Work Text:
She comes to on the shoulder of I-90, grip white-knuckled on the steering wheel, one of the most powerful men in the world slumped over next to her in the passenger seat.
"Eight," she rasps. She must have been staring, unseeing, at the sun for some time; the echo it’s burnt into her retinas lingers when she turns to look at him. "What the fuck?"
O5-8 doesn't respond. His chin rests squarely on his collarbone, and his eyes are closed. Wheeler can't tell if he's breathing. A grotesque chill lodges itself deep in her gut; she unbuckles herself, reaching over to check his pulse with two shaking fingers. There's an amnestic patch on his wrist, she notes through the blue-violet spots still obscuring most of her vision, and an identical patch stuck to her own arm. The two of them must be coming down from roughly the same dosage. Either he should be waking up along with her, or something is dangerously wrong.
His pulse is there. Thready, hesitant, but there. "Eight," Wheeler says again, sharper this time, shaking his shoulder. "Brent, come on. Wake up."
At last his lashes flutter. He looks at her askance. "Whuzzat?" he asks, and a wave of relief crashes over her.
"What's the last thing you remember?"
His eyes clear. "Where are we?" he returns.
Cars whizz by to their left: the morning-commute rush. She scans the periphery, and finds a sign informing her that they're maybe thirty miles out from Colorado Springs, which she relays to him. But his attention is elsewhere.
"I don’t- Marion." He's staring at her hands. "What did we do?"
She follows his gaze downwards and understands, at once, why her hands had made a wet peeling noise as she'd pried them off the wheel. They're coated in a layer of deep, flaky red. A random string of numbers - she recognizes her own handwriting - is scrawled on her left palm. Something hard and annoying is stuck in the sleeve of her jacket; she pulls at it until it comes free and is rewarded with a bloodsoaked Foundation-issue fountain pen, its nib pierced clean through a pale, fleshy chunk of... something. What did we do, she thinks, is something of a pleasant euphemism.
"Well," Wheeler says. "That's a problem."
"There was a meeting," O5-8 says. She appreciates his commitment to propriety, given the circumstances. "Site 167. You were there. Vegas-room business, I think." He pauses, pinching the bridge of his nose, as if to make his memories from between then and now resurface from their murky abyss. "That's about all I've got."
Wheeler is piecing her own timeline together, grasping at every fragment she can, and is frustrated to find she can't recall much more than that herself. The 167 meetings have been a regular occurrence for months. She remembers getting up at the crack of dawn to catch a flight out, remembers her surprise at O5-8's inclusion on the list of meeting attendees. Not necessarily his attendance - the fact that O5 Command had deigned to let them know in advance. Beyond that: a black, nameless void.
"Any details? Anything about content?" she presses. O5-8 shakes his head.
Something broke bad. That much she's sure of. Now it's a matter of what - and what role she played in it. The victim? The mediator? The culprit?
She doesn't know whether it's safe for her to be in a car with O5-8. She would never act against the Foundation of her own volition - which is to say, if she’s been compromised, there's no reason that whatever malevolent agent has been pulling at her strings wouldn't still be around. That it wouldn't have be waiting this whole time for the perfect moment to get an O5 alone.
Wheeler considers her options, or rather her lack of them. They have one car between them. No phones, no ID, but the powers that be are tracking her and O5-8 just as much as they ever are. They're hours out from 167, which means she's been conscious to some degree for a while; if she really was compromised, she probably would've taken the opportunity to kill O5-8 well before now. And where's she even going to go?
She leaves a silent pause, glancing out the driver-side window - it’s the middle of summer, right in the doldrums, and the humidity has left interesting patterns of condensation on the glass. But it's clear he's in no condition to give her an order.
"We're a few hours out from Site 41," Wheeler says. She sighs; it whistles through her teeth. "We'll go to 41, and we'll figure out what the hell is going on."
O5-8 stares at her for a long moment, and nods.
The outcome space of possibilities is still large, and growing. There's every chance what went down at 167 isn't as bad as all that.
It is, in fact, as bad as all that.
They give Wheeler a wide berth from the moment she and O5-8 show up at the Site 41 military checkpoint, bent fender and bloodstains and all. A quick scan for the ID chip in her arm comes away valid. So she's herself, at least. That's comforting. She leaves O5-8 in her office to make his necessary calls, and spends another two hours in its adjacent conference room-turned-battle station, running triage.
