Come Home for Zwistmas - SCP Foundation

Come Home for Zwistmas

2022

25 December

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

He stood in the elevator, waiting. Was he waiting for someone far below to call the car? Was he waiting for someone on his level to open the doors, and find him there, and ask him an awkward question before riding down in awkward silence? He didn't know. All he knew was that faced with the simplicity of the Site-43 topside elevator's control panel:

T

1

2

3

he couldn't quite bring himself to make a selection, no matter how long he stared.

Without so much as a jolt, perhaps five minutes after the doors had closed, the car began to move. He still hadn't pressed any buttons.

He wasn't at all surprised to see who was waiting for him when the doors opened on the third sublevel. He'd seen an awful lot of her over the past few months, and that state of affairs wasn't going to change much in the near or perhaps even distant future.

"Hey hey," Lillian Lillihammer crowed. "The turkey's here!"

It wasn't as though Thilo Zwist had never been to Site-43 before. Back in February he'd visited the top-secret fourth sublevel, to observe the two long-term prisoners whose very existence was so highly classified that the guard who stood outside their cells had to take amnestics after every shift. Once or twice before that, as part of Operation FIREBREAK, he had deigned to meet with the Site Director or his staff in the old military camp under which the facility sat. But walking through the actual corridors of the actual Site, that was something he had only done once before… before most of the people who worked there had even been born, in fact.

Then, he'd risked being shot. Now, he had a security badge.

"Hey there." Harold Blank fell into step beside them; he'd been waiting around a bend in the corridor, undoubtedly because Lillian had insisted on being the one to make a dramatic greeting. Zwist wondered whether the archivist had been peeking around the corner to catch the big moment. "Here's a thought: what if you started chanting gibberish, and raised both hands?"

Lillian guffawed. "The guards would probably start shooting."

"Nah." Harry tapped Zwist's badge. "He's one of us, now. Everybody'd just lose their shit."

One of us. Zwist wasn't sure how he felt about that.

1986

Vienna: Republic of Austria

Outside the café, it was snowing. It reminded Zwist of Canada.

This was, of course, absurd. It snowed under certain conditions in well over half the countries on Earth. He had seen it snow in Austria for hundreds of years before Canada even existed in its present form. And Canadians were certainly not the creatures of the cold they constantly claimed to be; one needed only to witness the absolute state of their roads, and the tragic lack of talent of the automobile drivers thereon, to see that myth safely to bed. And yet even back in his native land, watching the snow fall on the tessellated stones of Kärntner Strasse, he was nevertheless put in mind of the parkland which would be slowly whitening over Vivian Scout's head seven thousand kilometres away as the international flight flies.

"I take it you're somewhere festive?" Scout asked politely.

Zwist shook his head, though obviously the other man couldn't see it, and slid the telephone receiver across the table so he could get a better look at the nearly-empty street. "Yes and no. I'm sitting in my favourite café, which is closed, because the entirety of Austria is closed today, because apparently everyone but me keeps the old ways."

"Well, the old ways still have novelty, to them. You were there when the ways were new. You've had a few lifetimes to lose the taste."

Zwist smiled. "Where are you?"

"I'm in a coffee shop in Grand Bend, and I didn't have to brainwash anyone to get in, because in Canada making money is an older tradition than Christmas."

Zwist laughed. "I haven't had to brainwash anyone, Vivian. A grand total of one policeman has seen me sitting in here, and the CLOSED sign set him to rights immediately."

"Are you going to bring that CLOSED sign home with you, or do we need to send someone to contain it?"

Zwist sipped at the coffee he'd made for himself. The cash was already in the till. "If I left it for you, I'd just need to make another. Unless you need a minor victory…?"

Scout scoffed. "I don't think I'd win any accolades for securing a piece of anomalous cardboard, Thilo. And I'm quite beyond the point of caring about my career, at any rate."

Zwist watched a couple walk down the strasse, arms linked, laughing in the face of the snow. "And how are the things you do care about coming along?"

Silence over the line, which had nothing to do with the overseas delay. "Wynn is no better, and no worse, than before."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm the one who should be sorry. I'm the one sitting on top of him."

Zwist sighed. "There's only so much you can do, in your position. You're surrounded by suspicion and schemes. You're trusted, but trust is cheap in a market of secrets. You can't do anything more for him than you're already doing, or you'll lose the opportunity to do even that."

Scout sighed back at him, harder this time. "I'll have to do more, before the end. He's spent two decades of Christmases totally alone, and every other day in between as well. We sent each other a few messages this morning, of course. Do you know what he said?"

Zwist didn't answer. The question was rhetorical.

"He said 'When are you coming home, Vivian?' He said it three times."

Again, Zwist didn't answer. There was really nothing to say.

"It's been another year of small choices, Thilo, over and over again. Stay the course, don't rock the boat. Every year I make promises to myself, to him, even to you — not to your face, I've never seen your face, but to the idea of you. To all the people I've lost, and the people I haven't, and the people I haven't even yet collected. And every year I look back at the tally, gauge how well I've done, and you know what I find?"

