#i loooooove archivist sasha. shes like if jon was smarter but just as mentally ill

[fiendishartist2]

until my fears come to fruition, i'm not scared– tma

"'Once I even saw him take one of Hector’s femurs and, after twisting it into a corkscrew spiral-'" Sasha spoke evenly into the tape recorder, voice soft as if giving words to the statement was a divine act. She felt it reverberate through her, a warm shiver that ran from the soles of her feet to the tips of her fingers. It wrenched her eyes open and she drank the words in as quickly as her own cadence would allow. Cold fear settled unpleasantly in her stomach, but the deep rightness of it compelled her to continue.

Just as she came upon the climax of the account, reading growing more frantic with each word inching closer to the heart of the victim's terror, the door to her office swung open.

It crashed against the wall with reckless abandon– old and rusty hinges shrieking alongside a startled Sasha. Tim strode into the room, waving around a handful of loose papers and manila folders.

"I told you– I told you!" He raged as he paced in front of Sasha's desk. Each harsh clap of Tim's loafers against the scuffed hardwood floors of the Archives punctuated the pounding of Sasha's heart. She almost couldn't catch her breath in all of the commotion; the last remnants of her prior excitement trickled out of her thoughts, replaced by quickly fading adrenaline.

Sasha mustered up a weak glare, "Tim, what the hell are you on about? You nearly gave me a heart attack!"

Tim continued to pace, completely ignoring Sasha. He muttered furiously to himself, talking in circles.

"Look, Tim," Sasha sighed, "I really need to get back to work-"

He whirled around and slammed the stack of statements onto Sasha's desk. His eyes were wild and hard with anger, but flitting about the room nervously, as if expecting something to sneak up on them. She flinched– she had been doing that a lot recently, especially around the people she once called friends.

Tim released the papers, moving his hands to grip the edge of Sasha's desk. Sasha pounced immediately, flipping through them hungrily.

"Wait, are these-?"

"Statements you've already read? Some of them," He shot a look over his shoulder, "Most of them aren't. Most of them are statements I've never seen before. I-I found them hidden in Document Storage- surely so we wouldn't find them…" Tim trailed off, babbling to himself.

Sasha's attention was glued to the unfamiliar statements. Her gaze jumped from paragraph to paragraph– page to page– as she tried to discern if she had seen them around the Archives or not. Something about these statements in particular repulsed her, even the ones she knew she had read prior. It felt wrong, like Tim had disrupted something important by taking them.

"So… what?" Sasha asked distractedly, "You found this lot of statements in storage. Gertrude probably hid them away for some reason or another. You know how she was."

A hand suddenly blocked her reading again as Tim slapped it down in front of her. He leaned in, mouth caught in a snarl.

"No." He said darkly, vitriol boiling just under the surface.

"No…?" Her voice climbed a few octaves as a different kind of fear wracked her.

Tim's erratic behaviour in the past few weeks had been causing her considerable alarm, but being faced with his rampage upfront was a whole other beast. She didn't want to believe Tim or Martin would harm her, but discovering Gertrude's body had changed things. The last Archivist was murdered, her death successfully covered up by someone working in the Archives. It rattled Sasha, made her wonder day in and day out if that would be her last– made her obsessive and confrontational and paranoid. The only person who could keep her anchored to reality was Jon; he kept her sane, in a way. On top of being a trustworthy friend in a place where she had lost all feelings of safety, he was incredibly helpful with Gertrude's murder investigation. He always seemed to get the perfect evidence just when she needed it. Sasha needed Jon, and she was grateful for it.

"Someone in the Archives is hiding these statements. Hiding them from you and me and Martin- a-and probably Elias too, for that matter!" He lowered his voice, once again checking over his shoulder before speaking, "I'm sure this is all Jon's doing."

Sasha burst into laughter.

All at once, the tension in the room dissipated. Of course Sasha was not about to be shot in her office, going the way of her predecessor; Tim was on another one of his 'Jon is evil' tirades. Tim sat back on heels and crossed his arms protectively over his chest. The faint blush creeping over his stony face prompted another round of giggles from Sasha.

"Sorry, sorry! It's just- Tim, please," She all but rolled her eyes, "I promise Jon did not squirrel away random statements for nefarious purposes."

He started pointing desperately at the papers again, "Look at them Sash- really look at them and-"

"Tim, I am looking at them. All I see is unrelated statements." Her hand moved of his own accord, settling on top of Tim's. She smiled, "You're getting worked up over nothing."

He looked disgusted for a moment, and then confused.

And then angry.

"You're not listening!" He shouted, before shooting a frightened look over his shoulder and lowering his voice to a growl, "If you just read them, you would see how they connect to Jon-"

"Spit it out already!" Sasha snapped. Her own frustration was bubbling up and the longer Tim beat around the bush, the more irritated she grew.

Tim dropped himself bodily into the chair in front of her desk– the one reserved for statement givers who thought the couch made it feel more like therapy than academia. He slid one of the folders towards himself, plucking the statement from within and holding it up.

"Read this one," he urged, "All of the writing in this file was done by Jon, but it's not anything coherent. Just the statement and pages of nonsense. I've never seen it before because it's been misfiled since Jon started working here."

"How do you know it's Jon's and you're not just using him as a scapegoat? You all started work on the same day." She asked cuttingly. She felt quite mean talking to Tim like this, but these baseless accusations against Jon were getting under her skin. She was just protecting a friend.

"Look at the handwriting- it's got to be Jon's." Tim handed over the open file and sure enough: Jon's characteristic cramped cursive littered each page.