Site 167 is completely radio silent. Has been since midmorning - since an hour and fifteen minutes after Wheeler, Graves, Li, and O5-8 were set to meet. Site 45 hasn’t heard anything from them, either. (Or from Graves, for that matter. Concerning.) Environmental sensors show that the Site is still operational, but 167’s comms logs cut off completely from one minute to the next, with no obvious sign of any specific incident response protocol… which is in and of itself a sign of a specific incident response protocol. A large-scale memetic or antimemetic hazard breach - and the full lockdown initiated to contain it.
With her Level 4 credentials, they can query the few internal sensors within 167 that hadn’t stopped streaming when the lockdown began. The sensors prove her theory correct. Several sectors - including the one where they'd met - are under complete isolation from the rest of the Site, about a third of its total floor area. They aren't in position to mobilize resources immediately; the sister Sites close enough to 167 to be useful are barely equipped to handle a passably dangerous meme, let alone an antimeme. But they can set up pipelines, get the ball rolling for when either 167 comes back online or they hit the twelve-hour mark. Help the folks at 45 run PR damage control with the rest of the Coalition. God, the Antimemetics Coalition is going to go nuts over this.
Directing her response team distracts Wheeler well enough from the creeping unease gnawing away at her insides. Then she stands up to replace a broken pencil, and everything goes fuzzy, and she comes to seconds later, Gauss's hands on her shoulders the only thing keeping her from collapsing to the floor.
"Director," he says. "You're about to fall over. Go get something to eat. We can keep the place running for a bit."
From most anyone else she'd ignore it - the adrenaline kicked in again about the time they hit the outer perimeter of 41, and she really does feel fine. But Wheeler trusts him, and their working relationship going back years. She looks down at her hands; they're still stained red in places. Can't exactly be inspiring morale.
“Fine,” she concedes. “One of you, take this down to the research queue while I’m gone.”
Wheeler reaches into the pocket of the slacks she'd changed into, fishes out a Ziploc baggie, and dumps it unceremoniously on the table. The team crowds around to get a better look. As she turns to leave, she hears one of them gag, presumably at the chunk of flesh still attached to the fountain pen inside.
In the third-floor break room, Wheeler scrubs the worst of the blood from her hands, arms and face, and pours herself a steaming cup of coffee. There's a locker room down the hall, and as she strips off her undershirt she becomes acutely aware of the various aches and pains making themselves known throughout her body. She loses an uncomfortable amount of time sitting on the fold-out plastic shower stool, staring vacantly at the drain, watching the warm water carve swirling patterns through the red staining her skin.
She’s barely even started to make a dent in the grime when her phone buzzes. Without the aid of her glasses it's a blurry black blob on the shelf, and Wheeler grabs for it a little too fast, wincing at the sudden wave of dizziness that overwhelms her.
It's a text from Gauss. Head back soon? 167 back online. You need to see this.
Of course the second she leaves there's another fire to put out. She puts her hair - soaked through from the collarbone down - up in a military bun, too-tight, the painful tension of it grounding her, and limps back down the hallway.
The Division employees scattered about the room have matching vaguely horrified expressions on their faces, as if there's just been a murder. Which means, given the circumstances, that odds are good there's just been a murder.
Gauss, not quite as openly panicked as the rest but still obviously stricken, hands her some printouts and talks her through the files he'd been looking at. The good news is 167 is stable for the time being. The bad news is that nobody seems to know why. The sectors surrounding the one where they’d met had gone into isolation purely as a failsafe; the one containing their meeting room is still locked down tight. No information in or out.
“Anything about Li? Graves?” she asks. Wordlessly, Gauss gestures for her to keep reading.
Michael Li is missing. Josef Graves is missing. Technically Wheeler had been ‘missing’ herself until three hours ago, but she’d still been broadcasting the steady pulse of her vitals. They’d known she was alive. Li and Graves’ vitals, from the start of the lockdown onwards, are incomprehensible radio static.
Bartholomew Hughes is dead.
She reads the words as if they refer to someone else: characters in a television show, perhaps, not colleagues she's worked with for decades. Not friends. Not the most highly revered containment architect in the Coalition - hell, maybe the Foundation. Not the entire chain of command between her and O5-8.
