Abatement Failure 1966

Link to article: Abatement Failure 1966.

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[[include :scp-wiki:info:start]]
[[=]]
**"Abatement Failure 1966"**
Chemistry and electricity, unfortunately.

[[image https://vanslibrary.wdfiles.com/local--files/hole-in-the-river/black%20set]]

**[[[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/thefriendlyvandal|More by this author!]]]**
[[/=]]
[[include :scp-wiki:info:end]]

[[div class="anchor"]]
[[div class="sidebox"]]
[[=]]
||~ Abatement Failure 1966 ||
|||| Chemistry and Electricity, Unfortunately. ||

|| [[image chemistry%20set size="small"]]||

||~ [[[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/thefriendlyvandal|Access thefriendlyvandal's Personnel File]]] ||
[[/=]]
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[[=]]
+ Abatement Failure 1966
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

[[div style="border:solid 1px #000000; background:#F2E0C2; padding:12px; margin-bottom: 10px;"]]
[[=]]
**Content Warning:** Self harm, suicide, and mentions of the AIDS Epidemic and institutional homophobia. Some scenes are mildly sexually explicit. Read with caution. 
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

[[toc]]

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1943
++ Ilse Reynders, Unconscious In Her Chamber; Wynn Rydderech, Conscious In His. 
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

He was down in the abatement labs making like a sestina, that was to say, spiraling in and spiraling out, strung high on wired panic like a volatile salt, parsing the literature like a haruspex parses entrails-- geothermal venting, caustic fumes, the warped cylinder of his own reflection against the pipes. Staring at divining rods, casting tea leaves... he might as well be. Might as well. 

Chalkboard hallucinations in the dread factory. It was the way the pipes rumbled low and cool in the earth, twisting and churning in their barrels and tanks. He checked all of them and checked them again. Running along the pipes, checking, but Wynn always was running along the pipes, checking. Gauges and fuselages-- his lab benches were riddled with papers and piles of ideas and tests, and one by one he spent hours hunched over them ruling them out until all he thought he could do was to go walk the pipes again, go check the processes.

He came to the flocculation tanks at either midnight or noon, according to the clock on the wall, but Wynn couldn't tell you which. The third tank had stopped itself automatically again. A beat later he was on his stomach reaching into it, up to his shoulder in fluid so dark his elbow dissapeared in its depths, and felt around and pulled out a glimmering blockage of light, slippery and hot in his hands, that slapped on the catwalk like a fish and faded away into the shadows of the room after a moment of writhing. He watched it silently as it died. 

Ilse, in her chamber. Himself, in his. Everyone belongs where they cause the least damage, he's pretty sure that was in Leviticus somewhere. Warped, eclectic conduits pockmarked the cave walls in an endless excavation; his father said it was demons.

Alternative hypothesis: It's demons.

The flesh divining rod of the healing Set Animal burn told him it was raining upstairs. That and the healed fractures beneath both ached to remind him. He stretched, felt the pain, sighed. Had he ever actually //ruled out// demons?   

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1961
++ Evidence
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

[[div class="page"]]
Wynn, 
@@ @@
[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/the-good-work I know I told you I loved you.] That was a lie.  
@@ @@
You're an intuitive person. We've known each other for a long time. I see your hypotheses about these notes, or at least, I can guess at their nature: you think this isn't really me. You think, because they materialize overnight, that you're doing it yourself in your sleep. 
@@ @@
It hurts that you don't trust me to say how I feel, Wynn. After all we've been through together: it really does. 
@@ @@
Just sit with that for a while. 
@@ @@
-Vivian
[[/div]]

Now he was down in the AAF standing in a discombobulation of purring pipes and iridescent mist that clung to his skin like oil, and Wynn knew it wasn't real. He knew it wasn't. He was a man of science, or considered himself at least sane enough to parse his own neuroses, the ones that had been present since he'd been a young man, in the back of his mind. 

The evidence included: 

- Vivian did not speak or write like this. It was Vivian's handwriting, unmistakably, down to the heavier ink blotches on the lefts of his Ts and Is, but Vivian would not say this. 

- Vivian //would not say this//. He couldn't prove that Vivian didn't //think// this, Wynn thought, although he found it unlikely, but if he //did// think this, he couldn't imagine a non-anomalous situation that would posses him to write it down in such a manner. 

-If Vivian //was// to express this kind of sentiment, it certainly wouldn't be like //this//. In his mind's eye, still elbow-deep in fluid that felt like lactic acid, a slippery and distant burn on his forearms he easily ignored, Wynn gathered to the forefront what he always admired about Vivian: his intentionality. 

When Vivian spoke, he did so deliberately. When he communicated via body language, he did so deliberately. He went out of his way to leave little room for error or misinterpretation. Vivian would not have written these because Vivian would have just told him, flat out, what he believed. 

But, Wynn thought: he couldn't //prove// Vivian didn't think this. It drove him mad he couldn't prove it. He and Vivian had been close for decades, Wynn could point to endless examples where his intuition about his partner's interiority and instinct were correct, and that same instinct told him now that Vivian wouldn't think this about him: But. 

But. //But.//

It was the same instinct that made him a thorough scientist, Rydderech liked to think. Unfortunately, it was and always had been somewhat self-destructive. 

Wynn pulled his arms out of the fluid. In one hand he held the note he'd found in his briefcase that morning. In the other hand, he held a writing sample from Vivian, a note he'd left that simply said: //Stepped out for call, see you in 30.// 

Carefully, fluid dripping onto the already dissolved and sticky tile, Wynn flipped the two writing samples over and laid them out on a tray on the lab bench. The air around his arms had grown hazy and bluish as it reacted to light, and the two soaked pieces of paper turned from a soaked translucent to a lighter blue, and then the ink caught.

The reaction hastened, and bubbled, and let out a thin, slightly audible whine like a malfunctioning machine; then, it settled. The words on the note about stepping out for a phone call became smeared and blue, just as the rest of the note became saturated with thick blue haze-- it was a destructive test, that was the one drawback he'd found for it so far. But the words on the note about his partner of many secretly hating him turned a deep, shimmering purple. 

It was a forgery. His own unconscious forgery, maybe, but a forgery nonetheless. 

Wynn let out a  long, low sigh. He rolled his eyes at himself. Yes, Wynn Rydderech, he loves you, add this to the mountain of reinforcing evidence larger than both their PhDs put together, reinforced nightly. No, it was not the longest interpersonal farce in recorded history. No, there was not a single chance otherwise. 

Not a single chance. 

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1908
++ Vivian Scout, Touching A Lamb
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

Vivian Scout, when they'd been young. Vivian Scout. But first, himself: young, pale, stupid with fewer scars and maybe a third of a doctorate at most. 1908 was the final summer he'd actually become //less// pale, because Vivian had told his parents he wanted to stay in Cardiff to work on his dissertation, and Wynn was absolutely not going home if he could help it, aside from seeing his brother if the opportunity presented itself; he was a lab rat, he was going to be working in the same lab they always had. 

But-- that was back when they had time. Too much of it, one could argue. "We should go caving," was his first suggestion.

(They did. They made love in a cave in the Welsh countryside and Wynn would remember it for the rest of his life, because at one point their lamp ran out of oil, and he couldn't remember if he'd brought more, and the two of them froze in the dark with Vivian's bare back pressed on the bedroll beneath him, silent and still. He could feel the other man's pulse thrumming fast and hard in fear, and Wynn kissed him again and it slowed-- If there was such a thing as a God or the saints or anything else in the world, Wynn owed them everything, //Yn enw'r Tad a'r Mab a'r Ysbryd Glân Amen//. He'd never forget that, never.) 

And then Vivian suggested they go to London. 

(They did. Wynn hated London; it reeked of coal to him, and he hated coal and what it did to people and the land and society, but he wouldn't deny London was a city worth seeing. It was worth it to experience Vivian's amazement. It was, at the time, the oldest and largest city the Canadian had ever set foot in. They spent three days walking around, kissing in alleyways, seeing shows. They'd gone to a museum and seen a set of hyroglyphs on display for the first time, etched into a faded stone relief behind glass-- Vivian said to him, //I'm sure they got all this completely legally, don't you think?//, and Wynn's Welsh experience caught the sarcasm perfectly. All around, fantastic visit.) 

Lots of times, after work, they'd get out of Cardiff and head into the verdant countryside, and kick rocks down rural roads and talk, and argue, and bring papers with them to read aloud. It was this process that turned Wynn tan for the first time since childhood, and made him burst out in freckles like a creature shedding camouflage. Memories of Vivian Scout, leaning far over a stone retaining wall to stroke a lamb, speaking to it softly as he did so; memories of Vivian Scout, sunburnt with his spectacles off, standing waist-deep in slow river shallows, arguing with him about what datapoints could soundly be discarded from the projects they were working on. Yes, //that// Vivian Scout, notorious Site-43 Vivian Scout. How they'd gotten away with it for so long, Wynn had no idea. 

He still didn't know. He hoped they got away with it forever. 

------

Words have power. Yes, words have power. An example, taught in an undergraduate classroom at Cardiff: 

There is a difference between the statement, 'I have no evidence this is true' and the statement, 'I have evidence this is false'. The first indicates one is not sure that an outcome is true //or// false; we have no evidence one way or the other. The second indicates there //is// evidence, and the evidence points in the negative direction. 

Lack of evidence was not, in science, an automatic concession of guilt, failure, or a negative result. It said simply: I don't have evidence of this, a truthful and honest statement as much as it was an invitation to investigate further. Words have power; choose them carefully; when you state your goals in a journal, be clear, be concise, be actionable. 

This had been psychotherapy for Wynn at the time. His last psychotherapist in undergrad had diagnosed him with melancholia, which Wynn generally agreed with even if he found the definition unclear, and said his homosexuality was to blame, which Wynn did not agree with. But in a science classroom they had given him language to explain //why// he didn't agree with it. 

He had no evidence any of this was caused by his homosexuality. Neither did the psychoanalyst, from what he could tell. If anything, there was evidence in the other direction; there was concrete evidence the psychoanalyst was wrong. Look at the facts, Wynn: does loving other men hurt society? Does loving other men harm yourself? Does loving other men do anything other than break a negligible social norm? 

No. It did not. In this, another lesson: science is not infallible. It is not beyond the trappings of its time. The textbooks he was given in undergrad confidently stated homosexuality as a mental disorder; the papers he read further showed much less academic consensus. 

It wasn't easy to live as yourself. But, simply put: Wynn was not going to earnestly love a woman, and he was also not going to survive pretending he might. His later marriage would be a sham and both of them knew it. Much to his relief, this narrowed down his choices considerably. There was nothing brave about it; like any animal, he'd live as he was or die, and the textbooks could catch up behind him. 

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1965
++ Propulsion
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

Another lesson from a chalkboard at Cardiff: The antagonistic paired concepts of a null and alternative hypothesis. For instance: 

Here, alone in the primary Abatement lab at 1 in the morning, with a box of jars labelled 'JAR O' PROPULSION' sent from a colleague at Site-19. 

(Wynn was, as always, thrilled this arrived to him as described in the correspondence. 'Jar(s) o' Propulsion', that was fantastic. He'd get along great with some of these people.)

Null hypothesis: The Jars will have no reaction when opened. We have no evidence (notice, read, keywords: //no evidence//) that something may happen. We may reject this statement once we have evidence that //anything at all// happens, at which point we turn our attention to the experiment's alternative hypothesis. 

Alternative hypothesis: the jar will propulse in some way. You didn't always get the luxury of a label down in the primary abatement lab. Words have power, choose them carefully; either the null or alternative hypothesis will be confirmed and supported by the end.

Well, he'd been saving this for last for a reason, in part as a treat-- his job was not to study the jars but to abate them. Dr. Rydderech giddily took one from the box, pointed the bottom towards a target he'd drawn on a chalkboard on the wall, and unscrewed it.

The lid stayed in his hand and the glass part exploded spectacularly and shattered against the laboratory table to his right, sending shards of glass half an inch into the flesh of his right arm and several more lacerating across his face. The bits settled. Pain seared up his arm. He was still holding the lid. 

Wynn examined his injuries curiously for a moment, half expecting them to close on their own, if his distant, much more insane alternative hypothesis about the changes in himself were to be believed. The wounds did not close. The three-inch glass shard was still wedged in his forearm, quickly gathering blood. 

(These would be too deep for the fish to heal, he thought.)

Wynn placed the lid on the table, uncapped a pen that had gained infinite ink through being touched mid-abatement too many times, and wrote on the top of the box: JARS OF __EXPLOSION!__ DO NOT OPEN! Then, he recapped the pen and set it aside, where it righted itself on the lab bench as if in a pencil cup (cross-contamination with placement juices, Wynn suspected).

He looked at the blood spreading through the fabric of his shirtsleeves and thought: //Oh God, Viv is going to hate me.// 

------

"Enlighten me, Wynn. What did you //think// would happen?" Vivian said.