As she flipped through the pages and pages of indecipherable 'research', she came upon the original statement: 'Statement of Darren Harlow, #0101811'. It looked relatively new; maybe a few years old, taken by Gertrude but untouched until Jon picked it up. Curiously, some parts of the statement were obscured– words, sentences, even entire paragraphs scratched out in pen. Otherwise, the statement appeared unharmed.

The visual of a marked-up statement made Sasha itch behind the eyes.

"'Annabelle Cane'? So, what, she turns into a spider monster by the end or something? Seems as normal as a statement can be."

Tim shook his head, "They're all like that, though! All about spiders and webs and- and puppets, for whatever reason. All follow-up done by or re-opened by Jon."

Tim snatched another piece of evidence from the pile, "A-and look at this one! I could have sworn you recorded this one right before Martin's run-in with Prentiss, but apparently it's been unfiled since Jon decided to 'continue Martin's research'," he mimed exaggerated quotation marks, "While he was absent."

Sasha remembered this one; statement #0150409, from the man who believed he was haunted by an immortal spider. She still regretted how hard she pushed Martin into proper follow-up on that one. In some ways, she felt like she had handed him over to Jane Prentiss on a silver platter.

However, she knew she could put Tim's skepticism to rest, now that she had a statement that was already on tape. Sasha pulled open the bottom drawer of her desk, where she kept all of her tapes. They were in neat stacks of six, ordered by date recorded. She shuffled through them, passing over the exact date where Carlos Vittery's statement should be. Real panic gripped her when she came up empty handed.

With more urgency, she dug out the entire stack it was supposed to be in and tossed it haphazardly onto her desk. The itch behind her eyes spread like a wildfire, filling her brain with an inescapable, searing buzz. She needed to find that statement– it was hers and the possibility of it being missing or- or stolen was inordinately wrong.

She pawed through the scattered tapes frantically.

"It's not here," she said faintly, turning back to her drawer to dig through the tapes with reckless abandon, "Tim it's not- it's not here. Why isn't it here?"

"I didn't see any tapes with the lost files, but-" Tim started tentatively, his own rage fizzling out as Sasha visibly spiralled. She stood abruptly, sending her chair careening behind her. It crashed into the bookshelf on the wall, dislodging a few books that fell to the floor with dull thumps.

Sasha marched around her desk. She pulled Tim out of his seat and pushed him out of her office.

"They were right here, I swear."

Tim had led her to the back of Document Storage. She had been trying to tame this room since day one in the Archives; so far, she had managed to record a considerable number of statements, but it had barely made a dent. There were still stacks of statements littering the floor and filing cabinets overflowing with manila folders.

Tim had pulled out one of the drawers of a filing cabinet and pointed out the space behind it. She had to admit, she's not surprised Tim found it so easily. It was a horribly obvious place to hide something.

"I don't see the tape…" She mused. Calmness settled over her like a blanket, pinning her down underneath it.

When Tim had steered her toward Document Storage, the panic fuelling her started to lose steam. Despite everything that happened between them recently, Sasha loved Tim– he was one of her closest friends. But, ever since Jon joined the Archives, she had to admit he had become a bit… irrational. After Prentiss, his disdain for Jon reared it ugly head and, subsequently, so did the theories and the arguments and the paranoia. Looking at it from a calmer perspective, it was easy to see how Tim was just jumping to conclusions, like usual.

Document storage was a mess; a room where every nook and cranny had a statement shoved in somewhere. Sasha often found herself getting turned around in there. It was impossible to find anything in the nonsensical filing system as statements were, more often than not, incorrectly filed. She couldn't exactly blame Jon for just sticking all of his work behind a drawer and calling it a day.

Of course, that wouldn't explain the missing tape, but what reason did Sasha have for thinking Jon was the culprit? Maybe she had just misplaced it, even though she was impeccably organised. That pressing calmness was now almost crushing.

She must have misplaced it.

"Sasha…?"

Sasha squeezed out a chuckle. What a strangely humorous situation. How could she have gotten so wrapped up in this? Obviously Jon wasn't working against them just because he chooses to research spider-related statements. That's ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.

"Sasha, are you okay? You're acting a bit… weird."

Sasha felt a bit weird, but that was okay. She was so calm that she couldn't mind if she tried. The familiar force tugging at her thoughts was so helpful, so kind. It knew what was best for Sasha and wanted Sasha to know as well.

Wordlessly, she wandered back to her office, still chuckling under her breath.

When she pushed open the door, feeling a bit unsteady on her feet, she was greeted by the sight of Jon. Her desk was empty, cleared of statements and tapes. Something ugly squirmed around in her stomach, but that gut reaction was unreasonable. How utterly ridiculous she was being.

"Hello, Sasha. I was just coming to talk to you when I spotted my research work on your desk. Mind if I take it back? I believe there was some follow-up I hadn't quite finished up." He said innocently.

The ugly thing in her stomach was trying to crawl up her throat and out of her mouth. She wanted to scream at Jon– tell him no, tell him to leave, to stop doing whatever he was doing to all of them.

But Jon smiled that kind smile– the one that crinkled his eyes and thinned his lips and seemed to draw all attention to it– and numbness settled over her again.

Tim whipped you into quite the accusation, a voice in her head scolded. And of Jon of all people? That's ridiculous. That's absurd. How could that ever be possible?

The corners of her lips moved of their accord, manipulated into returning Jon's smile.

"Of course. Go right ahead Jon."

"Why, thank you, Sasha."

Jon shut the door softly behind him as he left. Sasha crumbled to the floor, her strings cut.

I'm going to find a way to tear your web apart, Jonathan Sims.