What the fuck.
What happened to Bart would seem at any other moment to be plain, dumb, bad luck. He’d been down in one of the basement labs, surveying it for refurbishment, when one of the autoclaves sprung an ethylene oxide leak. A horrible accident - but it can't have been an accident. Not like this; not under these circumstances.
"Here's what we're going to do," she says, voice infinitely steadier than she feels. "We're under limited lockdown from here on. Code 2. You all: standard channels, standard investigative procedure, you figure out what the fuck is going on. Facts of the case, nature of the breach, whether we're under immediate threat at 41."
She spends the rest of the evening handling the fallout. O5-8 has long since commandeered a helicopter and fucked off to parts unknown; if they’re going to get any solid information, it’ll probably come from the internal recording mechanism in his shielding, and that’s if O5 Command deems it practical to let her know what they’ve found. All they can do for now is support 167 through the cleanup - limited, at this point, as the vast majority of the damage isn’t yet accessible.
When things begin to quiet down, around two-thirty in the morning, she retreats to her office to catch a few moments of shuteye on her foldout couch. Adam’s texted her; his flight, she remembers, was supposed to get in from Seattle a few hours ago. Hi. Thought you’d said you were supposed to be home by now. You alive?
It’s a joke and not a joke. Yes. Work ran late, sorry, she types, as if this is a normal end to a normal workday, as if her world hasn’t just tilted dangerously on its axis. Need-to-know basis.
She shuts her eyes for a fraction of a moment, and is out cold before she can manage to hit send. Her alarm wakes her again at five a.m. sharp.
The morning doesn't bring good news.
167 is still on partial lockdown. They're getting more information from the units on the ground, at least, but not much is useful. The sector that'd initiated the lockdown is still impregnable - a tangle of interlocking defenses, engaged from the inside. She wonders who gave the order. Someone who gave their life to only be remembered by the shape of their final act? Li, or Graves? Herself?
She’s waiting for her coffee to cool down and is picking at a bagel, too nauseous to choke down more than a few bites, when her work computer gets an automated ping: her research queue submission has been processed. At least something’s gone right today. Wheeler scrolls through the results - the pen in her sleeve had been in some poor likely-dead soul’s esophagus, apparently. Then she gets to the DNA test. She scans over it twice, then three times, assuming the exhaustion clouding her mind is what’s making it incomprehensible to her. Then she just stares.
Wheeler feels, suddenly and acutely, as though she's in free-fall, her hands planted squarely on the table the only thing keeping her upright. She breathes. In, out; in again, out again. The feeling passes, retreats inward, where she can lock enough of it away so as to be manageable.
She clears her throat; several researchers chatting beside her throw her a curious glance. "Okay. So you’re going to need to keep me isolated until all of this is over. Get a room ready, prep standard interrogation procedure."
"Why?" Gauss asks, and she turns to show him what she’d been looking at.
"Would help if I could remember a single goddamn thing," Wheeler says. With her cursor, she highlights the line of the document that links the tissue sample collected from the fountain pen, with ninety-eight point five percent certainty, to one Michael Li. "But our chief of Antimemetics is dead. Maybe? Probably. And I think I might be your prime suspect."
They don't put her in an interrogation room, to her dismay. It's a quarantine unit, a converted containment apartment with convective airflow and fifteen different locking mechanisms, each of which she'd approved separately under advisory from Bart. Fine if they were isolating her completely, but they're going to have to come in here with her, and they'd be safer in a room with the equipment to keep her properly restrained. But she's voluntarily ceded all powers of command to Lensky, her vice-deputy director, until the situation is resolved. Indefinitely. Potentially forever. She's trying not to think about the worst-case scenario.
She misses her coffee. She hadn't gotten the chance to drink it; it must still be sitting on the table in the conference room. Wheeler wonders whether it qualifies as evidence, and laughs softly to herself, a tad hysterical.
She knows Division interrogation procedure like the back of her hand. She's approved most of it, personally revised a couple of clauses, and - back in her field agent days, before a string of promotions turned her job into paperwork and meetings - conducted more than a few interrogations herself. She understands how this goes. The Foundation is cold, not cruel, and the Division has inherited its progenitor's mantra. But the absence of cruelty does not imply the absence of efficiency, particularly when there is precious little time to waste.
