Archive of Our Own

The Circus of the Other never really sleeps, but pre-dawn shadows hide Danny as he slips from the dressing rooms and deeper into the Circus, towards the cold, sparse back room where Nikola has held the Archivist captive for some time now. 

To tell the truth, Danny had had no real interest in the Archivist at first. His skin was crucial to the Unknowing, so Nikola would fix him up, try to mend the bits of him she could, and then he would die. Danny has a lot of experience with being Nikola’s project, and one look at the scrawny, beaten Archivist had told him the poor man wouldn’t be able to talk Nikola out of skinning him. There was no reason for him to go near the Archivist after that. He didn’t want to get attached.

Except, last night - maybe? Impossible to say, in the Circus where time meant nothing - the Archivist had caught a glimpse of Danny passing by the door of his prison, and called out to him. Only it hadn’t been Danny’s name the Archivist had sobbed around his by-now-tattered gag. It was his brother’s. The forgotten name had brought memories to the surface - memories that were, admittedly, far from pleasant. Danny has been with the Circus for a long time now, and it never occurred to him to miss what he’d left behind. Not until the Archivist called out his brother’s name, and Danny remembered the person who had protected him, cared for him, who, if the Archivist knew him well enough to call out to him, must care about the Archivist too.

Danny wants to know...something. Something about his brother. Perhaps how he’s doing, if he misses Danny. There are many things he might want to know, but his head aches and his vision blurs too much these days for him to puzzle it out clearly. 

So in the dark before the dawn Danny creeps back to see the Archivist, not sure what he wants to ask but determined to get something resembling answers. There’s no one guarding the door, and even if there had been, they would have let him pass. Everyone always lets him pass, because he is Nikola’s best friend and that comes with privileges. 

He really just intends to ask the Archivist some questions, but… 

There is always a light on in the Archivist’s prison, to disorient him further and make it hard to sleep, and in the harsh glow Danny can clearly see the state the other man is in. Nikola means well - probably - but she is not gentle even at her kindest. Danny has heard the Archivist scream and beg to be left alone more times than he’s actually laid eyes on the man. He remembers it was hard to get used to Nikola touching him, and she never paid such attention to the condition of Danny’s skin. He can see bruises around the Archivist’s collarbone and on his hollow cheeks where Nikola must have pressed too hard. 

Worse than that, though, are the nails . Danny is certain those weren’t there earlier, yet here they are, long, cruel-looking things embedded in the Archivist’s limbs, pinning him to the wooden chair just as much as the ropes that bind him. 

Danny knows Nikola, and he knows this happened because of him. He let the Archivist see him, reacted when the Archivist called his brother’s name, wept at the remembrance of the human he’d once been. He doesn’t know how Nikola found out, but it doesn’t surprise him that she found out, nor that she decided to take revenge on the Archivist. She hates him, after all, as she hates everything of the Eye. Not only is it antithetical to her nature, but...Danny happens to know Nikola holds a personal grudge against the Eye’s current servants. 

That should make him feel better, should settle the horror and guilt he feels. It doesn’t. He can tell the Archivist is suffering. The unnaturally green eyes that blink up at him - a reaction delayed by far too long - are bewildered, cloudy with pain. 

“Hey,” Danny says, and tries to sound soft, like an echo of a memory of Tim, as he bends to untie the Archivist’s gag. “Don’t be scared. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The Archivist makes a despairing noise, huddling in on himself. His eyes skitter over Danny, and he only seems more afraid the longer he looks. For the first time, Danny tries to see himself from the Archivist’s point of view. As members of the Circus go, he’s one of the most normal-looking - he still has most of his original skin and everything! But, well...he has made quite a few modifications to his body, at Nikola’s recommendation. He can’t imagine his obviously false eyes or the visible scarring around his hairline make the Archivist feel safe around him.

Danny decides to take the nails out. The Archivist has suffered enough, and Nikola has made her point. If she wants to hurt someone further, it will probably be Danny, and he can take it. He’ll just take the nails out, and leave the Archivist alone again.

At least, that’s his plan. Only, as he bends down to inspect the nails closer, the Archivist sort of...collapses against him. Unconscious. 

It makes him realize how tiny the Archivist is. He’s shorter than Danny by a good bit, and on top of that, has no meat on his bones to speak of. The longer Danny looks at him, the more he knows he can’t just let Nikola kill this man. The Unknowing and the impossible new world of the Stranger be damned, and Danny with them. He has to return the Archivist to his people - to Tim. 

The thought gives him pause. He’ll almost certainly encounter Tim if he takes the Archivist back to the Eye’s stronghold, and that’s not a meeting that will go well for either of them. Danny is- he’s not human anymore. People don’t survive the things he has, don’t see out of glassy dolls’ eyes or recover from freak accidents with ease. He’s a monster, and Tim will know that. Going to where Tim is, seeing him again, is almost certain to cost Danny his life. 

