Chapter Text
The door appears as Gerard Keay is dying. It is perfectly normal with its surplus of edges and doorknobs, and bright, mustard yellow. It appears on the ceiling above Gerard's hospital bed, swinging open with an echoing creak. The door sways, hinges squeaking a grating, maddening sound, until it finally stills, wide open, a few feet above Gerard's head. The room is annoyingly bright, and yet none of the light reaches the doorway. Past it, the darkness is thick and unmoving, almost as if painted.
For a very long time, there's only the sound of rushed footsteps and hushed voices that never actually form any words, the steady beeping of a machine far away, and the gentle swaying of the door, as if due to some non-existent draught. The nurse with the flickering eyes and too many teeth doesn't mention the door, so Gerard doesn't either. He lets his eyelids drop, and waits for the Entities' game to be over.
He only opens his eyes again when it's time for another barely edible meal, to find that the door is gone. He eats his dinner, jokes with the nurses, and tosses in the hospital bed for most of the night. Nothing else happens.
Except, that is, for that Gerard doesn't die. Doctors and specialists probe and test and examine him over and over again, rubbing their eyes and joining their hands, declaring a miracle if they've ever seen one. They tell him that the tumor dissolved on it's own, and that they wouldn't believe it had ever been there at all, if it weren't for the scans that document it. A chubby, stern faced oncologist tells him she thinks she will go mad trying to figure it out. Gerard can't help but wince at the choice of words. He decides to check up on her, at some point, if he gets the chance. Just to be safe.
Gertrude takes him home, and it is a completely silent drive.
He doesn't think about the door. Infact, he's almost convinced himself he'd imagined it, when his bedroom gains another door. It is yellow and shiny, there for just a short while before Gerard blinks and it disappears.
Doors appear more often, after that. They stay closed at first, just odd yellow shapes on the walls of his apartment or the halls of the archives. Gertrude hands him a stack of statements when he tells her, and warns him to always double check any door he walks through. He scoffs at that, and tells her he isn't an amateur, as he leaves her office through a regular black door with a broken handle. A yellow and flickering one waits for him at the hall. It's not doing a very good impression of a regular door, he reckons. If that's the best it can do, it will have to wait a very long time until Gerard's so far gone as to open it out of his own volition.
The doors don't stop appearing. They're always yellow, and the air around them seems to turn heavier, but they always stay closed. It's weird, this whole thing. According to every statement filed under "doors", "the Distortion", or "the Spiral", whatever Monster or Avatar is doing this is usually more aggressive than that. Not that he's complaining; he'll take a bunch of closed doors over avatars of the Slaughter any time, but it does eat at him. It's too... Tame? Too subtle? It breaks the usual pattern without escalating in intensity, and that puts him in edge more than the usual tactics of the Spiral ever could. He really doesn't appreciate being toyed with.
Then the doors begin to creak open. An inch, at first, then a full swing that crashes into the wall behind it with force at every odd hour of the night. Gerard begins to understand how this is meant to drive one mad.
He does the only thing he can do, and ignores it. His already fucked sleep schedule gets worse, and he gradually becomes even grouchier than before, but that's about it. The doors don't seem to want to do more than annoy him, and, well, Gerard's dealt with worse. He plays heavy metal at full volume during the day and wears earplugs during the night, and he endures.
One day, the door creaks open just enough for two long, sharp fingers to wrap around the doorway. They look rubbery, somehow, like they'd stretch if he were to pull on them, and they flicker, like lights, leaving phantom shapes in neon colors when they go. They trace the yellow wooden doorframe for a few minutes, and then they're gone. The door crashes open once again, and all Gerard can see is the opaque blackness he's gotten used to.
The fingers don't appear every single time. When they do, they're... Dancing. He doesn't know why that's the word that pops into his mind, it's more like shifting really, like rippling water, but, you know... fingers. He thinks it might be the bright rotating shapes that replace them if he looks at them too hard; it reminds him of bad acid during a rave. They mimic legs, sometimes, an over exaggerated, playful kind of walk, and Gerard knows beyond doubt that whatever creature the fingers connect to is looking for his reaction. He resolves to never giving it what it wants.
