco’s not her dad. Funny how that works out, huh?”

“Powder,” Vi says, voice wounded animal-soft, “we really need to go now, okay? I’ll explain everything to you once we’re—”

“Her name is not Powder.”

Vi feels everything within her seize up, even as she turns, as if caught in a slow nightmare. Silco makes his way down the staircase, lip curled into a sneer as he adjusts the cuff of his sleeve.

Jinx immediately drops her boots from the desk and scoots her chair closer. She leans closer, propping her chin up with a hand. “So. I can go now, yeah? Now that the resident ogre’s gone?”

Vara clucks in disapproval, and Jinx's gaze snaps to her. The jay on her shoulder looks up, too, claws tightening slightly. Jinx doesn’t seem to notice the way the tips of them dig further into her skin.

“You two are still grounded, Jinx.” Silco leans back against his chair with a sigh. “Speaking of—which will it be today? Name-wise?”

Jinx casts an uncertain glance at her dæmon. “I dunno, she hasn’t even told me—“

“Powder,” the jay says, readjusting her wings. “I’m Powder.”

The crooning sound that comes from deep in Vara’s throat isn’t unfamiliar to him, but it’s certainly not a common one. The raven takes a step forward, and Powder flutters down from Jinx’s shoulder to meet her. Just as she hits the desk, she’s a fish crow, still smaller than Vara but much closer in appearance. Vara smooths her bill over a few ruffled feathers on Powder’s back, and Jinx finally manages to tear her gaze away to look him in the eye then.

“You should still be able to make it up to him, somehow. I mean, it’s not honorable to expect you to do the impossible—”

“Mandalorian honor is different from Sith honor,” Leia scoffs, crossing her arms and turning away. “It’s not something you’d understand.”

Helping. Yes. Luz can help. She can find his…his staff.

Like a wizard staff?

She gets to her feet, sketchbook dropped haphazardly on the crooked old steps, because as much as she loves her movie!Azura redesign—come on, the latest book had mentioned her dress being the same shade as Hecate’s cloak at least six times, how hard was that to miss?!—her brain is finally catching up with the events around her—notably that this is a portal, an actual, real-life portal, and she’s going to help this boy from another actual world, and then maybe he’ll offer to show her around his world in thanks, and—

To give Tristan some sign that he isn’t…what? That he isn’t a kept dog for the Empire? That Fourteen isn’t a weapon to point and shoot, destroying everything in his wake that’s so much as implied to be a mission objective?

He wonders if this is how it had felt to the Jedi in Nur’s butterfly case facsimile, in the brief moments alive before they were trapped, stuck with pins to the Empire’s ever-growing list of accomplishments, of names crossed out.

He’d only seen it happen once, as his master was taking him through to observe an interrogation, but once was more than enough.

Fourteen’s been stuck in those few moments before encasement and silence for years now. He doesn’t quite recall what a lack of apprehension is.

He’s so, so tired.

“What happened to you?” Tristan asks. He knows that it can’t have been more than a few seconds, but this conversation feels stuck, stuck with pins against a wall proclaiming the Empire’s holiness. Fourteen wants to tear the skin from his bones, if it will keep him from feeling this again.

Ezra shudders in his sleep, at first just a twitch before a full-blown, full-body shake, almost as if he’s trying to shed a skin that no longer quite fits but isn’t yet ready to come undone alone. Tristan finds himself fascinated, the way his attention had been magnetized to a dying bird he and Sabine had found in the woods once, too young to put it out of its misery and too old to know that it was leaving the world anyway.

Ezra isn’t having death spasms, though. He hopes.

He continues to shake, though, and Tristan reaches to touch his shoulder, biting his lip—this will help, right?—only for Ezra’s eyes to flash open then.

The gold eye, the blue eye, both stare up at the ceiling blankly, the rest of him eerily still compared to a moment ago. Tristan stands, making to leave.

Ezra grabs his wrist, grip ice and fire and death and life and burning all at once, and he’s drawn back into Ezra’s mismatched gaze again.

“You don’t want to see your own death,” he breathes out.

Tristan’s brows knit together, even as a spike of banal terror shoots across his spine, lightning quick.

Something blocks Caleb's line of sight toward the bodies. It’s blocking his line of sight to the singed helmets and the scorched armor, the too-still quiet that's settled over them.

It’s Depa. She’s the one blocking his vision.

She’s speaking, but he can’t tell what she’s saying. The buzzing grows louder, louder, louder—

Blaster smoke fills his lungs as he gasps and she grabs his arms, helping him sit.

“They’re– they’re– they’re all turning—“

She crushes him in a hug, forcing him to focus on breathing, on the way the phantoms of shots already fired still linger in his ears, on a smoke-stained iron odor filling his nose.

Hunter nods. It takes another minute to remind his vocal cords that he is, in fact, something like a witch, rather than just the wood he’d been once. “I would with Willow, of course, but…but she’s…it’s harder. To get her to understand.”

“Yeah.” Amity sighs. “Like, I love Luz too, and of course I love Camila and Eda and Dad, but it’s hard to explain stuff she did that wasn’t even textbook bad? Or at least it’s harder to explain that to Luz than, well, to you.”

Sam has been a tool of the empire for a long time now, and until recently, he hasn’t minded.

So why should it be this specific instance, this specific revelation, that threatens to upend him?

“Bailey? Did you find any—oh. You’re, ah, cryin’.”

