Work Text
1946
There’s a safe sitting in a back room on the fifth floor of a London office block. It’s old-fashioned and hidden in an oak cabinet, a little battered, but solid. It doesn’t contain much. The firm it belongs to is a small one, getting by, but not making anyone’s fortune yet. They sell carbon paper.“I believe they got it from a second-hand dealer,” Silver says, watching Steel circling the safe, the electric light from the ceiling casting his shadow over it as he moves. “Cast iron. Brass fittings. From the last century. Three not-so-careful owners.”Steel turns on his heel and glares at the object, which is not yet being as offending as it ought to be. “So, it’s older than the rest of the furnishings.”“Well,” says Silver with a vague wave of his hands. “Yes. No. I don’t think any of these things is the same age as anything else.”Steel glares harder. “If that’s the trigger, fix it. That’s why they sent you, isn’t it?”“It is and it isn’t,” says Silver. “It will be a problem, and it will need me, but they don’t know when.”“I was given the date – the night of September the 17th. Wasn’t that in your briefing?”“Oh, yes. It’s the year that’s the problem, you see. Something echoed backwards, briefly, enough for them to catch it, but whatever it is hasn’t happened yet, and nobody’s seen so much of a glimmer of it again.”Steel puts his hand to the safe's door. “So, it’s inert. Nothing here yet.”“Yes. And, as Iron pointed out the first time, destroying it would only cause more damage.”Steel shoots a wary glance at Silver. “You didn’t try, did you?”Silver ignores the implied rebuke. “Last year Amethyst confirmed the readings, and the year before Sapphire said she thought the problem was something someone is going to put inside the safe. The combination is the trigger, not the safe.”“They should send observers for something like this. Or you alone, if they must. Not both of us.” Steel paced from desk to window in the empty office, pausing to pick up a fountain pen, giving it a hard stare.Silver smiles. “I’m supposed to fix it, but they don’t seem to think I can do it alone. So . . . any ideas about how to pass the night, Steel?”***
1947
Ruby is singing.Silver winces as she hits notes above the capacity of any human, and from his vantage point sitting on one of the desks, checks the office for damage. “Aren’t you supposed to be waiting –”Ruby grins, and then looks straight at the safe and lets loose a note that resonates within the room, shaking everything, and smashing the windows. Even Silver can’t keep his balance; he tumbles off the desk, and onto the worn floorboards. The safe, however, remains intact and immovable.“Ruby.” She perches on the other desk and gives him a hopeful smile, removing her hat. “So. How are technicians with repairing broken windows these days?”“No trouble at all, not for our Silver,” says a voice at the door, and Lead strides in. He reaches into his long coat’s deep pockets and pulls out a handful of glass shards. “Ruby, Ruby. You were supposed to be waiting for me to try that. Now look at this mess!” He shakes his head and laughs, filling the room with his reassuring solidity.Silver slides off the desk, taking the glass from Lead, one piece at a time, and laying them down on the desk, pausing to wave his fingers over the top, like a magician. It’s no trouble to restore them to their proper state, and in another second, there’s a complete pane of glass there instead.“Ever fitted a window?” Ruby asks Lead. “Or do we need to call a glazier?”Lead winks at Silver. “You’d be surprised. Watch me.”“I think we’ve established that didn’t work,” says Silver to Ruby, as Lead lifts the glass pane back into its frame. “Shall I fix the other window now? Lead?”Ruby shakes her head. “Wait, wait – I can do it.” She clears her throat, and sings again, and this time it’s a melody, one that won’t stay in the mind, not even Silver’s, and the window’s taken back to a few minutes ago, pristine and whole. “I’ll behave now,” she says now that it’s complete. “What do you usually do on these nights, Silver?”He lies down on the desk, hands behind his head, and beams up at the ceiling. “Oh, I’m so glad you asked.”“What?” asks Lead, throwing an amused look at Ruby.“It depends,” Silver says. “On who I’m with…”***
1948
Cerium wanders about the room, orange lamplight filtering through the slatted blinds shifting shadows and light over her slight form as she moves. The office is much the same as in Silver’s previous years’ vigils, although one of the desks has been moved, and there’s a tatty red rug on the floor.It’s all new to Cerium, though, so Silver leans back in the manager’s chair and watches.She picks up each object from the other desk in turn. The paperweight fascinates her; she passes it from one hand to the other, feeling its weight, its history, and then laughs.“What is it?” he asks.Cerium puts down the paperweight. “It’s a joke,” she says. “Glass, little plastic house inside – plastic people – water. A useful object, but it’s a joke, too. Isn’t that clever?”“Is it a good one?”