"That it's unfair." Zwist took another sip. "That you're being too hard on yourself."

"That I am useless. That I'm not helping anyone. That I hardly ever have."

Zwist set the mug down, and rotated it on the table. "Vivian, you know that if I believed that, we wouldn't be speaking right now. If I truly believed you were not a force for good in this world, I would not only find someone else to speak to on Christmas Day, I would promise myself that come Christmas next year, I'd have removed you from the equation."

Scout laughed. "Spreading threats instead of cheer, eh?"

"Empty threats. You are the best man I've met in a host of lifetimes, Director Scout, and a better man than I to boot."

Again, a pause, and then: "So why won't you turn yourself in, and help me from the inside? If I'm such a good man, and the Foundation's not so bad?"

Zwist hurriedly took another drag on his coffee, and made sure his friend could hear it. When he was done, the other man was still patiently waiting for his response.

All Zwist could offer him was "You are a good man, Vivian. Let's leave it at that."

2022

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Lillian and Harry drove him through the halls of Habitation and Sustenance, showing him off to their colleagues like a beloved grandparent come to visit them at work. He supposed this wasn't too far off; he'd known the latter for more than twenty years, and he'd taught the former more over the past few months than a handful of apprentices in three centuries. Still, it was uncomfortable seeing the curious faces pressed to plate glass windows and the measured stares of armed security guards. Secure facilities did not, as a rule, entertain guests. He was already kicking himself for not ripping off this bandage on a less auspicious occasion, a lower-traffic day.

The main cafeteria was crowded. Many of the tables had been removed, and all the seats that remained were filled. It looked more like a Halloween party, thanks to all the absurd labcoats and jumpsuits, but whereas the rest of the Site was still relatively antiseptic, there was holiday cheer to spare in here.

"You're lucky you came in from the cold so late," Harry remarked. "We only started doing this again recently."

"It was my idea," said Lillian. "I convinced the entire world to react sluggishly and peevishly to a global pandemic, to give us a reason to hold big internal Christmas parties."

Harry nodded sagely. "I knew there had to be a good reason."

A silver-haired woman in a red and green Christmas sweater emerged from a crowd of archivists, all of whom were taller than her and had therefore obscured her presence, to sweep over and seize Harry's arm. "Ho!" she yelled.

"Ho!" Lillian yelled back at her.

"Don't call my wife a ho!" Harry shouted, loud enough to attract stares.

"You brought Santa!" the little woman beamed. Her cheeks were very red.

"Dr. Bradbury," Zwist smiled.

"You're aware that you look like Mrs. Claus right now, Mel?" Lillian pointed out.

Harry drew Melissa away. "She's already Mrs. Blank, figuratively speaking." He seemed to notice the cheeks for the first time. "I see you've been into the red stuff."

Melissa shrugged innocently. "I wasn't going to, but then someone said Willie—"

There was a loud crash, and a louder splash, and as one entity they turned to look at the buffet table in the centre of the cafeteria. It wasn't a difficult tableau to disentangle: Dr. William Wettle was lying on the floor, looking like his face had exploded, a bowl on the back of his head. He had somehow faceplanted into the punch.

"Yeah," Melissa hiccoughed. "Someone said Willie was coming, and he was probably going to do that."

Zwist had Provisional Security Clearance Level 3. At most facilities, this meant you were among the Site's most trusted staff. At Site-43, Clearance 3 was dime-a-dozen, but just about nobody who didn't work directly for the Foundation possessed it. It allowed him to walk unattended and with impunity through virtually any space within the facility, so after a relatively unchallenging hour of interacting politely with scientists and agents and support staff, few of whom seemed totally clear on who he was or why he was there — an interesting change from, say, the 1940s, when his capture and containment had been an alpha-level priority — he was able to excuse himself and order his shadows to not accompany him further. "Stay, and talk to your friends."

"They could be your friends too, you know," Harry had reminded him.

"And perhaps they will be, but not today. I don't like crowds, not even on Christmas, and I need some fresh air. Relatively speaking."

Lillian hadn't argued. She argued with virtually anyone, on any topic, but she'd long since learned that if he didn't want her doing something, he could literally prevent her from doing it, so she rarely pressed the point. He suspected that state of affairs wouldn't last long. The last time he'd had to slip away without her noticing, she'd very nearly defeated him. She was getting good.

He forced himself not to wonder whether she was getting too good. In honour of the memory of a very good friend, he tried not to needlessly deepen unwarranted suspicions.