Scratch that. He already is upended; this is just the aftermath.

He’d approached Daisy, then, her vision more pastel than she’d remembered it being before (and also swaying, slightly; she’d written that off as just disorientation) and bent down, just enough to meet her eyes. “I do hope you’ll at least keep any rodents out of the Archives, hm? Or at the least any insects. We’ve had problems with that in the past, as I’m sure you remember.”

He’d winked, then—winked, the bastard!—and straightened, inclining his head behind her.

“We’ll do it properly,” half of the thing from the circus—couriers, he’d called them, why couldn’t she recall their name?—had said.

The fae in charge of the court leans forward on its garish throne, eyes still as blank as he remembers as it laughs harder, mouth still as static as it was all those years ago. “What do you mean you want Sasha back! You already have Sasha back!”

“I’m not a fucking idiot,” Tim snarls. “That thing in her house is not Sasha. Nor has it ever been Sasha.”

It tilts its head, smile still frozen-painted-carved as wide as ever. “It’s the real Sasha! Didn’t you want the real Sasha back?”

“You made me come down all those damn stairs for a corpse?” Melanie makes a noise of disgust, but Basira hears her footsteps’ approach behind her all the same. “Georgie, are you getting anything?”

“Uh, one moment.” Basira takes the torch passed back to her from Georgie, watching as she raises a hand towards the body. “Safe.”

Basira passes the torch back before approaching the body herself. Crouching, she frowns down at—what she’d thought—were ropes around the arms. “Tied with strips of cloth. Seems like he did it him—“

A hand grabs her wrist.

She finds herself disappointed to let out a small gasp of alarm, barely stopping from dropping the torch. Shaking faintly, she follows the hand back up the arm of the creature, and to the head—

The corpse is staring at her with glowing eyes.

They’re a sickly viridian, and despite the flickering of the torchlight, their shine doesn’t waver.

She can’t break her gaze away from them.

“Georgie, I thought you said it was safe!” she hears Melanie hiss, as if from underwater.

“Whatever it is, it’s not undead!”

“Regardless of your doubt, you will be fine.” Elias sighs, massaging his temples. “You’ll still be doing some amount of cataloging, anyway; we prefer to keep our primary sources on file. And I’m sure that Mr. Stoker and Ms. James would be happy to show you the ropes. Now. Any genuine concerns?”

“I’ve never even fired a gun,” Jon says, voice small, in a last-ditch attempt. Elias only levels him with an unimpressed stare.

“See you soon, boss,” Tim had smirked, squeezing fondly. Despite himself, Jon had smiled in return.

“Only if you don’t call me that.”

As he’d headed to the lifts, Tim had called after him, “No can do, boss! Gotta remind you you’re in charge now.”

Jon had met Rosie outside the elevator, and had followed her into the Archives. He’d been a bit miffed to have the rumors confirmed that the lifts in the Institute didn’t go all the way to the basement. Something to do with interference from things in Artefact Storage, if the rumors were true on that front, too. Rosie had neatly sidestepped further questions about it, instead pointing out that there was a small exterior door at the top of the stairs down to the Archives, so Jon and his assistants could use that during the workday if needed.

“Once someone’s in here to open it up, at least,” she’d added, smiling in a way that Jon figured was probably meant as an attempt to ease his—likely visible—growing distaste. “No handle on the outside. For security reasons, of course.”

“Fighting the geas more than usual, hm? I thought you’d learned by now that was use—“

“Fighting against the damn bruised rib, Elias!” Jon regrets it almost immediately, gasping as his chest protests further, but at least Tim or Martin—or, gods forbid, Sasha—isn’t here to bring the migraine back. This time, he only has to fight one source of nausea.

“I can’t honestly tell you I’m sorry, Jonathan, but I do wish it hadn’t come quite to this ext—“

“Bull…shit.” He glares at Elias. “If so you would’ve– you would’ve—“

Thursday morning comes, and with it, the third of Jon’s panic attacks related to the Meeting With Tim.

They’d started the same day he’d texted Tim, agreeing to meet—so really, he’s the only one to blame for this, because he could have just said no, or not answered, or hell, even blocked Tim’s new number as Tim had with his old one—but he’d met with Laverne Wednesday afternoon, only an hour after the second of the panic attacks, and she’d talked him out of texting Tim to call the whole thing off, and told him several platitudes about how brave he was for moving on and trying to reconnect with old friends, with people he’d lost to Elias contact with, and he’d believed himself to be all that she said and more, and capable of doing it, besides.

Now, of course, in the light of the morning on a day when he hasn’t just had the therapist equivalent of a pep talk, he’s able to see the truth.

He can’t do it.

He can’t.

“You’re Silco's daughter?” Caitlyn says at last, and Vi can’t deny the smothering, angry loss she feels at the question. Powder is not Silco’s anything, she is Vi’s and their parents’ and Vander’s and Ekko’s—

“Yep,” she says, and Vi can’t breathe, not with the way Powder pops the p in something that feels like acid splashed against Vi’s ribs. She can’t move as Powder turns, one of the braids slapping against the spandrel with the momentum as she slings an arm around Vi’s shoulder. “And Violet here is my lovely sister. But Silco’s not her dad. Funny how that works out, huh?”

“Powder,” Vi says, voice wounded animal-soft, “we really need to go now, okay? I’ll explain everything to you once we’re—”

“Her name is not Powder.”