“I don’t know. He thinks so, the man who sits here every day. This is all very interesting. Do you really come here every year?”Silver nods. “For the moment. Waiting for a break.”“Yes.” She becomes utterly still, one hand in the air, fingers spread out, listening and probing for something, and then frowns. “I don’t think it’s going to happen this time.”“You can’t know that.”Her brow furrows in concentration again. “Yes. I can feel it. Can’t you?”“No.” Silver follows her movements as she picks up the last stub of a pencil, studying it. “I’m surprised they sent you. Isn’t it dangerous?”Cerium blinks, turning her head to him. “It doesn’t seem to be, does it?”“No. You being out here for a whole night.”She smiles. “Well within my capacity, Silver. You needn’t worry. This pencil, you know – I can see all the words it wrote if I try. Stretching out in a long line.” She indicates with her arm. “Calculations. Orders. Messages.” She puts it down and rests her hand on the telephone. “Now I can hear voices.”“Anything useful?”“Yes, madam, we shall be sure to deliver by Friday at the latest. How many sheets of carbon paper was it, again?”Silver pockets paperclips. “Oh. Not useful.”“It makes a change,” says Cerium. “It’s usually an emergency when I’m sent. I like this place. So many stories and all the time we need to explore them. The world isn’t even ending – or no more than it’s supposed to be.”Silver laughs. “Yes,” he says, and for a moment, he can see the office through Cerium’s eyes: a treasure trove of curiosities. For him, it’s not the objects that talk, it’s component parts of all sorts of things, waiting to be changed from one state to another in his skilled hands. He eyes the paperclip in his fingers with anticipation. What next?“The glass is odd, though,” says Cerium, drawing his attention back to her. She pulls the blind back and puts both her hands on the nearest window. “Very odd. As if it’s been wiped clean of everything at some point.”Silver becomes inscrutable. “How strange,” he murmurs and distracts her by disintegrating a paperclip into shining motes, and blowing them towards her.***
1949
“Do you do this every year?” says Jet. She kicks at the wastepaper bin with her foot, then stands, and moves towards the cabinet, long fingers running down its side, as she reads the wood. “Oak,” she says. “Surprisingly good quality. Fifty-nine years old. Nothing out of place.” She steps back, leans against the desk. “This is oak, too. Thirty-two years old. It won’t last much longer, though.”Silver lifts his head; he’s been making a paperclip chain, pushing metal through metal to form it rather than threading one to another. “Oh? Anything to do with the safe? I would prefer not have to come here every year.”“Yes, not the most elegant setting, is it?” Jet wrinkles her nose, laughing at him. “Poor Silver! If you stopped the break, you wouldn’t have to. It’s your own fault.”“What about the desk?”“Oh, not that. Woodworm.”“You’re a great help.”Jet appears, sitting on his desk. She grins. “Look, do you think that safe is going to manifest whatever-it-is tonight?”“I don’t know. That’s the point.”“But most likely not. So what you need is an entertaining companion. Someone who has all the latest news, and knows how to play your games.”“And that would be you?”She puts her hand over his. “What do you think?”***
1950
“There’s nothing here. I’ve been here, waiting all night once a year for the past seven years already, and believe me, there’s nothing here. If there was, I would have found it.”Copper looks at him. “You were here three hundred and sixty-five days ago. 525,600 minutes. I think something could have changed in the meantime, don’t you?”“Not of any material interest. I’d know. They’ve replaced one of the desks, but I checked that before you even got here.” He raises an eyebrow. “Late again, Copper? What do you get up to when I’m not around?”“Silver.” Copper merely sighs, but with no conviction in his rebuke. “Let’s be sure.” Two hours later, Silver, on his hands and knees, turns and watches Copper, still intent on feeling his way across the opposite wall, apparently engrossed in the task.“Copper,” says Silver, “it’s the safe that’s the problem. We know that much.”“We checked that when we arrived.”Silver pulls a slim, metal implement out of his breast pocket, and gives a slow smile. “I’ve had an idea. If we can be certain it’s not going to activate this year, we could stop this tedious search. Now,” he says, “Copper, one hand on the safe – yes, like that – now, take this –” He passes him the tool.There’s a sudden flash of light, and a fizz, and the electricity goes off. Copper’s knocked onto the floor.“Hmm,” says Silver, kneeling beside Copper and retrieving the tool from his hand, and polishing it with his handkerchief. “I don’t think it’s going to do anything, but I’m not sure the results were conclusive. Perhaps you’re getting rusty?”Copper tries to get up, but Silver gently pushes him back down. “I prefer to be warned if you’re going to use me as a conductor. I’ve told you that before, Silver.”“Yes, sorry,” says Silver, leaning over him, “but it’s so rarely I can get you at my mercy.”Copper closes his eyes, and Silver, with his hand still lightly resting on Copper’s chest, can feel his exasperation. It’s a very familiar sensation. Silver!“Oh, dear, yes,” says Silver, drawing back. “I was forgetting. You like to be thorough. Shall we try that again, just to be sure?”***