There would, in a perfect world, be complete isolation. This is not a perfect world. Wheeler is forcing her own organization to interrogate her, under circumstances which have no precedent and no set exit plan. They treat her too kindly. Deference? Fear? She hopes it's not pity. She doesn't know how she’d be able to face them, after, if it was pity.
The fountain pen that killed Li is in Site 41's evidence locker. No other record of his death exists. (Officially. O5-8's shielding, she knows, must have recorded some sort of footage. O5 Command must be aware of the incident by now. If the records prove useful, her people will hear word soon enough.)
The kitchen area of the containment unit is, like all features of their humanoid containment units, built to look inviting and to facilitate lockdown protocols the second they become necessary. The table she's seated at is homey and wooden; soft simulated daylight filters through the unit's window. But the table is bolted to the floor, as is her chair. She’s bolted to the table, handcuffs comfortable but titanium-strong. And there's a storm brewing outside, from what she can hear of the thunder and the pattering of rain battering Site 41's concrete hull. A veneer, like everything else.
A rotating cast of personnel enter and exit. She recognizes some of them - two she personally hired, years ago - and is surprised not to recognize all of them. They ask her the same questions over and over again, in welcoming tones, in threatening tones, attempting desperately to extract information from her that she doesn't have. They mnesticize her at intervals, and gradually she remembers flashes - movement, snatches of unhelpful conversation - but nothing from the duration of the meeting itself. Nothing that will help anyone make sense of anything. They record it all, ask her the same questions another ten times until she's ground down into dust for them to sift through, and then Wheeler is left alone again.
She’s so tired.
Someone comes back in: Lensky, and three orderlies. "Any news?" she asks, though at this stage it's not as though they'd tell her anything.
"I'm afraid I can't answer that," Lensky says, a look of genuine apology on his face, and they sit down and ask her the same questions again and--
Something is wrong.
Wheeler doesn't know how long she's been sitting here. Eight hours? Ten? She feels disoriented, unmoored - judging by the staticky, sated, blanket-like pulse of SCP-4987 around her, she's probably been feeding it the long stretches alone. It's still raining, but that could mean anything. It's all she has to go by. There's no clock in here.
Her arms are going numb. She's leaning on them, best she can with the way the handcuffs contort her position, trying to block out the overhead light. It hurts. Her head feels like it's splitting open. That's normal - she's definitely overdosed by now, but mildly, the kind she stumbles into at least once a month, which she usually recovers from with a good night's sleep and a long morning in. But she's also sleep-deprived, and dehydrated, and vaguely panicked in a way her lowered defenses are no longer allowing her to compartmentalize.
That's not what's wrong. What’s wrong is the feeling in her gut, ominous and foreboding, that something isn't quite right here, that they've miscalculated. Its imprecision bothers her, but she's rarely wrong about this sort of thing.
The door to the unit opens, its multitude of locks hissing and clicking. Wheeler closes her eyes tight to block out the fluorescents in the hall, not really succeeding. "What?" she groans, not looking up. "At this point - either I'm innocent, or shoot me. The latter would probably be kinder."
"You're innocent," Gauss says.
At that, she raises her head sharply, instantly regretting the speed of it. It's Lensky, and Gauss, and Still, and a few others. "Orders from O5 Command came through," Lensky elaborates. "They've investigated the situation further. You had nothing to do with Li."
"What? That doesn't make sense," Wheeler says. She has the murder weapon, and the literal blood on her hands, to prove it. There are, of course, ways she could be uninvolved; perhaps she’d found the pen elsewhere and chosen to bring it with her, knowing its future usefulness as evidence, or she’d attempted to staunch the bleeding. But those possibilities are small enough in number and convoluted enough in their structure so as to be practically irrelevant. And even if they're right, and she is innocent - there were a hell of a lot of ways for her to get out of there without making herself look like the culprit.
"They say you had nothing to do with it," Lensky repeats. He sounds as frustrated and confused as she is. "We've transferred everything back to you, and access to their files, when you want to have a look through them. Most of them are Level 4-restricted."
Already they're deferring back to her, an ant colony confused without its queen, limping back to the status quo. She wants to go home and say hi to Adam and pass out for fifteen straight hours. But she can't, not right now.
