Work Text:
“F-Faroe?”
“What?” her mouth said, even as her mind went wait, something’s not right here. She stopped digging through the cupboards for tea stuff and looked at her dad. Actually looked at him, not just registered the familiar silhouette and funny expression and kept moving.
He hadn’t styled his hair at all. He—had he shaved his mustache? He was just vaguely stubbly. She didn’t recognize his clothes. And that was all rather odd, but far stranger—
Looking months old, despite the fact that she had never seen it before in her life, there was a jagged slice of silver scar tissue cutting across his throat. His left pinkie finger was blackened and twisted, with raised dark veins stretching out across his hand. And his eyes…
Faroe sucked in a breath and took a step back, away from him.
Those weren’t her father’s eyes. Those weren’t human eyes.
“D-dad?” she said again, so much more uncertain now. “Is—what’s—why do you—?”
He lunged, and she stumbled backwards, not fast enough. Strange, bony and yet strong arms closed around her and drew her close—!
In a hug.
“Faroe,” he sobbed into her shoulder. She was frozen, unsure what was happening. “Faroe, Faroe, you’re alive, you’re here.” His face remained buried in the fabric of her dress as one hand came up to grasp her face, first cupping her cheek and then skating quickly across her nose, eyes, mouth. What was he doing??? In contrast, his other arm was stiff and unsure, hovering just above her back.
“Y-yeah, I’m fine, Dad. I’m, um, more worried about you? And whatever the fuck this is?”
He huffed a laugh, or maybe it was just another sob. He muttered, so softly she could barely hear even at this distance, “Please, descri—yes,” and then didn’t elaborate, though he did finally tip his head up to look at her with those alien eyes.
“Dad!” Faroe said, louder. “What the fuck is wrong with your eyes?!”
He stilled, pulled away. “Oh. Right.” He laughed, rather hysterically, though those eyes flickered away, almost embarrassed. “I—Jesus, I have no idea where to begin. Its a very long story.”
“You were only gone three days?!”
“R-right. Goodness. I—Perhaps I do want that cup of tea.”
Part of Faroe fumed, why couldn’t he just blurt out the point already?! How dare he put it off? Where was one of his stupid monologues? But she had offered, and, watching him turn slightly away to mutter incomprehensibly to himself, the tear stains on his cheeks, she knew he needed a moment to collect himself.
She wordlessly made his tea and put it on the table in front of him. “Talk,” she ordered.
He chuckled again, a little more naturally this time, and grinned from ear to ear. “Of course you’re… of course.”
“What’s. Wrong. With. Your. Eyes. And your neck. And your fingers.” She sat down pointedly across from him.
He took a deep breath. “...I am so sorry, Faroe. I am not your Arthur Lester. I am the Arthur Lester from another world, a parallel timeline.”
She stared at him. “You’re kidding me.”
“I am not.”
“Parallel timelines? You don’t believe in supernatural shit.”
“Perhaps your Arthur never had a need to. I suspect many Arthurs never did. My life… took a rather unexpected path. I-I’m not quite sure whether we have found ourselves in your universe, or you are somehow in ours. We’re the ones who were meant to be sent somewhere, but he said quite clearly that he was sending us back home. I mean, I said no to his offer. ...Hmm, good point, maybe there is no Nyarlathotep who keeps his word…”
“Stop, stop, stop—Who is we???” Faroe demanded, feeling like he was now speaking to someone else entirely, like she wasn’t even in the room.
“Oh. I’m sorry. I, um, well, John. Myself and… John.”
“Who is John.”
His left arm, the one with the fucked up finger, and without any kind of corresponding response rippling through the rest of his body, which was something Faroe had never noticed was normal until this moment when it was unnervingly absent, hesitantly lifted and gave a little wave. At the exact same time, his right arm rose to flick a finger vaguely towards his eyes, or maybe just his head in general.
“He is the reason my eyes are different. The reason my whole life went so strange, really. He is a… an incorporeal entity who I have been sharing this body with for… well, the passage of time has been a bit… let’s say somewhere between six months and a year.”