Vi feels everything within her seize up, even as she turns, as if caught in a slow nightmare. Silco makes his way down the staircase, lip curled into a sneer as he adjusts the cuff of his sleeve.

Jinx immediately drops her boots from the desk and scoots her chair closer. She leans closer, propping her chin up with a hand. “So. I can go now, yeah? Now that the resident ogre’s gone?”

Vara clucks in disapproval, and Jinx's gaze snaps to her. The jay on her shoulder looks up, too, claws tightening slightly. Jinx doesn’t seem to notice the way the tips of them dig further into her skin.

“You two are still grounded, Jinx.” Silco leans back against his chair with a sigh. “Speaking of—which will it be today? Name-wise?”

Jinx casts an uncertain glance at her dæmon. “I dunno, she hasn’t even told me—“

“Powder,” the jay says, readjusting her wings. “I’m Powder.”

The crooning sound that comes from deep in Vara’s throat isn’t unfamiliar to him, but it’s certainly not a common one. The raven takes a step forward, and Powder flutters down from Jinx’s shoulder to meet her. Just as she hits the desk, she’s a fish crow, still smaller than Vara but much closer in appearance. Vara smooths her bill over a few ruffled feathers on Powder’s back, and Jinx finally manages to tear her gaze away to look him in the eye then.

“You should still be able to make it up to him, somehow. I mean, it’s not honorable to expect you to do the impossible—”

“Mandalorian honor is different from Sith honor,” Leia scoffs, crossing her arms and turning away. “It’s not something you’d understand.”

Helping. Yes. Luz can help. She can find his…his staff.

Like a wizard staff?

She gets to her feet, sketchbook dropped haphazardly on the crooked old steps, because as much as she loves her movie!Azura redesign—come on, the latest book had mentioned her dress being the same shade as Hecate’s cloak at least six times, how hard was that to miss?!—her brain is finally catching up with the events around her—notably that this is a portal, an actual, real-life portal, and she’s going to help this boy from another actual world, and then maybe he’ll offer to show her around his world in thanks, and—

To give Tristan some sign that he isn’t…what? That he isn’t a kept dog for the Empire? That Fourteen isn’t a weapon to point and shoot, destroying everything in his wake that’s so much as implied to be a mission objective?

He wonders if this is how it had felt to the Jedi in Nur’s butterfly case facsimile, in the brief moments alive before they were trapped, stuck with pins to the Empire’s ever-growing list of accomplishments, of names crossed out.

He’d only seen it happen once, as his master was taking him through to observe an interrogation, but once was more than enough.

Fourteen’s been stuck in those few moments before encasement and silence for years now. He doesn’t quite recall what a lack of apprehension is.

He’s so, so tired.

“What happened to you?” Tristan asks. He knows that it can’t have been more than a few seconds, but this conversation feels stuck, stuck with pins against a wall proclaiming the Empire’s holiness. Fourteen wants to tear the skin from his bones, if it will keep him from feeling this again.

Ezra shudders in his sleep, at first just a twitch before a full-blown, full-body shake, almost as if he’s trying to shed a skin that no longer quite fits but isn’t yet ready to come undone alone. Tristan finds himself fascinated, the way his attention had been magnetized to a dying bird he and Sabine had found in the woods once, too young to put it out of its misery and too old to know that it was leaving the world anyway.

Ezra isn’t having death spasms, though. He hopes.

He continues to shake, though, and Tristan reaches to touch his shoulder, biting his lip—this will help, right?—only for Ezra’s eyes to flash open then.

The gold eye, the blue eye, both stare up at the ceiling blankly, the rest of him eerily still compared to a moment ago. Tristan stands, making to leave.

Ezra grabs his wrist, grip ice and fire and death and life and burning all at once, and he’s drawn back into Ezra’s mismatched gaze again.

“You don’t want to see your own death,” he breathes out.

Tristan’s brows knit together, even as a spike of banal terror shoots across his spine, lightning quick.

Something blocks Caleb's line of sight toward the bodies. It’s blocking his line of sight to the singed helmets and the scorched armor, the too-still quiet that's settled over them.

It’s Depa. She’s the one blocking his vision.

She’s speaking, but he can’t tell what she’s saying. The buzzing grows louder, louder, louder—

Blaster smoke fills his lungs as he gasps and she grabs his arms, helping him sit.

“They’re– they’re– they’re all turning—“

She crushes him in a hug, forcing him to focus on breathing, on the way the phantoms of shots already fired still linger in his ears, on a smoke-stained iron odor filling his nose.

Hunter nods. It takes another minute to remind his vocal cords that he is, in fact, something like a witch, rather than just the wood he’d been once. “I would with Willow, of course, but…but she’s…it’s harder. To get her to understand.”

“Yeah.” Amity sighs. “Like, I love Luz too, and of course I love Camila and Eda and Dad, but it’s hard to explain stuff she did that wasn’t even textbook bad? Or at least it’s harder to explain that to Luz than, well, to you.”

He’d approached Daisy, then, her vision more pastel than she’d remembered it being before (and also swaying, slightly; she’d written that off as just disorientation) and bent down, just enough to meet her eyes. “I do hope you’ll at least keep any rodents out of the Archives, hm? Or at the least any insects. We’ve had problems with that in the past, as I’m sure you remember.”

He’d winked, then—winked, the bastard!—and straightened, inclining his head behind her.

