Chapter Text
Being invisible does have its perks.
Jon used to wonder what that would be like, when he was a kid, about how much more convenient it would be. Most of that involved being to get out of awkward “family dinners”, where two people sat in silence pushing food around their plates, but some of it was the more interesting things he could do, like hiding in libraries for hours on end.
Alright, it was only interesting and fun for him and the weird kind of child that he was.
Grief leave was over, and Jon only knows that’s the reason the place was so empty because Tim complains about how great it was to no end and Basira keeps telling him to at least pretend to be respectful.
Not that Jon cares.
They all file into their usual spots, sitting by their computers doing God knows what. It used to be Jon’s greatest nightmare that he didn’t know if they were slacking and he’d be damned if he could figure out any of the technology that would tell him, even with all the help from IT.
Now that he thinks about it…
John sneaks around them, sticking his head over their shoulders and watching Basira play solitaire while she chides everyone about keeping their heads down and getting their work done. He scoffs, covering his mouth with a clap, but quickly realizes that none of them can hear him.
“I hate you all,” he tries announcing.
They don’t even blink.
“You’re all lazy, rude jokesters who couldn’t care less about me, let alone one another. Melanie’s a several times attempted murderer, Tim’s a whore, Martin’s annoying, Daisy’s a several times successful murderer, and Basira is a hypocrite! I can’t imagine worse co-workers, and in uni I worked retail.”
Of course, no one responded.
It’s not as cathartic as he thought it would be. But it’s not nothing.
If only he were alive to tell them, but he supposes that the irony of that is he wouldn’t have the guts then, hm? Only when they can’t hear him say it to their faces.
He watches them all keep working and wonders if they would find it funny or scary if he were to pick things up and just start throwing them, denting the wall and destroying all their equipment. Maybe he could unplug everything every time they went home for the evening, just to fuck with them.
No, none of that would do anything, they’d just take it up with the newest janitor. The last one he remembered got eaten by the supply closet, his mind supported. Or maybe it wasn’t his mind.
Well, there’s not much else he can do. Maybe see if he could fog up the mirror… if there are other ghosts in the world, how do they spend their time? Certainly not all holed up at their jobs.
Sometime through the week he’ll have to run home, get some books to read and things to do, maybe grab a few spare articles of clothing–can ghosts get changed, and do they need to? It seems so far he doesn’t need to eat, he hasn’t gotten the urge, but it was like that before. The next question would be does he have the ability to eat, if he wanted to, and would he be able to taste and enjoy it? So many questions. He’d never considered ghosts much other than to dismiss them and hadn’t had much of a reason to before.
A notebook. He really, really needs a notebook, and enough focus to hold things for long periods of time.
It’s hard to carry out and execute your lists when you have to rely on memory to tell you what you put on them.
Anyway!
He snoops on the rest of their computers. When seeing Tim do nothing but watch Netflix, he contemplates holding down on the power button, but when he reaches out to do so, Tim just sighs.
“Damn old technology.”
Jon tries to kick the desk but apparently he’s lost all his focus, because his leg goes through it and he falls flat on his ass. “Damnit, Tim!” He glowers to no avail.
After that, there’s not much to do. They don’t talk. Melanie excuses herself to the bathroom and Jon has no desire to follow her in there, so he settles for sitting next to Daisy on the bench in the corner. She’s actually doing the work, flicking through info on different people related to cases, hunting for linkedin profiles. Jon tilts his head back to clunk against the wall and pretends she knows he’s there and just fine with it.
His eyes skirt across the room and fall on Martin, who sits quietly at his desk. Jon hadn’t snooped on him, for some reason he just didn’t feel like lingering on whatever he was doing. It wasn’t much, no interesting emails or slacking.
He’s just… sitting there.
Why is he more curious about that than anything else going on here? There are a million interesting things going on, or there could be.
Jon rises suddenly, unwilling to be in the room any longer.
He makes his way down the hall calmly, as if he has some kind of image to protect, but the moment he walks through the door, his posture slumps.
There are still things he can control. Things he can get done.
The tunnels! He can get into the tunnels. Now that he has nothing to fear there’s so much more that he can explore, and if he freaks out he can walk through the walls and leave. If it sucks, hit da bricks, or whatever it is Georgie used to say.