He doesn’t want that. He wants to stay alive, to keep being Nikola’s friend - and if Tim doesn’t kill him, Nikola probably will. Helping the Archivist escape is nothing short of betrayal. He knows that. He knows he can’t go.

His eyes are throbbing, pulsing waves of pain driving him to his knees on the concrete floor. He claws at his eyes without meaning to, finding no relief no matter how hard he presses. He can’t think. He is Danny and he is not Danny and he wants to go home, but he doesn’t know what home is anymore. 

There is a sound of a door creaking open, and sharp, somehow soothing color wraps around Danny as he drowns in the bright song of the calliope. 

A strange, misshapen hand reaches out to him, and the calliope turns to static.

---

When Danny opens his eyes, he finds himself lying on a cold concrete floor next to an open trapdoor. He doesn’t remember how he got there, even when he looks around and sees the Archivist next to him, still unconscious. Danny peers down the trapdoor, and thinks he hears from the depths the echo of a twisting laugh. He might glimpse a flash of yellow, a hand with too-long curving fingers, but probably not. He doesn’t see well anymore, not since his eyes were replaced with those of a doll. 

There is a sound of something crashing and breaking against the ground behind him. Danny turns to look and sees a tall, round man in the doorway of the room he’s found himself in, staring more at the Archivist than at Danny. The shattered remains of a yellow mug are on the floor in front of him. Danny smells bitter, black tea.

He is just trying to think of what to say when there is a noise of footsteps behind the round man, and then a voice.

“Martin? I heard a crash, what-?”

Tim appears, and the sight of him knocks the breath out of Danny. His brother - is Danny still human enough to be Tim’s brother? - doesn’t look well. His eyes are hollow, and his skin is dotted with round, puckered scars. He takes in the scene, and Danny tries to imagine what he sees. The Archivist, certainly, gaunt with hunger and curled in on himself, nail-wounds still bloody. Next to the Archivist, a monster. 

“What are you?” Tim hisses. There is a knife in his hand, and his eyes are narrowed with hatred. He thinks Danny is a monster wearing his brother’s skin. Danny is not sure this analysis is wrong. 

He tries to remember words, and speaks in the voice poor Danny, the human one, used with his brother. Only it doesn’t come out right. His voice trembles, and there’s no laughter there. 

“He- he helped me remember, so I brought him back to you. You can kill me if you want. I’m not- I don’t think I’m really Danny anymore.” 

The round man sucks in a sharp breath, eyes wide as he looks from Tim to Danny and back again. 

“I’m sorry,” Danny says. “I didn’t want you to see me. I didn’t want you to have to know.”

Tim puts the knife away and steps toward Danny. At his approach, the calliope in Danny’s head crescendos and dies as static wraps around him once again.

---

When Danny comes back to himself, he is on a couch in another unfamiliar room, with a blanket around him and a mug of milky tea in his hand. It doesn’t smell bitter, and the warmth against his hands is nice. 

He becomes aware that Tim is slumped in a chair across from him, winding his fingers around themselves as he watches Danny in silence. Danny meets his brother’s eyes and isn’t offended by the way Tim flinches. He knows the glass eyes are eerie. That was the whole point of them.  

“Hey,” Tim says. “You feeling better?”

Danny shrugs. He realizes the round man is nearby as well, in a room across the hall. There are a couple of women with him, one skinny and sharp-looking, the other taller and wearing a hijab. The hijabi woman is in conversation with the round man, both casting glances at the Archivist, who is lying on a cot, presumably still unconscious. 

“You didn’t kill me,” Danny says. He puts no meaning behind it. It’s just a statement.

Tim runs his fingers through his hair. “No,” he says. “I didn’t.” 

“Why? I’m not Danny.” He feels hot, impossible tears on his face. He shouldn’t be able to cry. He shouldn’t be able to see. He’s a monster and that only upsets him because Tim found out. He didn’t want Tim to know. 

 He expected Tim to think he was an imposter, to kill him. He doesn’t understand why that didn’t happen. 

Tim starts to say something, but is interrupted by the hijabi woman. She stands behind Tim, making no effort to appear unthreatening. Still, she seems neutral - more like she’s assessing a threat than like someone about to attack. 

“Danny, isn’t it?” she asks, and waits for him to nod before continuing. “Can you tell us what happened to Jon? It’s clear he’s injured, but there’s been some...debate...about whether he needs medical attention.”

“Let him be, Basira-” Tim starts, but Danny cuts him off. He can do this. He owes the Archivist - whose name, he infers, must be Jon - this much. 

“I don’t know all of it,” he says, “but Nikola had him tied up for what I’m pretty sure was a long time. She didn’t let him move, and she’d- I think all she did was try to care for his skin, but she’s not very gentle. That’s where all the bruises are from.” 

“And the...puncture wounds?”