“We’ll do it properly,” half of the thing from the circus—couriers, he’d called them, why couldn’t she recall their name?—had said.

The fae in charge of the court leans forward on its garish throne, eyes still as blank as he remembers as it laughs harder, mouth still as static as it was all those years ago. “What do you mean you want Sasha back! You already have Sasha back!”

“I’m not a fucking idiot,” Tim snarls. “That thing in her house is not Sasha. Nor has it ever been Sasha.”

It tilts its head, smile still frozen-painted-carved as wide as ever. “It’s the real Sasha! Didn’t you want the real Sasha back?”

“You made me come down all those damn stairs for a corpse?” Melanie makes a noise of disgust, but Basira hears her footsteps’ approach behind her all the same. “Georgie, are you getting anything?”

“Uh, one moment.” Basira takes the torch passed back to her from Georgie, watching as she raises a hand towards the body. “Safe.”

Basira passes the torch back before approaching the body herself. Crouching, she frowns down at—what she’d thought—were ropes around the arms. “Tied with strips of cloth. Seems like he did it him—“

A hand grabs her wrist.

She finds herself disappointed to let out a small gasp of alarm, barely stopping from dropping the torch. Shaking faintly, she follows the hand back up the arm of the creature, and to the head—

The corpse is staring at her with glowing eyes.

They’re a sickly viridian, and despite the flickering of the torchlight, their shine doesn’t waver.

She can’t break her gaze away from them.

“Georgie, I thought you said it was safe!” she hears Melanie hiss, as if from underwater.

“Whatever it is, it’s not undead!”

“Regardless of your doubt, you will be fine.” Elias sighs, massaging his temples. “You’ll still be doing some amount of cataloging, anyway; we prefer to keep our primary sources on file. And I’m sure that Mr. Stoker and Ms. James would be happy to show you the ropes. Now. Any genuine concerns?”

“I’ve never even fired a gun,” Jon says, voice small, in a last-ditch attempt. Elias only levels him with an unimpressed stare.

“See you soon, boss,” Tim had smirked, squeezing fondly. Despite himself, Jon had smiled in return.

“Only if you don’t call me that.”

As he’d headed to the lifts, Tim had called after him, “No can do, boss! Gotta remind you you’re in charge now.”

Jon had met Rosie outside the elevator, and had followed her into the Archives. He’d been a bit miffed to have the rumors confirmed that the lifts in the Institute didn’t go all the way to the basement. Something to do with interference from things in Artefact Storage, if the rumors were true on that front, too. Rosie had neatly sidestepped further questions about it, instead pointing out that there was a small exterior door at the top of the stairs down to the Archives, so Jon and his assistants could use that during the workday if needed.

“Once someone’s in here to open it up, at least,” she’d added, smiling in a way that Jon figured was probably meant as an attempt to ease his—likely visible—growing distaste. “No handle on the outside. For security reasons, of course.”

“Fighting the geas more than usual, hm? I thought you’d learned by now that was use—“

“Fighting against the damn bruised rib, Elias!” Jon regrets it almost immediately, gasping as his chest protests further, but at least Tim or Martin—or, gods forbid, Sasha—isn’t here to bring the migraine back. This time, he only has to fight one source of nausea.

“I can’t honestly tell you I’m sorry, Jonathan, but I do wish it hadn’t come quite to this ext—“

“Bull…shit.” He glares at Elias. “If so you would’ve– you would’ve—“

Thursday morning comes, and with it, the third of Jon’s panic attacks related to the Meeting With Tim.

They’d started the same day he’d texted Tim, agreeing to meet—so really, he’s the only one to blame for this, because he could have just said no, or not answered, or hell, even blocked Tim’s new number as Tim had with his old one—but he’d met with Laverne Wednesday afternoon, only an hour after the second of the panic attacks, and she’d talked him out of texting Tim to call the whole thing off, and told him several platitudes about how brave he was for moving on and trying to reconnect with old friends, with people he’d lost to Elias contact with, and he’d believed himself to be all that she said and more, and capable of doing it, besides.

Now, of course, in the light of the morning on a day when he hasn’t just had the therapist equivalent of a pep talk, he’s able to see the truth.

He can’t do it.

He can’t.

“You’re Silco's daughter?” Caitlyn says at last, and Vi can’t deny the smothering, angry loss she feels at the question. Powder is not Silco’s anything, she is Vi’s and their parents’ and Vander’s and Ekko’s—

“Yep,” she says, and Vi can’t breathe, not with the way Powder pops the p in something that feels like acid splashed against Vi’s ribs. She can’t move as Powder turns, one of the braids slapping against the spandrel with the momentum as she slings an arm around Vi’s shoulder. “And Violet here is my lovely sister. But Silco’s not her dad. Funny how that works out, huh?”

“Powder,” Vi says, voice wounded animal-soft, “we really need to go now, okay? I’ll explain everything to you once we’re—”

“Her name is not Powder.”

Vi feels everything within her seize up, even as she turns, as if caught in a slow nightmare. Silco makes his way down the staircase, lip curled into a sneer as he adjusts the cuff of his sleeve.

Jinx immediately drops her boots from the desk and scoots her chair closer. She leans closer, propping her chin up with a hand. “So. I can go now, yeah? Now that the resident ogre’s gone?”

Vara clucks in disapproval, and Jinx's gaze snaps to her. The jay on her shoulder looks up, too, claws tightening slightly. Jinx doesn’t seem to notice the way the tips of them dig further into her skin.