Eventually, the fingers turn into one searching hand, and then an arm, skinny and long and bendy at all the wrong places.
Gerard is decidedly not a patient man. When the arm strokes the wall languidly from where it's appeared in the corner of his kitchen for the third time that month, he decides he's getting quite sick of it.
"You could just come out." He shouts at the door.
And the thing does. It is long, and thin, and shifting before his very eyes. And... It has Michael Shelley's face. His? Its? curly blond hair is longer than before, moving in hundrets of golden spirals, and it's head is cocked to the side, amused. Gerard stumbles back reflexively, his back hitting the kitchen counter.
"Hello, Mr. Keay." It says, and its voice sounds like different voices layered over each other, each turned to a different pitch.
"Michael ?" He asks.
"A little, yes." It replies. It's smiling.
"What does that mean?"
"Are you your left leg, Mr. Keay?" It points to its own leg, the right one, and it seems to twist 360 degrees. Then again, if he unfocuses his eyes, all of it seems to be twisting in some capacity.
Gerry exhales sharply. "Sure. Yeah, okay. What do you want?"
"Ooohhh! What a simple question. I want... To change the world! Mhm, yes."
Gerard scoffs. "That's terribly human of you." He says.
The thing laughs. It's a terrible laugh. "You insult me so." It sings.
"What do you want with me?" Gerard demands.
"Hmm. You are interesting." It replies, inhuman eyes glittering. "Michael liked you." It adds.
His voice sounds awfully desperate when he speaks again. "Is he gone?" He breathes shakily.
The creature that looks like Michael but isn't nods. "He is. As much as I am. But, of course. I am, and so is he."
He doesn't attack it with the steak knife just an arm's length away from him, though he barely holds back the urge. Instead, he does something far worse. "Can I get him back?" He asks.
There's a reason Gerard's survived as far as he has, and that is that he's not a fucking idiot. He knows better than to offer up his weaknesses on a silver platter for the Entities and their monsters. He knows that he can't go about betraying his motivations and his triggers like that, damn it, but he does it anyway, because underneath all the horror and the strange, it is Michael Shelley's face looking back at him and raising his eyebrows at the crack in his voice. He'd- He should've made it out.
"Back from what?" It asks playfully.
Gerard steadies his voice and meets its eyes. At least he thinks he does. It's hard to know. "From whatever you've done to him." He says carefully.
"I am him, Mr Keay." It chuckles.
"Like hell you are." He snaps.
"Oh! Yes, actually."
Gerard grunts in frustration. Gertrude had said Michael had left the archives of his own volition, and like an idiot, he'd believed her. It'd given him hope, for a while. Not for him, obviously, the only thing he could hope for at this point was a permanent death, but for other people. People like Michael , whose only crime was being too close to people like Gertrude.
He hadn't talked to him too much, but he remembers he was caring, and the endearing kind of awkward. He'd given him a lift, once, after a particularly close encounter with the Hunt, despite Gertrude's objections. The man blushed as he flirted with him, for fucks sake. He didn't deserve being made into a monster.
"What happened to Michael Shelley? The real one, before he was you. " He tries.
The thing sways. "Gertrude Robinson sacrificed him. So that he may be me, and I may be him." It tells him. It sounds regretful. Sorrowful, in a messed up, monstrous way.
"Gertrude? Why would she do that?"
"I had a purpose before, Mr. Keay. I would create. I was so close, to becoming. And then Gertrude gave Michael a map, and he followed it. He did not get twisted as he walked through the great twisting, but rather, he became it. He became me. And I became him." It says.
"She used him to stop the Ritual."
"Michael had a purpose too." It continues. "To stop me from being. And now we are one. I do not want to be Michael . But I am stuck. I fill my hallways twisted fear and it is not enough. It will never be enough. I want more."
"Because Michael wants more."
"He has ruined me."
"So what does Michael want?"
The thing sighs. "I am Michael ." It says in a tone that reminds him a bit too much of Gertrude, ironically. He has to resist the urge to roll his eyes.
"Fine. What do you want?"
"I want... For the whole world to be not what it is, and to be afraid."
"But it's not enough, is it? You want something else." He pushes.