Georgie. How’s she holding up through all this?
He means, like, is she worrying about him? Is she sad, does she feel regret, is she grieving, or was it like hearing an old worker you never talked to much passed in their sleep? Their relationship was… tense towards the end, tense is one way to put it, and if he were being completely honest with himself their relationship ended terribly and leading up to it was horrible and it might be categorized as mutual abuse if you looked at it from a certain angle. From the right angle. God, he never got to apologize.
Suicidal people are supposed to wrap things up in their last bit of time, whether that’s taking photos for the first time or getting rid of your things or writing notes, that would be the most important thing, to leave something for everyone, but Jon couldn’t think of anything he wanted to say or anyone he wanted to say something to, and now it’s too late. He’s dead and he needs to stay dead, to everyone–
No. He’s not thinking like this right now.
He’s going to get in the tunnels and be productive. He’s going to find something out, damnit, or at least a place to practice his ghostly abilities without Melanie sneaking up behind him. God, that had been terrifying.
He rubs his hands together and focuses, thinking about the door and visualizing grabbing the handle and twisting it open.
Instead his hand falls through again and again, but when he tries to push through the door he finds it solid.
Strange, how the mechanisms of this thing works.
He slams against the door once, twice, thrice, his shoulder starting to ache and as he tries to break down the door he reaches for the doorknob and it does. Not. open, and he kicks the door until he stubs his toe, shouting, “OW!” and grabbing his foot, hopping around like an idiot before falling to the floor again. “Fuck!” The door, as if to taunt him, belatedly slams open and then closes again.
The sound of something shattering pierces the hall and Jon looks over his shoulder to see Tim standing around the exit from the breakroom, a cup of tea now splashed across the carpet.
“What the hell?”
Jon groans. So much for slipping by unnoticed, right?
Tim walks towards the tunnel door, hesitantly turning the doorknob, checking that it was locked. “Weird,” he mutters, trying the handle once more. Jon’s heart leaps in his chest with hope that he might reach for his keys and unlock it, maybe go inside and let him follow–
Wait, though, if he can’t go through the door, would he be able to come back inside? Would he be trapped?
Jon chews the inside of his cheek, thankful that there’s no longer the chance of bleeding (probably. He’d assume. He hadn’t checked the limits of his “body” yet. Corporeal form? More like corporate form. Haha. He could be funny.)
Tim walks away with a puzzled look on his face, supposedly leaving the mess to whoever has the misfortune of finding it.
Rude.
Tim was spooked. It didn’t take much for him to be paranoid nowadays, but ever since Prentiss he had been carefully looking around corners in case some new monster decided to make its home in the Archives again. It was an unconscious action now, and it would have made him sad if he didn’t tell himself that it was a normal, perfectly adjusted thing to do.
The banging on the door had made him startle and drop his mug, but he wasn’t about to go clean it up. No one went over there anyway, and if they decided to go into the tunnels shoeless then that is their prerogative and not his problem. He pointedly ignored the broom closet on his way to the main area, too. It wasn’t even one of the ones that ate janitors, but again, he was paranoid. He wouldn’t lose to a broom closet of all things.
Tim found Melanie in the breakroom concocting more of her ‘drinks.’ He opened the door loud enough to get her attention, and she quickly looked over to confirm his identity before returning to her work.
He paced towards her, arms gesturing uselessly at her angled back. “Melanie. You’re not going to believe this.”
She doesn’t look up. “What, that Elias is an old creepy fuck that’s always watching us?”
“I mean–”
The scraping of her spoon on the bottom of the cup doesn’t cut off when she does. “Yeah, I know, he is.” She tapped the side of the mug with the spoon. “I’m busy doing absolutely nothing of interest, what’s up?”
Tim took a deep breath, but not too deep that Melanie could hear it, but just enough that you would’ve thought he was formulating an answer instead of trying to collect himself. “You know how you keep telling us about that book you saw fall and all that shit?”