“You two are still grounded, Jinx.” Silco leans back against his chair with a sigh. “Speaking of—which will it be today? Name-wise?”

Jinx casts an uncertain glance at her dæmon. “I dunno, she hasn’t even told me—“

“Powder,” the jay says, readjusting her wings. “I’m Powder.”

The crooning sound that comes from deep in Vara’s throat isn’t unfamiliar to him, but it’s certainly not a common one. The raven takes a step forward, and Powder flutters down from Jinx’s shoulder to meet her. Just as she hits the desk, she’s a fish crow, still smaller than Vara but much closer in appearance. Vara smooths her bill over a few ruffled feathers on Powder’s back, and Jinx finally manages to tear her gaze away to look him in the eye then.

“You should still be able to make it up to him, somehow. I mean, it’s not honorable to expect you to do the impossible—”

“Mandalorian honor is different from Sith honor,” Leia scoffs, crossing her arms and turning away. “It’s not something you’d understand.”

Helping. Yes. Luz can help. She can find his…his staff.

Like a wizard staff?

She gets to her feet, sketchbook dropped haphazardly on the crooked old steps, because as much as she loves her movie!Azura redesign—come on, the latest book had mentioned her dress being the same shade as Hecate’s cloak at least six times, how hard was that to miss?!—her brain is finally catching up with the events around her—notably that this is a portal, an actual, real-life portal, and she’s going to help this boy from another actual world, and then maybe he’ll offer to show her around his world in thanks, and—

To give Tristan some sign that he isn’t…what? That he isn’t a kept dog for the Empire? That Fourteen isn’t a weapon to point and shoot, destroying everything in his wake that’s so much as implied to be a mission objective?

He wonders if this is how it had felt to the Jedi in Nur’s butterfly case facsimile, in the brief moments alive before they were trapped, stuck with pins to the Empire’s ever-growing list of accomplishments, of names crossed out.

He’d only seen it happen once, as his master was taking him through to observe an interrogation, but once was more than enough.

Fourteen’s been stuck in those few moments before encasement and silence for years now. He doesn’t quite recall what a lack of apprehension is.

He’s so, so tired.

“What happened to you?” Tristan asks. He knows that it can’t have been more than a few seconds, but this conversation feels stuck, stuck with pins against a wall proclaiming the Empire’s holiness. Fourteen wants to tear the skin from his bones, if it will keep him from feeling this again.

Ezra shudders in his sleep, at first just a twitch before a full-blown, full-body shake, almost as if he’s trying to shed a skin that no longer quite fits but isn’t yet ready to come undone alone. Tristan finds himself fascinated, the way his attention had been magnetized to a dying bird he and Sabine had found in the woods once, too young to put it out of its misery and too old to know that it was leaving the world anyway.

Ezra isn’t having death spasms, though. He hopes.

He continues to shake, though, and Tristan reaches to touch his shoulder, biting his lip—this will help, right?—only for Ezra’s eyes to flash open then.

The gold eye, the blue eye, both stare up at the ceiling blankly, the rest of him eerily still compared to a moment ago. Tristan stands, making to leave.

Ezra grabs his wrist, grip ice and fire and death and life and burning all at once, and he’s drawn back into Ezra’s mismatched gaze again.

“You don’t want to see your own death,” he breathes out.

Tristan’s brows knit together, even as a spike of banal terror shoots across his spine, lightning quick.

Something blocks Caleb's line of sight toward the bodies. It’s blocking his line of sight to the singed helmets and the scorched armor, the too-still quiet that's settled over them.

It’s Depa. She’s the one blocking his vision.

She’s speaking, but he can’t tell what she’s saying. The buzzing grows louder, louder, louder—

Blaster smoke fills his lungs as he gasps and she grabs his arms, helping him sit.

“They’re– they’re– they’re all turning—“

She crushes him in a hug, forcing him to focus on breathing, on the way the phantoms of shots already fired still linger in his ears, on a smoke-stained iron odor filling his nose.

He’d approached Daisy, then, her vision more pastel than she’d remembered it being before (and also swaying, slightly; she’d written that off as just disorientation) and bent down, just enough to meet her eyes. “I do hope you’ll at least keep any rodents out of the Archives, hm? Or at the least any insects. We’ve had problems with that in the past, as I’m sure you remember.”

He’d winked, then—winked, the bastard!—and straightened, inclining his head behind her.

“We’ll do it properly,” half of the thing from the circus—couriers, he’d called them, why couldn’t she recall their name?—had said.

The fae in charge of the court leans forward on its garish throne, eyes still as blank as he remembers as it laughs harder, mouth still as static as it was all those years ago. “What do you mean you want Sasha back! You already have Sasha back!”

“I’m not a fucking idiot,” Tim snarls. “That thing in her house is not Sasha. Nor has it ever been Sasha.”

It tilts its head, smile still frozen-painted-carved as wide as ever. “It’s the real Sasha! Didn’t you want the real Sasha back?”

“You made me come down all those damn stairs for a corpse?” Melanie makes a noise of disgust, but Basira hears her footsteps’ approach behind her all the same. “Georgie, are you getting anything?”

“Uh, one moment.” Basira takes the torch passed back to her from Georgie, watching as she raises a hand towards the body. “Safe.”