"Yes." It purrs.
"What?"
The thing laughs, and laughs, and laughs, and then it is gone.
It shows up again after a month. The doors don't stop appearing in the meantime, but they mostly stay closed. When Michael appears again, it walks through a normal looking yellow door in the wall of his living room.
"Hello Mr. Keay." It greets. It hurts Gerard's eyes just to look at the cacophony of colour that is its body.
"Fuck off." He spits.
The Distortion laughs.
"What's funny." He grumbles. He's had a ruthless headache for the past day, and the sound of its laugh scrapes at the inside of his scull.
"How are you?" It asks, moving itself over to the TV, and siting on top of it. Surprisingly, it doesn't fall of the wall.
"Really? Small talk?"
Michael only looks at him expectantly.
"I have a bitch of a headache." He says after a while, because why the hell not.
"You are mean." Michael frowns. It looks ill-fitting on its features.
"Says the embodiment of evil." He replies.
Maybe he should be more polite to said embodiment of evil, now that imminent death is no longer on the cards for him (probably), but his head really is killing him.
Michael hums. "Am I evil? Am I evil just because my very nature frightens you?"
"You don't frighten me."
It laughs again. "No, no I don't." It confirms. "Why is that?"
"There are worse things than going mad." He says.
"That's not all I can do, Mr. Keay. Would you like me to show you?"
He really should be afraid, shouldn't he?
"I'll pass." He replies.
Michael sighs and hops down from the TV.
"Very well." It chimes and then it lunges, moving towards Gerard like water out of a water pistol, and before he can blink its face is hovering inches above his, face stretched into an unsettling smile of stained teeth. Blond, twisting spirals spill down its shoulders and over its face; a rippling curtain preventing Gerard from shifting his attention to anything other than the swirling, monstrous eyes locked onto his. It drags the point of a single, too-sharp finger across his skin, from the contour of his cheek to the apple of his cheekbone, to the delicate skin beneath his eye, coloured deep purple by exhaustion. For one frightening moment, Gerard's sure it will dig in, gouge it out.
It never does. It traces the bridge of his nose, and rests the pad of his fingertip in between his brows, eyes filled to the brim with too-human emotions.
"There!" It exclaims, and it's in front of him again, looking at him like it's waiting for something. It takes Gerard a few seconds to register the absence of pain.
He rolls his neck experimentally "Uhh. Thanks, I guess." He says.
"Hm. You're welcome." It beams.
"How'd you do that?"
Michael laughs. "It's what I do, Mr. Keay. I can make your mind feel all sorts of things." It explains. Its eyes fall to the mess on the crate that Gerard passes as a coffee table, and it begins to hum. It's an almost familiar melody, off just by a few notes that throw him off every time he thinks he might be able to place it. It picks up a discarded statement, and skewers it on its pinky finger.
It's not quite a threat, but it's close enough. It watches through the corner of its eye for his reaction. He's so fucking tired of the entities and their games. He hates that at the core of every fear lies a crippling sense of helplessness, the knowledge that you can never escape them.
I can make your mind feel all sorts of things.
He might not feel frightened, but his body is littered with reasons to be. Every one of his scars vibrates at Michael 's almost-song, and he hates, above all else, that it's making him wait for the pain.
"Go fucking ahead then." He snaps. "Make me hurt." He stands on shaky legs, fists curled tight around nothing.
Michael stills. "I don't want to hurt you." It replies, voice tight, as if it hates to admit it.
Gerard scoffs. "Surely the Throat of Lies can come up with something more convincing. Try again."
"Ah." Michael sighs. "Why would I? When the distress the truth causes you is so sweet?"
Another deception. "This is enough then?" He asks.
Michael huffs a bitter laugh. "Is there ever enough water for a glass with a fractured bottom?"
Gerard swallows. Michael leans towards him. "Nothing will ever be enough." It sneeres. "You understand what that's like, don't you, Mr. Keay?"
"Yeah." He croaks. "I understand."
It disappears behind its door the very next second, and Gerard falls onto the sofa. He doesn't see it again for a long time.