“Mhm.” She started to sip her coffee, but stopped herself. She made a hmm noise and looked at the cup, back down to her counter of concoctions where a mug that said in a rather ‘midwestern grandmother of three who wears too many jacket vests font’ “You don’t have to be ~CRAZY~ to work Here!,” looked at her cup again, back down to the messy counter, and put the coffee down slowly before sliding it over to a clean part of the counter where Tim assumed she thought she wouldn't confuse it for the poison–sorry, coffee.
Warily eying the mixture in her hands, he began with “Okay, get ready for this–” before pausing for dramatic effect, of course– “...I believe you.”
Melanie sniffed, and added some green powder to the mixture. His mouth felt dry at the sight of it. “What brought this on?”
Tim stopped, looked around and leaned in with a hand to the side of his mouth. “I saw a door violently shake and close. But like, it was slammed. It kinda flew. And before you say anything like ‘was there a draft’ or ‘does that door normally do that’ which is honestly out of character but I'm so used to Jon asking stupid shit like that no, it was not, it was just sitting there!”
Melanie's eyes sparkle when she finally turns to look at him. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
She takes the spoon out of the cup and points it at him, still dripping. “You know what this means?”
Tim dodged a drop of possibly corrosive liquid. “I have no idea.”
“Elias is fucking with us.” She punctuated each word with a flick of her wrist towards him, and he elected to ignore the sizzling sounds coming from the carpet of the sitting area behind him.
It did sound off, though. He started “I’m not sure–” before being abruptly silenced.
She cut him off with a finger to his lips. “Shh. It’s Elias, I’m sure of it. He’s doing this with his annoying spooky powers or some shit.”
“I– okay.” He wasn’t going to win this fight and to be completely honest he wouldn’t mind blaming his problems on the old fucker. “Alright. It’s Elias.”
She finished stirring the concoction, dropped the spoon into the sink with a loud CLANG, and picked up the cup. “Speaking of Elias,” she said gleefully, “I have something to deliver to him.” It smells good, somehow. Tim is almost inclined to ask what’s inside, but before he can Melanie fast walks out of the room.
Before the break room door closes, she looks back at him with eyes full of glee and says “Be back in five. Get out the whiteboard.”
Ah. So she found it.
They had hidden the whiteboard from Jon on top of one of the large, tedious shelves and turned it around so the brown cardboard side blended in with the dark ceiling and wood of the bookshelf after one of his more notable tirades on how one of the statements that pointedly wouldn’t record digitally was not, in fact, a supernatural occurrence and instead a result of a mixture of mental illness and tricks of the light. They had to hide the red string and magnets after that. He even complained that they didn’t have a corkboard.
Melanie has been pacing for a while. She’s put the sad, old printer to work because Tim refused to ask Rosie to use hers (half because he wouldn't want her to see them printing out pictures of her boss and half because he does not want to run into said boss upstairs with printed pictures of him in his hands) and has been printing screenshots and evidence. Many, many screenshots. He wonders where she got them but doesn’t pry for the sake of both his time and sanity.
The printer, fighting for its life, makes a sad noise like a cough. Melanie doesn’t stop in her pacing but reroutes to kick the poor thing once, convincing (or perhaps threatening) the thing into working again.
She's also brought out the markers. There’s no doubt she found them from rummaging around everyone’s desks. She labeled the top of the whiteboard in bright red marker with CAPITALIST SCUM and an unflattering picture of Elias right below it. He’s sprawled across his desk blackout drunk, and she said she found it on a private account named @fog.fag without a profile picture but had to cut out the other man that had taken the selfie. In the original picture, which she had ever so generously sent to him, the other man is carrying a bottle of fireball and it’s captioned “guess who got a surprise in their strawberry kiwi daiquiri today!”
Tim gleefully makes it the group photo of the Assistant’s group chat.
Tim, ever the instigator, quietly erases the S off of the top of the whiteboard when Melanie’s not looking.
She had already told him how to harvest the mold spores in the back room while she was setting up the whiteboard. She was using a spare toothbrush that she had learned Elias kept in a cabinet in the archives ‘just in case,’ and she pointedly told him that she knew a knife or scalpel would be more effective but she didn't care. She also taught him how to make good smelling but foul tasting (and poisonous by the way) tea, so that was something. What was most interesting was her knowledge of Elias’s schedule: when he came in, when he left, when a visitor often appeared (Tuesdays and Fridays at 3:00), and his lunch breaks.