He wandered the halls for a while, nodding at everyone he passed. He recognized Delfina Ibanez, master of the Mobile Task Forces, and noted that she looked flushed and excitable. They shared only a brief exchange of words, him saying "Good evening!" and she responding "Hey! Grabbing some water. Catch you later?" before slinking through the back door to the cafeteria stores. He wondered what that was about, but knew he hadn't yet earned the right to pry. He also recognized Daniil Sokolsky, and that was almost enough to send him back into the cafeteria before the bald man favoured him with (by his standards) an unthreatening grin and told him that "Even megalomaniacs take holidays off sometimes, friend." Zwist wished him a Merry Christmas, and received in return "We'll be making the new year a whole lot merrier." He had earned the right to ask what that meant, but he practiced a little of what people these days were calling 'self care' by refusing to do so.

In the end he found himself at the doors to the Site's main theatre, and finding those doors unlocked, he opened them up and found Ilse Reynders. This rendered him momentarily at a loss for what to do.

She was sitting on the stage, swinging her legs back and forth, taking deep breaths and shaking while making sounds like a startled turkey. She was in some sort of distress, and that settled the matter for Zwist. He closed the doors behind him, and approached.

She heard him when he was halfway down the aisle, and her big blue eyes widened in surprise. She smiled, but there was a sense of guarded caution about her now, and he thought he might know why.

"Dr. Reynders." He placed one hand on the back of a front row aisle seat; he wasn't nearly so infirm as he liked most people to think, but he had done quite a lot of walking about lately, and could use the support. "It's a pleasure to meet you at last."

She didn't look pleased, precisely, more curious and uncertain, but she smiled nevertheless. "It's not every day you get to meet your own plagiarist. How does it feel?"

He shook his head. "That was a long, long time ago." Ilse Reynders had been one third of the brain trust who had decoded Zwist's cryptomancy, effectively inventing the science of memetics on the back of his life's good work. What the Foundation had done with that knowledge… he was only now beginning to see the upside, having lingered on the downsides of his talents and their implications since his almost-forgotten youth. But this deceptively fresh and innocent-looking woman was not to blame for any of that. When it came to memetic kill agents and brainwashing, she possessed not even one single Oppenheimer's worth of liability. Her involvement had been brief, though admittedly vital.

Reynders straightened her arms and pressed her hands into the stage floor. "Hmm. 'A long time ago' means something different to you than it does to most, though, doesn't it?"

He pulled down the seat, and slid into it. "And you as well." Reynders hadn't been born in the seventeenth century, as he had, but she had seen the tail end of the nineteenth. She was, thanks to arrested aging, just under a century older than she looked.

"I was glad when they said you were coming." She was having trouble meeting his eyes with her own. "We've got a lot to talk about. And it's nice not to be the oldest person around for a change."

He held his gaze steady and even, and waited for hers to join him. "You don't look a day over thirty."

"And I never will. You had the right idea, I think. If I'd made my fifties before stalling out, people would automatically take me more seriously."

"You could dye your hair silver," he suggested.

"Actually, I can't. She reached up to scratch at her orange mop top. "It won't take dye, even now. It reverts. When you mess with time, time messes with you right back. I'm not sorry to have the lesson, in my line of work."

He folded his hands in his lap. "You want to talk about the work, don't you? I'm amenable. Know this: I don't hold your past actions against you now. I counted your partners among the best of my friends, and they still did more harm than good with their good intentions. You do not bear the burden of their mistakes, or the responsibility to address mine. Each of us has only to answer for the consequences of their own acts."

She nodded. "Thank you. I've tried to extend you the same courtesy, but after all these years I'm honestly still trying to figure out how I feel. I didn't waste much time on feelings, bending everything I had towards getting out of that damn incinerator, and now I've got too much time to spare."

He narrowed his eyes. He wasn't at all sure what cause she might have to begrudge him something; he'd thought her reticence connected only to her slights against his art. There was something in those eyes he could not identify, even with half a dozen lifetimes' worth of studying his fellow man to guide him.

"It's interesting that you'd forgive so easily, though," she mused. "Is it a coping mechanism?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You're training Lillian to become like you, and you're doing it so you can win a war with the giftschreiber and schriftsteller. It goes against everything you used to stand for: non-interference where possible, peaceful assistance where necessary. Are you rationalizing the past to make the future easier to live in?"

He had heard she was sharp, but he hadn't expected to be cut so deeply so soon. "Yes, that probably is what I'm doing. But is there a better use for the past, do you think?"

"The past doesn't really exist, speaking scientifically. Parascience has more to say on the matter, but sticking with just the basics, you're right; if it's anything at all, it's a story we tell ourselves about what was, to be measured against what is and what might be. I've been a dozen different experts in my long life, you've worn who knows how many disguises, and here we both are trying to figure out how to act like the people we've been all our lives." She gestured at the doors. "I've been out of prison for more than a year now, and you know what? I still get panic attacks in large crowds, and I get worse panic attacks when I'm alone. I've had to apologize to a dozen people for reaching out to touch them, out of the blue, just to confirm to myself that they really are there, that I really am out, because there's a part of me that just can't accept it. There's a part of me still in that incinerator, just as there's probably a part of you still cursing the English language or lighting German generals on fire or… cutting ties with the Foundation once you discovered we'd stolen your fire. We become different people, we shed identities and skin, but we can still look back on the older iterations and see constants within ourselves reflected back. Sometimes it's frightening, sometimes it's upsetting, but sometimes… it's alright. The historians call it continuity and change. You need to keep both of those in sight, at all times. If you've changed, you want to have changed for the better. If you've stayed the same, it needs to mean you've remained true to something key within your character. Can you say that about yourself?"