Basira passes the torch back before approaching the body herself. Crouching, she frowns down at—what she’d thought—were ropes around the arms. “Tied with strips of cloth. Seems like he did it him—“

A hand grabs her wrist.

She finds herself disappointed to let out a small gasp of alarm, barely stopping from dropping the torch. Shaking faintly, she follows the hand back up the arm of the creature, and to the head—

The corpse is staring at her with glowing eyes.

They’re a sickly viridian, and despite the flickering of the torchlight, their shine doesn’t waver.

She can’t break her gaze away from them.

“Georgie, I thought you said it was safe!” she hears Melanie hiss, as if from underwater.

“Whatever it is, it’s not undead!”

“Regardless of your doubt, you will be fine.” Elias sighs, massaging his temples. “You’ll still be doing some amount of cataloging, anyway; we prefer to keep our primary sources on file. And I’m sure that Mr. Stoker and Ms. James would be happy to show you the ropes. Now. Any genuine concerns?”

“I’ve never even fired a gun,” Jon says, voice small, in a last-ditch attempt. Elias only levels him with an unimpressed stare.

“See you soon, boss,” Tim had smirked, squeezing fondly. Despite himself, Jon had smiled in return.

“Only if you don’t call me that.”

As he’d headed to the lifts, Tim had called after him, “No can do, boss! Gotta remind you you’re in charge now.”

Jon had met Rosie outside the elevator, and had followed her into the Archives. He’d been a bit miffed to have the rumors confirmed that the lifts in the Institute didn’t go all the way to the basement. Something to do with interference from things in Artefact Storage, if the rumors were true on that front, too. Rosie had neatly sidestepped further questions about it, instead pointing out that there was a small exterior door at the top of the stairs down to the Archives, so Jon and his assistants could use that during the workday if needed.

“Once someone’s in here to open it up, at least,” she’d added, smiling in a way that Jon figured was probably meant as an attempt to ease his—likely visible—growing distaste. “No handle on the outside. For security reasons, of course.”

“Fighting the geas more than usual, hm? I thought you’d learned by now that was use—“

“Fighting against the damn bruised rib, Elias!” Jon regrets it almost immediately, gasping as his chest protests further, but at least Tim or Martin—or, gods forbid, Sasha—isn’t here to bring the migraine back. This time, he only has to fight one source of nausea.

“I can’t honestly tell you I’m sorry, Jonathan, but I do wish it hadn’t come quite to this ext—“

“Bull…shit.” He glares at Elias. “If so you would’ve– you would’ve—“

Thursday morning comes, and with it, the third of Jon’s panic attacks related to the Meeting With Tim.

They’d started the same day he’d texted Tim, agreeing to meet—so really, he’s the only one to blame for this, because he could have just said no, or not answered, or hell, even blocked Tim’s new number as Tim had with his old one—but he’d met with Laverne Wednesday afternoon, only an hour after the second of the panic attacks, and she’d talked him out of texting Tim to call the whole thing off, and told him several platitudes about how brave he was for moving on and trying to reconnect with old friends, with people he’d lost to Elias contact with, and he’d believed himself to be all that she said and more, and capable of doing it, besides.

Now, of course, in the light of the morning on a day when he hasn’t just had the therapist equivalent of a pep talk, he’s able to see the truth.

He can’t do it.

He can’t.

“You’re Silco's daughter?” Caitlyn says at last, and Vi can’t deny the smothering, angry loss she feels at the question. Powder is not Silco’s anything, she is Vi’s and their parents’ and Vander’s and Ekko’s—

“Yep,” she says, and Vi can’t breathe, not with the way Powder pops the p in something that feels like acid splashed against Vi’s ribs. She can’t move as Powder turns, one of the braids slapping against the spandrel with the momentum as she slings an arm around Vi’s shoulder. “And Violet here is my lovely sister. But Silco’s not her dad. Funny how that works out, huh?”

“Powder,” Vi says, voice wounded animal-soft, “we really need to go now, okay? I’ll explain everything to you once we’re—”

“Her name is not Powder.”

Vi feels everything within her seize up, even as she turns, as if caught in a slow nightmare. Silco makes his way down the staircase, lip curled into a sneer as he adjusts the cuff of his sleeve.

Jinx immediately drops her boots from the desk and scoots her chair closer. She leans closer, propping her chin up with a hand. “So. I can go now, yeah? Now that the resident ogre’s gone?”

Vara clucks in disapproval, and Jinx's gaze snaps to her. The jay on her shoulder looks up, too, claws tightening slightly. Jinx doesn’t seem to notice the way the tips of them dig further into her skin.

“You two are still grounded, Jinx.” Silco leans back against his chair with a sigh. “Speaking of—which will it be today? Name-wise?”

Jinx casts an uncertain glance at her dæmon. “I dunno, she hasn’t even told me—“

“Powder,” the jay says, readjusting her wings. “I’m Powder.”

The crooning sound that comes from deep in Vara’s throat isn’t unfamiliar to him, but it’s certainly not a common one. The raven takes a step forward, and Powder flutters down from Jinx’s shoulder to meet her. Just as she hits the desk, she’s a fish crow, still smaller than Vara but much closer in appearance. Vara smooths her bill over a few ruffled feathers on Powder’s back, and Jinx finally manages to tear her gaze away to look him in the eye then.

“You should still be able to make it up to him, somehow. I mean, it’s not honorable to expect you to do the impossible—”

“Mandalorian honor is different from Sith honor,” Leia scoffs, crossing her arms and turning away. “It’s not something you’d understand.”