She stared at him. “You’re saying you’re possessed by a ghost.”
“He’s not a ghost, he’s the fractured soul of an extradimentional entity—its quite complicated. You are only the second person I’ve had to explain this too, I never imagined I would get the chance to... For the moment, I suppose it can’t hurt to think of him as something like a—yes, I am aware you’re not a ghost, John! I literally just said that!” he snapped suddenly.
“Dad…” Faroe began slowly, trying to figure out how to broach the delicate subject.
“I am not crazy, darling. Let’s see, how would be the quickest way to prove something… ah. Excellent idea, John.” His left arm reached out, again with the subtly wrong effect that really did look like her father wasn’t the one moving it, and Faroe found herself looking down at his discolored finger. Her curiosity got the better of her, and she leaned in.
It wasn’t discolored at all. Because it wasn’t his pinkie. It was a piece of dark wood, emerging from inside his hand, anchored into muscle and tendon by roots stretching underneath the skin. It was horrifying, and gross. Faroe couldn’t look away. She touched it, quickly, then pulled her hand back. The wood was warm, warmer than skin, with a sort of oiliness that Faroe thought might just be inside her head. She didn’t feel anything when she rubbed her fingers together. She was about to argue that was clearly just some weird, fucked-up tree infection, when the finger flexed. It bent smoothly, easily, just like a finger should, and just like wood absolutely, definitely should not.
She gasped and flinched back. “What the fuck?!”
“To escape an otherworldly wood, I had to give it part of myself, as a sort of blood sacrifice, and we got a piece of its flesh in return,” her dad explained matter-of-factually. His eyes still wouldn’t look at her. “It actually saved my life once.”
“...Sure. Sure, fuck, whatever.” Faroe crossed her arms, mind racing furiously. He opened his mouth to say something else, but she cut him off. “I want to meet this John character.”
“Oh. Yes, of course. Alright, uh, just like with Noel, I suppose. What do you want to say?”
Faroe didn’t know what he was talking about, so she ignored it, trying to prepare herself for some kind of specter appearing. She couldn’t really believe that was about to happen, but that finger thing wasn’t like anything she’d seen before… she didn’t want to freak if something did happen.
Sure enough, no specter appeared. Her dad just took a breath, closed his eyes and opened them again, the yellow irises now focusing on her intently, and then, like he was trying to remember lines for a play he hadn’t practiced nearly enough for, he said, “Hello… Faroe. It is... good to finally meet you. Your father has told me much about you.”
She waited. Nothing else happened. The yellow eyes flicked to the side, almost awkward. She sent him her best seriously, Dad? look. He didn’t respond at all. That always worked on him! A moment later he flinched and asked, “F-Faroe?”
“You’re going to have to do better than that, Dad.”
“She still doesn’t—it’s a very reasonable reaction, really. But I’m not sure how else—that… is an option, I suppose. If you feel comfortable. Yes, yes, I’m fine with it. For her… yes, I want her to see you.” His head remained cocked off to the side, eyes staring off into space, but he raised his voice and Faroe belatedly realized he was talking to her again. “John’s going to, ah, show himself now. It may be a little scary, darling, but he’s a friend.”
Faroe began to snap that she wasn’t a little girl anymore, she was nearly 18 and could handle herself—but then her father’s eyes flashed and a yellow sheen flickered over his body.
She snapped her jaw shut.
The glow pulled itself upwards, becoming thicker and more opaque. It hovered cloudily above her father like some twisted puppeteer, golden strings binding it to him, mostly on his left arm but with thick ones coming from his blanked-out eyes and some even stretching down to his feet. The strings were easy to see compared to the main body, which Faroe’s own eyes really did not want to focus on. She gritted her teeth and tried anyway. It was sort of shaped like a big cloak, a sort of dirty gold in hue, like a yellow that had been dragged through the mud, with lots of dangly bits that might have been ribbons or torn strips of fabric, or might have been tentacles, or might have been many-fingered hands. There was a hood, with a shadowed pit inside, and its face had to be in there right? She wanted to see its face. She could see the shape of it, almost, maybe if she got just a little closer…
STOP! A voice boomed.
