camera and looking at it his chest warms as he sees it’s a copy of 
Frankenstein, the copy he’s seen his father read over and over and 
over again through his childhood, the one with the highlighted pages 
and the torn off cover that’s dad’s, dad's, daa’s, that’s his that’s 
dad's book that's the book that’s one of dad’s favorites— 


“Dad.” His voice wavers, unsure, and he doesn’t expect his father to 
respond but he knows that his dad heard him because he does that 
little thing he always does where he cocks up an eyebrow in his 
direction and continues typing, saying just one minute, let me finish 
this email. 


Draven comes and sits across the table from him, and he sees the 
outline of some of 408 crawling on his father’s sweatshirt as he does 
so, crawling in his hair, on the back of his computer. One lands on 
Draven’s fingers, wings fluttering gently. The whole world is soft and 
he feels light, airy, tinted with anxiety and love. 


His dad looks up at him from his computer and Draven is so happy 
he wants to cry, and he must be crying, because his father looks at 
him with concern. 


“Dad,” he repeats, and he doesn’t know what to say. Why did you do 
it? Did it hurt? Would you have done it if | stayed? 


And none of his questions get answered, because his father looks 
him dead in the eye, removes his service pistol from his tattered 
backpack, puts it in his mouth, and without breaking eye contact 
pulls the trigger and Draven wakes up screaming. 


8 


“Iris?” 


“Look, | just—” SCP-105 turns around to face him where she’s 
standing in front of his father’s old desk, and Draven sees the red 
stain on the floor next to her and can’t stop himself from gagging 
sharply, cutting her off. He leans against the door frame in the early 
hours of the morning two days after his father’s suicide and is glad 


915d: In light of the investigation taken of the material related to 
research of this device, as well as further anomalous events 
originating in the interior of 915, research on 915 has been 
suspended at this time. 


It seems interactions with SCP-915 tend to fall into two categories. 
Most reject the non-Euclidean geometry that 915 displays, ending 
with a surface appreciation of these traits and mental equilibrium 
intact. However, a few cases have emerged of researchers and 
agents internalizing their experiences with 915 in a way detrimental 
to their mental health. Further, it appears intimate knowledge of the 
workings of 915 may allow one so affected to induce preternatural 
effects in one’s environment. 


We have taken steps to determine who is most susceptible to this 
"damaging insight". While no concrete results have emerged, 
current evidence suggests that mathematicians and artists 
concerned with appreciation and understanding of "space" and 
"shape" are the most likely to internalize the experience of 915. -Dr. 
Foudray 


¢ Personal Log of RA 915-g 


« SCP-914 | SCP-915 | SCP-916 » 


he hasn’t had the appetite to eat in the past 24 hours, because his 
entire body finds everything about his father’s newly uninhabited 
office to be nauseating, revolting, everything from the coffee cup still 
on the nightstand from where James got his father water in the night 
to the empty chair behind it. He swallows a few times, not really 
expecting to have this kind of reaction to it — being in the task 
forces, he’s seen plenty of gore, but this is the first thing that he’s 
seen in years that has brought him to almost vomiting. 


“Are you okay?” 


Draven swallows again, and again, and eventually feels the 
dizziness pass enough to respond to her. 


“Yeah, no. I’m okay,” he says wearily, trying not to look at it. The 
room smells like bleach and the orange soap the janitors use to 
clean up blood, so much that it’s suffocating. “...Just a little fresh in 
my mind is all.” 


“| can tell,” she replies, and he knows that it’s also the fact that he’s 
dressed in his boyfriend’s grey sweatpants and t-shirt and the fact 
that he hasn’t shaved. He looks rough — Draven will be the first to 
admit this, given that he just rolled out of bed to come get this over 
with — but he’s coming to pack up his dad’s stuff, not to go to work 
in the full-tactical-gear-over-black-jumpsuit Iris usually sees him in. It 
occurs to him that this is probably the first time that she’s seen him 
without his visor or helmet in years. What an impression he must be 
making. 


“So who put you up to this?” he sighs, letting go of the doorframe to 
wander into his father’s work space. “Eskobar?” 


“Myself,” she replies, and he sees that she already has three 
cardboard boxes of files loaded up, printed with ‘CLASSIFIED’ or 
‘UNCLASSIFIED’ on the top in black sharpie. He spends a dumb 
second hazing over the fact that she’s an SCP, shouldn't be seeing 
those, security breach? before he realizes that she’s a Safe-class 
semi-employee who's lived here since Draven was around seven. 
His dad had signed the paperwork for her low-level clearance 
himself. She has the red authorized security card clipped to her 
uniform and everything, and he briefly thinks / really should have let 


James do this. Draven had left him a note and a kiss on the 
forehead instead. Better to let the poor guy get some rest. 