Danny drops his gaze. “Those are new. He...he thought I was Tim and called out to me. It reminded me of, of who I was before and- I don’t think Nikola liked that very much. It’s my fault-”

“I don’t need a confession,” the woman - Basira - says. “I just need to know what caused the puncture wounds.”

“Nails.” Danny hears the round man gasp. “Nikola nailed him to a chair.” 

Tim flinches, and the round man buries his head in his hands. Even Basira looks vaguely disturbed. Danny knows, objectively, how horrifying it is, but the Archivist’s injuries don’t look that bad to him. The Archivist still has all his parts attached. Danny doesn’t know any other victim of the Circus who could say the same. 

Basira asks a few more clarifying questions, things like “were the nails rusty?” and “do you know how much food he was given?”, until the static starts to get loud again. Danny claps his hands over his ears, and Tim shoos Basira away, actually standing up to make it clear she needs to leave. The way he looms over Danny should be threatening, but it feels more...protective. It’s nice.

Tim gestures to the cushion next to Danny. 

“Mind if I sit there?” 

Danny shakes his head minutely, and Tim sits down. They’re silent for a while, side by side but not touching. It’s Tim who finally breaks the silence.

“You don’t have to explain anything right now,” he says, “or ever. You’re safe now. Basira will probably want to know how you escaped eventually, but if you don’t wanna tell her anything, don’t let her make you. It’s going to be okay now.”

“I don’t understand,” Danny says. “What- what makes you so sure I’m the real Danny? I could be an imposter. I could be here to trick and kill all of you.”

Tim laughs, a short and bitter thing. “An imposter wouldn’t come out and say what it was, not in a million years. That’s how I know.” He punches Danny lightly on the shoulder. “And besides, even with your weird body mods, you’ve still got the Stoker good looks.”

Danny smiles, careful not to show his teeth. He doesn’t want Tim to freak out about how sharp his canines are. “Thanks.”

Tim’s smile is soft and tired as he wraps an arm around Danny’s shoulder. “Seriously, don’t worry about it. The past few years have been weird - and not in a good way. If you coming back from the dead is the one good thing that’s gonna happen to me, I’ll sure as hell accept it.”

Danny wants to explain it’s more complicated than that, that he wasn’t kidnapped, that Nikola never even tried to skin him, but- He’s really, really tired, and his eyes ache. The truth can wait.

He closes his eyes and leans against Tim. Tim leans his head against Danny’s, and Danny feels warm and safe and almost happy. 

---

Jon wakes, and tries to give no indication that he’s done so. Maybe, if he pretends to remain unconscious, Orsinov will leave him alone a little longer. Maybe it will buy Tim’s brother - Danny, how does he know Tim’s brother’s name is Danny? - a little more time. 

Just before calling Sarah Baldwin over to drive nails into his limbs, Orsinov had promised to kill Danny (more specifically, to skin him in front of Jon), all because Jon had, more or less accidentally, made him remember he was - is? - human. If something happens, it will be his fault. God, he can’t even avoid hurting complete strangers at this point, can he? If, by some miracle, he survives his captivity, Tim is going to kill him-

He realizes, quite belatedly, that something is wrong with this picture. He’s- he’s lying down, on a surface that, while not quite comfortable, is certainly not concrete or wood. Besides that, he doesn’t feel the ropes around him anymore, and- and someone is humming softly, in a voice he knows.

Jon opens his eyes and finds himself in the Archives. He’s lying on the cot in Document Storage, in fact, and sitting next to him is none other than Martin. The other man’s eyes are closed, and Jon doesn’t recognize the song he’s humming. Still, he looks real enough, for all that he does not appear to be working . (Not that that’s a new development.)

“Martin?” he tries, which, of course, startles Martin enough that he jumps, letting out a surprised squeak.

“Ah-! Jon, you’re awake!”

“I’m aware,” Jon says drily. “How did I- why am I in the Archives?”

He tries to sit up, and Martin’s eyes go wide with something a less cynical man might interpret as genuine concern.

“Don’t- I mean, be careful, you’re...you’re hurt.”

He wants to snap back at Martin, to say that he’s fine, but he’s...not. He’s scared and confused and the wounds in his limbs are still throbbing, for all that, as he looks down at his arms, he sees they’ve been bandaged, injuries hidden away. 

He lets Martin help him sit up, and waits until he can breathe easily again before asking again why and how he came to be in the Archives.

“Oh, Danny - that’s Tim’s brother! - brought you here. He said he didn’t want to watch you suffer, so he rescued you.”

“Danny’s here?” This is not helping Jon feel less confused. “What- where is he, then?”