Good, solid scientific question, said a little loudly in the infirmary at 3 in the morning. Wynn had been in the process of getting stitches for the past hour or so; he really was the stitched-together man, at this point, although he'd say he was far more familiar with the treatment for chemical burns. 

"Well, I was //hoping// it would //propulse,// Vivian, if what it said on the //tin// was anything to go by," Wynn said. He had rejected the null hypothesis he'd chosen, was what had happened; the jar had propulsed glass shards in his face. So be it. 

Vivian sat down carefully into the seat beside the infirmary bed and worked his fingers under his spectacles. Then he leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees in anguish, as if he was at a loss for what to say. 

Wynn knew what to say. Doghouse expert, woof woof, etc. "I have a beautiful dream, Viv. Picture this." He outstretched his heavily bandaged right forearm, ignoring the distant, throbbing pain that twitched when he did so, and spread out one hand in a gesture of 'dream with me'. 

Vivian's foot twitched in his peripheral vision. He heard the two nurses manning the infirmary giggle down the ward, and found himself bolstered by having a larger audience. Wynn put out his other arm as if to unveil a painting. "All the world, perfectly labelled," he said. "Every cereal box, every bottle of goo, every medication and poison in the world, Vivian, and it says exactly what's inside it and what it does, it has instructions for how to get rid of it, and it has contact information for who's responsible, can you picture it?" 

He glanced back at Vivian, beaming. The famed Vivian Scout, user of words and not using them yet, was looking back at him with his glasses taken off and dangling from his pinkie finger, his eyes exhausted.

"Well, it's just not the case," said Wynn, as if he had made his point and stuck the landing. 

Vivian, still in his shirtsleeves from work-- he'd probably still been awake when it happened-- said simply, "Five stitches." 

Damn. He could try again! Wynn did. "Five stitches is a small price to pay for science," he suggested. 

Vivian sighed. He slowly and carefully pinched the bridge of his nose and said: "Are you alright, at least? Does it hurt?" 

"It hurts //a little//," said Wynn, automatically. It was funny; Wynn didn't really feel pain as much if Vivian was the one asking, and this had been the case since they'd both been getting their PhDs. This was also the truth if he was tired or ill, or if his melancholia was getting the best of him; it wasn't //lying// so much as it was //taking something off Vivian's mind//, so to speak, because he knew Viv would worry, and more than that he knew Vivian would pull him away from his work in response. 

"So it hurts, then," Scout said flatly. 

"Oh, //marginally//, I mean, I'm going to keep the arm!" 

Woof, woof, etc. At least the doghouse was comfortable; Wynn slept alright on the camping cot he'd erected in the abatement labs. Not as well as when he was in the room he shared with Vivian, of course, or in Scout's arms, when their schedules permitted; but he slept alright. 

It was cold, though. He wasn't going to say it was cold. But it was. "Marginally," he repeated. 

Vivian stood. He put his glasses back on in a way that communicated to Wynn in bright, burning letters that he was going to be sleeping in the abatement lab, for the crime of recklessness, and for the crime of not changing this behavior a single iota in all the years they'd known each other. Then he closed the gap between them in a way where his body and the curtain around the infirmary bed blocked anyone seeing, and kissed his forehead, and then kissed the bandage over the single stitch on a gash on his right cheek, and whispered: "I'm glad you're alright. Please, //please// be careful. It upsets me when you do this." 

"It's the Good Work, Vivian," Rydderech whispered back. 

"If you getting hurt is part of The Good Work, then it's not good work at all. It's terrible and pointless and unnecessary," he said, bluntly. He touched Rydderech's arm gently, rotating it to see the padding under the gauze. "Five stitches, my god," he said, and the way he said it actually //did// make Wynn's heart twist with guilt. 

But this, here, was the difference: Wynn thought maybe it //was// necessary. Sometimes the price was what it was. 

------

Doghouse, woof woof. Camping cot in the abatement lab. Vivian felt that sometimes he was prone to lashing out when he was upset, and he took care to think before speaking, to act with intentionality. Words have power. Use them carefully; if you may misuse them, then wait until it passes. 

Thus: the cot. 

He retreated here both when The Good Work was exciting or dire and when his melancholia was especially bad, when he couldn't stand to talk to other people and especially not to Vivian. When he felt irritable and angry and miserable, and The Work was taxing and slow and tedious-- people could find him here, they could even get him on the intercom around the corner. But he didn't have to face people this deep in the labs. He could be alone. 

Rydderech approached the cot and the trunk of clothes beneath it, tucked in a small alcove off the main cavern of the secondary abatement facility, and lying on top of the thick sheaf of blankets was a note. It said: 

[[div class="page"]]

Your work hurts people. 

[[/div]]

Wynn squinted at it. The alcove was lit by a bare light in a metal cage about 5 feet above; he held it by the backlight of the instruments to his left and squinted at it again. Then, he placed it carefully on an overturned crate he used as a nightstand, and flopped onto the cot (he was getting too old to flop onto things, he thought distantly, but somehow that had stopped being an issue a few years ago).  Then he picked it up again. 

Words have power. This was another example. It wasn't, 'your work is bad,'; it wasn't, 'your colleagues are lying about your work', although those, too, had been twin neuroses Wynn had been plagued with since his first undergraduate thesis. It was, 'Your work hurts people,' connotation: he knew his work was good, Wynn took a good amount of pride in making //sure// his work was good, that was to say, technically sound and scientifically proficient, even elegant, as far as it would allow. But instead, its effects: Your work makes the world a worse place. It is deleterious towards society. It hurts people for touching the toxins at all. 

What was abatement, anyway? The Good Work, that's what it was, the act of taking something toxic and rendering it stable to the world. It was a form of betterment. 

It was true it hurt him quite a bit, sometimes, the process. Vivian told him all the damn time to be more careful, more mindful, of the tax the most dangerous parts of Acroabatic Abatement took on him. But this was also true: Wynn wasn't sure he could stop himself from doing it if he tried. And Abatement could be a wonderful, exciting, endlessly positive experience in his life. 

Wynn lit a match from a box he kept for these papers specifically and lit it on fire, then dropped it into a metal tray already littered with scorch marks. Not for the first time, it burned non-anomalously and curled into ash. 

Fascinating, Wynn thought, watching it. It didn't regenerate at all. Just popped into existence and was subject to all the world's rules-- quite interesting, in terms of an anomalous text, to die as easily as it lived. 

Maybe it was because it wasn't the source of the text. The source was in Wynn's brain, and for the past 50 years of his life he just could not seem to get rid of it. Abatement, toxins, lines of pipes and wires, the incinerators and the treatment plants, the thu-thunk of the pumps above him as they ran the length of the labs into the buffer tanks and up through the steamstacks...

It was a complicated, power-heavy, exhausting process. If he could only stop these toxins at the source, Wynn thought, none of this would even be necessary. 

------

Two nights later, back in the Directors' complex, his arm freshly bandaged. They made love, as usual, and Vivian was so conscious of his arm it was astounding; so deliberate and meticulous, far more than Wynn was. That was Vivian for you. It was as if it never left the forefront of his mind. 

(Wynn had said 'to hell with it' and stuck it into one of the flocculation tanks maybe five hours before, to clear a clog in an overflow pipe, and had to rewrap it afterwards. But he wasn't about to admit //that// offhandedly.)

And afterwards something he always felt was incredible happened: Vivian Scout, formidable Site-43 master administrator and arguably one of the most powerful men in Canada, fell asleep in his arms. Just was out like a light, like he did sometimes when the capital-g capital-w Good Work was exhausting, and he was grateful for Wynn being there, and the stars above Kettle Point aligned in just such a way that this got to happen. 

(No, not the stars aligning, Wynn thought, kissing Scout's forehead; their landlords the //Mishipeshu// throwing a dog a bone, maybe.)

Wynn laid very still and listened to his breathing, soft and slow and deep. His head was rested on his left shoulder, limply rolled towards his sternum, Vivian Scout, Mountie murderer, dual-doctoral-werewolf provoker, could do anything with his words when he put his mind to it. Etc. 

He interlaced his right hand with Scout's right hand. Behind him, the lamp was still turned on on the bedside table, illuminating the other bed against the far wall, the one that Wynn would now go to if he wasn't pinned down (oh, how terrible! It seemed as if nothing could be done). He held his bandaged forearm and Scout's non-bandaged forearm against one another. He inspected them. 

His own arms and hands, riddled with scars, burns, and various discolorations under the gauze. He'd started collecting them before he'd ever met Viv. It was a miracle he still had ten fingers, Vivian had told him once, and Wynn had said, //Don't say that, it's bad luck, now I'm going to have eleven.// Sure enough...

He tilted his right hand slightly. Between his thumb and index finger was a small scar where they'd removed the accidental eleventh finger, which had not been his own, and appeared in his sleep after a different learning experience with the abatement flocculation tanks just the year before. Wynn had been fascinated, then delighted, then had darted out of bed to waggle it at Vivian, who had yelped- really //yelped//, Vivian Scout, only Wynn knew he had it in him- and told him to stop joking around like that. He hadn't been joking. 

(Part of Wynn wondered if that was when it started. The power of suggestion issues. The lingering thought that was more of an alternative hypothesis: he was changing.)

Wynn forced this out of his mind and looked at Vivian's forearms, his hands, his clean fingernails. A small, pink scar from a cooking accident lanced the side of his middle finger and had healed perfectly. Otherwise undamaged-- even the liverspots along the knuckles were intact. 

The Good Work. Touching the toxins, the poisons, making them safe. It was worth every drop of anything he'd ever given it. And then the back of his mind said: he's too good for you. It was never meant to last forever. 

Rydderech did not counter this thought. He sat in its agony, it's bitter half-truth, its objective ambiguity that made it impossible to disprove. The strength he would need to counter it was not forthcoming, so he stared at the ceiling and implored the similar lines of thought that came with it, and held them alongside the weight of his happiness. 

Something had to give. Silently, he cried. 

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1907
++ Rain on Window Pane
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

Wynn's father had said it was demons, and Wynn's mother had said: Wynn, it's all your own fault. It was all the books you read, and all the radio you listened to. She said: You can stop at any time you'd like, but you won't, because you're doing it because you hate me. 

Water on the window panes at Cardiff. Vivian, young and full of...hair, is what first comes to mind, but maybe that was just Wynn's own reflection speaking. Vivian, he'll never forget it, lost in thought with his glasses off, staring out into the rain. No scars anywhere. A chemistry student with straight As in his labs and no chemical burns: what did that tell you? 

He was beautiful, of course. Vivian had an elegance to him that he never lost as they grew older. Even now, sometimes Wynn looked at him and saw the PhD student with his chin in his palm like a child, twirling the pencil in his other hand, staring out at the storm. Vivian Scout. Fantastic.  

"Well, is she right?" Vivian asked. Scout's voice had only grown more fitting with age; it was too big for his body back then, and it had wavered more, and was used far more recklessly. Nearly impossible to imagine now. Wynn felt lucky to have seen it firsthand. 

"What? You're asking if I hate her?" Wynn asked from the bunk to his right. He'd been staring at Vivian for the past ten minutes, just taking him in. Just a pillar of sanity, saving his life at least once a semester, casually sitting there like he was normal. //Incredible catch,// //Wynn//, he thought, //if you had no luck for the rest of your life you'd know where all of it went.// 

Vivian did this //thing// that he still did to this day, if you caught him in the right moment. He held the pencil eraser between his teeth, not biting it, just holding it there absently like it was the tip of a knife, and he didn't want to cut himself on it. Then he said: "That's right." 

Wynn gave a low laugh. Himself, his body, imperfect and strange in Vivian's shadow, his mind a cacophony of noise that Scout somehow parsed seamlessly every day of their paired existence. Even his own voice, flawed and clashing: "I don't know, Viv. I don't like being told what I think about other people without having any say in it."

Vivian nodded and three strands of hair over his forehead bobbed in the dim grey light. "I wouldn't blame you if you did. I don't think most people like being told something like that, while having no say in it. It just sounds..." He flipped the soft pink eraser off his soft pink lips and flipped the pencil over, and tapped it against the wood all in one impossibly handsome motion, and said, "...terribly insecure of her. She's projecting." And then he smiled and said, "I don't know how your father stood all that." 

Oh, that one stuck with him. Not even a barb in his direction. Terribly insecure of him to hold onto. 

He was probably projecting. 

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1908
++ Thank God We're Homosexuals
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

In the cave with the lamp half-empty, and Vivian was a dark shadow as always, a form dressed in angles and lines of black, and Wynn was crouched above him with his bare back covered in brown freckles and his half-anomalous lab boots still on, about to make love to him for the second, maybe third time in their relationship. He couldn't remember now how many times they had, but it was early enough in their relationship he was still nervous. 

Wynn hid it well. Wynn hid everything well. 

Wynn finished kissing him again and looked down at Vivian in the light, and not for the first time and not for the last time, he thought: thank God I'm a homosexual. Behind door one, a terrible life with a woman; behind door two, //Vivian Scout// of all people with his dire glasses askew, helping Wynn undress him on the bedroll. The world was full of men who would never love other men as a man, and here they were, the lucky ones. 