“You volunteered to do this?” Draven asks, picking up a cardboard 

box from the pile provided, briefly imagining some kind of dystopian 
straw-pull or bingo game. Person who wins gets to help the sad kid 
clean out his dead dad’s office. 


Iris looks at him with tears in her eyes, and he winces. 
“Your dad,” she says slowly. “Saved my life more than once.” 


Draven nodded, distantly. His father was a big advocate for 
humanoids. He treated them well, and again, it wasn’t perfect, but it 
was something, anything. 


“He...did that a lot,” he drones numbly, moving to the bookshelf on 
the other side of the desk across the room, more out of avoiding the 
cot and the stain than anything else. Without thinking, he just starts 
at the top left and drops the first three books in the box with a heavy 
thwump. 


“When | was twelve, you know, | tried to kill myself,” Iris says, and 
Draven feels his entire body tighten like a steel rail. But she 
continues, and part of him wants to hear it. He doesn’t stop her. “... 
was...you know. They took me at ten, and | got put in therapy and 
everything, but | hated it, you know? This whole place. | hated it.” 


Iris lands the last couple manilla envelopes into an almost-full box 
and tapes it shut with packing tape. 


“So like, when | was twelve, | took the shoestrings out of my shoes 
and tried to hang myself. And | did it badly because | was too short-” 
She takes a second to laugh grimly. “-too short to reach the air vent 
where | was gonna tie it to, so like, the rope slipped and | fell and 
they took me to the infirmary.” 


Draven can’t help but smile, too. One hell of a thing to laugh about, 
but both of them have had one hell of a past couple of days. Smiling 
at anything is better than the alternative. 


“And then your dad came in. It was like, god, like, one in the 


morning. And he came in and introduced himself, and we just kind 
of...talked. Like, he was just...easy, you know? Like, easy to talk to.” 


He nods, still smiling sadly. His dad was good with kids, good with 
adults, good with most people except people he felt deserved to 
take some shit. Never felt like the kids were inhuman. Never thought 
that they deserved to be locked in a box, just that it was safer for 
them to be. Tried to make shit normal for them, and for the adults, 
too, and for the staff. Wasn't always good at it, but tried his best, 
sometimes took some risks, sometimes broke some rules. They 
were still people to his dad. 


“And after a while, he told me, /isten, it doesn’t seem like it’s gonna 
get better, but it will. It always gets better, because shit changes, 
you know? And he told me-” Iris swallows, collecting herself. “-He 
told me, you and | are gonna take this one day at a time, because 
I’ve been having problems, too, and then said that | was on his list 
now, and that he was gonna come see me every day to check on 
me and that if | wasn’t there, he was gonna come looking for me. 
And | thought he was kidding, but no. He came every damn day for 
two years. Missed maybe 2 or 3 times, and you know what? Shit got 
better. And after that, he still came a couple times a month, and 
Jesus, Draven, the last time | saw him was probably three weeks 
ago, and he was fine.” Iris slams a stack of papers into a new box, 
and Draven jumps slightly, still frozen where he was standing. “I just 
don’t fucking get it! Like, people give him shit, and that’s fine, but 
goddamn, he cared more than anyone about the people in 
containment. And it’s not fucking fair, okay? It’s not! Because he 
actually fucking gave a shit about what happened to us once we 
were inside!” 


Draven looks at her, and she looks at him, and there are tears in 
both of their eyes, and there’s a silence in the room, and his father’s 
books are being put in boxes and there’s blood staining the 
carpeting next to where she’s standing and he knows that she’s 
right. 


“...Oh my god, Draven, I’m so sorry—” 


“My dad had bipolar disorder,” says Draven blankly. 


Iris looks at him with confusion, then with slow, quiet dawning of 
understanding. 


“What?” she says. 


“You said that he he seemed fine a few weeks ago?” Draven turns 
back to the bookshelf and digs his fingers into another couple 
paperbacks. “That’s...part of the reason why.” 


“You're kidding me,” gapes Iris. “He just. Never said anything about 
that.” 