“He and Tim were talking in the breakroom.” Martin chews on his bottom lip thoughtfully. “Basira and Melanie are...around, somewhere. I can go get the others if you want me to-”

“No, don’t-” He bites back a string of pleas, all of them horribly pathetic. “I’d prefer that you stay with me, if that’s all right. I’m sure I can walk to the breakroom; it’s just across the hallway.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea-” Jon elects to ignore Martin’s protests in favor of levering himself out of bed. Judging by the placement of the nail wounds, they’d been intended to cause pain, not permanent damage, so it appears he can still walk. He wonders what happened to his cane. Maybe it’s still at Georgie’s, but more than likely it was taken with him and someone’s tossed it out by now. A pity. He liked that cane.

Martin is hovering at his shoulder, his voice pitching higher with worry.

“Jon, if you’re going to be like this, at least let me help you! Please?”

The hands that come to rest against his shoulder and forearm - carefully avoiding his injuries - are warm and blessedly human. It’s all Jon can do not to burst into tears. Somehow, this is when it finally sinks in that he’s been rescued, he’s home. 

He’s certain it has nothing to do with Martin being kind to him. Just the touch of a human - any human - would have been the reminder he needed. 

---

Danny’s head hurts. His head always hurts, but right now it is worse because he is trying to ignore it, trying to remember the things he’s learned today. 

He now knows the names of Tim’s coworkers. Besides Basira, there’s Melanie, who is skinny and short and looks like she’s not far from either bursting into tears or killing someone, and Daisy, who showed up about an hour ago and looks at Danny rather like he imagines a predator looks at prey. He tries to ignore her. Nikola has told him about Hunters, and nothing she said has made him keen to tangle with one. 

There’s also the round man, whose name, apparently, is Martin. Danny hasn’t gotten to apologize for scaring him yet, because, well, he hasn’t left the Archivist’s side. It’s nearly evening, and the Archivist-

Has, apparently, finally woken up. He limps in, Martin more or less supporting his entire weight and looking extremely uncomfortable with the Archivist’s newfound mobility. Danny is rather impressed that the Archivist - Jon, right, the Archivist has a name - can move around at all, given he’d been tied to a chair for, well, a while. 

Martin deposits Jon in the armchair Tim had been sitting in earlier, and then bustles off, mumbling something about tea. He’s very careful not to meet Danny’s eyes. They all have been, even Tim, although Jon doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. He makes direct eye contact with Danny, who suddenly wishes Melanie hadn’t convinced Tim to go with her to pick up food for everyone. He certainly can’t count on Basira, Daisy, or Martin to help him navigate talking to the Eye’s Archivist. 

Jon seems to understand Danny’s discomfort, because he looks down when he starts speaking, fiddling with a loose string on the sleeve of his jumper. 

“Martin said you rescued me.”

Danny shrugs. “You looked like you needed rescuing. I wasn’t just going to leave you there.”

“You could have,” Jon says, though there’s a strange hesitancy in his voice. “Thank you.”

Danny is still trying to think of how to reply when Martin bustles over with tea, and then Tim and Melanie are back with takeout from what Danny is pretty sure was once his favorite restaurant, so he’s too busy to worry about how to explain himself to Jon. It’s his fault Jon is hurt as badly as he is. Rescuing him can’t begin to erase things like nerve damage and scarring.

He has a lot to make up for, and the thought follows him as everyone decides - without consulting him - that it would be safer for them all to stay in the Archives for the night, and decide on a more permanent safety plan in the morning. Danny wants to tell them that there’s little risk of Nikola coming after Jon; more than likely, she’ll move on to one of her other backup plans, or work on something else for a while. The Unknowing is looming ever closer, and Danny doubts Nikola will have time to even search for him, her self-proclaimed best friend, let alone for Jon. 

They’re as safe as they can be, he knows that, and yet he feels restless and ill at ease. There’s somewhere he should be, and that place isn’t here. It’s with the Circus, where he chose to belong, where he wants to belong, even though the human part of him rejects it. 

The human part of him knows he can’t leave now. Tim knows he’s alive; if Danny disappears again, his brother will hunt him to the ends of the earth to make sure he’s safe. Thing is, he’s never been safe in his life, and at least with the Circus, he could be himself. 

He’s sitting in the hallway, citing a lack of ability to sleep to get a concerned Tim and suspicious Daisy to leave him alone, when he hears hushed conversation from the room labelled Document Storage. It had been a unanimous decision that Jon should sleep on the cot, and he hadn’t protested when Basira had suggested Martin stay with Jon. She, Melanie, and Tim are asleep in the breakroom; Daisy had been headed upstairs when Danny saw her. The voices, then, are Jon and Martin’s, and Danny can’t help but feel curious, then worried, as he listens closer. Jon sounds terrified, possibly on the verge of tears. 

“She was going to skin him , Martin, and it would have been my fault. I can’t just- I can’t just not tell Tim that. I thought Danny would mention it, but maybe he didn’t know, or maybe he just lived with the threat of that this whole time, and-”

“Jon, slow down.” Martin’s voice is patient, but he sounds one bad fright away from panicking himself. “The...evil mannequin, the one that kidnapped you-”

“Nikola,” Jon provides. 