A yellow door opens in the archives only once, just enough for Michael to walk out of it and stand off to the corner with a tight expression the entire time, as Gerard tries to make sense of Gertrude's non-existent filing system. It doesn't answer any question with a real answer, and it keeps trying to pry the files from Gerard's hands. Eventually, it disappears within the hallways, leaving behind only its door and the overwhelming sense that something is not as it should be. The statements have all been made wrong when Gerard checks them afterwards, words jumbled up and changed until it's hard to believe they had ever made sense at all.
Michael takes offence the next time it rises out of his floor and he accuses it of having done it on purpose. It makes some kind of comment about things that aren't and things that are but have not been, the chasm between them or the lack there of.
Gerard only nods along to appease it. He reasons that if anything truly important existed in those statements, Gertrude wouldn't have left them to him, and doesn't spend any time wandering about it.
The next time Michael appears, Gerard's sitting on the toilet, dressed in only a towel, hair still wet from the shower, smoking a joint that will do nothing for his nerves. It cascades down from the door that has replaced his bathroom mirror like one of those colorful springs he's seen kids play with on stairs. He remembers finding them mesmerizing, even if he never actually got to play with one. Maybe he can go get one, if Michael doesn't kill him that day. Just for the hell of it.
"You know, you're supposed to knock before entering an occupied bathroom." He jokes.
Michael watches him for a second, then actually disappears behind its door, only to knock twice from the other side. Gerard can't help barking a laugh. Fuck he's high.
"Come in." He calls, and Michael does. Confusion looks weird on it. Gerard laughs again, and Michael stares.
"How are you today, Michael ?" He asks.
It rolls it's head. "Bored." It growls with a flash of teeth. Gerard huffs through his nose.
"You smoke?"
Michael examines the offered joint curiously, before nodding excitedly and plucking it out of his hand, fingers twisting oddly to grab it, then bringing it to its mouth and... Eating it. Still lit and half finished. Filter and all.
Gerard winces. "No, dude, ughhh." It was good stuff too, gone too soon.
Michael has the nerve to look apologetic. He'd feel bad for it, if he wasn't intensely aware that it could probably eat him in much the same way.
"I'm sorry." It says softly.
Gerard digs his thumbs into his eyes. "It's fine." He tells it. "Should probably cut down on it anyway."
He holds on to the towel on his waist, very much aware of his vulnerability as he stands to open the door. Michael steps to the side to let him pass and lingers uncomfortably close.
"Um. Do you... Eat?" He asks.
"All things must feed, Mr. Keay. Even me." It responds, amusement evident.
"Right. Are we talking real food too, or just the screams of the innocent."
Michael laughs. "I do so hate it when they scream." It says.
He fights the urge to recoil. "So pizza? Burgers? Mexican?" He tries. Michael sighs, and very purposefully doesn't respond.
It trails behind him as he moves to the living room, picking a shirt and some trousers from the abundance of laundry currently accumulated on the sofa and pulling them on quickly. He throws the towel on the floor, and searches for his phone amidst the pile. He exclaims triumphantly when he locates it between the pillows, and collapses in the corner of the sofa, still wet hair draped over the back.
He feels the sofa dip a second later, as Michael sits on the other side. It sits crosslegged, bending it's knees experimentally, as if for the very first time. It looks at Gerard like he's the most fascinating thing in the world.
He wouldn't know what to do with that if he was sober, so he orders two pizzas from his phone, and stays silent. He does remember to choose the no-contact drop off option, just in case Michael is more in the mood for people's sanity rather than Mama's special. It'd be a shame if he had to switch spots because it drove the delivery guy mad.
When he looks up from his phone, Michael is still rearranging its limbs in vaguely unsettling ways. Without thinking, he turns to it and asks: "What are you?"
Michael pauses its shifting to frown. It seems mildly annoyed at the question. "What I am cannot be spoken aloud. There are no words for it." It tells him. After a while, it shrugs. "I suppose you could say that I am that for which there are no words. That which isn't and that which is but should not be."
He's not even mad at that answer. It kind of makes sense. Probably a sign he's going mad, now that he thinks about it.
"You serve the Spiral?"
Michael lets out a soft noise of consideration. "I am a note off its strings." It declares finally.