“Yeah. Like, it was more obvious if you lived with him, | guess.” 
Draven started dropping books methodically in the box, noting some 
of the titles in passing. Frankenstein. Something old in Polish with 
the lettering rubbed off. Cannibalism: a Perfectly Natural History. 
“He...had moods. Kind of ups and downs. When | was little he took 
mood stabilizers for it, but when my parents got divorced he-” He 
almost says chose drinking every night over taking care of himself, “- 
stopped taking them. Like, sometimes he wouldn’t need to sleep for 
days, and other times it was hard for him to get out of bed. 
Sometimes it happened in hours, where he just kind of would spiral 
down until he crashed, and then be fine the next morning, or 
sometimes he would suddenly kind of get in a swing for weeks or 
months, you know? And you would think it was getting better or 
getting worse, and he would just swing in the other direction out of 
nowhere.” Carrie. Famous Serial Killers of the 19th Century. The 
National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies. 
“| think he started drinking because of it. Like, in terms of the actual 
disorder itself, | always knew my dad was sick but he never really 
mentioned it outright. Sometimes that’s why he would do some 
stupid impulsive shit, because it kind of affects your decision making 
that way sometimes.” House of Leaves. History of Poland. The Spy 
Who Came In From The Cold. “But the past few years...| don’t 
know. Most of his episodes have been bad ones, and like, he would 
start coming up and then go back down instead, and his drinking got 
really, really bad. Like, he’s been an alcoholic since mom left, but 
this was...worse than I’ve ever seen him.” Demons: Summoning and 
Expulsion. Pet Sematary. The Silence of the Lambs. “Like, he 
wouldn’t eat, wouldn't sleep, would just binge drink until he passed 
out. Actually, that’s how James and | found him the night he—” 


Draven dropped the box on the floor, breathing hard. Oh god, the 
night he died. 


“Hey.” Iris looked shaken from the information, but recovering into 
concern. “...You okay?” 


Draven slowed his breathing, then slowly, carefully picked up the 
box. 


“| think—” Draven swallowed hard, voice wavering, fighting back 
tears. “I think we should stop talking about dad and just focus on 
getting this over with.” 


Iris agreed, and within four hours everything in his father’s office was 
loaded into the back of James’ green Saturn; 90% of it books and 
manuscripts covered in his father’s writing, unpublished novels, 
diary entries, everything in Polish and English alike. All the work shit 
packed in separate boxes equaled about the same amourt, all in all, 
but that happened when you were a Site Director for nearly two and 
a half decades. 


When they’re done with that, Iris asks him if he wanted to get the 
apartment where his father lived done too, and he agrees, because 
the only thing worse than cleaning out the place where he grew up is 
waiting to do it, and when they get there they realize that most of it is 
already Foundation-owned and is slated to be repossessed, 
including his dad’s recently untouched bed, all the furniture, and all 
the files left behind. It becomes clear when as they clean that his 
dad hadn't bothered to come home for quite a while longer than they 
thought. No food in the cupboards, most clothing in his office, most 
things for living in his office and most already either thrown away or 
packed, as they realize, because his father was too damn drunk to 
stumble home each night at the end of his life. Some things they 
move to Draven’s apartment, and others they move to the Saturn. 
They sift and sort and find all the pieces of his dad among a mosaic 
of an abandoned living space and pack up all the little scraps they 
find, although there’s not much left to begin with, and when they’re 
done they make one last check of the place to ensure that they got 
everything, and Draven almost cries for the thousandth time today 
but is too exhausted and numb to do so. 


“Well,” says Iris as Draven slams the trunk of James’ Saturn, “We 
got it over with, huh?” 


And Draven rushes forward and embraces her, and she embraces 
him back, and when he’s done he drives home and James is waiting 
there for him, and they bring everything into the garage, and turn out 
the lights and walk inside the house and leave his dad out next to 
the car when they go to bed. 


9 


A portrait of your father: 


The farthest you ever saw your dad into mania was probably when 
he threw piss on Duke and started running. 


Dr. Kondraki, with a small lead, attempts to enter non- 
sentient object containment by making his way past two 
armed guards and flashing his ID. 


And when he passes you, in all your tactical gear and headset and 
radio, he doesn’t realize that it’s you at first, and there’s a moment 
when he whips out his ID that he does recognize you and up until 
that point in time you think that he’s just doing his job but his grin 
falters when he sees you, and that’s the point when, instead of 
letting your father barrel down the R-14 hallway, you run after him. 
He runs faster from you then he does from Duke, and you manage 
to get him away from the stairwell and chase him down an adjacent 
hallway instead, and when his squad commander squeaks over his 
radio “43, come in for status, 43, over” he pushes the little button to 
talk and says “I’ve got him, commander, over”, and in a second he 
does, or thinks he does until his father whips around and lands a 
poorly-thought-out punch to his visor that rattles it enough to startle 
him, but it looks like it startles him, too, and you take the opportunity 
to grab him by the wrist and tranquilize him and Duke is dead in five 
minutes two hallways over. 


There are no casualties. The chase, including the short scuffle they 
have, takes maybe a minute. The fact that your dad fought back was