Chapter Text
According to the most recent Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences from the Health and Safety Executive, the rate of fatal workplace injury for industry code 91 (Libraries, archives, museums and other cultural activities) amounts to approximately five per thousand people per year. The Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences might have further elaborated that four of those five deaths occur at the Magnus Institute, London. And it might have further, further elaborated that from year to year the Artifact Storage department usually wins the dubious award of Most Deadly Department in the Institute unless the Archives have had a particularly rough go of things.
Of course, none of the job adverts for openings in Artifact Storage mention this particular honor. Kurogane wonders whether it would have mattered if they did. Artifact Storage still seems to attract a very specific type of dumbass to the staff roster, and he tries not to think too hard about what it means to count himself among that number.
He doesn’t hate his job. Far from it. Something twisted in his head gets a thrill from the threat of danger. And when someone fucks up and the artifacts throw something truly monstrous his way, he doesn’t have to worry about hurting anyone if he really cuts loose in a fight. Only the constant paranoia eventually wears him down.
Artifacts—real artifacts, not the objects of people’s mundane ghost stories—can be literally anything. When something new arrives in storage, no matter how benign it looks, it absolutely must be treated as a dangerous, unstable weapon. No touching with bare skin, minimum contact if possible, and all reasonable containment should be immediately employed.
Some things make themselves obvious, like the set of scalpels still dripping with blood that never dries someone passed along last week. Others… well. On the floor below his desk, his predecessor had locked a cast-iron frying pan into its own high capacity cooling system before “retiring.” It still manages to heat his cubicle like a sauna when the mood strikes it. On those days, the resting temperature of the air several feet above its surface is hot enough to bubble fat beneath human skin.
Needless to say, a healthy amount of suspicion for mundane objects is a matter of life and death in Archive storage. It usually serves him well, but he starts to have trouble separating his work situation from the rest of the world. Outside is supposed to be the haven of reality, where everything makes sense and the table across the room doesn’t secretly want to kill him. He just has trouble convincing himself of that.
He knows it’s the sort of thing he should talk to a therapist about—He’d gotten used to seeing one after the total wreck of his childhood, but he doesn’t know how the hell he would explain this damn job. Kurogane does not think he will ever be able to explain to any human outside Artifact Storage that he’s gotten jumpy around decorative pottery because last week he saw a creature crawl out of a Ming Dynasty vase and try to eat a co-worker.
He starts carrying a long knife and picks up a caffeine addiction instead. Coffee suits him far better than sleep anyway—he’d rather suffer heat flashes and heart palpitations than dreams.
The small cafe just a few minutes’ walk north-west of the Magnus Institute has served as Kurogane’s only saving grace for the last year now. He has never appreciated added sweeteners or foam, and in his opinion this place has the only decent black coffee for miles.
Even his paranoia calms a little as he steps through the glass door and hears the chime of the bell. Sure, any fork in the cup by the espresso machine might secretly entreat the holder to eat people or something, but he has a hard time staying on edge when the smell of roasted coffee hits the air. Stupid, but somehow the smell reminds him of relief.
Besides, paranoia aside, he has started to get a pretty good instinct for these things. He wouldn’t have lasted long without it.
At first, nothing seems out of place. The London morning crowd clogs the small space of the shop as usual, customers thronging here for caffeine before a long commute or a slow day. Kurogane joins them, not thinking of much. He woke up with the strangest feeling of foreboding this morning—a common companion—and he just knows they’re going to get a new delivery in today.
The line moves quickly, one zombified customer at a time, until finally only two people separate him from the cashier and the goal of coffee. He starts to feel nervous—an itch beneath his skin, a restlessness in his hands he usually only feels moments before something goes wrong. His eyes dart around the café, searching for the source. Just by chance, he happens to glance toward the counter and catch the gaze of the person stacking drinks on the bar and—
Blue eyes. Fall into the sky blue. Bottom of the ocean blue. The sort of blue that sends all the breath fleeing his lungs and drops his stomach to his knees with vertigo. This room was crowded just seconds ago, but somehow he begins to feel the space that isolates him. Unfathomable, impossible distance that stretches on and on forever in every direction. The endless maw of a gaping beast too enormous to comprehend.
He—
Blinks.
“Can I take your order sir?” The girl at the cashier asks with a bored expression, looking with confusion at the way he stands just a little too far from the counter. Kurogane stares at her without comprehension for just a second more, glancing between her and the stranger currently manning the espresso machine. The blonde doesn’t let on that anything happened at all, simply moving between one paper cup and the next. He could, maybe, have written the strange moment off as nothing more than a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep... if not for the self-satisfied smirk scrawled over the guy’s face.
Besides. Kurogane does have a pretty good feel for these things… that asshole did something. He just doesn’t know what.
“Sir?” The girl asks again, boredom giving way to mounting anxiety. “Are you… okay?”