1951
“You don’t seem worried,” Mercury says, the chessboard between them on the desk, as they sit in the pool of light cast by the desk lamp.Silver lifts his head and frowns. “It’s not going to happen tonight. If something had changed here, I would know. I can feel it now. I’m getting used to it. Every year, I learn more.”“No,” says Mercury, “not that. I trust you to have that in hand, old thing. The game! I make it checkmate in two.”Silver glances down at the board, and then gives a soft laugh. “Do you? Really? How did you come to that conclusion? Quite the reverse, I’d have said.”Mercury puts a hand to the board, and suddenly, all the pieces have changed. Silver sees that he now has two rows of pawns, Mercury two sets of the more aristocratic pieces.“I believe that’s called cheating.”Mercury shrugs. “Depends on the rules one chooses to play by.”“Oh, yes, I agree,” says Silver, studying the board with renewed interest. “The rules of the game, such as they might apply to this situation – if they could be said to do so at all – or perhaps the situation demands new rules entirely. Perhaps a set of pawns left to fend for themselves will develop new abilities? Or if, for instance, we used narrative rules, you may have left me no option but to win now you’ve stacked the odds so high against me.”Mercury grins, holding out his hands. “Your move, Silver. You decide.”***
1952
Emerald puts a hand to the safe. “There doesn’t seem to be anything out of place. Cast iron. Brass fittings. Oak cabinet. Not much inside it, either. An accounts book, some petty cash.”“Yes, they seem quite regular about banking the takings,” says Silver. “I’ve noticed that. I wanted to know if you could see further – what is it that’s going to be placed inside it? And when?”“I can’t see that.”“You could try.”Emerald glances up at Silver from her crouching position on the floor by the safe. She frowns. “I shouldn’t.”“This night – the 17th of September. Look at 1956, 1960, 1964 at least. Maybe I don’t have to be here every year. Perhaps we can rule out a few years, or a decade. Save time.”She nods. “I’ll try. I make no promises, though, Silver. It’s hard enough to look back – forwards is always more complicated.” She hesitates, her hand trembling on the safe.“I’ll be here,” says Silver softly, putting a hand to her arm, as she bows her head, in shadow. What she does hurts her, he knows, but they can’t let that stop them.Emerald’s eyes glow vivid green and she freezes. Only the outer shell is here, the rest of her is elsewhere. The silence stretches on. Silver pulls out his pocket watch to count the minutes. Four, five… ten… twenty…“Emerald,” he says. Emerald? Can you hear me? The room is suddenly unfamiliar again, empty and grey with shadows. One day something terrible will happen here, some juxtaposition that will cause the corridor to break. It seems much more possible now. Perhaps Emerald will bring it back with her. Perhaps she won’t come back.Silver, one hand on the sleeve of her blouse, the other on his pocket watch, tightens his grip on both. She will come back. He gives the watch a regretful look, and rubs his thumb over the engraved silver casing. Let it go. He can have another any time he likes. He throws it up into the air and it hangs over them, a blazing white light.“Emerald!” he calls. Emerald!The light dies; the watch evaporates into nothing, matter converted to energy, energy used up.“1956,” says Emerald in an unsteady voice, “is a blank. Nothing different there. 1960, 1964, 1970, 1976, 1979 –”“Emerald! I never asked for that much. No wonder –” He hesitates. “I thought you might not return.”“There was nothing there. It felt wrong to stop. So now you know – you’re much too early. But you needn’t be tied up here when people need you now.”“Yes. I’d probably best still check – be sure, as Copper would say – but that does help a great deal. I won’t have to stay all night, unless I see any reason to. Are you all right?”She nods. “Yes. I was almost lost for a moment – split across all those years – but then I saw your light.”“My pleasure,” says Silver, and kisses her hand in thanks.***
1980
“Here? Again?” says Steel. “Have you still not fixed it, Silver?”Sapphire runs her fingertips along the top of the cabinet containing the safe. “Oak. Eighty years since it was made. Like the safe, made in Manchester. In the north, not here.” She lifts her head. “Silver?”Silver presses himself back up against the wall. It had begun to seem like a game, this annual vigil, but it isn’t, of course; nothing they do is. And now there’s something wrong. This is the night. The 17th of September 1980. “Sapphire,” he says, looking to her.“Oh,” she says, and kneels down to put her hand to the iron front of the safe, tracing the raised letters of the brass plate on the front, and then on down to the handle and the lock. “It’s now, Steel. It’s here.”“It?”Sapphire wrinkles her forehead. “I can’t see inside the safe to tell you. It’s sealed. Resistant.”