“Nikola,” Martin continues, “seems like the kind of person who just, I don’t know, just says things like that? Probably a lot? Not that I think she was joking, but surely if Danny was in that much danger, he would have said something -”

They keep talking, probably, but Danny tunes them out. So Nikola threatened to skin him. That’s...really not a concern. It’s always been an understanding between him and Nikola that if it becomes too hard, too painful for him to stay this close to human as a member of the Circus, she’d have to...well, come up with a complete costume change for him. He’s been trying to prepare himself for that, and Nikola’s never pushed him to do anything he wasn’t ready for in regards to his own body before.

Still, lately, with his headaches getting worse, with his grip on reality and unreality both slipping… he’s known it would have to happen soon. Maybe Nikola was bluffing to scare Jon, maybe not. It’ll mean the same thing for Danny in the end. 

Except...what if it won’t? What if Tim won’t let him go back to the Circus? If he doesn’t go back, he’ll probably-

He’s been moving, stumbling, falling without realizing, and now, somehow, he’s in the tunnels, the ones Tim had explained were below the Institute, that he must have dragged Jon up from. The light of the trapdoor is off in the distance, and it seems so, so far away. 

His eyes hurt. His eyes hurt , and they’re not even his eyes, and he can’t see properly. The pain throb-pulses, blinding him. He has these attacks frequently, but there’s no Nikola here to soothe him, to press something cold against his eyes and hug him until he can breathe again.

It hurts.

He bites down on the fleshy part of his palm and screams, hoping the sound doesn’t carry. He doesn’t want Tim to hear him, to see him like this, crumpled on the tunnel floor, screaming, bloody tears dripping from eye sockets that should be empty, and-

And there is a door. He’s seen it before, this yellow door with chipping paint. It creaks when it opens, and the hallway behind it swirls, bends, twists in on itself. It doesn’t hurt him to look at it. Somehow Danny knows that if he surrendered to it, that hallway would take the pain in his eyes and twist it into something he wouldn’t remember or recognize. 

“Oh,” says the sharp-color creature in the doorway, “you poor thing.” 

The hands that reach out to him are too heavy, too long. A finger knicks Danny’s cheek, drawing blood, and the creature-that-is-not pulls away. Its hands were cold. Danny, wanting that cold against his eyes, reaches out for the hand. The creature hesitates.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” it says helplessly. “I don’t want to hurt your eyes.”

Danny sob-laughs, tries to say his eyes are already wrong, but it doesn’t come out right. The creature seems to understand anyway. 

“I know,” it says. “It hurts, doesn’t it?”

Danny nods tearfully. The creature curls its hand and doesn’t seem to notice how it cuts itself with knife-fingers. Danny can feel the misshapen joints when he leans his face against the hand. It’s not the weirdest thing in his world, not by a long shot. 

The creature rubs his back and seems to be trying very hard not to cut him with its impossible hands. It tells him it is sorry for him, that it understands, and after a long time that is no time at all, Danny looks up and sees that the creature’s eyes are full of static, that its hair twists and coils around it like razor wire. Its colors are so bright and blurred that Danny is sure the thing is bleeding color, somehow. 

“It’s okay,” says the creature, distorted voice tinged with relief. “You’re not alone anymore.” 

---

It does occur to Jon, after he has stopped hyperventilating, that it is a very awkward and embarrassing thing to have a mental breakdown in your subordinate’s presence generally. When said subordinate has been so kind as to hold you while you try not to cry loud enough to wake the dead, there really is no way to move forward normally afterwards.

Sitting on the cot in Document Storage with a mug of tea in his hands and a blanket around his shoulders, he doesn’t know how to repay Martin for any of this. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, not for the first time that night. “This isn’t your responsibility to listen to or deal with. I’ll be perfectly fine in a few days-”

“Jon, for Christ’s sake, you don’t have to be fine now or ever!” Martin sounds frustrated, and Jon can only assume it is because of the great inconvenience he is causing by continuing to exist in this world. “You just- You were kidnapped around when you stopped coming in to work, right? That was, that was almost a month ago. Of course you’re not okay; you were literally physically tortured!”

He certainly can’t argue with that. But, well, it’s not like it’s the first time he’s been hurt like this. The puncture wounds aren’t at all unlike-

“I can’t make this about me,” he says, trying to direct the words at his tea rather than Martin. “Danny was there longer. If I make this about me, Tim will probably kill me. I don’t even think I’d blame him.”

He’d had a lot of time to think, being held captive. It’s not as if he blames himself for everything ; he didn’t bring Prentiss to the Archives and he’s not entirely sure he can be faulted for his paranoia after that whole situation. It doesn’t change the fact that he accused one of his very few friends of murder and never even bothered to ask if Tim was all right.

He hadn’t even known Tim had a brother. He hadn’t noticed there was something off about Sasha. He hadn’t cared, after Prentiss, that Tim wasn’t okay either. The list of grievances went on and on, and it had taken a sentient mannequin invading Georgie’s flat, the one place Jon almost felt safe, for him to even start thinking about how Tim must feel. 