“Yeah,” Kurgoane grouches, cursing his fucking luck. He’s been using this place as an escape from work, so it fucking figures he’d find work here to meet him eventually. He’s never seen a person that could pull shit like the artifacts could, but sure! Why not?
The paranoia he keeps trying to escape crawls over his every nerve and he truly begins to understand that nowhere and nothing is safe.
“Forgot my wallet,” he lies to the poor barista, turns back and walks past his fellow customers to the door. The musical sound of laughter chases him out into the street.
He doesn’t hate his job. He doesn’t. But sometimes he just wants to—he could strangle someone.
The latest acquisition included nothing special—a creepy looking doll that someone’s aunt swore was haunted, but he’d only needed to look at the thing to know it wasn’t really. Two books that had seemed dubious, but they hadn’t put up a fuss when lifted into separate containers with tongs. He suspected they were only minor items if anything. He hasn’t seen more than meaningless junk from a delivery in weeks, and he can’t tell which pisses him off worse: the boredom or the anticipation that something far worse must be imminent.
The case around the perfectly innocent looking umbrella in Storage Area U has begun showing signs of acid erosion again, despite the lack of any kind of liquid residue or damage anywhere else in the room. Nothing unusual there. Normally they would simply switch the umbrella to a new case. (They usually rehome it every few months.) But they’re running low on glass displays, Hannah in accounting doesn’t understand why they would need to buy something like a Teflon case for artifact storage, and he has absolutely no way to explain a possessed, acid rain-inducing umbrella.
(Because of course, while anyone who’s ever worked in Artifact Storage understands that the shit that lives there absolutely breaks the laws of reality, the rest of the Institute seems to have very little grasp of the situation.)
Kurogane thinks he could successfully argue for it if he could just get his department head to sign off, but the asshole decided to push for another fifteen glass cases instead because “we wouldn’t be able to see it if it were inside the Teflon case.” As if that fucking matters! It’s a goddamn umbrella. It looks like a goddamn umbrella. And while it melts shit around it and he’d never touch it without protective gear and a pair of tongs, it has never once changed its appearance.
Ugh. Just. Fucking stupid.
Now, usually, on a day like this, with his temper running high and no end to his frustrations in sight, he would escape at lunch and make a trip down the road for coffee. He can’t do that now. He hasn’t returned since the vertigo hypnotism incident.
Kurogane doesn’t know what to think about the barista with the gaze that feels like falling, or what to do. His whole job revolves around keeping dangerous, paranormal things contained. Just when he’d started to think he really understood the ins and outs and the usual ways Artifacts with a capital “A” could act… he’d run into a person with the same sort of effect.
What does that mean for him? Should he… report it somehow? He doesn’t know to whom or how. Besides, the ethics of keeping a person contained seem spotty at best, even if they can toss random passers-by into an agoraphobia attack on a whim. On the other hand, he doesn’t know how much damage that guy can really do…
He decides to leave it. Part of him thinks… maybe this madness only follows him because he has so much contact with it through work. Maybe If he stays away from the coffee shop the strangeness will leave it and he can pretend he did anything to protect it.
(Maybe he’s lying to himself)
The dreams deepen—pull him deeper into a tide he doesn’t understand with every night.
Something deep and thrumming beneath his skin that drives him with certainty even as anger bubbles over and boils his thoughts. He doesn’t know why or where he is, nor can he truly comprehend the scene that plays out at his hands, but he doesn’t need to. His sense of self cannot surface from the haze of blood and the sound of pipes.
The knife in his grip feels good, feels right as he tears through another neck, lands a second hit in the next opponent’s chest. He can feel the sting of the wounds that lace his own body but they only drive him harder, wild-eyed and eager to make them all hurt far worse. There used to be a reason for this, he thinks, but he doesn’t need one now. The call of blood and the piercing whistle of the Piper’s song both wail so much louder than reason.
Drill through the mass of shooting-stabbing-screaming-slashing, cut the rest down and do not think of silly things like “why.” Sing the song with each drop spilled and each swing of the blade, for the pipes are calling.
Kurogane wakes with a start, whole body dotted with sweat, adrenaline sending his heart through its paces. One of the nightmares come to call again—mindless, senseless slaughter that shouldn’t unnerve him as much as it does.
He goes to push sweat-soaked hair away from his over-heated brow and finds his fingers wrapped around the hilt of the knife, still sheathed, but… He drops it, trying not to think too deeply of dream memories and the slippery grasp of a knife handle drenched in red. It lies innocently atop the sheets.
That’s not…. That doesn’t mean anything, right? He’d been upset and frightened by the dream and must have grabbed it from beneath the pillow out of instinct. It doesn’t mean anything.