"But you're Michael too." He thinks out loud. "So you're a little bit human, too, right?"
"Would it please you if I was?"
"I don't really care." He says, and finds that he means it. "Just want to understand."
Michael straightens. "Do you know what happens to humans that understand me, Mr. Keay?"
He digs his nails in his palm. "If you're gonna threaten me, at least don't call me that." He says tightly.
Michael Shelley had been the only one to call him "Mr. Keay". It feels wrong coming from the thing that wears his face. He's pretty sure Michael had caught the surprise on his face the first time he'd addressed him as such, and then thought it was funny to continue to be formal with someone that's anything but. It had sounded like a shared joke, when Michael said it. The Distortion doesn't get the intonation quite right.
"What would you like me to call you?" It asks.
"Gerry." He says, enjoying the way it feels on his tongue. "Gerard" feels like the man his mother had wanted him to be. It had never felt like him. He always meant to change it, but he never actually met enough people for that. Still, he'd always imagined he'd ask his friends, if he ever got them, to call him Gerry. Visiting monsters will have to do for now, he supposes.
"You humans and your names." Michael laughs. "Like colours."
"Names have power." Gerard— Gerry, defends.
"Only as much as you give them."
He considers this, closing his eyes. When he opens them again his sofa, his lovely black sofa that Gerry had gotten for free from a drag Queen because it had a broken leg, is bright canary yellow. Even the stack of magazines that hold up the corner with the broken leg is yellow and swirling.
"Not my sofa." He groans, and Michael giggles.
"Like colours." It says again, and Gerry has absolutely no idea what it means. He would ask, but he's honestly kind of upset about the sofa.
"What are you?" Michael asks him after a beat.
Gerry snorts. "Human, as far as I can tell." He says. "My relationship to the Eye is conditional at best. Definitely not enough to make me an Avatar."
"You don't feel like a Watcher."
"Guess the tattoos were a waste, then."
Michael chuckles. "You're funny."
"Alright, then."
They both fall silent, after that. When the pizza arrives Michael thankfully doesn't try to do whatever it is it does to its victims to the delivery guy, only humming its not-quite-right melody as it picks apart its slices. When it speaks again, it's to announce it doesn't like peppers. Gerry waits for it to say anything else, to pounce at him or threaten him or make him believe his hands are worms, or something,but it doesn't. When he returns from the kitchen holding two glasses of water, Michael is gone and the sofa is once again black, if a little more... Spirally.
He finds he breathes easier with it gone.
In the morning, he goes to see Gertrude. He has a bullshit excuse about using their library that he knows Gertrude won't buy. He doesn't care. He needs to know. Not if what Michael had said is true, because he knows in his bones that is, just... if it hurt her. He looks in her eyes for any hint of sorrow when he mentions the Distortion, and he finds something, but it looks rather like fascination. She leans in with wide eyes, and asks him about the new mark on him, and Gerry has no choice but to tell her.
He curses at her, after. His throat is raw from trying to fight it, but he screams at her anyway, smashes a bunch of stuff she never really cared about. He doesn't hit her, but it's a close thing. He can never forget she'd saved him, in a way, but the blank stare she throws back at him is almost enough to make him want to. He can't stop remembering Michael ringing his doorbell some time after he'd dropped him off at his flat that one time, holding a bag of take-out on each hand. I thought you probably wouldn't have any food, and since you don't want me to take you to the hospital, I thought it was the least I could do. And then I thought I might as well get something for miss Robinson, since I was already there. She works too hard. I never see her eat, he'd explained.
Gerry had asked him to stay. Michael hadn't. If he had, he would've told him everything. Begged him to quit and get as far away from the institute as he could. He probably wouldn't have. No one ever does. But maybe it would've been enough to prepare him for Gertrude's ruthlessness. To let him survive it.
Michael had gone back to work after, and gotten his number from Gertrude, to ask him out to lunch the next day. Gerry had never gotten the message. His phone had been lost the previous day, along with chunks of his flesh. The Eye, in its unending cruelty, drops that piece of information into his head now, when it's far too late for him to do anything but mourn what could've been, and hate Gertrude just a little harder.