“Allow me,” says Silver, peeling himself off the wall, and nudges Sapphire out of the way so he can kneel down by the safe. He rubs his hands together, and touches the lock. “Let’s see what’s been waiting for me all this time.”He pushes the door and it opens.“Silver,” says Steel somewhere behind him, “they said you’d need help. Let Sapphire –”Whatever it is Silver should let Sapphire do is lost in what feels like a combination of static and white noise, cutting him off from the other two. Silver grits his teeth, reaching a hand inside the safe, and pulls out a glass paperweight. There is blood on the object, blood on his hands, and whatever has been locked inside with it, the nameless thing Silver has now released, barrels into him; an invisible force, something that claws at him and wants to scatter him across the years.They don’t seem to think I can do it alone, that was what he’d said to Steel, almost right back at the beginning. It’s true. He gasps out, and wonders why him, when a safe like this could more easily be destroyed by Lead, or Iron, or Steel; the paperweight is Cerium’s line, the entity Sapphire or Ruby or Jet. The odds against him are too high, and Sapphire and Steel are somehow gone. Either he or they are not in the right time any more. It’s only him left now.That’s not true, though, is it? He strengthens his hold on the paperweight and straightens himself. He’s not alone. Even if it’s taken him a little back or forwards, enough to be out of sight of Sapphire and Steel, it can’t change that they’re all here with him in this room, every one of them who shared his vigil across the years.Lead’s presence is a firm hand on his shoulder, laughter driving the fears away. Oh, you can do this easy, Silver. You know you can.Oak, says Jet, and the cabinet around the safe seems to glow for a moment, containing the safe and its horrors in more ways than one. Sturdy oak, long grown in the earth, well shaped for use by trained hands.It can be broken, says Iron, and Ruby’s notes echo in the room, through Silver, and the safe breaks in front of him with an audible crack.Lying in his hands, the bloody paperweight is a murder weapon. That’s the important change in the room. Someone took a life too soon. Silver can’t see –Not a very funny joke in the end, Cerium says in his ear, like a ghost. She was so young – so afraid – so unfair –Copper is in every inch of this damned place, and he interrupts: Keep your mind on the task in hand, Silver. You can’t do anything about that. That’s not what you’re here for.Silver closes his eyes, and with an effort puts the heavy glass globe back into the cracked safe, and reaches around inside, and finds jewellery – silver and gold, set with emeralds and rubies and sapphires and jet.Your move, says Mercury, laughing again. Change all the rules.Silver closes his fingers around the necklaces, the bracelets, the rings, and cries out. They’re first cold, then hot, and like barbed wire in his hands. He needs to remove them, change them, erase their dangerous history, but it hurts. The effort, the force here, is splitting him.Not that any of them can let that stop them. He has to try anyway, and he thinks of Emerald and makes stars of each piece, each blood-bought jewel, until the electric light winks back on and obliterates them.Silver, says Sapphire, and he can see and hear her again now, kneeling directly in front of him. The most welcome sight in the world. Silver!Steel’s holding him, holding him together, hands on his shoulders, except now his grip is growing painful, almost as if he wants to crush Silver, but that can hardly be right, can it?“Steel!” Silver’s first word is a protest. “You’re hurting me.”Sapphire lifts her head. Steel. It’s all right. It’s Silver. Just Silver. Nothing else has come back with him.“Ow,” says Silver, although his grumbling is half-hearted and he doesn’t try to pull away, leaning his head back into Steel’s shoulder as Steel eases his grip on him, although he doesn’t yet let go. “Of course it’s me. Who else would it be?”Sapphire kisses her hand and presses it to his cheek, briefly. “We’re very glad.”“Is it done now?” says Steel. “What was it?”Sapphire’s eyes glow, and her voice is laden with the sadness of it. “Theft. Murder. Injustice. An old safe. Old items. Memories. He tried to lock it inside, but it would have broken out. Broken everything.”“Silver?” Steel says, turning to him. “Was that it? We mustn’t leave any of it here. And if it is, no need to stay in this place any longer. We’ve all seen more than enough of it by now.”Silver nods. “Yes, Steel. It’s done.” He doesn’t mind it here now, though. He could stay here for any length of time now, especially in this company.You were here, he adds, addressing both of them – all of them? – with a small smile. I was never alone. Not here.Sapphire nods. No. Not here, and not now, Silver.“Are you just going to lie there?” asks Steel.Silver doesn’t move, but his smile grows. He twists a little so that he can look up at Steel, albeit from an awkward angle. “Why, Steel, whatever do you have in mind? What would you like me to do?”