"I'm staying here for the time being," Wheeler says. She's unsure she'll be able to make the walk back to her office without stopping midway, and it's better for everyone involved if no one else knows that. "Would one of you get me a cup of coffee?"
The unit has a sitting room, and the sitting room has a sofa, and it's so much more comfortable than the bolted kitchen chair that Wheeler almost wants to cry the second the overstuffed pillows hit her back. She takes a long swig from her coffee and goes through the documents.
The information from within the Vegas room is sparse, even with the near-total clearance her Level 4 credentials afford her. No doubt it's automatically been sifted through forty different cognitohazard filtration systems before being deemed safe for human eyes. At least it confirms Li and Graves dead.
Both of their faces bear germ markings. Which is odd, because there aren't any germs kept at Site 167, not as far as Wheeler knows.
But how much sense does that make? Site 167 is their keystone, the hub of their operations - why wouldn't they have germs on-Site?
Another question occurs to Wheeler: where do they keep their germs, if not Site 167? She thinks. She realizes she doesn't know the answer.
Hundreds of asynchronous meetings take place at 167 each month, many of them requiring more security than a Vegas room can provide, and germs are single-use. There must have been a vast stock of germs on-Site. She probably helped requisition them herself. Why doesn’t she remember them?
Wheeler can’t get over the germs. They continue to nag at her until she reads down the list of additional confirmed casualties in the sector and realizes, the third time her brain scans over them, that she hasn't absorbed any of their names. Hundreds dead - perhaps thousands - and Li and Graves are the only ones that stick in her head when she looks away for more than a moment.
A side effect of whatever antimemetic agent caused the breach, perhaps. But why would she forget everyone but Graves and Li? Their deaths both appear to be the work of human hands. Maybe everything it touched, it killed, and everything it killed, it erased.
It reminds Wheeler vaguely of the Alastair Grey kill agent - it tends to be more choosy about its targets, but from what the Division understands of it, said targets end up much the same. Come to think of it, it reminds her of SCP-1425; millions dead and the Foundation never figured out who. A whole class of SCPs, really. Even exhausted as she is, it sparks a small flame of academic curiosity. Maybe they share some sort of taxonomy? The similarities abound; it’s odd that they’ve never put two and two together before--
A flash of clarity hits her, chased on its heels by something like a pitch-dark wave of pure, seething enmity, and it’s then that Wheeler realizes the gravity of her mistake.
Calmly, sitting stock-still, Wheeler navigates back to the list of files she'd been sent. She deletes the list of casualties, then all of the postmortem records pertaining to Li and Graves. After a moment of thought, she goes back and deletes everything else restricted to Level 4 clearance. She knows she's being watched. She doesn't turn around.
Wheeler stands, leaning heavily on the arm of the sofa, and staggers to the door. Only two of the locks are still engaged, but it takes her too long to deactivate them, with how badly it hurts to think.
Out in the hallway, a few paces from the entrance to the isolation unit, is what she'd been hoping to find: a medkit, mounted to the wall. She unlatches it and locates a fast-acting, low-grade amnestic. She’s already overdosed. This isn’t going to be a good time. But needs must.
Wheeler redoes the latches - someone will come and refill it as part of tomorrow's inventory, and she doesn't want to know what'll happen if she wakes up and sees the open kit - and swallows the tab dry. She sinks to the floor.
In her pocket, her phone buzzes. It's an automated email, warning the entire Site of a completely non-anomalous phishing scam. Scrolling further, texts from Adam, received hours ago. Seriously. What's going on? I'm worried about you. Did something happen?
She hopes she'll wake up and have a better idea of what to say than she does now, which is nothing. She isn't one hundred percent sure she'll wake up.
Sorry, she sends, and then she’s out cold.
She's in an elevator. Wheeler blinks, then blinks again. Something is wrong. She's in an elevator with a strange man. Six foot five, perhaps twice her weight. Where the fuck is he leading her? She can't take him in a fight, that much is certain, especially not like this. God, her head is killing her. Where is he taking her? She doesn't know. Something is wrong. Play along. That's the best she can do, for now, until she's able to get her bearings: where she is, what he wants from her. She can feel 4987 twitch around her, an electric current blanketing her thoughts. She has it, at least. Her secret weapon, in case things go south. And they always go south.
