#wormscarred

graham, one of the nicest (he care u...) but also one of the most annoying (those Got Fish To Catch and Married To An Accountant shirts...) dad figures. do u accept the duality of a halfway decent dad figure, tim

“Alright, Tim?” No, clearly he wasn’t alright, but there was no need for Elias to cause further panic by fluttering around his employees flapping his hands and weeping -- as if he were capable of such theatrics. “I’ve told Jon to go home once already, but... I doubt that he will, and he’ll likely be coming around for a statement, sooner rather than later. I’ll do my best to head him off, but I don’t know what good it will do.” Slowly, he seated himself beside the bench in a free chair, pressing his fingertips together. It was unfortunate that Tim had found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time; he could have been like Martin, gotten separated from the Archivist in the tunnels, but he hadn’t, and thus would be bearing these scars alongside Jon.

“Lovely to see you again, Mister Stoker. How was your trip?” Elias had pushed for more relaxed gardening techniques on the tower grounds; the northwestern Temple of Beholding had such carefully-cultivated gardens, with geometric lawn designs and neat rows of bursting flowers, but Elias had argued that allowing things to grow more naturally instead of clipping away constantly at what plants they introduced would encourage diversity -- and, therefore, there would be more to observe. He liked inviting guests into the garden to see what they gravitated towards. Would it be the foxglove? The oleander? Or perhaps the azalea? Perhaps he would press a few flowers to send with Jon on his journey. To remind him of home.

(but yes thank you for saying this bc uh otherwise i would’ve just Suffered <3 ilu)

His stomach swooped a bit. Again, that word! It made his scalp prickle in the worst way, but he couldn’t stop it. There was so much to consider regarding the future: Tim’s continued compliance as this, Tim’s potential compliance once it was fixed, ice cream-- oh, that was a more immediate concern. It held the potential of spoiling dinner... why was this his problem, again? He was supposed to be in his office at the institute, draining fear from his visitors and employees alike, sitting pleased as punch like a dragon atop his hoard of knowledge. Yet he had dedicated more than a few Eyes to making sure that he kept tabs on Tim wherever he was ( and had given in to working at home after he realized that his hovering Gaze was too little and the full press of the Eye too much when it came to stopping a rambunctious child from getting into his things and potential harming himself ), and the face he was pulling really did demand his attention. Elias’s expression didn’t shift once as he thought of all this, and he folded his glasses, tucked them into his breast pocket, and swung around in his chair to face Tim. “I believe you’ve already had your answer, Tim,” he said, plucking the memory of Aaron’s denial from the surface of his mind. “It was a good attempt, though. Better luck next time, hm?”

“No, Tim, you’re not.” He paused on the threshold, adjusting his tie. Risks and rewards, the scales teetered constantly in the back of his mind. Over the centuries, he’d become very good at making snap comparisons, weighing everything out with one half of his attention while the other focused on what was in front of him. Tim was becoming quite powerful in his own right; from floors away, Elias could smell the smoke that rolled off of him, the nose-tingling stench of melting wax and charred bone. Having an avatar of the Desolation to guard him would likely have eased his mind about this meeting with Dominguez, in which he would be explaining in no uncertain terms that he’d had nothing to do with Maxwell’s untimely demise. After all, who was Elias to prevent a fellow avatar from transferring its consciousness from one body to another? They wouldn’t believe him right away, though, and in that situation, a good fire might have come in handy. It was, however, known as the Lightless Flame. It did not seek to illuminate, but to consume. Even if it could pierce the Dark, Elias didn’t know if it would choose to. And Tim, young as he was in relation to his powers... was more a liability than anything. “You are going to stay here, and continue working.”

“We’ll discuss it later.” His white-knuckle grip on the wheel didn’t ease any at Tim’s apology, and he continued to stare fixedly at the road ahead of them, following as closely behind the ambulance as the law allowed. If he lost them, it would be a relatively simple thing to find them again, but he didn’t want to be too far from Jon until he was safely in a hospital bed, with air being pumped into him. Oh, he sensed brain activity from here, but everything else was absent; he knew even without the Eye telling him that he was going to have to twist a few arms ( and minds ) at the hospital to convince them not to pull the plug on a patient with no heartbeat or respiratory function. Tim... would probably need to be checked over for appearance’s sake, but it was going to do any good. He smelled like melting plastic and wax, and Elias rolled down a third window to filter the stench out of his car. Desolation. He couldn’t have it in the archives.