Work Text:
And the Ghosts
they own everything
- a poem by Graham Foust
He’d been so fascinated by his buildings and his books on urban architecture and Tim remembers buying Danny his first-ever tome of ‘An Explorer’s Guide to the Ghost World’ and he can remember Danny’s eyes lighting up as he’d flipped through the glossy pages of abandoned buildings and their histories.
“Was I enabling him?” Tim asks over his uneaten sandwich, years later, “Why did I give him that goddamn book?”
He doesn’t want to break down in front of his coworkers – again – and it’s not like he remembers Danny that often. Not anymore. And he sometimes feels guilty about it, but life moves on and he almost forgets, but not fully, never fully, because even his workplace is a shadow of Danny’s dance upon that damned stage, no skin to speak of but a dazzling, 32-tooth smile.
And now, during lunch break, sitting across from Martin and Sasha he realizes that he can’t help remembering. At least he won’t cry.
“Tim,” Martin reaches across the table and tentatively places his hand over Tim’s own, “Don’t blame yourself.”
“I wonder if that fucking circus was in there.” Tim can’t help himself. “I wonder if the book said to go there.”
Sasha chimes in, all their food momentarily abandoned, “You couldn’t have known. No one could have.”
He listens to them and doesn’t look up, though he can picture their faces perfectly, worried, and concerned and so kind he wants to throw up. The 911 first responders that’d shown up at the scene of that night – only to find nothing but a weeping man – had looked at him the same way. Testing his blood pressure, shining a flashlight in his eye, and asking him soft yet prodding questions. They’d ruled it inconclusive but certainly all in Tim’s head. After all, the abandoned theater was only that: abandoned.
And he powers through it. Had powered through it that night and the night after that and then the week, the month, had carried on. And he’ll power through this lunch, so he looks up and nods and says, “Thank you,” and bites into his sandwich, feeling like throwing up instead.
Martin and Sasha try not to share a look and he tries to ignore that they do. This is just another workday.
He’d had a therapist in college tell him to stop bottling things up. It wasn’t a very good therapist and he certainly hadn’t liked her collection of old jester dolls. He thinks about that sometimes: both the advice and the dolls. Asks himself: Was she human? Was she human? Was she human?
Were the dolls watching him?
Tim isn’t sure how much Martin knows. Either way, he trusts it to stay a secret as the guy’s reliably polite and caring and Tim suspects even under threats he wouldn’t babble about his friends or their demons. But he hadn’t told Martin all of it. Maybe he will one day but he doesn’t want to verbally relive it at all any time soon. Sasha, on the other hand, knows. She knows because she’d found him, late, on the office floor sitting in a fetal position and holding his head. His desktop monitor cracked.
This was long ago, they hadn’t known each other for long then and maybe that helped to open up, because sometimes it’s easier to confess to someone who barely knows you than to a close friend who might never look at you the same from then on.
She’d sat down next to him and had hugged him for what could’ve been hours before asking what’d happened.
And he’d told her.
He’d told her about Danny and about what’d took him – even if he omitted how and what’d it looked like – but he’d told her someone killed his brother and then it’d all vanished, just like that, without waking the rest of the world in what must’ve been the greatest tragedy to take place.
And when she’d asked what happened to the computer, Tim had said: can you believe I forgot he had a facebook until this evening?
Because Tim had been staying late, not even in search for more information on Danny’s undoing, not even that. He’d been reading up on some case out of left field, something so unrelated he doesn’t even know why he remembered Danny at all.
But he had. And when he did, the image his mind provided was that of a grinning, dancing, thing. And he’d had a split second of fear, not of the night itself but of that he’d forget his brother’s face.
And so he’d pulled up Danny’s facebook, both horrified and relieved to see it was still up and still had all of his old pictures, and he’d sat down to scroll through it, just to see his face without that fucking smile. To commit it to memory so well he’d think: yes, my brother on our boating trip, yes, my brother at his eighteenth birthday with his two-tier batman cake, yes, my brother with his bright eyes and smooth skin and brave, genuine expression. Danny rarely smiled in photos. He deemed himself too cool, too serious. Instead, he’d tilt his head a bit and lift and eyebrow sometimes and it was just so cringy to look at especially if it was in every photo but Tim wouldn’t trade it for the world. Danny thought it was funny. It never was. But god was it so Danny.