He didn't even notice he'd crossed himself with one scarred and freckled hand until the other man laughed, loud and melodious under him, and said, "What, are you Catholic?". Scout's voice echoed in the cave and seemed to brighten it and warm it, and thank God he loved men, thank God.

"Raised Anglican," Wynn answered, absently. They kissed again, and again, and he said, "but I don't believe in nonsense." 

"You're superstitious, though," said Vivian, still grinning. 

"Thanking God for you, is all. You're incredible." He meant it, and kissed the warm skin of his neck, fiddled with his trousers, and said: "You'll tell me if you're not comfortable--" 

Vivian gripped the back of his head, his fingers tangled in Wynn's thick red hair, and silenced him by kissing him again, forcefully, his elbows on the bedroll, his skin pale and warm in the dark. Then he pulled back and said, "Never accuse me of silence, Wynn. I'll always tell you if it hurts." His gaze was suddenly serious and intense, glasses askew or no; Vivian Scout was a man in control. 

//Ah,// Wynn thought, understanding. //So that's how it'll be.// 

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1966
++ Notes on the Last Manuscript
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

[[div style="border:solid 1px #999999; background:#fef6df; padding-left: 16px; padding-right: 16px;margin-bottom: 16px;"]]

10/15/1966

Dr. Rydderech, 

@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ I've received your latest manuscript, 'On The Abatement of Foul Portents and Ill Omens of the Self'. I have read it. As a long-time colleague in Abatement, as a long-term correspondent with you, and indeed, as a friend and most distantly as your ex-wife, I will not be doing you the disservice of putting this work through to reviewers or to the AcroAbate journal at large. 

@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ Dr. Chen and Dr. Ivanov have similar thoughts. I've corresponded with the two of them over the past week. Chen claims his copy appeared fully formed in his briefcase while attending a conference in San Diego, and Ivanov contacted me after finding his own copy written on the walls of his office at Site-19 Abatement. They are both willing to give you leniency for these unusual  submission formats, but each of them wished to inquire about your health. Chen says he attempted to call 43 AcroAbate and an unknown person picked up and said some rather unkind things-- he said he didn't think it was Falkirk, but couldn't make out the voice any more than that.

@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ Who else is in the laboratory with you right now, Wynn? //Is// there anyone else in the laboratory? I know Dr. Reynders doesn't have the ability to answer the phone, but I've corresponded with her. She claims you've been working more or less alone, and she's seen no-one else of note. This deepens my concern.  

@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ You had the decency to send my copy via courier per usual. I assume from the state of it this is the original, and if so, I assume it is the most complete copy. There are large portions of this missing from both Chen and Ivanov's transcripts; out of concern for your privacy and for the security of Site-43, I am quite grateful this is the case, but even the censored versions appear to be nonsensical and unfit for publication. 

@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ I am especially concerned by the discussion section of this work. When you discuss this abatement of omens as part of a larger 'Self-Abatement' procedure, what do you mean by this? The same goes for the discussion of 'Abatement of Love' and 'Nullification of Violent, Disruptive, and Antisocial Omens and Urges of The Self'. These concepts have no prescient in the literature and seem to be completely insular and self-referential. Have you sought review from Dr. Scout on this article, and if so, did he have any remarks? Can you send me those remarks within the next two weeks? 

@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ I have attempted to correspond with Dr. Scout myself since receiving this manuscript. My calls have not reached him, nor have my letters or telegrams, yet I hear he is fine and working as usual. I have called the abatement labs at 43 and reached Falkirk, who said nothing of terrible importance aside from confirming you were alive and physically well, and he would tell you to call me back. 

@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ I am tempted to keep calling until I reach the other person who's down there with you, the one Chen says knew all sorts of odd things about you and was barely understandable on the phone. Are you drinking? Are you inebriated down there? He says the person spoke phrases in what he believed to be Welsh.

@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ I feel as though Dr. Scout might echo my sentiments. I will continue attempting to reach both him and you. In the meantime, I will go forward with sampling the blood on this manuscript to see if it is yours. 

@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ I expect answers and they should be suitable ones. I'm not as easy to fool as Vivian. Exactly who, or what, are you working with down there? 

Regards,
@@ @@
Dr. Silena Svalbard
Stokholm Acroamatic Abatement

[[/div]]

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1943
++ Melancholic, As In, 'Struck By The Set Animal', If You Must Understand Me
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

In 1943 there was an explosion down in the abatement lab that Rydderech took on the right flank, point blank, knocking him out and leaving him punch-drunk and slurring like he hadn't been since undergrad. Three broken ribs, a nasty burn the width of his hand simmering up his shoulder and down his side, a proper, ear-ringing explosive blast. By the time they'd gotten it under control, Wynn found he couldn't make it up the stairs. And then he passed out again. 

He and Vivian had forged an agreement, once upon a time, that they wouldn't camp at each others' bedsides at Site-43 in the event the unthinkable happened. It was too obvious, they agreed, and more than that they had a damn Site to run, there was two of them for a reason, they were a team. One of them had to maintain all they'd built in the wake of whatever had managed to fell the other. 

But anyway, he'd woken up and seen two of Vivian Scout beside him, crying. 

Wynn hadn't even comprehended what had happened; it had all come across to him at the time like some sort of odd, baffling comedy skit, a nightmare of bizarre circumstance accompanied distantly by excruciating pain in his head and right chest and the rest of his damn body, but Vivian was here in what he dimly decided was the infirmary. Curtains pulled. He only knew Vivian was crying because he did it the way Vivian cried, with his glasses clutched in one hand and his face in both, his form bent in half in silhouette. //Two// forms bent in half in silhouette, at that moment. 

Wynn pushed himself upright hazily, faltering on his right shoulder, pain making itself known all across his body, and reached for him. He tried to touch him somehow, instantly felt disoriented by the alterations to his vision, and settled by just calling stupidly for his attention like a loudly braying sheep, //Viiiiiiiivvv. Viiiiivv...// Punch drunk, stupid, slurring...

//Winny.// That was what Vivian had called him, then. He was never, ever Winny unless they were alone, and Scout was absolutely beside himself, and Scout was the last person on Site-43 to be both alone and beside himself, that was the way the world worked, that was the way the universe was constructed. //Winny//, earnest and pathetic in Scout's voice like the children's book character, last name on the left before an anguished cry. 

The last time Rydderech had been called //Winny// was when they were both PhD students and he'd thoughtlessly threatened to do something stupid, the very last stupid thing a deliriously stressed 20-something graduate student could do. Winny, as in, a plea.

Words have power. That was an Abatement sort of word, was what that was. 

------

Vivian cut away the dressings from the infirmary with shears from the well-used first aid kit, and peeled off the padding. Wynn, discombobulated, stupid, slurring, hissed in pain. The blotted blood, dark and matted with something dark and stickier than blood, mirrored the shape of dozens of ancient runes and characters, some identifiable as modern writing systems and some not, tessellated and overlapping into a dense criss-cross running from his shoulder to his forearm, and then mirrored down his side to his right hip and back. He'd been leaning in to feel uneasy about the instrument readings when it happened. 

"I know. I'm sorry," Vivian said, peeling back another strip. His skin was mottled yellow and swollen, the runes almost singed in, as if with a strange brand. 

Wynn let his head fall forward and exhaled slowly. "Oh, I'll never forgive you," he droned. His head hurt more than the burns. It had been smacking it against the concrete floor that had knocked him out, not the anomalous...the anomalous...

Oh, he couldn't think. Punch drunk, stupid...

Vivian pulled the other strips off, one by one, until the entire series of wounds was exposed to the light, and Wynn was anticipating the end of this excruciating process quite keenly. He'd even find the wounds interesting if it wasn't for... for the head issues. Not the melancholia, although that was what had him down there at that hour in the first place, lucky in the end to put out the flames; the head injury. 

"Alright. It's time to come clean about something to you," Vivian said. "You might find it interesting, I know //I// found it interesting." 

He slid a glass jar of what appeared to be ointment of some kind, plastered in patterns of text. Wynn didn't have to focus his eyes on it to know who it came from. "You... phoned him when it happened?" he asked. 

"I don't have a phone contact for him, but he was the first person I wrote to when I saw the burns," Vivian admitted. "Can you believe he was in town less than six hours later? I didn't do more than drop it in the post box." 

Wynn smiled, his eyes closed against the painful light. "Thilo Zwist on an airplane is quite the picture," he said. 

"Flying Canadian Pacific, handing 'don't crash the plane' leaflets to the stewardesses, I imagine," said Vivian. 

Wynn chuckled and felt his three broken ribs protest at the movement. "That's still not as good as 'Thilo Zwist making a speech at our wedding'." A homosexual wedding in Canada, imagine that (they did, periodically, imagine it). 

"'Thilo Zwist responding to a wedding invitation'," said Vivian. 

"'Thilo Zwist receiving the consecration of communion'," Wynn countered. 

"'Thilo Zwist meeting my mother'," Vivian offered. 

"She would say, 'I thought the groom was Welsh'," said Wynn. 

He watched through sore, ringing eyes as Vivian cleared his throat and turned slightly away from the light, his face less visible, and started unscrewing the cap on the ointment. This was how Vivian blushed. //Good one,// Wynn thought sluggishly.

"Aren't you going to ask me how he delivered it?" Scout asked. "You were sleeping when it happened. I earnestly thought he'd post it to us and we'd make do with what we had in the meantime. Go ahead, guess how he did it."

Wynn groaned. "My head hurts, Viv. Just tell me." 

"Why, he waltzed into Camp Ipperwash with an absurd cursed sign and delivered it straight to the medical tent, of course," said Vivian. 

"He //what?//" Rydderech jerked his head hard enough to make the world swim sickeningly again in his vision, but he felt the twin emotions he felt with Thilo almost cancelling it: on one hand, he was jealous as always for the attention and interest he commanded from Viv. And on the other hand, he couldn't help but be fascinated: both by this cure, whatever bizarre abatement concoction it was, and by however the hell he did it. 

Vivian silently held the ointment up to the light. It was greenish, thin like a lotion, and infused on top with Russian letters in a nonsense order, floating among what looked to be an illustration of three koi. He prodded the surface with one finger. Both the Cyrillic letters and the koi swam away from the disturbance, as if it were the surface of a very thick pond.

"You //have// to be joking," said Wynn, about both the man and the medication. 

"The world really is his oyster," said Vivian. "Ah, to be a three hundred year old //Giftschreiber//, delivering bizarre medicine to a secure military base by writing 'Ambulance' on a sheet of paper and walking through the gates."

"That //can't// be how he did it," Wynn said. 

"The Surgeon swore to me up and down it was a manned ambulance with lights flashing," Scout replied. Wynn leaned his head back on the pillows again and groaned, both in pain and as an expression of the absurdity. 

"And... you're not going after him?" said Wynn. "He's so close you can taste it, I imagine. Just walking onto base like that..." 

Vivian scoffed. "Oh, he knows I'm not going after him this time, that's why he was so egregious. Otherwise he would have just started hawking them downtown or something." 

"You really aren't?" Wynn asked. 

Vivian looked appalled. "Absolutely //not//, Wynn, just //look// at you." He gestured to the expansive burn and bruises, the black eye developing on his right side, and the the slow, careful breathing to avoid upsetting the broken ribs. "No. Zwist can wait and he knows it. Sit forward, he says it should be applied from North to South." 

"Applied from North to South," Wynn echoed slowly. An abatement clue, a small insight into the recipe... 

"Don't think. I can tell you're thinking." Vivian glanced at a compass he'd laid down on the nightstand, confirmed they were facing South, and disturbed the animate fish further by dipping three fingers in the ointment jar. "The reports I read about boxers' injuries say not to think, I told you that. Rest your brain." 

Vivian Scout, at his bedside, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows and not a scar on his forearms to be seen, nursing him. He leaned forward and thought... and thought... ugh, //stop thinking//. "Might as well tell me to stop breathing," Wynn said. 

"That's what I thought when I read it. Only for a couple days, that's it. It shouldn't be that different from whatever you're usually doing when you get hurt down-- oh, hello." 

Vivian had leaned in to start applying the ointment, and paused. He chuckled, then sighed. "You get the most interesting wounds. You've got a Set Animal on your back now." 

"...I can't say I'm familiar," Wynn said. 

"A Set Animal, a Typhonic Beast. An Egyptian hieroglyphic." Historian and social scientist Vivian Scout, somehow knowledgeable on all things Wynn wasn't. "Scribes used them to denote words in the text they were using in the chaotic or damaging meaning, sometimes. A determinative. Or just to represent the god Set, depending on the context." 

[[=image https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Set_animal.svg/330px-Set_animal.svg.png ]]

= The Set Animal, 𓃩. The //Sha//. 

"He's right...here." Vivian smeared the ointment on his skin in a swath maybe the width of three fingers deep on his right side, just far enough into his back he couldn't see it if he'd been able to twist his torso, and Rydderech jerked and gasped in pain. 