God save us all.
JONAH MAGNUS’ CRUSTY HOES group chat
Timothee Shatlamet changed the group chat profile.
Basira🌺: What is this?
Daisy🌼: Blackmail. Thank you, Tim.
Daisy🌼: Who changed my name again?
Timothee Shatlamet: np but melanie found it
Timothee Shatlamet: also not me
Melanie 👻: not me
Daisy🌼 has changed their name to Daisy Tonner
Daisy Tonner: Whoever did that, enjoy the next 24 hours.
Timothee Shatlamet: ur so funny daisy. and amazing
Daisy Tonner: Flattery won’t save you.
Timothee Shatlamet has changed Daisy Tonner’s name to 🚨Popo🚨
🚨Popo🚨: Watch for dark alleys.
Melanie gets her hands to shake as she holds the old camera, her voice low and raspy. “As you can see, the atmosphere of the office is spooky enough as it is. It smells like herbal tea, old pages in leather books, and perhaps some black mold.”
Out of the camera’s view, Tim gives her a thumbs up and she makes a shut up motion at him.
“It’s a perfectly normal archival job… or is it? Because sometimes we see things. Things that should not be possible.”
From where he’s sitting in the corner of the room, where he should be napping, Jon rolls his eyes. She’s ridiculous. Looking back, he has no idea why she ever scared him in the slightest. She’s a clickbait youtuber, for Christ’s sake! (And yes, he does know what that means, Melanie.)
She creeps up on the corner of the room across from Jon, and he repeats the motion of rolling his eyes, no matter how pointless.
“You know,” he calls upon deaf ears, “I’m over here.”
When nothing happens, she puts the camera down and turns to Tim, blowing hair out of her face with frustration and a look that says nothing cool ever happens to me and nothing ever goes my way, despite the fact that may angsty teenagers would be very jealous of her life and everything does happen to her, it just…doesn’t go well…which could be interpreted as a point in her favor, but it could also be interpreted as Melanie being whiny, something Jon thinks she excels at.
“You know, I swear I saw that book floating the other day. Right in this corner.”
“And you’re not crazy,” Tim says, beating her to the punch.
“Exactly. I’m not. So what we need to do is set up security cameras, see if we can catch anything. Or just let these roll high up on the shelves or something.”
“Do you think we should get one of those recorders with tape? Y’know, ‘cuz nothing spooky registers digitally when we talk about it, so how should it capture it anyhow?”
She shakes her head, shrugging. John rolls his eyes. All of this is more than ridiculous at this point, it’s–it’s the height of absurdity. Please, this is a workplace, and despite its prior track records for nonsense, it should not continue!
Actually, The Eye starts feeding to him, Jonah Magnus has operated under many ridiculous–
Melanie’s head snaps up and she starts wacking Tim in the shoulder for his attention.
“Tim! Tim! Look at that!” She grabs the camera and starts recording, pointing at Jon. “Is that a… a glowing eye? It looks like it was drawn on someone’s phone, what the hell?” She clears her throat before switching back into entertainer mode, “and here it is, the proof of- oh, fuck it, I can do a voiceover later.”
She starts creeping torwards him and Jon leaps to his feet with a declaration of “oh, fuck no,” and her camera jerks up to follow the floating thing above his head.
Jon bats at it like a cat, but it won’t disappear. The Eye keeps talking and he does his best to tune it out, mumbling “go away!”
Nudging the book with his foot, he sees that he’s still solid, which apparently now that he can turn on, he’s not sure how to turn off. Jon closes his eyes, focusing the sensations in his body. If he’s translucent and things can pass through him most of the time, it follows that with enough focus, he should be able to will his body to let things just pass through him, right? He tries to nudge the book again and his foot goes right through.
Ok. Here goes.
He takes a deep breath, taking in his cornered surroundings, and runs right towards Melanie, who is blocking the door–no, right through Melanie, he has to focus on what he wants, that’s how he can get it–
And collides with her, hard.
For the first time in his skinny little life, Jonathan Sims knocks somebody to the ground and panics because by God, that never worked when it was convenient? before starting to run.
Breathing hard, only a few words leave Melanie’s mouth– “Do–do you think the camera caught all of that?”