This was overwhelming. "Was that a prepared speech?" he asked, by way of stalling to gather his thoughts.

She glanced to one side in mock-saintliness. "I've had a few decades to mull things over. It's hard to separate the extemporaneous from the rehearsed, at this point."

"Well, you'd make a peerless philosophy lecturer, if that was extemporaneous." Zwist leaned back in the comfortable chair, and closed his eyes. "To answer your question: I don't know. I don't know if I'm the same man I once was, in the most important respects. I'm fairly certain I know what those respects are, and I've tried to hold those parts of myself close, but I honestly can't judge it objectively at this point. It's all spinning out of control, now, and everything's a moral blur."

He felt those wide and distant eyes settling steady on him at last. "Well, through no fault of my own, I'm as sharp as I've ever been. And I think you haven't changed, where it counts."

He paused before responding. "How would you know?"

"I know everything about you, Doctor Bromide. I got it straight from the source."

1954

Vivian Scout placed an armful of reels beside the projector, and smiled. "I think you'll like it. It's one of those staggeringly impractical flights of fancy you like so much, and brand new too; the cutting edge of senseless fiction. And! There's a pair of sequels, inexplicably also already available. We've already started in on those as well." He winked. "Checking them for anomalous effects, of course. They do seem to be selling much better than I might have expected, so there could be something there."

Ilse smiled. "Thank you, Vivian." Judging by the number of reels, it could only be a meticulously-photographed copy of the full text of The Fellowship of the Ring. She had hardly ever spared a moment for fiction before becoming trapped in the Anomalous Documents Disposal Chamber, but since that unfortunate incident, she'd developed a serious appetite for unserious things. She had found the whimsy and imagination of The Hobbit a comfort and a source of inspiration; there was nothing, she had found, quite like the flagrantly impossible to overcome one's self-imposed limitations on what might be possible. She spent practically all of her time poring over the latest and greatest scientific literature — projected in reverse against a large, thin sheet of paper pressed against the ADDC window — searching for some clue to her predicament and advancing the causes of parascience in every possible direction in the process, but she always made time now for a little recreational mind-expansion. After all, it wasn't like her time was precisely precious.

"And what did you get for me?" he asked, expectantly.

She laughed. "Wonderful things. Come in here and get them."

Wynn Rydderech ambled into frame. "Merry Christmas, Ilse." He patted the reels. "I'm already halfway through. It's like something you might have written. He must have spent a lifetime preparing to tell just the one story, whoever he is."

"Sounds dangerous," she said. "You'd better try and catch him, since you're having no luck with the other guy. Merry Christmas, Wynn."

Scout tried to ignore the veiled remark. "We're going to pipe the party in here, so you can hear it. Unless that's not what you—"

"Are you ever going to catch him? Vivian?" she interrupted.

Scout and Rydderech shared a look. Each pair of their trio had an entire language of meaningful glances, and the odd one out had only a vague sense of what each of them meant. This one, she thought, meant 'How much should we tell her?'

"I'm not sure it's in anyone's best interests that we catch Thilo Zwist," Scout finally said. "He's not doing any harm out there."

She snorted. "He's floating around in all our heads, just waiting to catch our hair on fire. That's not harm, in your book?"

"She's got you there," Rydderech remarked.

Scout shot him a dirty look before replying. "What he did was an accident, Ilse, and you know that. What he's doing now is atonement. We're trying to bring him in, of course, but—"

"Are you? Are you though?" She squeezed the pencil tight between her fingers. It was tied to the window glass, and amplified through a crude vibrational sensor on the other side. She could hear her own voice bouncing back at her from the hall. She sounded shrill and jealous. "Or have you decided that the human race isn't safer with a man who could kill every man, woman and child trapped behind glass?"

She knew from pointed conversations that Rydderech had his own doubts about the search for the rogue cryptomancer, its efficacy and urgency. The old toxicologist looked exhausted already. "Overwatch wants him caught," he sighed. "So of course we're trying to catch him. We don't make value judgements like that. The approach is one size fits all."

Scout waved this away. "Ilse…" He took a deep breath. "Look. All three of us know what your concern is. And it's valid. Of course it's valid. But this is a man who's spent centuries trying to make up for what he did wrong. Doesn't that speak to his character?"

Ilse narrowed her eyes. "How many centuries of making-up will it take to bring my sister back to life, do you think? I'll accept a ballpark figure."