"Christ!" he muttered. He crossed himself, partly out of childhood reflex, partly out of genuine shock of the intensity of pain, and partly, distantly, just to see Vivian roll his eyes.

"I'm sorry. Ribs?" Vivian asked. He didn't roll his eyes. 

"Exactly where the fractures are, it seems," Wynn said. He felt sweat beading on his brow just from Vivian touching it, and he hadn't been touching terribly hard. The ointment was cool and fizzled slightly where it made contact with the wound, and then it settled, and he found himself sighing slowly: the pain relaxed from a sharp throb to a dull one, but the pulse in his ribs remained. Wynn relaxed again. 

"Ah, Wynn. I'm sorry." Vivian repeated it, and he sounded incredibly earnest. The other man sighed, again, and he deduced another meaning: //You have wounds that are frustratingly interesting for being painful and on someone I love//, or something to that effect. "I think we know what broke your ribs, if the bruises are anything to go by," Scout said. "Words have power, etcetera. Correct time and time again." 

Wynn knitted his eyebrows and exhaled when it hurt. "Words have... velocity. Inertia...." he glanced at Vivian through one wary, swollen right eye. "Words have...//Mass?//" //Really?// Was that really possible? Had he just been hit by the equivalent of ancient birdshot? 

He was distracted by Vivian kissing him on the forehead, standing to get a better vantage point, the jar in one hand. "Don't think," he said. 

"Don't think," Wynn repeated automatically, like a dog satiated with a treat. 

"He suits you, you know. The Set Animal." Vivian started applying the cream upwards of the hieroglyphic, and to his relief, Wynn realized he'd done the most painful wound first. "Historians don't know what real-life animal it's supposed to represent, there's quite a lot of debate in the literature about if it was ever a real creature to begin with. I ran across it looking into the Water Panthers." 

"...And we know how that turned out," Wynn said, softly. Very obviously, thoughtfully. 

"Don't think," Vivian repeated.

"You keep feeding me...//thoughts,// Viv!" Wynn groaned.  

"It's //terribly// interesting," Vivian lamented. Then he paused, the open jar in hand. "We're both going to struggle with this, aren't we?". 

------

It //had// been hard for both of them. In a way it elucidated something about their relationship that Wynn had never really been able to point out: they were always talking about //something//, and god, they were talking. All those years of correspondence, sometimes multiple times a day... It was so obvious he hadn't even considered it all these years. 

Wynn loved hearing Vivian talk, he loved discussing things with him, he loved his ideas and his mind and his smooth, clear, judicial way of making decisions, then telling him about those decisions; Vivian Scout could talk about the weather and find a way to capture Rydderech's attention for hours while doing it. Talking about //nothing// for a few days was terrible. It was agonizing. 

(Not to mention, quite frankly: how were they supposed to be in a room together and not //discuss The Good Work?// How were they //not// supposed to talk about all sorts of things they wanted each others' opinions on? About their theories regarding the explosion, and about the ointment Zwist had procured that had miraculously abated the strange sickly black around the edges of the burns?) 

But no. Vivian Scout, also seeming noticeably depressed by the circumstances, just rewrapped the wounds and bruises saying: //Don't think, Wynn. Go back to sleep. Don't think.// And then he'd turn the lights back off and leave the Directors' Complex to work, the lucky bastard. 

It helped that his head hurt terribly. He didn't want to do much else other than sleep. His body wasn't much better; his ribs were terrible, whenever he had the misfortune of needing to move. Set animal, damn it, hit by a hieroglyphic hard enough to break bones-- yes, it excited him. That was the worst part. He couldn't even talk to Vivian about it. 

On day four, his head felt clearer, and it was about damn time. He took off the bandages himself, turned around, and cast a look over his shoulder in the bathroom mirror in the Directors' Complex. 

Striding confidently towards his middle back with its tail straight and its ears erect, was a massive red blister in the shape of the Set Animal, healing noticeably slower than everything else, right at the nexus of the worst of his pain and wounds. Around it was a jumble of letters and symbols; he recognized something resembling the old medieval Welsh ð, a few things that might pass for Korean, and something not unlike a tilda, among others. But no real words in an actual order that he could make out. 

Wynn studied it carefully in the mirror. The skin surrounding the Set Animal had turned from yellow to green to a deep, angry shade of blue while he'd been sleeping; the rest of the burn, as it was spread from his shoulder down his side and mid-back, was healing over pink and tender, ringed with bruises more purple than blue.

//We're both getting too old for this job,// he thought, looking at it. It was a thought every person over the age of 40 had in their line of work, and most of them, like Wynn, knew they would never stop doing it either. 

Oh, it was fantastic. It was fascinating. It was--

"Stop thinking, Wynn," said Vivian from the other room. They knew each other too well, was the issue, because he knew that Vivian was //also// thinking about it. A letter with mass and velocity hard enough to break bone!

"I'm fine, Viv," he said, scanning the runes in the mirror. 

"No you aren't, you just think you are because you can stand. Go back to bed," said Vivian. 

"It //has// to have mass," said Rydderech. 

Silence. That was Vivian restraining himself. He left the bathroom, shirtless still, and walked into the kitchen where Vivian was sitting in front of the usual journal menagerie covering their table. This time, he noticed instantly, the review was ancient Egyptian themed. 

"It's not fair you get four days of a head start on the literature," Wynn said. 

"It's not fair //you// get a week of medical leave while //I// pick up your admin duties. I'd say it's a proper trade," said Scout, seamlessly. 

"I'm inclined to replicate the conditions, anyway. Put the same sort of pottery I had in the autoclave--" 

"Don't you //dare// try to replicate the conditions," Vivian snapped. "You're trying to kill me, Wynn, you really are. And the autoclave is beyond repair anyway." 

The last part made him smile; it meant this mystery was also eating at Vivian. He sat down across from him at their dining room table, carefully, wincing as his ribs and the Set Animal above them both noticed the shift of his body, and sighed. "You've been down to see it, then?" 

"I have. What were you putting in that thing?" 

"I was disposing of anomalous pottery fragments." 

"In the autoclave?" 

"They were covered in human blood, Vivian. Abatement comes one step at a time," Wynn said smoothly. "I thought the runes were of purely Sarkic origins, but I suppose they weren't. I thought, well, the biological material first, then the pottery can go in the crusher." 

Vivian came alive. He quickly flipped through a printed archeological journal to his right, to a page with the Set Animal drawn from a coffin. He pointed at a passage he'd underlined with pen. "Determinitive of the words 'storm', 'thunder', and 'flood' in various texts, to denote them as chaotic or damaging." He looked at Wynn. "That wasn't a //steam// autoclave, was it? You had to put water in it?" 

"It was. And I did," said Wynn.    

"Am I allowed to say how fascinating this all is while you're still healing the very painful burns?" 

"I was about to ask you the same question." 

"Well, it's fascinating. My god." Vivian took off his glasses. Steel grey eyes underneath. 

"Every mistake in the abatement lab is fascinating. I've been telling you that for years," said Wynn. He flashed a playful smile; far too many 'mistakes', that was true. He watched as Vivian rolled his eyes (oh, he loved it when Vivian rolled his eyes), and changed the topic. 

"Zwist has been asking after you."

"Oh? Did you finally stop stringing him along and tell him you're taken?" 

"He knows I'm taken, Wynn, we've been over this. And no, he wanted to know how you were holding up. I told him you looked like a prizefighter but were starting to improve. Now I can tell him you're up and about again, he'll be glad to hear--" 

Wynn brightened. "Do you think I look like a //winning// prizefighter?" he asked. 

"No. You lost to Hieroglyphic E20 on Gardiner's sign list," said Vivian, without looking up from the literature. 

"He took me by surprise," Wynn said. "Next time I'll have a gun that shoots umlauts, we'll see how he feels about //that//." 

Vivian smiled and pretended not to notice, which was how he knew this was also a good one. Then he said: "Elaborate on that design, if you will. Is this a double-barreled gun, or are both projectiles coming from the same barrel?" 

"Whatever fits the bandolier," said Wynn. Then he said, "Well, I suppose it depends on how strong the bonds between the umlauts are, actually, since we suddenly need to test a hieroglyphic for mass now. Have you been thinking about that?" 

"Oh, I've been thinking about it. I thought I'd leave that mystery to you," said Vivian. 

"Generous," said Wynn. He sat back in the chair, and it pushed in on the Set Animal and made him grimace and recoil hard, sucking air through clenched teeth. 

Vivian touched his non-injured shoulder. "Take it easy. I'll help you rewrap it." 

"You just want to look at it again," said Wynn. 

"In part, yes. You can hardly blame me, can you?" 

------

The Alternative Hypothesis of the hour needing an exceptional amount of data to prove: 'The Egyptian //Sha//, as a symbol, has mass'. Wynn, as always, saw the burden of proof was upon him and lifted it. 

Well-- it was a joint effort. Far from the first paper he and Vivian had written together, and far from the last. He always admired how Scout wrote: clear, concise, and linear, as if his head was always quiet and the path ahead was always obvious. He wrote like a straight-edged blade.

"It's funny you think that, you know." He and Vivian in the Cardiff countryside the summer Wynn was bathed in freckles and sunlight, the two of them laying in a pasture in their tweed, a stack of journal articles between them. Vivian Scout, sliding his round glasses up his sunburnt nose and looking at him, saying: "I just don't know how //you// do it, honestly." 

"What do you mean?" Wynn said. Wynn, his own stacks chaotic and obscene with notes and layers of meaning, stacks upon stacks of them. He worked feverishly and chaotically, he worked impulsively, he worked in fits and starts without regard to anything or anyone. 

Wynn slunk out of bed at all hours of the night to work. He worked like a man consumed by lightning. This was what Vivian meant. 

"I can't imagine wanting that," huffed Wynn. "It's a pain in the arse, is what it is, a whole lot of spinning wheels and not a lot of moving. Can't get anything done." 

"Yeah, you do, don't kid yourself. You just go in a thousand directions with it first," said Vivian.

"And that translates to wasted time, the last I checked." 

Vivian waved a hand in the warm clear air lazily. "We have nothing but time," he said. (God, they had been so young, actually saying something like that-- you couldn't torment this out of Scout even a year later!) "And you're just so... you know. When you work, you're so //you//." 

Wynn did not know what he meant by this, but Vivian said it admirably, and softly, like it was something he savored. 

(Wynn, as in, like a propulsing machine, kinetic, spasmodic, churning, makes-it-look-easy, moral highground, passionate Wynn. Brilliant, graceful, powerful... This was what Vivian meant.) 

(//'Graceful', he claims!// is what Wynn would say in these times, when he was well.)

(//Graceful, I proclaim,// Vivian would respond, earnestly. Endowed with ease of motion and sense of purpose. Grace.) 

Some tremendous Wynn marks on this paper, ones that Scout loved: the data, twelve pages of it, which included mass spectrometer readings and an excuse to use calculus, as well as cross-experimentation with documented anomalies. Some brilliant academic wordage Wynn refused to see as brilliant because of how easy it was for him to come up with; some ingenious logical deductions, including the method for testing the Set Animal glyph in a spectrometer at all, that Wynn regarded with the same blase disinterest as though he could do it in his sleep. The rough draft discussion section had been twice as long as the data and included everything under the sun in speculation-- Vivian was well aware that for Wynn, this already //was// the shortest version, and he adored watching his husband's trains of thought so honestly displayed in text, but Scout highlighted the relevant parts and handed it back to him and told him to do it again with less effort, per long-held editorial agreement arranged in a college dorm in 1908.

(Scout put the marked up rough manuscripts from Wynn in a dense filing cabinet in the archives, which he dedicated to Rydderech's more raw, ambulatory writings and correspondence. There were some Wynn-wrought gems in there Vivian considered top-of-class.)

Some titillating surprises from Wynn in the uncut manuscript, also as usual: Wynn admitting he'd built the mass spectrometer himself from blueprints sent by an industry plant he knew; Wynn cross-verifying his data with three anomalies Scout had never heard him talk about in his life, and all of them were in the Site-43 Abatement labs; Wynn, accidentally showing he had read the paper Scout had put out last week about something entirely different, for a completely different undisclosed reason; and a single carefully worded admission to a previous incident with certain hieroglyphs in the autoclave that Scout had also never heard of, downplayed to him in their kitchen when Vivian brought it up. //I burn my forearms all the time, Viv, I didn't think much of it. Not all the time. Every once in a while.// Scout wasn't born yesterday and they both knew it. 

And then, of course, the Vivian Scout marks on this publication: Two paragraphs succinctly describing 60 years of research without dropping a detail. Active restraint from speculation on the significance of the //Sha//; that was beyond the scope of this paper, and the association with water in ancient writings was already well-documented. A line wryly conceding how painful the wounds were and a paragraph about how their healing process, which made Wynn chuckle-- Scout, always careful to give credit where he felt it was due. And then: 

Pictures of the wounds themselves, specifically the Set Animal, as it lay healing and bruised in black and white on Wynn's back. 