She follows him out of the elevator, docile, down one hallway after another, growing dizzier by the second. He keeps looking back at her. Wheeler can't read the expression on his face, and that terrifies her more than anything.
Eventually they stop at a door with gray hatching coating its glass window. He opens it for her, and when she hesitates, gestures for her to enter.
There are more people in the room. They look concerned. One of them says something to her, and then another chimes in with something else, and she's pretty sure it’s English, but she can't seem to make out individual words. An antimeme? Is she compromised? Where is she? Something is wrong. Wheeler nods, hoping some message comes across that they'll be able to parse, and to her relief they don't ask her anything more.
In the corner of her vision, Wheeler notes tools. Surgical tools, individually wrapped, sterilized. Oh no. Oh fuck no. Absolutely not. SCP-4987 begins to buzz and chitter, feeding off her rising panic.
She’s up against a wall, heels back against a freshly-painted cream baseboard, people surrounding her on all sides. Wheeler attempts to formulate a plan, to take stock of her memories and senses, but over and over again they slip through her mind like water through a sieve. There must be something affecting her memory. She can't feel SCP-4987 feeding on her; that narrows it down to an antimemetic anomaly, or a manmade amnestic. The people who'd noticed her entrance rule out a certain class of anomalies- what was she thinking about? Something is wrong. She's surrounded by people, and she doesn't know who they are, and for all she knows they're dangerous.
A sudden pressure on her right arm burns like frostbite. Wheeler whips around, and in her mind's eye she feels SCP-4987 move with her, smoothly synchronized, an extra appendage. She thinks they're trying to hurt me and within seconds she can feel its tentacles reaching out, siphoning from them bits of memory and sensation - a child's birthday party, a recipe someone made for dinner two nights ago, an advertising jingle - and they reel back, as if stung.
They're all looking at her. Everyone in the room is looking at her, and everything is too much, and the added sensory input pouring in from SCP-4987 is only serving to ramp up the white-hot intensity of it further: an infinite feedback loop.
She moves toward the exit, and two of them move towards her, no doubt trying to stop her, and SCP-4987's tentacles slither around them, an embrace - an email password, a memory of a hike. They stumble only for a moment, then they keep moving implacably towards her, and Wheeler's hand hits cool metal. She looks down; there’s an array of tools, and she grabs one, feeling the trustworthy weight of it in her hand. She strikes outwards - and she hits skin, and finally, blessedly, they stop advancing on her long enough for Wheeler to make her escape.
It's dark here.
She doesn't know where she is, but everything was light and pain and now it's dark and blessedly quiet and there's pressure on all sides of her to the point where she can breathe again. She doesn't know how long it's been since she started feeling this way - can't quite grasp at the existence of a time before she started feeling this way. She's very tired. She'd like to go to sleep, but she can't. Once or twice there’s been a sudden burst of bright light, and someone reaching towards her - and then she strikes out, or SCP-4987 strikes out, and they leave her alone. But she has to stay awake. They're going to come back; it's just a matter of when.
She blinks. Someone is sitting next to her. Her heart jumps in her chest, and she waits for him to move towards her, to try and trap her- but he doesn't. He just keeps sitting there. He's humming something, she realizes, some strange, jaunty tune.
She's confused. She wills SCP-4987 to come out and embed within him, see who he is, what's going on - and is surprised when it doesn't. It likes memories, and when she tells it to go somewhere with memories, it goes. This is unusual. Something is wrong.
Wheeler wills it again, to see what will happen- and SCP-4987 perceptibly hesitates, a sort of well, you asked for it, buddy, and its tentacles wriggle forth. They make contact for only a second before she feels SCP-4987 retreating back, anguish radiating off of it in waves, a magnet bouncing off another with the same polarity. It didn't get anything off of him.
Just as her muddled neurons are starting to fire long enough to understand what exactly that means, the person turns toward her - the motion slight, clearly taking care not to startle her. "Hi," he says, his voice pitched soft. "How are you doing?"
All of a sudden she feels like she can breathe again. "Adam," she says, and the relief quickly replaces itself with cold fear; do they have him, too? "Why are you here?"
"Why do you think? For you," he says. He reaches out, methodical, slow enough that her blurry eyes can track his movements. He covers her fist, clenched tight enough that it's starting to burn, with his own hand. "Do you think I could take that?"