Scout and Rydderech both approached the glass. The former spoke first, as he always did. "I haven't forgotten her, Ilse. I couldn't possibly. But you are more than the memory and the image of your sister, just as he is more than the memory and the image of the man who threw the stone whose ripples turned to waves, and drove her under."

She turned away from the glass, but did not release the pencil. "If she were still here, she wouldn't let me go. She'd be out there every day, trying to find a way to set me free."

"If she were still here," Rydderech said, "you'd be out here with us."

She spun, mouth agape in shock and anger. It was true, of course; she'd been in the process of abating the piece of paper which had killed her sister, impregnated as it was with the curse Zwist had laid on every language on Earth derived from German in a pointless act of blind, stupid rage. That piece of paper was in her labcoat pocket right now. It was weighing her down as she struck the glass with her free hand, for emphasis. Rydderech winced. Scout did not. "You want me to move on? Fine. It'll be easy. You catch that man, and you bring him here, and you tell him what he took from me. You extract from him an apology, and then you put him in a box. Just like me. We can work on the solution together. We can be neighbours."

But still, she didn't let go of the pencil. Her body never grew tired, she never needed to sleep, but she could still exhaust her own capacity for anger or sorrow or even guilt. She was already feeling guilty for shouting at them on Christmas morning for something they hadn't even done, and she was already sick of the sickly feeling in her stomach. So she took a deep breath, and added: "But bring in Professor Tolkien first. I think he might be a thaumatologist, and I could really use one of those on my side."

She loved them both a little more for how quickly they allowed the tone to turn. Most people could learn something about forgiveness from Vivian Scout and Wynn Rydderech, even if all people could learn something about everything else from Ilse Reynders.

Or, at least, that was the goal. She knew she'd get there eventually.

Part of her hoped that Zwist was still at large when she did.

2022

"So, you know. We've both taken something from the other, in different ways."

His eyes were open now, in more ways than one. He felt very old and foolish. He was unsure how to reply.

He knew how to start, however, so he fulfilled the obvious duty: "I'm sorry, Dr. Reynders. I didn't know."

She nodded. She wasn't shaking any more, though her blue eyes were brighter than they'd been before in the stage lights. "Thank you. I didn't think you did." She sighed. "He wouldn't have told you."

"Vivian?" He shook his head. "No, I suppose he wouldn't. He always said I had a martyr complex. I've been told that I make everything that happens about me, as though my presence at the beginning makes me responsible for the entire run. It's difficult not to feel that's true."

"Yes," she said. "Very difficult."

He peered up at her. "It was my fault your sister died. I planted that seed. Strength comes with an obligation to only exert it on others when absolutely necessary, as the consequences of a misaimed attack can be disastrous on the uninvolved. There has been so, so much collateral damage from that first ill-aimed volley, and—"

"Oh, shut up." She hopped down from the stage, and offered him her hand. "I burned that bridge to that grudge in a metal drum in Ipperwash Park. I meant what I said about science, and the past. You haven't got a single cell in common with Thilo Zwist in Austria, 1645. His guilt is academic to you. Learn from it, remember it, but don't bury your head in it. If I spent every waking moment wondering how I could have kept myself outside the ADDC, been there for my parents in their old age, been there for Vivian and Wynn when they needed me, I'd never move a muscle ever again. And I'm too damn smart for that to be fair to everybody else, them included. I've got a responsibility to keep moving. And so do you."

He couldn't laugh, not after the story she'd told him, but he wanted to nevertheless. "I used to be the one delivering the lectures," he said. "I don't know how you all turned this around on me."

He took her hand. She didn't have the leverage to help him get back up, but he found he had the energy to manage it himself.

She walked with him for a time, in silence, and they parted near the Director's Complex with the promise of meeting up again soon to discuss mutual acquaintances long gone. She wasn't the only person alive who had known Vivian Scout, of course, but no-one save Zwist himself had known the man better. It would be good to feel, just for a moment, like his old friend was still alive. But they'd been maudlin enough for one Christmas already, and so he allowed her to leave him with a polite excuse — "I'd better go see if anyone's holding up the cafeteria walls" — when Allan McInnis emerged from his quarters.

The Director nodded and waved at Ilse with friendly ease, then shook Zwist's hand with a firm grip. "It's good to see you're more comfortable," he remarked. "Roaming the halls on your own."

Zwist shrugged. "It's easy enough, once you get started. Every hall is very much alike to all the others."

McInnis smiled politely. "That's only true to an extent. I could show you things which, well…" A thought visibly occurred to the other man. "I could show you things. Come with me."

McInnis turned back to his door, swiped his keycard, and re-entered. After a moment's hesitation, Zwist followed him in.

The Director's Complex was the largest block of rooms dedicated to a single occupant in the Site. Zwist had seen its outline on the map, though the contents were of course top secret. McInnis led him through a streamlined, light wood-toned reception room, a matching study with a copious library and workspaces, a wraparound living room and finally a series of spaces with older decor and less clear purposes, ending in a corner with a pair of doors, perpendicular. One of them had a neatly-pressed suit hanging from it, likely a disused back way to McInnis' bedroom. The other had an old-fashioned key lock.