"Why not a sketch?" Wynn asked him. 

"Because I have no pictures of you." said Scout. 

"That's for a reason," Wynn sounded very serious, suddenly, sitting with his shirt off at their kitchen table, the camera impossibly small to both of them-- a folding box a fraction of the size of the cameras of their youth. It was on a tripod facing him. "I'm not fond of risking losing our brand-new Site just because you're aroused." 

Vivian paused fiddling with the camera. He stepped around the tripod, leaned in, and kissed Wynn's forehead, again, making him blink in surprise as if it was a surprise at all. Then he said, "I didn't say I was //aroused,// I said I had no pictures of you. And there are plenty of reasons to have photos in a journal article. And for what it's worth, the darkroom is in the Archives. I'll process them myself." He paused. "There's no need to be foolish about it, either. Just sit still and look away for a moment," he clarified. 

Wynn straightened. "I won't be foolish, //Vivian//," he said, in a tone they both knew meant he now fully intended to be foolish; there were, after all, reasons why more photos of Vivian Scout existed than photos of Wynn Rydderech. He heard Viv suppress a giggle, the kind only Wynn was used to hearing, and Vivian said, "Just... sit //still// for a moment. The exposure time on this model is a fraction what it used to be." 

"You sound like my mother," said Wynn. 

"I //feel// like your mother," said Vivian. "I'm putting it on a timer, now. //Don't// be foolish!" 

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1957
++ Visions of Hari 
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

He was down below the Abatement Labs like the Oracle of Delphi, his eyes open and unseeing, sitting at a folding chair at a broken wooden desk he'd shoved under the pipes at the bottom of the achomatic materials tanks. 

The pipes were broken. He was inhaling the heated fumes escaping from their couplings. And they were making him see the future in some sort of way, or at least that was Wynn's working hypothesis. Around him in the hundred-meter pit, lit by the single kerosene lamp he'd brought down with him, were stacks upon stacks of frantic scribblings. 

He'd been spending a lot of time down here recently. He didn't always like what he saw. 

The future now, in this particular waking vision, was one of his tamer electric dreams. A man standing in front of a hall of people was claiming to be quoting Wynn's own words, repeating them [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/12-aromantic-abatement in an odd, incantation-like tone that seemed to suck the gravitas out of what he was saying:] "--Byddwch yn falch o'r prosiect, ond nid o'ch rhan ynddo. Byddwch yn ostyngedig gerbron Duw, neu byddwch yn ostyngedig..."

(Yes, this was the problem with the scrying the future from the fumes of the tanks: every figure spoke in Welsh, and Rydderech would say it was obviously his own mind if not for the fact that the future spoke Welsh better than he did. He'd needed to start reading Welsh books again just to remember his first language enough to transcribe it.)

"Ar y cof, rydych chi'n hoffi hynny? Felly dydw i ddim yn gwybod am y stwff duw yna, ond mae'r neges gyffredinol yn gadarn," said the man at the front of the room. //'I don't know about the God stuff', he says, oh, that would be the 1662 Welsh-Language Anglican Book of Common Prayer, Hari,// Wynn thought sardonically, still scribbling down the words as quickly as he could. //Ein Tad, yr hwn wyt yn y nefoedd,// so on, so forth, //eithr gwared ni rhag drwg,// et cetera... Wynn had worked for decades to forget all that nonsense, and he could still regurgitate it by heart.

It had been an accident, discovering all this about the Site and its future, its many timelines and convergences. It was true that when Wynn had first been struck by the fumes, while inspecting the couplings themselves a year before, he had only had one idea of what to do with it: he wanted to know how Vivian would react if he knew certain things, so he could pick and choose, in this timeline, exactly what to say. In some senses he'd gotten what he'd wanted, and in others-- well, Wynn was still piecing together everything, but it seemed like things developed as planned. 

Most of the time. Some of the time. Sometimes Wynn crawled out of the pit and walked from the caverns back up to the main abatement labs, and he'd be choking back tears the whole way. But he wouldn't tell Vivian. The evidence told him not to. 

The man in the vision went on to describe exactly what Wynn would say to show regret about some kind of tremendous, life-altering lab accident that had not yet occurred, in a publication he had not yet written. Wynn translated it back to English and wrote it down with great interest and specificity. He would not mean a single word. 

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1954
++ ECT
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

Electroconvulsive therapy at a hospital in Toronto. His choice-- a series of melancholia spirals lasting the better part of a year, each so deep and vast and endless he was running out of extra AcroAbate work to keep himself afloat with. 

If there was a chance to put a stop to it, he felt he needed to try, before... well, before things became truly severe again. It was his first time coming to the surface in months. Leaving the abatement labs and Ilse felt like leaving his heart behind.

Vivian //was// beside himself, but, he said, if this was what Wynn wanted, then he'd be there. He said he wasn't going to watch; Wynn was horribly fuzzy and exhausted afterwards, but driving back to Kettle Point, he could tell Vivian had. 

(Vivian Scout, trembling, eyes locked on the road, the nail of his left index finger trapped between his teeth. Wynn didn't know which emotion that was and was too tired to care.)

"Winny." Sitting in the company car at Ipperwash at sunset, the ignition off and gone cold, Vivian waking him up by squeezing his hand. Winter had ended and Wynn hadn't even noticed. Around the car in the back of the lot, it was late summer turning to fall. 

"Mm," he said. 

"Don't do that again," said Vivian. "Please. I know you can handle it, but I can't." 

"Do what?" Wynn asked him. 

Vivian's hands took the steering wheel seemingly just to have a place to rest. He watched the other man take a slow, deep breath. Then he took Wynn's hand in his own again. 

"The shock therapy, Winny. I can't stand it," he said. His voice was low and calm. 

"I still love you," said Wynn. Oh, it was a gift, it always was. 

"I know," said Vivian. "Bad news for... for all the people they have locked up on that floor, that we passed. People like us." 

Wynn watched uncomprehendingly as Scout closed his eyes, leaned his head back on the headrest, and took another strangely vulnerable deep breath. He let it out slowly. Wynn himself felt completely calm.

"You'll be alright," Vivian said. Reassuring himself.  

He didn't remember being called Winny, that time. Didn't make another appointment, though. 

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1963
++ It Is Very Important You Don't Tell Anyone Else About This
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

[[div class="page"]]
Wynn, 
@@ @@
It is very important you don't tell anyone else about this, but we should have let them deport you when we had the chance. 
@@ @@
There are only two options remaining. One will hurt more than the other. They are:
[[/div]]

Cruel and unnecessary, was what they were, Wynn thought, and his blood was cold, and he stood alone in the secondary lab over the vat of forgery liquid and watched as both this note and Vivian's writing sample faded into streaks of blue. 

His homemade test said it was not a forgery. Not for the first time. Not for the last time. 

Time. He was running out of it. Foul omens and portents. Coal, low and heavy in ones body, a curse that never left. 

He was changing, alright. Something was happening to him. 

------

"Did you catch him?" Wynn asked. It was the customary Wednesday night question. Although Zwist sometimes deferred to giving a longer chase, Vivian preferred to be back by 8:30 to watch bland historical dramas on TV, and sometimes Wynn joined him, just to watch Viv's reactions as the story played out. 

(In September 1966, this block would be replaced with a new science fiction show called //Star Trek// on NBC. He already knew Vivian would love it; he had seen it in an electric dream.)

Vivian sighed. "No. But he makes it interesting." 

"Stressful interesting?" Wynn asked. It was his turn at the kitchen table with papers strewn all over. 

"I just hope nothing //bad// happens to me tonight. That's all I can say," said Vivian. 

Wynn perked up. Pavlovian response; the two of them had //definitely// been together for too long. "Oh, really?" he said. "Well, that would be a shame, if something terrible were to happen to you. Although I wouldn't speak too soon. I think I hear musketfire over yonder hill." 

Half a Canadian historical battle later, Wynn was making like they were in the cave again, like no time had passed at all. Vivian 'Never Accuse Me of Silence' Scout, acting prone and somewhat helpless below him; well, they both knew who was down in the abatement labs, most of the time, if they were going to go off of geographical location instead of preference, but Vivian spent his days making stressful decisions. Wynn was nothing if not skilled at abatement, in more ways than one.  

Kissing him, and then kissing him. Thank God they were homosexuals, not for the first time and not for the last. Vivian, tracing his scars as he sometimes did, and then kissing again, and then--

Vivian pulled back, both amused and confused. "What happened to your handsome little fellow?" 

"Oh, he's functioning just fine tonight. I can show you in a moment," Wynn said, hastily and with confidence. He kissed Vivian's neck, and felt, rather than heard, him chuckle. 

"No, I mean your little bit of morbid chaos. Your Set Animal. I don't feel him," said Scout. He traced a patch of skin where the ribs beneath still ached when it rained, on his right side. "I hope he's not fading. I quite enjoy your morbid chaos, I don't think I tell you that as often as I should." 

Kiss. Kiss again. Wynn said, "He's there, don't worry," and demonstrated. 

-----

He was not there. 

Wynn checked in the mirror once he was certain Vivian was asleep. The skin was blank. The Set Animal was gone. 

Wynn did something he thought he'd never have to do. He emerged into the main common area of the complex between Archives and Abatement, crossed to a painting of a landscape of Lake Huron, and pushed it aside. It revealed a vault door sunken into the wall. Inside were a handful of Site critical documents and records, a handful of personal artifacts Vivian considered significant, Vivian's Foundation-issue service revolver, and one thing from Wynn: shotgun rounds, buckshot and slugs. 

The gun itself was his father's. He'd stolen it from him when he left for the last time, and currently had it in the labs for experimentation. He took one box of each. When he closed the vault door and moved the painting back, the Set Animal was looking back at him from the shores of Lake Huron. And then it wasn't. And then it was looking at him from beside him, standing waist-high in the darkness, its flank matted black like coal. 

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1949
++ The Patron Saint of Muck Reduction 
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

He was running and running, and spiraling, and he always went to the labs to spiral, and the weeks went on and on, and Ilse was still in there, damn it, she still was, and then Scout got sick. 

Wynn found that his worst melancholia spirals needed an electric shock to wake him out of, like forcing him from a prolonged, painful nightmare where the weight in his chest never went away and all things in life lost their happiness. So he was down there, and down there, speaking to nobody, and Scout got sick. Wynn needed  to take over. That was what drew him out of the labs after a month and a half of subterranean living on the cot. 

He couldn't run the Site. Wynn could count on one hand the number of times Scout couldn't run the Site on extremely short notice since it was built. The request for him to take over admin duties came in the morning and had him sitting bolt upright on a stool in the primary abatement lab, getting paged over the intercom for more than just a meeting, and he was unshaven, and not put together; //Vivian// was the one who was supposed to be put together, //Wynn// was not. 

He didn't think he'd ever cleared his schedule faster in his life. Ilse-- good god, it was painful, but Wynn had exactly one other person whose responsibility it was on this planet to take care of, and he'd rise to the occasion, he always did. Scout wouldn't have called for him if he didn't think he could. 

And Vivian Scout, sick. He hated that memory. Wynn didn't think they ever officially decided what exactly it was that took him down, but at the same time Wynn knew it was the same thing that had him in the damn basement for the past month and a half, only thinking about Ilse and himself, and how miserable he felt, and how much he hated everything. It was Ilse that did it. 

Ilse and himself. Wynn hadn't even thought about that. Vivian had been up there, alone. 

"//Christ,// Viv," he murmured. Vivian Scout, sweating through his underclothes, alone in the Directors' complex with an absurdly high fever and a certain crazed, glassy look to his eyes Wynn had never seen before. Vivian could do what he did because, unlike some people, he was conscious of the work, he was conscious of the toll it took, he //paced himself//, damn it--

Vivian grabbed his wrist. His fingers were so hot he couldn't fathom it. "Ilse," he breathed. "Do you have anything?" 

Wynn sat down hard on the side of the bed, feeling in some ways frantic, insane, no, no he didn't have anything but six weeks of wasted time and a partner much worse off than he'd left him, no he didn't have anything, he didn't have //anything!//

"Damn!" Vivian croaked. He let go of Wynn's hand and pushed himself upright in bed, looking just as disheveled as Wynn did, and they looked at each other miserably, like they were both lost, like they both were at the end of their ropes, and they were. And then Vivian did what he did, the way he did it-- he craned his spine down in a slouch, his pale hands balled up to his forehead, and sobbed. 

Wynn stood and the room swayed. Up for a day and a half, something like that. He knitted his fingers behind his head and entwined them in his hair and paced in their bedroom, agitated, then angry, then terrified-- "You should have called me upstairs--" 

Vivian snapped his head up and for half a second he was all as vivacious as he had been at Cardiff when they argued. "I //did// call you upstairs!" 

"And your reasons were asinine!" Wynn snapped back. "I had a //damn// good reason not to come, didn't I, if you would have //told// me you--" 

"//I know you had good reasons!//" Vivian shouted. 