Jon has had a lot of time to think about that over the past month. He’d suspected he couldn’t begin to make up for how he’d acted - not just towards Tim, either - before he met Danny. Now he knows it. 

Martin is saying something, but Jon isn’t listening. He shakes, and stares down at the tea, which is going cold. 

He almost wishes Martin hated him, like Tim does, like Basira and Melanie and Daisy probably do. He can’t bring himself to want that seriously. He’s spent too long away, alone except for his tormentors, to be able to stand the thought of Martin hating him, leaving him alone. 

Never mind that he’s Martin’s boss, that the other man must have chosen to care for him purely out of some perceived obligation. It’s fine. Jon will take what he can get. 

---

The sharp-color creature, as it turns out, calls itself Michael, although that is not its name and also its entire being. Danny relates to this, and says so, which Michael seems to find funny. 

“I know,” it says when it has finished laughing. “You and I are similar.”

“You...brought me here from the Circus,” Danny hazards. He thinks he remembers that, remembers Michael prying his hands away from where he grasped and tore at his hair, remembers it slinging the unconscious Archivist over its shoulder and leading Danny through its door. 

“Perhaps I did,” Michael says noncommittally. “Would you like me to return you to that place?”

“I haven’t decided,” Danny says. After a moment he asks, “Why did you help me?”

“Because I thought it would be funny to watch your brother’s rage turn to something like madness,” says Michael. “Also...because Michael Shelley had no one to rescue him from the trap he stumbled into. You, on the other hand, had me.”

“I don’t understand,” says Danny.

“Ask the Archivist,” Michael says, opening its door. “I’m sure he will be able to Know enough to explain it to you.”

The door closes, and Danny is alone. He sits there for a while, quiet in the darkness, and when he is done thinking about what he has seen, he goes to find Jon. 

As it turns out, though, finding Jon is easier said than done. The clock on the breakroom microwave reads 5:45am, there is silence in Document Storage, and Danny isn’t desperate enough for answers to wake Jon from a much-needed sleep. Tim is awake, though, pacing the hallway under a flickering lightbulb. He relaxes when he sees Danny, but his smile is tense and tired.

“I was starting to think you disappeared on me again,” Tim says.

“Sorry,” Danny replies, because he knows it’s meant to be a joke, but it’s not really funny, and they both know it. “I just...just needed to clear my head.”

“Cool, cool. Maybe leave a note next time.” Tim sinks down against the wall, sighing. He doesn’t look like he’s slept, which, Danny knows, means he’s worrying himself to death. Danny should say something, maybe give Tim a hug. He used to do that, didn’t he, when he looked more like a person? He doesn’t feel like he can now. He’s not the person Tim thinks he is, not really. He never has been.

He sits down next to Tim, because he can do that much. His brother is fidgeting, chewing his fingertips. Restless maybe, and definitely afraid. Danny wonders if Tim is afraid of him, but doesn’t ask. He doesn’t want to know.

“Does it hurt?” Tim asks suddenly. Danny blinks at him, and Tim just sort of gestures at him. “All that, I mean. It looks painful.”

Danny looks Tim in the eyes and says, “It’s not that bad.” He says some other comforting things as well. They are all lies. Danny has always been a good liar. 

---

It’s three pm on the day after Jon was rescued, and he’s still in bed. 

More precisely, he’s lying on the cot in Document Storage, curled as small and close to the wall as he can be. He knows he needs to get up. He has work to do, an Unknowing to stop. He needs to be there when plans are made, plans to protect him and Danny in the short term, and, hopefully, save the world in the long term Danny probably knows things that will help them stop the Unknowing. Jon needs to get moving, before Martin gets worried and comes back to check on him. 

He needs to carry on, but he doesn’t feel like he can. He was too out of it yesterday to notice, but he’s sure the others still hate him, must have hated that he disappeared without a word. They didn’t know he’d been kidnapped, of course, but still. His absence won’t have erased their grievances. 

He’d...clung to the memory of the days before the Prentiss attack, as a captive. He’d wanted to die thinking about when he’d had friends, when he’d almost been happy. It’s selfish, of course, and awful of him to think about after he let Sasha die and didn’t even notice she was gone, after he stalked Tim, cut him out of his life when they were both suffering. 

They were all he had to think back on fondly, really, at least in the comparatively recent past. He’s not ready to face Tim’s anger, if it even exists, if he’s not- He’s not blowing it out of proportion, is he? He knows Tim hates him, there’s no reason for him to overexaggerate-

Someone clears their throat. Jon jumps, and jumps again when he finds himself thoroughly unprepared for the sight of Danny in the doorway. This isn’t technically the first time he’s seen Danny in daylight, but, again, Jon wasn’t exactly lucid yesterday. And the doll eyes are...uncanny, to say the least. 