"Just a moment," the Director told him, and he entered his most private of spaces without closing the door behind him. Zwist saw, unsurprisingly, that there was no more ornamentation or profusion of personal effects in the inner sanctum than there had been in the outer. McInnis retrieved a key from his dresser, which a moment later fit snugly into the lock on the other door. He gestured. "Go ahead."

Zwist turned the handle, and walked into a space he had never known existed but could identify at a glance.

It was a second workroom, a second library, and it could not have been more different from the first ones he'd moved through. There were photographs on every exposed inch of wall, the furnishings were much older and considerably finer, the lights were warmer. There was a familiar winter overcoat on a hangar near the door, and on top was an even more familiar felt fedora with a dark purple band. Zwist didn't dare touch it. He had the superstitious feeling that its owner might arrive to claim it at any second, for this was very obviously the last retreat of Vivian Lesley Scout, preserved precisely as it had been when the man had reluctantly vacated the post he had inaugurated.

Zwist examined the photographs while McInnis stood in the doorway, silent. He recognized several of the storefronts as hideaways he'd used while on the run from the Mobile Task Forces, when the two of them had played a decades-long game of cat and mouse which both Reynders and Rydderech had rightly suspected was never meant to end. He found a few framed advertisements from his past as a hawker of dubious wares: Dr. Bromide and his Asclepian Alcohol, Poor Yorick's Trepanation Service, even — Zwist shuddered — a few of the least-odious examples of Wil Deaver's Sunday newspaper strip Polk the Lazy Cat. There were plenty of things he didn't recognize in the photographs, of course, various letters patent and Foundation awards and personal thanks from the men and women who had served at Scout's command, but there were also examples of their private correspondence left on display for him to see, stationery he'd last held in his hand in the 40s or 50s or 60s now inches away from his face, unfaded by incandescent light through glass.

"How long has he been gone, now?" he found himself asking. "Is it twenty years? More."

"More," McInnis agreed. "Twenty-five. A quarter-century."

Zwist whistled. "They say time flies, but they've never seen how swiftly it flies for me." Zwist noticed another door beyond the rows of bookcases, and looked back at the other man for confirmation. Even though McInnis nodded, it still felt wrong to lay his hand on what was obviously the portal to Scout's bedroom. He couldn't quite bring himself to do it.

"Do you know," he said, suddenly, "I've never forgotten the sound of his voice? I remember it most clearly, particularly on days like today."

"He was singular," McInnis agreed. "They both were."

Zwist turned back. "Both…?"

The Director nodded. "This was where they lived, and worked, together." He pointed at another door, which Zwist had almost missed, in the opposite corner. "Rydderech's rooms were that way. They could ramble about in here in relative privacy, if they wanted, or they could work together. They were partnered for a lifetime, you understand."

Zwist did understand. That partnership was one of the reasons he'd never set foot in Site-43 while Vivian Scout was alive, save for one memorable occasion when the man had been mostly unconscious and Zwist had been too busy battling giftschreiber to play tourist. "I'm surprised you've kept it all," he remarked. "It's like a monument to their memory."

"That's precisely what it is." McInnis put his hands in his pockets. "It's good to remember them. It reminds me why it's so important that we do what we do."

"And what lesson did Dr. Rydderech and the late Dr. Scout impart to you?"

McInnis inclined his head. "The meaning of sacrifice. What it is to live for other people, even at your own expense. The understanding that it will all have been worth it, in the end."

Zwist bit the inside of his cheek, thoughtfully. "What would you know about the end, Director McInnis?"

Then baldly, unexpectedly, explosively, even matter-of-factly, the other man told him.

Zwist left McInnis in Scout and Rydderech's old haunts, mind racing. He knew better than most the late hour of their struggle against the writers of power and poison, he had seen the brothers in their berths and witnessed firsthand the decay of stable reality which heralded the final days of this era. He had thought he understood. But McInnis had seen something more, knew things which would have broken Zwist to know, if they had pertained to him, and yet still he could stand in that shrine to days gone by and feel that what he had done, and what he had left to do, had meaning. His predecessors gave him purpose, even dead and buried respectively. They gave him strength, strength he would need. The scope of the revelations left him breathless, so he stood outside the Director's Complex and watched as a pair of janitors walked past, arms linked, and a slate grey monster followed them from mirror to mirror on the wall. They didn't notice him. He felt they wouldn't even notice if the roof caved in on top of them, and he thought once again of the man he had loved, and the man that man had loved himself, and just for a moment, technically-stolen coffee on Kärntner Strasse and a costly but priceless long-distance phone call.

This was a longer walk, more of a pilgrimage than a ramble, but he knew he had to make it. He had to understand.