Wynn jumped. If anyone had to be on the receiving end of Vivian Scout honest-to-god shouting, the sort of thing as rare as a solar eclipse, Wynn would prefer it be him. Silence fell between them; he could have sworn the Site went quiet, too, just for a moment, as if the idle chuggings and whirrings of the Abatement pipes had heard him say it. Wynn stood stock still like a deer and looked back at him. 

"They're the only... the //only// damn good reasons there are right now, you..." Vivian dropped his head down again, like he'd lost all the rage he'd been able to summon, and his shoulders shook. Vivian couldn't always finish curses; he put too much power in the words.

Guilt hit him on the same lightning rod as the intercom page about his illness had, but also, more intensely: worry. Vivian was not like this. And then Vivian started coughing, and for a sleep-deprived, hallucinatory moment of stress two pale threads of Wynn's life crossed and converged in his mind and he thought: //You have coal lung, Viv, you're dying. People die of coal lung all the time. You and me, underground together, it should be me first but God is the one who picks, what on Earth am I going to do down here without you.// 

But it was entirely, deliriously nonsensical, absurd. Wynn made his heart stop racing, and Vivian paused to catch his breath, and Vivian said, "I just wanted you to tell me you weren't going to do anything stupid down there. That's //it//, Wynn. Just tell me I won't lose you." 

Wynn went back to Vivian's bed and sat down beside him. He took his pale, feverish, scarless hands in his own. 

"I'm not going anywhere, Viv. I'm okay." Electric shock to system, cogs turning, good god, he'd been so lost, what had he been thinking, "I'm alright. Christ, you're burning up--" 

"I'm sorry. About what I said. I shouldn't have said that," said Vivian, in the most Vivian-like maneuver he'd ever seen, apologizing for the words first, always for the words. 

"You weren't wrong," said Wynn. He wasn't. He let go of Vivian's right hand and brushed a few strands of sweat-soaked hair out of his face, "You're fine, Viv. You're alright." 

(He'd been lying, though, was the thing. Wynn had lied.)

-----

Once Site Medical had looked at him, Wynn did what he knew he had to do. He left offerings of food, water, and medicine on the nightstand, feeling a little like a trained bird bringing shiny trinkets or a disaffected and confused family dog, and then turned the lights in the room off, made himself actually presentable, and went to do his best Vivian Scout impression as an effective administrator that left work at 5pm.

He wasn't sure anyone bought it. Wynn always felt out of place with the administrative work; Vivian was just such a //natural//, and he was incredibly well-liked among senior staff and well-respected by everyone else. Meetings felt stilted and unfamiliar, even ones he regularly sat in on as the Abatement lead; he knew vaguely that people were looking for guidance, subtle cues on how they should behave in any given situation, the sort of thing that put people at ease about Vivian's leadership instincts, and Wynn tried his damn best in that department, you couldn't say he didn't give it his all. Where that failed, he settled for being friendly. Where that failed, he settled for being helpful. Where that failed, well, Vivian would be back sometime next week, he told people. Apologetically.

(The lingering melancholia that had driven him downstairs didn't help, but he was used to that. Keep breathing, keep working, remember it's false, the signals were fake, he was working off corrupted data in his own mind. No, people did not hate him. No, //Vivian// did not hate him. He had no evidence for these claims, and to be frank-- he could not express them, no matter what. They did not put people at ease.)

He worked until 5. Then, feeling like again like a helpless family pet, he went back to the Directors' Complex and checked on Vivian, a shape wrapped in blankets and domestic darkness. Viv was perfectly exhausted; he barely touched any food, barely spoke when he was awake... Wynn put his palm to his forehead like touching him would do something. It did nothing to help. 

He cleared the dishes and left him more offerings, then changed into his lab clothes and went back down to Abatement to lurk among the pipes and tanks and out of place chalkboards on wheels, where he felt profoundly more at ease, and there was plenty of work to be done and not enough time to do all of it. 

Four hours, no longer. Then, back upstairs. Greeting people who hadn't gone home yet in the halls like it was a natural thing for him to do. Checking on Vivian, who was usually coughing painfully if he was awake and uncomfortable and feverish if he was asleep. Still, nothing of significance to be done. 

He paced in their living room. He read comic books. He slept on the couch for some reason. They had separate beds; why was he sleeping on the couch?

-----

He showered, changed, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and then doused a washcloth in lukewarm water, wrung it out, and went back to their bedroom. 

Vivian was still asleep and still too-warm to the touch. Vivian Scout, at rest; it never ceased to amaze Wynn to see it, like he was privy to some incredible secret and an unfathomable amount of trust, and Vivian slept through the night, every night. No bolts of electric consumption or bizarre preoccupations to wake him. Wynn could only imagine being Vivian Scout. 

He pressed the cloth to the other man's forehead. Viv laid limp under the blankets and didn't stir. He left it there and pulled away, then stood awkwardly with his arms crossed for a long moment, watching the miraculous secret of Vivian's chest rising and falling in deep, slow rhythm, then letting his gaze grow unfocused looking at the bland drywall above Scout's bed. 

Wynn sighed. He crossed himself absently.

Vivian let out a low, tired laugh, roughened but melodious, that quickly lapsed into a coughing fit that made Wynn wince. Once recovered he rasped, "Are... are you going to give me extreme unction now?" His voice was husky, laden with sleep and the incipient chest cold. 

Theatrically, Wynn stepped forward. His shirtsleeves still rolled up, exposing all their chemical spills and bizarre scars, he held three fingers together and crossed Vivian in the air above him: the father, the son, the holy ghost, the gestures wide and deliberate, as if he was teaching him. Then he kissed the same fingers, and pressed them to the cloth on the other man's forehead. 

"And may the Work be Good forever and ever. Benidictus, Domine, Lorem ipsum, et al. Amen," he said dramatically.

"Et al," Vivian whispered. Smiling, specticalless, unshaven. 

Wynn drew back his hand. "Includes friends and enemies as well as lovers of the journal, of course."

Vivian rolled his eyes. "I'm sure you have a lot of those," he rasped. 

"//You// do," said Wynn. "//I// don't, that's true." 

"Taking potshots at Thilo while I'm in such a condition. That's unbecoming of a man of the cloth." 

"I never said anything about Zwist. But Lorem ipsum to him, too," said Wynn. 

"Patron saint of muck reduction," whispered Vivian.  

Wynn forced himself not to jerk his head up in shock. Patron saint of muck reduction. Patron saint of muck reduction, that was in an electric dream he'd had, scrying under the pipes.

"I'm no Saint," said Wynn, somewhat hastily. He didn't want to think about it; he knew how all this ended, or at least, he knew vaguely how it //might// all end. And he was worried about Vivian. Scout had suffered from asthma in his youth, something Wynn had never seen signs of as long as he'd known him, but something superstitious and illogical in the back of his mind still kept the information at hand. "How are you feeling?"

"Getting better. I just sound wretched. And I've attended conferences with you, that's exactly what you are." 

Wynn sat down on the edge of Vivian's bed and took his hand in his own, and kissed the pale knuckles gently. "Real saints get martyred. Be careful what you ask for, you uncouth heathen." 

"But is our heathenish house in order?" Vivian rasped. 

"In order is debatable. Fully intact, though, yes," said Wynn. 

"And our people?" 

"Brilliant as usual," Wynn said. "I'll have to sign their paychecks, what do you think they'll make of that? Do you think they'll call a mutiny when they see my handwriting?" 

"I'll be back tomorrow," said Vivian. 

"You'll be back next week. Don't push it, Viv, you're not as young as you used to be." He squeezed Scout's hand gently. Asthma in... what, the 1890s, maybe? It was silly to anticipate now.

"Neither are you," rasped Scout. Breathing fine, by the way. Very visibly under the weather, but not dying. 

(Coal lung, in the back of his mind-- maybe that was why Wynn held onto that information. It was true he'd watched so many men in their village die from it as a child. Coal, a vile corruption that entered all living things and never left them, lying deep and low inside them like a curse.) 

"The admin work is good for me. Keeps me spry. Lets make sure you can speak above a whisper before you go back, is that reasonable?" 

"Spry," Vivian echoed, his eyes closed. "You are, aren't you? Spry."

"More than ever," he said, and almost added something sexual, but the words died in his throat. Vivian's hand was still hot with fever, and it made him feel on-edge and nervous, like a small bird wound with tension on a powerline, waiting for something to change. 

Vivian usually had something to say about that kind of waiting. Wynn sighed. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to wake you. You still have a bloody temperature, don't you know that?"

"'m taking it up with my hypothalamus. And you know you can always wake me," Vivian rasped.

"If that were true, we'd be sleeping in the same bed," Wynn said. 

Vivian smiled with his eyes still closed. "Oversight has woken me more than you ever have," he said. There was an intercom mounted inside the bedroom they shared, and it blared to life on occasion. 

"Well, lets keep it that way, then," said Wynn. 

Vivian squeezed his hand. "No." 

"What do you mean, 'no'?" 

"You should wake me up whenever there's something wrong," Vivian rasped. 

"There's no need for that," said Wynn. 

Scout took a deep breath and sighed, then coughed again. "Oh, yes, there is. Don't play dumb with me, you have a PhD." 

"If something is wrong enough on-site it'll come through the intercom," Rydderech said. 

"I'm not talking about if something is wrong with the site, Wynn," said Scout. His eyes came open, and Wynn found not even the feverish glaze could take the edge out of them completely. "I mean, if something is wrong with //you//." 

(In his village when he was young, they'd treat Coal Lung by bleeding people to 'remove the contaminated blood', a quite literal if not extremely crude attempt at coal abatement. They treated Spanish Flu like that too, if you were to ask a doctor in Wales for the treatment specifically during the pandemic years; Wynn simply chose not to think about that.) 

Wynn scoffed playfully. This had been the start of many arguments they'd had in their relationship, ever since they'd been young-- the confrontation on the seashore at Cardiff, for one, but there had been many more, and he didn't want to get into it now, when Viv was ill. "You need to stop worrying about me so much, what are you, my mother?" 

Vivian's smile grew wider. His eyes relaxed and closed. "Yes," he croaked. 

"You'll ask my stepfather for a discount on the encyclopedias, then," said Wynn. A perpetual goal in his life was to make Vivian Scout laugh, or at least giggle reluctantly like a teenage girl, because it was something rare and quite special for him to observe; he succeed again, imbibed the chuckle and sigh of scolding that followed, and turned the lights off on the way out.

------

Vivian Scout, at rest, looking exhausted and pale with his spectacles off, but Wynn was encouraged that the feverish tint was gone and he was out of bed. He was dressed down in his night clothes, squinting at the text in a Science Fiction periodical at their kitchen table. 

This wasn't normal Vivian behavior, but Scout wouldn't work when he was ill; he said it set a bad prescient for others. It was the same reason he tried to leave the office at the same time each evening, and to arrive back at the same time each morning. An example of rest, he said, leading by example. 

(This was not expected of Wynn; Wynn tended to rest when his nervous system exhausted itself of ideas and his body ran short on drive, and not a moment before. Vivian had known this when he'd first slept with the man; there was no changing it, god help them, but he made it clear Wynn was no example to follow.) 

"People are asking after you. You should have seen that Runsen fellow, he saw me sitting at your desk and looked like he'd entered a worse timeline," Wynn said. He placed Scout's folded spectacles in front of him, and watched as he put them on and instantly looked marginally more like himself then he had in the past three days.

"Did he say why he was missing the worse of the pair?" rasped Vivian. 

"Nonsense. You wait until I'm the one filing things for you, and then we'll see which is worse," Wynn said, sitting down in the chair across from him. Then he reached into one interior pocket of his coat and produced two thick unmarked letters, both postmarked from Japan as if they'd been supplied with an address. He put them on the table and opened his mouth to speak. 

Vivian held up a silent hand to stop him. He shrugged. "You figure out what he wants. I'm going back to bed in a moment," he rasped. 

"Are you sure it won't curse me if I open it instead of you? Do they typically come with anti-husband memetics, or something along those lines?" Wynn asked, genuinely. 

Vivian looked dazed. He shrugged, uncharacteristically. "He waits, then," he croaked. 

"For the best," said Wynn. 

Scout blinked slowly, as if processing this. "Yes, for the best," he said. "Ah. I'm still sorry for shouting at you, Wynn. I don't think I've told you that, since I've been up." 

"I'm just surprised you could still shout at me," Wynn said. "How are you feeling by now, anyway? Presumably not well?" He slid the unopened letters from Thilo to the side. 

Vivian, abstaining from words, another rare occurrence: responding by tilting his hand back and forth in a 'so-so' motion. Then, one finger came down on a sentence in the science fiction periodical. 

"'Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent,'" he read. "This fellow, Issac Asimov, he's been serializing these stories in here for the past year. Do you know what he calls them?" 