Helping. Yes. Luz can help. She can find his…his staff.

Like a wizard staff?

She gets to her feet, sketchbook dropped haphazardly on the crooked old steps, because as much as she loves her movie!Azura redesign—come on, the latest book had mentioned her dress being the same shade as Hecate’s cloak at least six times, how hard was that to miss?!—her brain is finally catching up with the events around her—notably that this is a portal, an actual, real-life portal, and she’s going to help this boy from another actual world, and then maybe he’ll offer to show her around his world in thanks, and—

To give Tristan some sign that he isn’t…what? That he isn’t a kept dog for the Empire? That Fourteen isn’t a weapon to point and shoot, destroying everything in his wake that’s so much as implied to be a mission objective?

He wonders if this is how it had felt to the Jedi in Nur’s butterfly case facsimile, in the brief moments alive before they were trapped, stuck with pins to the Empire’s ever-growing list of accomplishments, of names crossed out.

He’d only seen it happen once, as his master was taking him through to observe an interrogation, but once was more than enough.

Fourteen’s been stuck in those few moments before encasement and silence for years now. He doesn’t quite recall what a lack of apprehension is.

He’s so, so tired.

“What happened to you?” Tristan asks. He knows that it can’t have been more than a few seconds, but this conversation feels stuck, stuck with pins against a wall proclaiming the Empire’s holiness. Fourteen wants to tear the skin from his bones, if it will keep him from feeling this again.

Ezra shudders in his sleep, at first just a twitch before a full-blown, full-body shake, almost as if he’s trying to shed a skin that no longer quite fits but isn’t yet ready to come undone alone. Tristan finds himself fascinated, the way his attention had been magnetized to a dying bird he and Sabine had found in the woods once, too young to put it out of its misery and too old to know that it was leaving the world anyway.

Ezra isn’t having death spasms, though. He hopes.

He continues to shake, though, and Tristan reaches to touch his shoulder, biting his lip—this will help, right?—only for Ezra’s eyes to flash open then.

The gold eye, the blue eye, both stare up at the ceiling blankly, the rest of him eerily still compared to a moment ago. Tristan stands, making to leave.

Ezra grabs his wrist, grip ice and fire and death and life and burning all at once, and he’s drawn back into Ezra’s mismatched gaze again.

“You don’t want to see your own death,” he breathes out.

Tristan’s brows knit together, even as a spike of banal terror shoots across his spine, lightning quick.

He’d approached Daisy, then, her vision more pastel than she’d remembered it being before (and also swaying, slightly; she’d written that off as just disorientation) and bent down, just enough to meet her eyes. “I do hope you’ll at least keep any rodents out of the Archives, hm? Or at the least any insects. We’ve had problems with that in the past, as I’m sure you remember.”

He’d winked, then—winked, the bastard!—and straightened, inclining his head behind her.

“We’ll do it properly,” half of the thing from the circus—couriers, he’d called them, why couldn’t she recall their name?—had said.

The fae in charge of the court leans forward on its garish throne, eyes still as blank as he remembers as it laughs harder, mouth still as static as it was all those years ago. “What do you mean you want Sasha back! You already have Sasha back!”

“I’m not a fucking idiot,” Tim snarls. “That thing in her house is not Sasha. Nor has it ever been Sasha.”

It tilts its head, smile still frozen-painted-carved as wide as ever. “It’s the real Sasha! Didn’t you want the real Sasha back?”

“You made me come down all those damn stairs for a corpse?” Melanie makes a noise of disgust, but Basira hears her footsteps’ approach behind her all the same. “Georgie, are you getting anything?”

“Uh, one moment.” Basira takes the torch passed back to her from Georgie, watching as she raises a hand towards the body. “Safe.”

Basira passes the torch back before approaching the body herself. Crouching, she frowns down at—what she’d thought—were ropes around the arms. “Tied with strips of cloth. Seems like he did it him—“

A hand grabs her wrist.

She finds herself disappointed to let out a small gasp of alarm, barely stopping from dropping the torch. Shaking faintly, she follows the hand back up the arm of the creature, and to the head—

The corpse is staring at her with glowing eyes.

They’re a sickly viridian, and despite the flickering of the torchlight, their shine doesn’t waver.

She can’t break her gaze away from them.

“Georgie, I thought you said it was safe!” she hears Melanie hiss, as if from underwater.

“Whatever it is, it’s not undead!”

“Regardless of your doubt, you will be fine.” Elias sighs, massaging his temples. “You’ll still be doing some amount of cataloging, anyway; we prefer to keep our primary sources on file. And I’m sure that Mr. Stoker and Ms. James would be happy to show you the ropes. Now. Any genuine concerns?”

“I’ve never even fired a gun,” Jon says, voice small, in a last-ditch attempt. Elias only levels him with an unimpressed stare.

“See you soon, boss,” Tim had smirked, squeezing fondly. Despite himself, Jon had smiled in return.

“Only if you don’t call me that.”

As he’d headed to the lifts, Tim had called after him, “No can do, boss! Gotta remind you you’re in charge now.”

Jon had met Rosie outside the elevator, and had followed her into the Archives. He’d been a bit miffed to have the rumors confirmed that the lifts in the Institute didn’t go all the way to the basement. Something to do with interference from things in Artefact Storage, if the rumors were true on that front, too. Rosie had neatly sidestepped further questions about it, instead pointing out that there was a small exterior door at the top of the stairs down to the Archives, so Jon and his assistants could use that during the workday if needed.