His security clearance was provisional, but it also had provisos. He was granted knowledge of certain anomalies deemed important to the overall project of resisting and driving back the rogue memeticists he'd been struggling with all his long life, and when he'd mentioned already knowing quite a lot about one other, his clearance had been extended to cover it: SCP-5520, the long-lost and lamented Wynn Rydderech himself, now dwelling beneath the Site in a vast mechanical retirement home of his own construction. He had powers even Zwist could only dream of; like Reynders, he had suffered the consequences of a lifetime spent with anomalous materials constantly at arm's reach. Unlike Reynders, he had lost himself at some point in his long exile from society. He was considered irrecoverable.

Irrecoverable, but not unreachable.

Maximilien Vroom, the Chief of Identity and Technocryptography, ushered Zwist through the otherwise sophisticated computer labs of his Section to a jury-rigged terminal in a triple-locked server closet. This, he was told, was a sister terminal to one located right above the chasm where Rydderech brooded over his eternal factory of acroamatic chaos. Messages could be daisy-chained from here, to there, to the man himself — if he was listening, and if he could comprehend. Getting two for two, Vroom told him sadly, was a rare thing indeed.

Still, it was Christmas. He couldn't call Scout, but…

…he found, actually, that he couldn't call Rydderech either. Not yet. With McInnis' words on sacrifice and meaning still ringing in his head, however, he knew that he couldn't let this go for very much longer. It was an old debt shamefully unpaid. He'd resolved to visit the lost scientist well before the turn of the last century, and yet he'd never taken the trip or found the time until now. He had to make at least a token effort, start the wheels a-turning.

So he bade Vroom sit in the hot seat, and issued a few requests.

The other man was game. He considered the questions for a moment, then typed:

Merry Christmas, Dr. Rydderech.

The response came instantaneously:

Shouldn't you be calling Thilo instead, Vivian?

It left Zwist thunderstruck. Vroom, mercifully, was looking the wrong way to notice, and continued to type.

Why would I do that?

I always had to share you, on Christmas. I always understood. But that didn't make it any easier.

"He's in fine form today," Vroom mused. "We could probably ask him something more pointed." Before Zwist could object, could call off the conversation, the chief tech had already tapped out and fired off his next message.

How are you feeling today?

Like today is yesterday is yesterday is yesterday is yesterday is yesterday is yesterday is yesterday is yesterday is yesterday is yesterday is tomorrow is yesterday is yesterday is never ending. I can see myself ahead of me, and behind me, and on every side. All of me is doing the same damn thing, all the time, and

Oh, I'm feeling well. When are you coming home, Vivian?

Vroom's typing was slower now, and he seemed to deflate a bit in the chair. Zwist could hardly blame him. He felt like an airless tire himself.

What would you think if Thilo came down there to meet you instead?

This time the delay was unbearable. Zwist only ever used a cane as an affectation, but he suddenly wished he'd thought to affect it before visiting the Site.

I would think I must have lost track of time.

"What does that mean?" Zwist was beginning to wonder if everyone was farther along in the script than he was. "Ask him what that means."

What does that mean?

Did you get my Christmas present, Vivian? It's not much, but then again you were always such an easy sell.

Vroom sighed. "It was probably nothing. He gets these little flashes, and you think he must know something, know who he is and where he is and what's going on, and maybe even something you don't know, but then it always ends like—"

Tell Thilo to beware of dragons if he sets foot in my lair.

Try as he might, Vroom couldn't get another word out of Rydderech for the five minutes Zwist could stand to remain in the airless closet, cast adrift.

He almost didn't notice when Udo Okorie came slinking past, looking like she didn't want to be noticed. Her cheeks reddened when she noticed Zwist, though after a moment of examining his no doubt blasted expression, she shifted from inexplicable embarrassment to understandable confusion. "Hello, Dr. Zwist."

It wasn't much, but it was something to seize on. He clawed that lifeline back to sanity. "I'm not a doctor, Dr. Okorie. My, but your grandfather would have been proud."

She smiled at him. She looked preoccupied, but also like she wanted to say something more. "I, ah, I've heard that before. From Arik Euler."

Another dead friend. Zwist forced a smile. "I'm glad you got the chance to meet him. I wish you'd known Izaak, too, but… well. No doubt you know." Okorie's grandfather had been murdered by the giftschreiber. It was starting to feel like everyone at Site-43 had lost something to the war he'd once felt was his alone to fight.

She blew out a sudden breath, vibrating with nervous energy, and said: "I'd like to talk about it. Later. After the party's over. Maybe on Boxing Day?" That was what the Canadians called the day after Christmas. "We should get together."

He reached out to take her hands, and nodded. He could feel her pulse was racing. "I'd like that. Perhaps…" He suddenly nodded again. It had all fallen into place. The shore was in sight. "Yes. We'll speak again soon."

She smiled warmly at him, turned away, then suddenly turned back again. "You'll still be here tomorrow, right?"