"If you're about to tell me you suspect Zwist--" 

Vivian shook his head. "No, no. Issac is a graduate student in chemical science. I exchanged letters with him when this issue went to print." Vivian exhaled, suppressed a cough, and put his chin in a palm of his hand, his elbow on the table, another incredibly rare Vivian Scout action. His eyes drifted blearily across the page. "He calls it, 'Foundation'." 

"So it //is// a Zwist front," said Wynn. 

Vivian smiled a little at that. "That's why I wrote to him, just to be sure it wasn't. Do you know what it's about?" 

"If it's about anomalies, you might be onto something." 

"Plenty of science fiction is about anomalies," Vivian rasped. "No. It's about a planet of scholars dedicated to writing an encyclopedia, except..." he cleared his throat and it did little to help, "...In this story, 'The Encyclopedists', 50 years have passed and they learn it was all a ruse by the founder. He says he used psychology to tell when the end of the ruling empire of their time would begin. His plan was to bring the right people and resources together far in advance, not to write an encyclopedia at all." 

Scout sighed again. "Now, what do you make of //that?//" he asked. 

"One," Wynn put a scarred finger in the air, "I think it's astounding how many of these you read, and you still tease me for reading comic books. Writing to the authors, too, don't tell me you have more word wizards I don't know about. Two," he put up another finger, "Well, you know what I think about violence." (He was a hypocrite.) "And three," He put up his left ring finger, the one endowed with a scratched gold band he joked had been lead when he'd started in Abatement, the same he'd worn for the past thirty years, "I thought you said no considering work while you were ill. And I think you sound like a crow when you talk, right now." 

Vivian was gazing at him with what was undeniably love. When Wynn's melancholia grew particularly severe and feeding and grooming himself became tedious, he'd see Viv looking at him like this and find himself genuinely baffled, as if there were someone standing behind him who truly deserved that kind of expression; his gray eyes were still visibly unfocused behind his spectacles, and Wynn didn't disagree with him going back to bed (four days of Wynn running the Site by himself, so far, it was well worth it)- but it was adoration, that was what it was. Vivian smiled. "Fair," he crowed. 

"You didn't give that Issac boy any ideas, did you?" 

"None that he didn't already have," rasped Vivian. 

"That's a rather ominous response," said Wynn. 

"He //imagines// quite a lot, but //knows// nothing. Now, if he happens to stumble on //Aqua invica// or something similar, we may have to have more correspondence." He sighed. "Those twenty-something chemical students, they //are// known troublemakers, don't you think?" 

------
[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1966
++ Abatement Of Foul Portents
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

“You’re missing a thesis statement,” said Vivian, standing to the left of the desk in the Directors’ Complex. He was glancing over the abstract of the paper Wynn was working on with his usual analytical pointedness, but he was in his night clothes, and Wynn wasn’t. He was sitting hunched over the typewriter with scattered papers on either side.

Wynn groaned. “You //always// say that,” he said. 

Vivian’s glasses had slid down to the tip of his nose as he read, and he didn’t bother to fix them. He had a pencil in his hand and did something he did sometimes, that thing with the pink eraser held like a knife between his lips, that //thing//, like he didn’t want to cut himself on accident, perish the thought. “I don’t know how you start things with no thesis statement. You always write it last. It’s baffling.” 

“It’s the last thing that’s ever clear to me,” said Wynn. He waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, won’t you just read over the rest and tell me what you think?” 

“I //think// you should come to bed,” said Vivian, leaning in to kiss the top of his head. But his own body was alight with agitation. He was full of electricity, like he was sometimes when he worked—how anyone //ever// could stop, it was beyond him. 

(Below them the pain fish swam in circles, their impossible illustrated fins brushing against the steel walls; he had shut off and emptied a flocculation tank for them since the incident abating the remaining Jars O’ Propultion, and they swam in industrial oil they’d tinged black and deep red, their three-foot-long bodies just visible beneath the surface. Churning.)

“You always say that,” said Wynn, and his eyes were wide open and his pupils were pinpricks and the Set Animal stood frozen in the painting of a pipe above the desk, an icon in miniature amid the still life, so whenever he stood his gaze fell downward slightly and the creature stirred in the pastels. In the oil. In the oils. 

“Write it in the morning,” said Vivian. 

“I need to be up to check the systems in four hours, anyway,” said Wynn. At the current speed it worked at, whenever he cleared the pipes it let out a loud BANG that shuddered through the entire set of labs, and the surface of the pain fish tanks lapped and drove in half-waves up the sides, staining the cave walls with black and tar.  

Do you remember your thesis, something said. Do you remember the cliffside. 

------

Tormentous lights and lines and illusions of being. Knives on tabletops, a growing shadow that transformed symbols from nothing, that generated experimental data from nonexisting experiments, transforming a knife into knife (𓃩), a glass object to glass (𓃩), paper (𓃩), water (𓃩), edges (𓃩), electricity (𓃩). Chemistry (𓃩). Love (𓃩). 

[[div class="page"]]

You aren't being honest

[[/div]]

said the Set Animal. 

"Honest about what?" Wynn asked. He had to raise his voice above the horrible din of the thudding, thrumming instruments. "I'm being as honest as I'll ever be." 

[[div class="page"]]

The article lacks a proper thesis because you are hiding something significant. You're not presenting all the evidence. 

[[/div]]

The Set Animal was speaking from the cave walls, where it sat in two dimensional relief and shadow. It would not pass into Archives and Revision; the salt walls repelled it. Or maybe it was because Vivian's office was there, Wynn thought, but he couldn't prove either for certain. 

"I'm presenting all //relevant// evidence," said Wynn. 

[[div class="page"]]

If you refuse to present all evidence you will not catch me. We will keep going around, and around, and around again. You will continue to not speak of me. 

[[/div]]

"I don't speak of you to begin with." Wynn pushed the stack to his left aside, the one that was labelled, ON THE ABATEMENT OF FOUL PORTENTS AND ILL OMENS OF THE SELF. The version Vivian had seen was not, in fact, the version stained with blood. 

[[div class="page"]]

If you had, we wouldn't be here. But if you did, you would have deserved everything that followed. That is the price of words with mass.

[[/div]]

said the Set Animal. 

Wynn chuckled to himself dully and sighed. He had briefly imagined a conversation between himself and Vivian about this, and the Vivian Scout in his head had said: //Well, then those words should be said most of all, don't you think?// The Vivian Scout in his head, with which he discussed only the most pressing and alarming matters. 

He did not want to think about how the real Vivian Scout would react to this. It made his blood turn cold in his veins. 

The Set Animal said, 

[[div class="page"]]

Shame is a perfectly adequate emotion. What was it that Issac boy said about violence? 

[[/div]]

And the tanks churned. They churned. The violence fish swam and circled and churned. 

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1960
++ "All Through The Night" By The Mystics Hits A Lake Huron Radio Antenna
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

The antenna protruded in its rabbit-eared form from the top of a telephone pole, where it was attached with twine and metal couplings. The wire tail ran down the pole to its base, than spooled to a nearby culvert, where it ran 250 feet into an air vent supplying the Site-43 Research and Experimentation section and pivoted at a crude repeater with a sticky note. The note said: NUCLEAR ARMS TRANSMISSION, DO NOT TOUCH - W.R. 

The wire continued along the ceiling to Identification and Technnocryptography (MEMETIC, DO NOT TOUCH -W.R), through the Janitorial and Maintenance section (DON'T TOUCH THIS, TRUST ME- W.R.), hit a repeater in Archives and Revision (no note, but concealed in a thin metal pipe that ran the length of the section and looked both trustworthy on first glance and imposing to remove), and made its way into the abatement labs, where the imposing metal pipe died off, and it snaked its way through haphazard conduits until it reached an unlabelled door. 

A hole was drilled in the door near the top that allowed the wire to pass through. It did so, and dipped considerably along the door frame to the railing of a stairwell in a recessed cave. 

It followed the railing down, and down, hitting several more repeaters as it did so, and came to the bottom, where it did away with all prior context of restraint and transformed into a poorly-insulated coil of wire riveted along the cave ceiling in curves of electronic drapery with everything else. It turned one corner, then another, pausing with the larger chaotic cord bundle in the stale cave air to run past a single bare incandescent bulb, and then finally it reached a recess, and dipped from the others downward and into a radio on the floor. 

The radio sang: 
= Sleep my love and dream about me
= All through the night

It was a Welsh folk song called 'Ar Hyd y Nos' with a new permutation of English lyrics adapted to it. And to the left of the radio, slumped on the cave floor with his chest rising and falling despite it all and a wood block falling from between his teeth, was Site-43 co-director Wynn Rydderech, limp and embroiled in wires in the aftermath of a self-delivered electric shock. 

= Keep my love while you're without me
= All through the night

His eyes came open, unseeing. His mind was blank, finally, and he laid on the cold floor in complete calm, and slowly tried to place the song. When he found he couldn't, he attempted to stand, shedding the crude electric cap in his wake; fell; got onto all fours in a scrabble of discombobulation; and reached the radio crawling on his stomach. He fumbled with the controls before managing to turn the volume up. 

= There's my special star above me
= All through the night
= Twinkling down, how much I love you
= All through the night

Wynn sighed dreamily. He laid his head back down on the floor of the cave in front of the radio, smiled, and thought of nothing but the lingering, residual pain in his extremities and the sound of the music. 

It was 3pm on a Wednesday. Vivian would give up trying to page him in another ten minutes. And what he was escaping would come back in a matter of hours, considerably worsened from before.

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1966
++ Vivian Scout, A Queer (Raynard Watts Leaves The Electric Fan)
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

Raynard Watts won. There was a while where he really thought that. 

Vivian didn't know why he didn't see it before. He and Wynn were very good at doing what they did; they skirted the margins of what was considered plausibly deniable so well at this point that it had long become part of a complex dance that faded to the background, a sort of elaborate ruse where only they were in on the joke. There had never been a time in their lives where they could be who they were without losing everything. They had long accepted the risk and danced in its glow. 

Until now. 

All the lights in the Directors' Complex were off. Vivian sat alone, in the kitchen, drunk. He never drank alone. But Wynn had been gone six hours, task forces came back empty handed, he was gone, //really// gone, and he was alone at the kitchen table facing the empty chair, not even weeping anymore. Just sitting with the whisky with one hand over his mouth, his spectacles hastily discarded on the table, staring at the empty space Wynn used to fill, thinking: he won. The bastard won anyway. The worst people in the world always got what they wanted. 

It came down to this: In less than eight hours, Vivian Scout would have to emerge from here, as always, and put on a face like he hadn't just lost his best friend and lover of over thirty years, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it, because the world was full of Raynards. There were so many Raynards that they built society and the hatred seeped in through the cracks. He and Wynn had done everything they had while standing on scaffolding half hatred by volume. 

It didn't matter that he had gotten rid of Raynard. At the end of the day, Vivian Scout was still just a queer. And so was Wynn. 

Rage. It wasn't unfamiliar to him. Rage; jealousy, even, the worst kind of it, of all the heterosexual men and women in the world who'd been widowed, of their freedom to break down, the societal understanding that existed that allowed them to do so. Pensions, marriage certificates, next-of-kin documents, bereavement leave. None of it mattered; he'd take Wynn over all of it in a heartbeat. But oh, it was salt in the wound. And the wound was so very, very wide, and damn it if he couldn't use being able to say 'I'm sorry, I just lost my husband' right about now. 

(Winny had always worn that ring; why had he never had one? Why hadn't they just said to hell with it, to hell with all of it, we are who we are?)

Vivian was very, very small. That was what it came down to. There was nowhere to turn; there was noone to tell. Thilo, yes, but he wasn't even sure Thilo knew the full extent of what he and Wynn had been. 

He looked down at the empty glass and wondered why the whisky wasn't working like he'd hoped it would be working. He was chewing his nails, a childhood habit he'd worked hard to stop, he didn't think it was elegant or professional, but here he was, chewing them to the quick. Oh, god. 

If he wanted to keep everything they'd built together he was going to have to find a way, and fast. Cursing Wynn, cursing God, cursing the Foundation and everything it had ever stood for, cursing the government and the prime minister and the country he'd lived his entire life in, cursing all of history that led to this point, cursing himself. 

He was pushing it even now. If someone came to their door at this second Vivian wasn't even sure what he would do. He was a mess. He was going to be hungover as hell by the time he was done here and he didn't even care. He chewed his fingernails and stared at Wynn's empty chair. 

He was going to have to do it all alone. And there was no room for error. 

-----

He put on his most severe suit to do it. Vivian liked to flatter himself by thinking he didn't come across as hungover at all, that time he'd held the All Sections meeting to tell everyone Winny was gone. He dressed in black as always-- him, always in black, and Winny, always in browns and earth tone sweaters, his lab clothes with the sleeve garters that he still used out of habit, his lab shoes repaired anomalously at the heels. Vivian went to dress himself for this and ran headfirst into Winny maybe ten times before making it out the door, dry-eyed and intimidating. 