“Once someone’s in here to open it up, at least,” she’d added, smiling in a way that Jon figured was probably meant as an attempt to ease his—likely visible—growing distaste. “No handle on the outside. For security reasons, of course.”

“Fighting the geas more than usual, hm? I thought you’d learned by now that was use—“

“Fighting against the damn bruised rib, Elias!” Jon regrets it almost immediately, gasping as his chest protests further, but at least Tim or Martin—or, gods forbid, Sasha—isn’t here to bring the migraine back. This time, he only has to fight one source of nausea.

“I can’t honestly tell you I’m sorry, Jonathan, but I do wish it hadn’t come quite to this ext—“

“Bull…shit.” He glares at Elias. “If so you would’ve– you would’ve—“

Thursday morning comes, and with it, the third of Jon’s panic attacks related to the Meeting With Tim.

They’d started the same day he’d texted Tim, agreeing to meet—so really, he’s the only one to blame for this, because he could have just said no, or not answered, or hell, even blocked Tim’s new number as Tim had with his old one—but he’d met with Laverne Wednesday afternoon, only an hour after the second of the panic attacks, and she’d talked him out of texting Tim to call the whole thing off, and told him several platitudes about how brave he was for moving on and trying to reconnect with old friends, with people he’d lost to Elias contact with, and he’d believed himself to be all that she said and more, and capable of doing it, besides.

Now, of course, in the light of the morning on a day when he hasn’t just had the therapist equivalent of a pep talk, he’s able to see the truth.

He can’t do it.

He can’t.

“You’re Silco's daughter?” Caitlyn says at last, and Vi can’t deny the smothering, angry loss she feels at the question. Powder is not Silco’s anything, she is Vi’s and their parents’ and Vander’s and Ekko’s—

“Yep,” she says, and Vi can’t breathe, not with the way Powder pops the p in something that feels like acid splashed against Vi’s ribs. She can’t move as Powder turns, one of the braids slapping against the spandrel with the momentum as she slings an arm around Vi’s shoulder. “And Violet here is my lovely sister. But Silco’s not her dad. Funny how that works out, huh?”

“Powder,” Vi says, voice wounded animal-soft, “we really need to go now, okay? I’ll explain everything to you once we’re—”

“Her name is not Powder.”

Vi feels everything within her seize up, even as she turns, as if caught in a slow nightmare. Silco makes his way down the staircase, lip curled into a sneer as he adjusts the cuff of his sleeve.

Jinx immediately drops her boots from the desk and scoots her chair closer. She leans closer, propping her chin up with a hand. “So. I can go now, yeah? Now that the resident ogre’s gone?”

Vara clucks in disapproval, and Jinx's gaze snaps to her. The jay on her shoulder looks up, too, claws tightening slightly. Jinx doesn’t seem to notice the way the tips of them dig further into her skin.

“You two are still grounded, Jinx.” Silco leans back against his chair with a sigh. “Speaking of—which will it be today? Name-wise?”

Jinx casts an uncertain glance at her dæmon. “I dunno, she hasn’t even told me—“

“Powder,” the jay says, readjusting her wings. “I’m Powder.”

The crooning sound that comes from deep in Vara’s throat isn’t unfamiliar to him, but it’s certainly not a common one. The raven takes a step forward, and Powder flutters down from Jinx’s shoulder to meet her. Just as she hits the desk, she’s a fish crow, still smaller than Vara but much closer in appearance. Vara smooths her bill over a few ruffled feathers on Powder’s back, and Jinx finally manages to tear her gaze away to look him in the eye then.

“You should still be able to make it up to him, somehow. I mean, it’s not honorable to expect you to do the impossible—”

“Mandalorian honor is different from Sith honor,” Leia scoffs, crossing her arms and turning away. “It’s not something you’d understand.”

Helping. Yes. Luz can help. She can find his…his staff.

Like a wizard staff?

She gets to her feet, sketchbook dropped haphazardly on the crooked old steps, because as much as she loves her movie!Azura redesign—come on, the latest book had mentioned her dress being the same shade as Hecate’s cloak at least six times, how hard was that to miss?!—her brain is finally catching up with the events around her—notably that this is a portal, an actual, real-life portal, and she’s going to help this boy from another actual world, and then maybe he’ll offer to show her around his world in thanks, and—

To give Tristan some sign that he isn’t…what? That he isn’t a kept dog for the Empire? That Fourteen isn’t a weapon to point and shoot, destroying everything in his wake that’s so much as implied to be a mission objective?

He wonders if this is how it had felt to the Jedi in Nur’s butterfly case facsimile, in the brief moments alive before they were trapped, stuck with pins to the Empire’s ever-growing list of accomplishments, of names crossed out.

He’d only seen it happen once, as his master was taking him through to observe an interrogation, but once was more than enough.

Fourteen’s been stuck in those few moments before encasement and silence for years now. He doesn’t quite recall what a lack of apprehension is.

He’s so, so tired.

“What happened to you?” Tristan asks. He knows that it can’t have been more than a few seconds, but this conversation feels stuck, stuck with pins against a wall proclaiming the Empire’s holiness. Fourteen wants to tear the skin from his bones, if it will keep him from feeling this again.