"Yes." He wondered where she was rushing off to, and why it mattered so much to her, but that didn't really matter. What mattered was that something excited her, something animated her, because she was a real human being doing real human things. She wasn't trapped behind glass, she wasn't about to catch fire — her obvious perspiration notwithstanding — she wasn't lost in an endless cavern or dead of a gunshot wound in her private home or buried beneath the earth, at least no more than he was himself, no more than she was plotting to overthrow her government or sentence an innocent man to death or stamp out the wonder and mystery in the world as he secretly feared they all would some day do, all of them, these people he universalized against all his years of evidence to the contrary because it made the distance easier to maintain. Not this one. She was alive, tonight, and happy, and she would be alive tomorrow, doing the work. His work. Their work. The only work that mattered.

"Yes," he repeated. "I'll still be here."

Zwist returned to the party, which showed no signs of abating. He smiled at his own choice of words, and smiled wider when Harry and Lillian welcomed him back into the fold. "Thought you got lost on the way to the bathroom," the former suggested. "Thought you mistook the floorplan for an infohazard," the latter slurred. She was leaning on her best friend as a structural support at this point.

Behind them, William Wettle sat red-faced in a crowd of hard-faced men and women who were treating him with uncommon solicitousness. One, a woman, was dabbing at him with a handkerchief which kept coming away pristine. It couldn't still be the punch. It had to be an allergic reaction. Two of the administrators, an elegant blonde woman and an elegant indigenous man, both immaculately dressed, were consoling a sobbing old man in a deep blue engineer's labcoat. On closer inspection, he was crying tears of joy; there were strange lines on his face, as though he was unaccustomed to goodwill towards mankind on any occasion. Zwist saw the ghost hunters and the theologians locked in a friendly sparring match beneath the gaudiest Christmas tree, overgrown with ornaments from every possible era and no doubt sourced from the entire general staff; he saw the security chief helping a little man in a grey labcoat off the floor, and saw them trade a look which was more than just friendly; he saw the Chief of Hiring and Regulation, who'd stamped out his Clearance Level 3 badge personally, flirting shamelessly with the Chief of Health and Pathology, who'd told him he was in fine shape for a man who should have long since mummified. He saw a bulletin board full of best wishes from far-flung facilities he'd never even heard of: a man from Wisconsin with a name that simply couldn't be real; someone from Massachusetts who seemed to write with their non-dominant hand; one fellow all the way from Poland who typed like a recovering alcoholic; an insurance company (?); a man from Vegas whose printed note ran out of ink halfway down the page, and was finished in the most arrogant hand he'd ever seen; even a woman he could swear was associated with a media company which… no, that was impossible, his imagination was getting far too carried away. He saw Bradbury asleep in a loafer, and the top psychologist pulling a blanket over her as she snored. He saw what had to be five brothers sitting together at a table, looking askance at one another but occasionally sharing a moment of familial solidarity as the gaggle of mixed researchers and janitors and technicians around them joked and japed and gulped and occasionally fell flat over.

He found he could believe, in this moment, that they were united in their belief that peace on Earth was within reach.

He hoped he still believed it tomorrow.

26 December

Zwist liked to think that Vivian wouldn't have minded, and he resolved some day very soon to ask for Rydderech's forgiveness. It had been decades since this space had rebounded with the sounds of laughter or been filled with the warmth of companionship, and to his mind that was all it was really a monument to. He'd heard a lot on the topic of history, the past, and what within it might be worth carrying forward. What deserved to be buried, and what deserved to live. He'd felt this would strike the correct balance, and within minutes he'd known he was right.

Ilse Reynders cried when she found Scout's copy of "We'll Meet Again" by Vera Lynn, and they listened to it together on his old phonograph. They played it three times, from start to finish, without anyone uttering a coherent sound over top. Udo Okorie told them what her father had told her about her grandfather, and then she told Zwist about her father, and he told her things about them both which made her laugh and cry. Harry Blank smiled as he read aloud Scout's evaluation of his doctoral thesis proposal, which alternated between easy praise and entertainingly difficult damnation. Allan McInnis told them, straight-faced, the story of how he and his predecessor had straight up stolen an anomalous pop-up video store and run it for a week, ostensibly for surveillance of its patrons, then suffered the inexplicable loss of all their records when, of all things! Scout's car had been stolen. Zwist pretended not to have heard any side of that story, and McInnis pretended to believe him.

Ilse spoke for Rydderech, whom none of the others had known personally, and Zwist listened closely. Before the afternoon was out, she and he were thick as thieves and planning… well, time would tell, but they were both done taking the long view on this subject. It was time to gather momentum.

Lillian Lillihammer finally brought the house down when she went fishing in Scout's overcoat and produced nothing but a note in immaculate penmanship, which spoke to the man's ironclad knowledge that anyone penetrating to his holiest of holies, guarded in his absence by a fiercely loyal cadre of the best that the Foundation could offer, would naturally be friends to him and his absent love:

I regret that we are not at home. I sincerely hope that you are.

For the first time in three hundred and seventy-seven years, Thilo Zwist felt that he just might be.

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