And Tim had begun scrolling and there was Danny, captured forever alive in a picture of him and his college friends, all from the back, posing on the ledge of a roof and flexing. He scrolled, desperate to see his brother’s face, the next picture showed Danny and his girlfriend from far away, silhouetted against a sunset or sunrise, holding hands. Tim found himself filled with a rare feeling of peace, looking at his brother’s moments of happiness. And then the next picture finally features his brother looking at the camera as he sat on a tree branch, legs dangling. Tim stopped scrolling, feeling his heart drop into his soles. No.
He scrolled onto the next. His brother posing with another friend and a Labrador. No no no.
The next. Danny at a bar with drinks. Next, Danny and Tim himself on kayaks. Next, next, next, Danny showing off a new suit, Danny and his girlfriend at a theme park, Danny walking a dog, Danny’s baby pictures tagged throwback Thursday, Danny with tickets to a movie and a group of friends- no.
And Tim had hit a picture of Danny outside an old building holding a finger to his lips, and Tim had been shaking, shaking and so so tense and he’d hit the monitor after he missed the red X to close the tab three times, mouse too wildly out of control and he’d slid out of his office chair, not having noticed the beginning of tears.
Danny had been, in each and every picture, grinning. Wide and so so unlike him.
And Sasha had found Tim like that, coming in to collect papers she’d be taking home. She’d found him with a monitor glitching in and out of a facebook page and with scratched knuckles on one hand and with tear-stained cheeks and so much despair.
He hadn’t known how closely she was aware of the… of everything that the Magnus Institute was affiliated to and researched, but she’d taken his story in stride and lead them to the bathroom to wash his hand. She’d also unplugged the monitor and desktop from the wall. She’d made tea in the staff room of the Institute’s late, empty building and they’d sat and she’d grieved with him and it was a frightening lapse in his valiant effort to carry on.
After the first bout of it, Tim barely cried as they sat side to side against a wall, and thank god the Institute had carpet floors.
“Sorry about this, you should go home,” he’d finally dragged his eyes away from a nondescript point of a chair’s leg he’d been staring into for the last half-hour, “It’s late.”
Sasha had let him rest his head on her shoulder and was petting his hair, fingers light and warm, her vest smelled like cinnamon and he wondered if she’d been baking. He felt her shake her head, “It’s alright.”
She left it at that and he’d stared at her shoelaces next, tracing their twining that she’d certainly redone to form a pattern. She’d noticed him looking and asked, “Want me to re-lace yours?” And he’d agreed because watching her redo his laces to make a star pattern was ages better than looking at the depressingly beige wall paint of the room.
“Thanks, Sasha,” he’d turned his chrome sneakers left and right to study the star of laces, “Thank you.”
And she knew he was thanking her for much more than the laces and she nodded, smiling, and reached out to ruffle his hair, “Any time, Stoker, any time.”
And when he hugged her, she’d repeated it, much more serious, “Really, any time. You ever need a breather you call me or text me or something.”
“I will,” but he supposed it wouldn’t happen again like this. He wouldn’t want to bother her. It’d be alright. These hours of a calm night could last him another decade, he supposed, her warm hands and incredibly kind eyes and a sense of rare understanding could last him for the rest of his life. And she must’ve seen it, then, because she’d sat up and flicked his shoulder.
“Stoker, I mean it.”
And her little angry expression had sparked an unexpected chuckle from him, tired and drained and startled, but he’d laughed and bumped their knees, “What would I do without you?”
“Well don’t make yourself find out,” she’d stuck her tongue out and winked, “Call me so you don’t have to find out next time this happens. Yeah?”
“You’re a saint.”
“Sure.”
He’d deactivated Danny’s facebook page the next morning, lest someone else would see the warped pictures. Lest someone viewed them and thought Danny had smiled like that in real life.
Sasha made him tea again the next morning and didn’t say anything about last night. They’d simply looked at each other and moved on and he’d went back to typing up an email, so calm it was strange to, for a few hours, be ridden of the consistent, underlying buzz of regret. The day carried on and the name Daniel Stoker lay void of images across facebook. And Tim supposes that, after all, Danny had taken the book to heart and had found himself so deep into the ghost world of his ‘ghost buildings’ that he’d stopped being an explorer at all. And now Tim was the one exploring the remnants of Danny’s influence on the world of the living. Chasing the ghost of a stage and a show and a smile.