She considers. She clutches the scalpel tighter.
"They're going to hurt you," she whispers, voice nearly gone. "I won't let them hurt you."
"They're not going to hurt me. No one's going to hurt anyone." His tone goes sharp at this; he turns, for a moment, to look pointedly in the direction of something she can't see. "We're safe. You don't need to keep us safe. Everything's okay."
Well. They can fuck with her head, but it'd be difficult, if not impossible, to fuck with his. If he's here… everything's all right. Probably.
Wheeler lets him pry the scalpel from her hands. He keeps her hands in his, helping her out from- a cabinet, she discovers, seeing it from the outside. She tucks herself against his side and breathes. She's so tired, but she can't stop looking at him. Doesn't want to know what will happen if she lets him out of her sight.
She blinks. She's sitting on the floor of what appears to be a storage room, up against the wall. She can hear voices in the hallway, see shuffling feet through the crack underneath the door, and they unnerve her. She’s tired, but she’s warm. She’s sitting next to- Why is Adam here?
She turns to face him. “Adam? Why are you here?”
He hesitates. “For you. I just- never mind. It’s okay. How are you holding up?”
Her head hurts. She’s tired. “I don’t like this,” Wheeler says. It sounds childish to her own ears; she can’t bring herself to care.
He gives her a sad smile. “Me either. Do you think maybe we could move out of here? Would that be all right?”
She considers. “It’s too bright out there,” she mutters.
Adam is- wait, Adam? Why is he here? She can ask him in a moment. “We can figure something out,” he says, and she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to figure out but she can bear with him for a moment. He reaches out, brushes her cheek - there are tear tracks streaming down her face, she realizes, though she’s not sure where they came from - then moves upwards to brush a lock of hair away from where it’s plastered to her forehead, and his fingers come away red.
She's in her office, somehow.
The fold-out couch in her office is folded out, and she’s on it. There's her laptop, and something playing softly on it, words she can't quite make out. She's so tired, but she can't fall asleep. Why can't she fall asleep? She turns her head and Adam's there.
"Why are you here?" Wheeler asks him. It's rare for him to show up at her work. Rarer still for him to spend any length of time there.
He looks at her askance. "I've been a foreign crisis actor this entire time," he says, deadpan. "This was a long con to get in here and steal your Foundation secrets. A very long con."
In any other circumstance she would have snarked back at him. With her brain the consistency of mush as it is, it takes a while for her to figure out what the hell he's saying, and in the meantime he's clearly thought better of it. "Sorry," he says, although he's still laughing at his own stupid joke. "Wasn't funny, given the circumstances. I can only think of so many zingers before I start losing my edge."
She turns in his loose hold. Scattered around them are empty glasses full of ice she doesn’t remember drinking from, plates she doesn’t remember eating off of, a wadded-up pile of baby wipes smeared with red. She was in pressed slacks and a blouse that itched, before; now she’s wearing sweatpants and an overlarge t-shirt. Her glasses are folded neatly on the side table, and her hair is in a neat braid she doesn’t remember tying. She feels safe.
”How long have we been here?” Wheeler asks.
”A good bit,” he says. “I came here looking for you mid-afternoon yesterday - you were supposed to be home same time the day before, which wouldn’t have worried me if not for the radio silence. Got ahold of you around eight or nine. It’s… what,” he checks his phone, “five in the morning? So, ah. However long that is.”
”I don’t remember. Sorry.”
”I’ll bet. You were… in a bit of a state. I’m not sure whether you slept at all. How are you feeling?”
Like she’s been hit by a Mack truck. “Like I want to go home,” Wheeler says.
”Sure,” he says. “We’ll get you looked over, go home, get some sleep. That sound good?”
A thought occurs to her. “I didn’t kill someone,” she says. In her soupy haze it feels important. “Apparently.”
He stares at her for a long moment. “Sure,” Adam says again. “How do you feel about some breakfast?”
(Three days later, Wheeler is promoted to Interim Chief of Antimemetics. They've dropped the Interim bit before the month is out.
Three weeks later, all information detailing the existence of Site 167 has been scrubbed from the record.
Three months later, Adam asks how Graves and Li are doing, is met with confusion and a blank stare, and doesn’t bother to push further. She forgets a lot of names, these days. That’s just how these things go.)