Faroe fell out of her chair. Her head was ringing, her vision spinning.
“John?!” her dad asked, panicked. “Faroe?! What’s wrong, what happened?!”
SHE TRIED TO LOOK AT MY TRUE FACE, the voice said, deep and rich and beautiful, sending oil-slick rainbows rippling through her head, and yet just as frantic and worried. I-I THINK SHE’LL BE ALRIGHT, I SHOCKED HER OUT OF IT. I-I’M SO SORRY OURTHER, I DIDN’T—I DIDN’T THINK THAT WOULD HAPPEN. I DON’T REMEMBER ANYTHING LIKE THAT HAPPENING BACK AT THE ORDER, BUT IT WAS SO CHAOTIC—MAYBE SOMETHING CHANGED WHEN I FUSED BACK TOGETHER WITH YELLOW—
Her father was at her side now, running his fingers comfortingly through her hair like he had when she got sick when she was little. Actually, maybe she was sick, Faroe thought distantly. “Faroe!” her dad was saying. “Faroe, speak to me! Are you alright?! God, I can’t—I can’t lose you again—”
Faroe pulled herself together enough to respond, though for some reason she responded by glaring up at the writhing lemony mass and asking, incredulously, “Are you—why are you Canadian?!?”
A beat. Then Arthur burst out laughing wildly. The voice spluttered, I DON’T—WHAT??? OURTHER! STOP LAUGHING! DO I REALLY SOUND—
Faroe found herself giggling too. Was this really happening to her right now? She felt dizzy.
Her dad’s laughs dissolved into a fit of coughing and all of her worries fell back down on top of her. She hurriedly sat up and grabbed his arms. He was shaking. “Dad?!”
He shook his head vigorously with one last frustrated cough. The gold cloud lowered to ripple just a few inches about his shoulders, an almost… comforting gesture. Less puppeteer, more extension of his own body. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he insisted. “John projecting like this is… draining. But I can handle it. I want you to see him.”
OURTHER… SHE HAS SEEN ME NOW. POSSIBLY TOO MUCH. I DON’T WANT TO HURT HER OR YOU ANY MORE THAN I ALREADY HAVE. I CAN GO BACK INSIDE NOW.
Arthur radiated a general sense of disappointment. “John…”
The amorphous shape sighed, and turned its hood towards her. Faroe’s breath caught and she forced her gaze to fix on a spot right above it, desperate not to look back at the void beneath.
FAROE. HELLO. I AM SORRY, I REALLY DID NOT MEAN TO THREATEN YOU SO. I MEAN NO HARM.
For such a loud, terrifying voice, it was incredibly gentle.
“H-hi,” Faroe managed softly. “You’re… John?”
YES. JOHN DOE.
Huh. Oddly fitting for a thing without a face. “Nice name. Um.” She tried to pull herself together, and crossed her arms. “You’re taking good care of my dad, right? You’d better be. He looks like shit.”
The thing huffed. I CERTAINLY TRY. HE MAKES IT DIFFICULT.
Arthur said, “Hey!” and both Faroe and the entity laughed. “I am… getting better,” her dad corrected, more seriously. “I am trying.”
I KNOW, the entity—John—told him gently. Faroe felt suddenly out of place. This… this really wasn’t her dad. The man before her knew this creature, had some weird dynamic with it, one built over somewhere-between-six-months-and-a-year that her own father had never lived. This man didn’t belong to her, he was some other Faroe’s.
Wait. Then where was—
The hood turned back towards her. I WILL NOT SAY THAT I HAVE NEVER HURT HIM, OUT OF ANGER OR FEAR OR DESPERATION, BUT I AM LEARNING NOT TO ACT THAT WAY. I HOPE YOU WILL FORGIVE ME FOR SAYING THAT HE HAS HURT ME TOO. I WANT NOTHING MORE THAN HIM SAFE AND HAPPY. AND AS HE CARES FOR YOU MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE, I WANT THAT FOR YOU AS WELL, John said.