“Sorry,” Danny says. He and Tim don’t sound dissimilar, but Danny’s voice is much more subdued. He carries himself like someone who doesn’t want attention. Or maybe Jon is just projecting. 

“It’s all right,” Jon says, although it clearly isn’t. “Would you- would you like to come in?”

Danny nods, and takes the chair Martin had spent the night dozing in. It’s not comfortable at all. Jon isn’t sure why he knows that. 

“I, uh, I have a question for you,” Danny says. “A weird one.” Jon’s alarm must be apparent on his face, because Danny hastens to clarify, “Not about the Circus or anything. Just...I made a friend? I think? And they...told me to ask you about them? About it? I don’t know why it wouldn’t just tell me itself-”

“Was it blonde?” Jon interrupts, because this is an interesting puzzle, and one he may well be able to solve. 

“Actually, yeah. It said its name was Michael? Or rather-”

“It called itself Michael, but made it very clear that that is not its name?” Jon massages the bridge of his nose, sighing. The mere thought of Michael gives him a headache. 

Danny affirms his suspicions, and launches into the rambling tale of not one, but two meetings with Michael. His story explains a few things Jon has been wondering about, and lends some new data points to a few more as yet unsolved problems. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a definitive answer for Danny’s questions about his cryptic new friend. Still, Danny looks so crestfallen when he says so that Jon decides it won’t do any harm for him to share a few theories. 

“Michael Shelley was one of the previous Archivist’s assistants,” he explains to Danny. “I wasn’t... certain that your Michael was the same person, but it seems more than likely. As for how it ended up...like that...I have no idea.”

“It said Michael Shelley was trapped,” Danny says, “and no one came to rescue him.” He sighs. “I don’t understand.”

“It may have thought you were the same way,” Jon suggests. “It’s...I suppose it’s not impossible for Michael to feel empathy for others, though it does come as a bit of a surprise.” He forces himself to straighten up, to meet Danny’s eyes and not wonder if he’s imagining the blood-colored smears on the glass. “I’d be very careful. Michael can be...unpredictable. Just because it likes you today doesn’t mean you’ll be safe around it tomorrow, from what I’ve seen.”

“You don’t make friends by playing it safe,” Danny says with a laugh. “It’ll be fine. I might even have some fun. Thanks for the help, uh...can I call you Jon?”

Danny stands, extending a hand, and Jon reaches out to shake it, trying not to flinch. Danny isn’t like Jude. If anything, his hand is a little too cold for comfort. 

“Jon is fine. I… Thank you again for rescuing me, Danny.” 

Danny grins and says it’s nothing. Once he’s gone, Jon thinks about playing it safe, and wonders if he still deserves to have friends, if friends are even something he’s still capable of making.

---

Danny goes back into the tunnels, because he’s not sure how else to find Michael. The door doesn’t appear right away, and when it does, Michael seems more than a bit amused.

“You could have said you wanted to talk to me,” it says. “It would have been faster than waiting around for me to notice.”

“You could have told me that earlier,” Danny says, laughing a little. Michael chuckles.

“That is...very fair, little Stranger. Would you like to talk in my house, or do you prefer to stay out here?” 

“Doesn’t your house eat people?” Danny asks. Jon had said as much, in such a sorrowful tone that Danny hadn’t been keen to pry further. Michael laughs. 

“Only if I wish to devour them,” it says. “Which I do not, and could not, in your case. You are already too much like me for that.”

Danny doesn’t really understand, but he follows Michael inside. The ever-shifting hallway feels like home; not as strange as the Circus, but with the same real-yet-not quality. Michael drapes itself over something that might be a chair but might also be a mirror, and Danny sits on the floor. The carpet is bright green, and plush enough that Danny wants to run his hands through it forever. 

“You spoke with the Archivist,” Michael observes. 

“Yeah,” Danny says. “He said you used to work in the Archives.”

“He is mistaken,” Michael says. “That was Michael Shelley, and I am only...well, I am not Michael Shelley. I am just Michael.”

“That doesn’t really make sense.”

“No more does it make sense that if I stabbed you-” Michael waves its fingers idly. “-you might bleed, but gears and pieces of broken dolls might also fall out. You are not who you were, but you are still you.”

Danny tucks his knees up against his chest, fiddling with a loose bit of carpet. “If you say so, I guess.”

Michael gives him an odd look. “Are you not still you? You appear to me to be something like a person.”

“I don’t know who I’m supposed to be, so don’t ask me,” Danny says. “If I figure out, I’ll let you know.”

Michael hums. “I will look forward to that, I think.” Its image shifts, and for a moment, with green eyes and a round face, it looks almost human. “And, although last time I said this, it did not end well… I would like it if we could be friends.”

“Funny you say that,” Danny says. “I thought we already were.”

Michael laughs, and although it appears once again sharp and distorted, the edges of its razor-smile are a little gentler. 