(He doesn’t know how much longer he can believe that)
Another morning, another commute. Kurogane makes his way off the tube at Sloane Square and wanders blearily up the steps into the early grey light of London. He should make his way immediately to the Institute. No good sleep to speak of, but he hadn’t finished re-inventorying Area W last night and he has a sneaking suspicion about a “misplaced” book. He could head there now and make an early go at things before anyone else shows up to distract him.
Or, whispers the temptation of clarity, he could go get a coffee.
Kurogane crosses the street and steps west with determination.
He hasn’t forgotten the strange creature of—he doesn’t know what to call it. Heights? Depths? Giant things?—Whatever. He hasn’t forgotten the creature who pulled him into a hallucination before. He’s just much more willing than usual to fight an unholy abomination for a moderately good cup of black coffee.
The chiming of the bell as he enters the café sounds off. Just a touch too shrill—almost like…
No. Nope. Kurogane refuses. He will not think about strange pipe music or the battlefield of his dreams. He will buy a damn cup of coffee and stay awake.
Bolstered by annoyance, he glances over the other customers, noting the crowd swarms just as thick as usual. Still the room feels somehow more spacious than he remembers.
Sure enough, the same strange blond with the stare that nearly floored him last time still grins away at the customers behind the counter. He gave up the espresso machine for the cash register, but it doesn’t seem to have dampened his mood.
Kurogane pays attention this time. He knows what to look for. “Welcome! How can I help you?” the stranger calls out with a wide grin. No one reacts abnormally as they move through all the usual route motions of the café transaction. Not at first, anyway. Four people make their way through the line before Kurogane catches anything odd. Then, without warning, he watches as the woman in front of the cash register stiffens, her purse sliding through her slack grip. She startles before she can drop it completely and just stands there, blinking for a second too long at the stranger’s blithe grin. With a dazed expression and a distant voice she stutters out her order, and the line moves on. As if nothing had happened at all.
Well. It’s not that dangerous, he reasons to himself. (This is incredibly foolhardy.) The woman seems just fine, if a little frazzled as she steps to the side to wait for her drink, one hand pressed self-consciously against her chest. (He could have had some kind of delayed effect. Kurogane doesn’t know—) Besides, Kurogane’s already faced this guy once and been fine for it. He can do that again. (What if he got lucky last time?) He wants a goddamn cup of coffee, alright?
The bodies between himself and the cash register dwindle until at last Kurogane looks up and finds the cashier’s smiling face.
“Oh!” The asshole chimes, eyes half lidded. The nametag on his chest, now in full view, proclaims his name as “Fai.” It doesn’t sound like an evil creature sort of name but then he supposes evil-sounding names are hardly a requirement. “You’re back! Did you finally find your wallet?”
“I did, actually,” he grouches. He expects to feel the strangest sensation of falling at any second, but it doesn’t come. He squints, rendered suspicious by Fai’s too-pleasant expression.
“Something on my face?”
“No, guess not.” Fine. Maybe the guy can only use the trick on someone once? “Just a house coffee, please. No cream or sugar.” They perform the usual exchange of goods and services, but Fai seems far too smug as he trades Kurogane’s card back over the bar.
“Just wait here—I’ll get that coffee for you,” he offers, turning to the spigot that dispenses the house blend and Kurogane just knows if he doesn’t leave now he’s going to face that fall/dispersion/endless void again.
He puts his wallet back in his pocket, makes sure his hands are free and doesn’t budge.
“Right here, sir,” Fai demures, holding Kurogane’s coffee up like a lure, and the way the light hits his eyes doesn’t reflect quite right. Almost like his gaze is somewhere else—like his eyes were cut from a different scene and photo-shopped back in. Kurogane looks him directly in the face as he grasps the cup anyway.
He expects it, this time, and that lessens the effect but cannot halt it completely. The world is endless, is gone, is nothing. He falls so far and fast that his lungs cannot find the air, for all that he knows, suspects, it causes the dull roar in his ears. There is only the sky, the sea, the gaping maw of the universe and the endless fall. His heart races and his mouth dries, and he—
Does not care.
His mind tries to muster the fear he knows he should feel, his body reacts, but the dregs of emotion he has left run low after the weeks of nightmares. He watches nothing fly by for all he knows he must be falling, disoriented by the lack of reference point until the massive mouth of an incomprehensible giant looms below. He should fear that at least, he thinks, but in his annoyance he only wonders what it might take to kill something like that. Whether it might make him feel better.
Time stretches further than it should, but he finds himself blinking back to reality long before he loses the exhausted anger that drives him. The blonde cashier stares, utterly-blank faced and clearly thrown off by Kurogane’s lack of reaction. Good.
He holds the coffee up towards Fai’s mounting confusion in a “cheers” motion and makes his way for the door, prize in hand. He steals the first sip on the front step of the Institute’s entrance. It’s the best damn coffee he’s ever had.