To her credit, she'd never pretended to be anything but ruthlessly practical. Not with him. She knew it wouldn't drive him away. And it was fine, when she used people like him, but Michael ... Michael was kind. And she never even mourned him. It's not the sacrifice that gets to him, not really. He's not deluded enough to value one life above all others. It's the lack of regret, the perfect apathy with which Gertrude had made it. It's not right. This kind of thing... It should tear people up.
Not a spec of guilt appears in her eyes. She watches him impassively as he vents his anger, like a neglectful mother watches a toddler throw a tantrum. She doesn't leave, or try to stop him. Doesn't even roll her eyes. She watches him, with those empty, gray eyes that strip your soul bare. It only makes him angrier.
He leaves the archives with a scream bubbling up his throat and Gertrude's violating gaze on his back. It never goes away.
When the Distortion rolls out of his oven door, now yellow and swirling, he feels it grow heavy, like hands gripping the back of his neck so hard it hurts.
"Hello, Gerry." Michael greets.
"Hey, Michael ." He greets back.
"The Eye is with us." It points out, and a terribly human wrinkle of irritation appears between its brows.
"That would be the dear old cunt that serves it." Gerry offers. "She got a statement out of me."
He just meant to piss of Gertrude, really, he doesn't think, until he's looking at Michael , and it looks... terrifying. Its eyes darken — they must change colour; it's so jarring — and it leans forward, too-long fingers tensing in front of it.
"Oh!" It chimes. "Would she like another one?"
It's a threat. A real one, this time, but it's not directed towards him. Its terrible gaze falls just behind him, where he feels the weight of the Beholding like talons digging into his nape.
When it speaks, voice distorted and piercing, it steals the air out of his lungs.
"Would you like to know about Michael Shelley, Archivist? Or do you already know about how he stood on the wrong side of Becoming, before the last door he would ever walk through, and prayed? You see, ever since he was a kid, Michael Shelley was an optimist. He thought that if there are terrible things in this world, then there must be benevolent ones. Even as he twisted, and bent and became not-what-he-was, as he was remade in a mold cast by my own agony, Michael was... An optimist. With his very last thought that could be called his own, he prayed to any force that would listen for your safety. He prayed for you. And then he became me.
Did you know, I wonder, if that was what was going to happen? I must assume not. A servant of the Eye would know to weild any knowledge in its arsenal better than that.
You see, Archivist, Michael Shelley ended trusting you. A perfect deception on your part, I must admit, even if it does leave a bad taste in my mouth. Nevertheless, it is as true as anything that Michael never learned of your deception, too occupied with that-which-is-not to know that-which-was. You were successful, I suppose, in that regard. You... Have stolen my existence and intertwined it with a meaningless, inconsequential, real one.
Still, I do not think you knew, Beholder, what it is you were doing. The Eye cannot show you the future, can it? You did not know what would happen after the great Twisting has been undone. You assumed Michael would die. You assumed your betrayal would go unknown.
But I am Michael now, Archivist. And I know.
I do not need to tell you that Michael 's last breath was wasted."
It laughs, at the end. It is jumpy and bitter and wretched, and Gerry feels it like a thousand tiny fishhooks, stretching his mind in ways it should never go. He's certain everything changes, but... It doesn't hurt. It's rather like watching the sun set from beneath a very large wave, and you know you should swim to the surface, but it's so beautiful you forget for a moment why you must.
For a single, quiet moment, Gerry surrenders to the current, and watches the sun set. He is not afraid.
Drowning is not that bad, Gerry thinks, until you know you are drowning. That, the Eye ensures, will always be excruciating. Whatever The Spiral is doing, the Eye fights against, and Gerry feels all of it. He screams, maybe. Or tries. He stumbles back, away from the sun, away from Michael , away from whatever it's doing to him—
It's holding his wrist. Five long fingers wrap around his wrist more times that they should, warm and solid and real, and Gerry freezes. The gentle warmth of skin, the steady beating of a heart... were too distinctively human, he'd assumed, for him to find it in a being so categorically not. But Michael 's grip is firm and muscles tense in its arm when it tugs, and Gerry is too slow to react. When Michael pulls him through a door that isn't there at all, he knows better than to try praying.