---

They meet to discuss plans, and don’t get very far. Jon is still exhausted and struggles to identify the questions he needs to ask, but he knows Danny is dodging around the point of something, though he isn’t sure what. Tim and Martin speak of the Circus as a distant threat, and when Danny’s eyes fall to the floor, Jon remembers that while he was tied to a chair, Danny was free to roam the Circus, to enter places that most were denied access to. There is more going on than he knows, and he is too tired to pry. 

No definitive plans are made. They decide to spend another night in the Archives, to postpone their fight against the apocalypse a little longer. Jon wants to be annoyed, but, in truth, he’s grateful. His joints ache, and he wants to curl up with a pillow over his head, to try and block out the intrusive thoughts of undoing his bandages to see if he can poke his fingers straight through the holes to the other side. 

Instead, he waits until the others have dispersed - even Danny comes up with some excuse to slip away - and only he and Tim are left in the breakroom. Tim is washing up the dishes from their measly dinner. His back is turned to Jon, who is seated at the table, but his shoulders are rigid with tension.

“Tim,” Jon says, words sticking in his throat like food swallowed wrong, like writhing worms, “I want to- That is, you don’t have any reason to listen to me, after everything, but- I’m sorry. For not being there for you, for not caring that you were hurting too. I’ll do better, if you’ll let me. I swear I will.”

Tim turns to face him, and there’s no hate in his eyes. Betrayal, yes, and exhaustion and sadness and mistrust that Jon can’t begin to undo, because he helped put it there. 

“I don’t forgive you,” Tim says. 

“I know. I’m not asking you too.”

“Good. It’d piss me off if you were.” Tim smiles, and it’s almost warm. “You do better - you get better - and maybe I’ll rethink that.”

Jon more than suspects if they were having this conversation any other time, when he hadn’t just been kidnapped and tortured, Tim would be less agreeable. He doesn’t care, because he’s going to try. They don’t have to accept it - not Tim or Melanie, not even Martin. He survived the Circus not through his own strength, but through his connections to others. If he hadn’t called out to Danny, mistaking him for Tim, neither of them would be safe in the Archives now. No matter that things might have been different had Danny known how many burnt bridges lay between Jon and Tim; the fact remains that it was their connection that saved Jon.

He can’t go back to a time before the Archives, before Prentiss, when Sasha was alive, before Jon’s paranoia became too overwhelming for anyone in his life to ignore. In truth, he doesn’t know how to move past that - to get better, in Tim’s words. He’s not even sure he can.

He knows, though, if he doesn’t want to lose everyone - if he ever wants to be welcome in Georgie’s home again, if he wants to be able to laugh with Tim, if he wants to ever actually be friends with Martin - he has to try.

If he doesn’t, he’ll end up all alone. Jon was once a lonely child, and an only marginally less lonely adult. He doesn’t want that anymore. 

So he’ll try to change, to make a difference in his own life. Maybe he won’t fail this time. 

---

Sometime in the night, while Danny is pretending to sleep so as not to worry anyone, Tim has a nightmare. Danny had spent enough time around his brother over the years before the Circus to recognize the signs. Tim twitches in his sleep, kicking his blanket off. His breathing is quick and shallow, as if he’s been running. 

As a kid, Danny never knew what to do about Tim’s nightmares. Now he remembers what Nikola used to do for him, back when he still slept like a human. He sits up, fixes the blanket around Tim, and tentatively tries stroking his brother’s hair. It’s objectively a kind of weird thing to do, but it seems to work. Tim relaxes, snuffling in his sleep, and curls around Danny, who regrets his decision to sit up. He manages to lay back down again, only for Tim to more or less sprawl on top of him.

Danny resigns himself to remaining in this position for the rest of the night. The things he does for family, huh? 

Which brings him to a far more serious problem. Danny still wants to go home - not to his parents’ house, not to wherever Tim lives these days. No, he wants to go back to the Circus. That’s his home now - the home he chose - and he misses it. He misses Nikola, misses Breekon and Hope. He even misses Sarah, for all that she’s not a) not always around and b) not very nice to him. 

He will go home, but he can’t just disappear. If he does, Tim will search for him. If he doesn’t, he’ll have to explain everything, and he doesn’t want to. It will only make Tim feel sad and guilty, and Danny doesn’t want to leave his brother feeling like that. But he can’t stay around. He’s not the person Tim thinks he is, and never has been. He’s not going to stifle himself to make Tim happy. He can’t do that anymore. But he can’t hurt Tim, either, not if he has any other choice.

He doesn’t have any good options. But, well, he’ll just have to think of something! He’s good at coming up with solutions, after all, even if he doesn’t usually have to think this much about them.

His head is starting to hurt a little, so Danny closes his eyelids and, for the first time in years, tries to sleep. 

He’ll figure out what to do in the morning. For now, Tim is quiet and warm, and Danny finds that he is tired.