Faroe found herself tearing up slightly. “Oh. Ok.”
Something like John had to be powerful, right? She was still so very confused—this was madness, everything that had happened since she’d walked in the door had been madness! But something like that, caring so much for her dad? It had to be good, right? He got into so much trouble on his investigations sometimes, John could protect him! Maybe that scar on his throat had been fixed up by some kind of healing magic.
And the implication that he cared about her too, if only by proxy?
“Thank you, John,” Arthur said. “Now I think it is time that we all get up off the floor.” He started to push himself back towards standing, and Faroe jumped to help him. John’s form shimmered and shrunk back down until it vanished completely, and some tension in Arthur’s body disappeared just as quickly. Faroe settled him back in her chair, him almost leaning into her touch in an almost worrying way, and then retook her own seat.
She tried to figure out what to do or say next. “So… alternate universe, huh?” she said finally.
“Yes. I’m… starting to get a theory about what may be going on here, but there’s no need to jump to conclusions so quickly. Faroe, in the world you come from, am I a still private investigator? Is this the office you know? And, John, you said this was our office just like we left it—are you sure?
Faroe was briefly distracted away from her own examination of the space by watching Arthur’s eyes rove around the room, his head only shifting at some inaudible cue. Why wasn’t Arthur just looking himse—oh. Oh. Those were John’s eyes, not his. He couldn’t use them, could he? John had to see for him. That explained so much about him. How horrible.
“John says it looks the same as he remembers, though he doesn’t recall exactly when the sign changed. Probably some stupid fucking taunt from Kayne.” God, Faroe had so many questions. “Faroe?”
“OH uh er, give me a minute okay?! This is kind of a lot!” Flustered, she scanned the office. If she had originally missed that her dad wasn’t her dad, what else had she missed? And… yeah, there were things she had missed. Nothing major, it was still basically the Mosby Ave she knew, but different dents and stains, more of them, more dust than made sense for her having been here just yesterday.
“Oh… Oh god…” she whispered. “How didn’t I notice? When did… I just walked in like normal…”
“I’ll take that as an answer, then,” Arthur said, grimly.
“How did I get here?! How do I get home?!”
“Faroe, I understand you’re scared, but I need you to stick with me, alright? How old are you?”
“W-what?”
“I’m trying to figure out which timeline you’re from. Just work with me here.”
“18. Al-almost 18. My birthday’s tomorrow. My D-dad should be home from New York by now. We were going to have a little party, w-with Mom and all my friends—” Through her rambling, Faroe saw Arthur’s face go pallid. Tears glimmered at the corners of John’s eyes. The man who wasn’t quite her father launched himself around the table to hug her again.
“Oh Faroe, oh my darling, I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry. Oh Faroe,” he whispered. John’s arm was a little more sure in its attempt at comfort this time.
“What’s the problem?!” she nearly screamed.
“W-we’ve heard of a timeline where something awful happened. On your 18th birthday. Where you l-lost everything. Everyone.” He pulled slightly away, like he was trying to look her in the eyes, although John didn’t seem able to go through with it. “I think… I think the Manager brought you here to save you. To try and give you a second chance. With at least versions of the people you knew. Some of them.”
No. No it couldn’t be. That was impossible. E-everyone? Everyone she loved—what, dead? How? Why? She was going mad. This couldn’t be real, none of this could be real.
“I’m so sorry, Faroe. John is too. We’ll take care of you, okay? Whatever you need, whatever you want. If you want to go back there, find a way to continue on from that, we’ll track down that fucker, find a fucking summoning circle or whatever, and make him send you back. Or if you don’t, if you want to st—whatever. I don’t care. I’ll love you whatever. Okay? I love you, Faroe, no matter what. No matter the universe. Whatever you need, I’m here. I’ll take care of you. This time I won’t let you down.”
Faroe whispered the question that had been digging at the back or her mind since she had first begun to understand the implications of this haunted, scarred version of her father. The one she had already half-figured out the answer to. “But… what about your Faroe?”
He looked at her so, so sadly. “Oh my darling. My Faroe’s been gone for a long, long time.”