He would be clear. He would be concise. He had thought out what he wanted to say and would say it like he hadn't just lost his husband. And when he went to face all of Site-43, assembled for this purpose, Scout realized the great majority already knew. 

Wynn was always wrong about what people thought about him. People //liked// Director Rydderech, and especially in the world of Acroamatic Abatement, he was beloved and respected. Wynn had been known for his chaotic approach and for his odd, reclusive neuroses, but people found him kind and expressive in a clumsy, earnest sort of way that stood in stark contrast to Vivian's well-honed and reassuring leadership style. In the journals he was a force to be reckoned with; in private, well, Scout would say he was also a force to be reckoned with, Winny in all the things he did and ways he was. 

He did the Good Work and did it well. But if Scout thought about that he would start weeping again, and he needed to be straightforward and stalwart. Whatever man had sent Watts off to be killed, the kind of man who could defend his home and people and would do it to the death, that's what he needed to be. 

His voice only cracked once, when he first said Wynn was gone, and it was unclear what could be done to bring him back. He distantly realized the assembled Site-43 would have forgiven him even if he'd broken down sobbing, but he wasn't about to do that to them. They needed him here, now. 

They needed Wynn, too. Good god, did they need Wynn. 

-----

Wynn's next of kin was a distant relative of his father's. Vivian didn't care about the money, he and Wynn were both paid just fine for what they did, but he //did// mind who it was going to, because he'd always hated Winny's family and how they treated him. Wynn was one of the most resilient people Vivian had ever known, someone who regularly clawed himself out of some dreadful places and states of mind, and it was something he admired quite a bit about him; but there was no doubting the obvious. He wouldn't have been in those states of mind to begin with if things had been different. Maybe he'd even still be here.

But what was he going to do about it. What was //he// going to do about it? Divine punishment for Raynard Watts: look here, smart one, man who got permission to kill someone for threatening to deport his queer lover, what will you do about it now? What will you do now that the tide has come in? Are you going to tell the ocean off, too? 

He didn't even have Winny's wedding ring. He didn't even have Winny's keys. 

-----

How //did// he do it. How //did// he do it? How did he even do it. 

One day at a time, biting at the bars like a rabid animal, kicking and screaming the whole time, that was how he did it. Winny, dead, legally, lab accident, Ontario coroner's office. No more publications or correspondence. He got an SCP number and Vivian finally understood what it was like to want to kill himself. He cried quite often alone, at home. He went through Wynn's files and tied up all the loose ends related to their Site, which ended up being very involved and complex, because in terms of Acroabatic abatement there wasn't a thing he wasn't doing. He stripped the sheets off Wynn's bed one Saturday morning and found blood spotted in half a dozen places and felt like he could barely move for the rest of the day. He gritted his teeth. 

Oh, the rage of it. Oh, the rage. 

-------

What are you going to do about it, Vivian Scout. What are //you// going to do about it. 

There was a funeral held for him in Wales. Vivian didn't attend, in part because he was too busy still talking to Winny, comforting him, because he was scared and in pain and confused and sick, and in part because if he went this entire charade would collapse like a stack of cards and Site-43 would be gone from his control in an instant of-- well. 

Rage. He could kill all of them. Or worse: grief, coming all at once instead of slowly titrated into his bloodstream over years and years of careful repression. Vivian Scout was a man in control and god, he did not want to be, this was hell, //this// was hell, the slow titration, the agonizing slow burn of grief embalmed in the performance of nothing being wrong. Any Winny, in so much pain. Wynn, so scared and getting worse all the time. 

If it wasn't for Zwist to talk to, he might have lost everything. He might have lost his goddamned mind. 

-----

@@ @@
[[div class="page"]]
And it's memetic, you say? Something infecting the concept of male homosexuals? 
[[/div]]
@@ @@
[[div class="danke site"]]
No. The virus seems to be spread by sexual contact and blood. Drug users are being affected, too, people who share needles, and people involved in sex work. It's just that male homosexuals have been affected most, arguably.
@@ @@
First there was no media attention, then the wrong kind. How very typical. But yes, I thought I'd tell you, I've been putting off telling you for so long. 
[[/div]]
@@ @@
[[div class="page"]]
Does Vivian have this HIV? Is this your way of telling me he's ill?
[[/div]]
@@ @@
[[div class="danke site"]]
This is still Vivian, Wynn. No, I'm healthy and safe, and it's quite unlikely I'll be infected, given I haven't taken to anyone else in that way since you. Although I've paid a few trips to a ward in Toronto.
@@ @@
There's not much for an old man to do there but keep people company, that's what I've done. Some of those kids, they're just so young and afraid. No older than you and I when we met. It's the curse of the historian, to endlessly bear witness and think, 'my god, it could have been us, if not for time'... You told me you were with multiple partners as an undergraduate. I just can't stand it. 
@@ @@
We talk about better times, often. Do you remember when we almost ran out of oil for that lamp?
@@ @@
I'm sorry. I don't usually speak so frankly with you these days. I miss the times when we could discuss things like this.  
[[/div]]
@@ @@
[[div class="page"]]
Cross my heart covalent bonds. Eithr gwared ni rhag drwg, God et al., all of them from all atoms and more. 
[[/div]]
@@ @@
[[div class="danke site"]]
I still can't speak Welsh, Wynn. You'll have to translate. 
[[/div]]
@@ @@
[[div class="page"]]
You should let father hear you say that. A man leaves Swansea once, learns these terrible things, forgets his whole mother tongue and the Lord's Prayer...
[[/div]]
@@ @@
[[div class="danke site"]]
Don't make me cry, now. I have an All Sections meeting to chair in half an hour.
[[/div]]
@@ @@
[[div class="page"]]
Tell Vivian, 'a walk at Mount Royal for the Prime Minister', if you would.
[[/div]]
@@ @@
[[div class="danke site"]]
There's the man I love.
[[/div]]
@@ @@
------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1964
++ Love is Terrifying
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

"Love is terrifying," Wynn said to him, and kissed him, because that was in the script after Vivian told him he killed Raynard Watts. And then he handed the letter back unopened and descended into the abatement labs. 

The pumps were quiet and nearly still. In the distance, the flocculation tanks moved their arms lethargically in their tracks. 

He had been hoping it would have been one of the other electric dreams he'd seen. The ones where Vivian didn't kill Watts, and Wynn took his test and was slated to be deported, and before they came for him he killed himself. He used the shotgun, loaded it with real bullets, and offed himself in the caverns below the Site. And yes, Vivian would be wracked with grief and the worst guilt he would ever have, and yes, it would hurt him-- but it would have the same outcome, wouldn't it? And the Good Work would continue, wouldn't it? 

(That was excluding the other endings, the ones where Wynn went back to Austria and did what he was already doing, but worse, now that nobody was there to watch him.) 

No. He stood in the abatement labs. He rolled up his sleeves, his hands trembling as he did so. He secured them in place with garders. He looked up, at where the Set Animal lay exposed, sprawled peacefully across a shelf in the rock like a lounging lion, staining the rock black with its coal corruption, its sticky, filthy taint. 

[[div class="page"]]
Well? 
[[/div]]

It said. 

"Well," said Wynn. He took off his tie as he always did before working with moving components. He folded it and put it neatly on the lab table and then looked at it blankly like he was seeing it for the first time. He looked back up at the Set Animal. The Set Animal looked down at him. 

"Don't say it," Wynn said. 

[[div class="page"]]
If he would react like that to a crisis like this, just imagine how he would react if he knew about you. 
[[/div]]

said the Set Animal. 

Wynn looked back down at the tie. Noose. He looked back at the Set Animal. Coal. He looked at himself: the assortment of bandages under his shirt making up the remnants of the worst he'd ever been, the worst it had ever gotten, the thing that had been so bad Silena had rejected the manuscript from the journal and expressed her concern. 

He had not opened the envelope because in half the electric dreams he'd had about Scout killing Watts, it hadn't been what he'd said it was. Oh, Scout always //thought// that's what it said, and then the words did not agree. Scout had not sought further evidence before taking this action. He said he would have done it anyway. 

(There were some universes where he did. Wynn almost preferred those, although they didn't change what happened next.) 

"I know," said Wynn. 

[[div class="page"]]
I know you know.
[[/div]]

said the Set Animal. 

It was so much like Vivian he wanted to scream, but no, that wasn't right: he wanted to hurt. To get his mind off of it. 

[[div class="page"]]
There is nothing more terrifying than a man who takes action regardless of your wishes, without further consult or consideration. 
[[/div]]

said the Set Animal. Sometimes the Set Animal had very good points, ones that might come from the mouth of a normal and reasonable person, instead of from the Set Animal, who, like Watts, had only ever wanted to destroy him. 

Wynn sighed. He put his hands on his hips, his scarred forearms exposed, and looked around, and said, "It should have been me." 

He meant, getting eaten by werewolves. If the trade was a life for a life, it should have been him, the person who had been playing games with his life in secret already, not some equally horrible man with a twisted political agenda. 

[[div class="page"]]
You're right. 
[[/div]]

said the Set Animal. 

"You really are my best friend, you know that?" Wynn said. His voice echoed through the empty lab, off the pipes and lab tables and instruments, off the bandages in the periphery and the pain fish swimming in their tank. "I'm not going to say he didn't do the right thing, damn it, if the Site was at risk then he //did// do the right thing. I'd be a hipocrite to suggest otherwise. I just wish--" 

[[div class="page"]]
That he would have asked you first. Instead of deciding to make himself proud. 
[[/div]]

"Exactly," said Wynn with a sigh. "You get it." 

[[div class="page"]]
I get it.
[[/div]]

said the Set Animal on its lounging perch, where he did not attempt to shoot it or do anything of the sort. 

"He stood up for what was right. He stood up for //me//, that bastard, that... oh, God damn it, I really can't tell him what's been going on, can't I?" 

[[div class="page"]]
You weren't going to anyway. 
[[/div]]

"I was //thinking// about it," said Wynn. This was true; after Silena's letter, he really //had// been considering saying something, even if it wrecked Vivian, and he knew it would. He had seen that, too, in an electric dream; oh, Vivian was beside himself, two years before he would be beside himself anyway. And it ended with Wynn...well. 

[[div class="page"]]
It ends terribly.
[[/div]]

said the Set Animal. 

Sometimes, Wynn was disgusted and repulsed by the things the Set Animal said, and sometimes it would say only things that compelled him. Sometimes it really //was// his best friend, like Zwist was to Vivian, Wynn thought. 

"Oh, I'm sure," said Wynn, ignoring the fact that he had seen many outcomes scrying under the pipes, and not all of them were bad. The Set Animal looked down at him in its shadows and he knew he would not fight the Set Animal tonight, like he did some nights; instead, it followed him down like a lab assistant into the dark, and he welcomed it where it stood. 

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1965
++ 'There Were No Warning Signs' Why, Thank You! I Work Hard To Lie To The People Who Love Me 
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

He woke at 5, kissed Vivian where he still slept in the bed across from him ("Mm," said Vivian), dressed in his lab clothes, and headed into the Abatement labs to feed the violence fish. 

"Rape!" Wynn called out, entering the lab where he kept them and turning on the lights. He was the first one here in the morning and the last one gone at night. "Murder! Blasphemy!" From what he could tell, the fish especially enjoyed violence from 16th century Russia. "Mongol hordes from the East!" he called (history was not his strong suit, but the fish liked the hordes regardless). These were all the things he said just to wake them up, since they didn't seem to react to light or indeed, even to sound; only to language. Words.

He crossed the lab to an oatmeal canister papered in runes, tucked in a cupboard above a fume hood. He'd copied the runes by hand from the ointment jar Thilo had sent. Wynn opened the top; the three koi fish were beginning to wake, rising to the surface of the petroleum oil and bobbing their drawn fish mouths at the surface. 

"Rape," Wynn supplied again, conversationally. The fish wiggled and circled in the paste. 

He called them 'violence fish' because they seemed to like pain, but in reality they were healing fish, as far as he could tell. And he hadn't told Vivian he'd avoided using the last bit of ointment in the jar Thilo had delivered just to reverse engineer it. 

The three fish were still swimming in the ointment when his scalds from the autoclave blast were healed enough for him to start experimenting again. They had shrunk considerably, maybe to a couple millimeters in length, but they had persisted. Wynn had made a crude neutral poltice from petroleum and transplanted them there, where they had stayed the same size while he experimented with feeding them various Crylic letters and symbols. Eventually, it was the sentiment that mattered-- now they were the size of coins, and he could see the details of drawn scales on their bodies. 

"Hello," he told them. They wiggled and swam. "You all are saving me from a lot of trouble, you know." They heard the word 'trouble' and gasped their tiny mouths at the surface eagerly. 

It was true he didn't know exactly how it worked. The ointment Wynn had ended up making seemed to help more than just anomalous wounds, and definitely healed them faster, thank God, but it didn't look even remotely the same as what Thilo had delivered originally. It was more greasy, the fish expending more effort to move through it, and more of a reddish brown than a blue. He would be spending a lot more time with these three if he didn't have more pressing things to attend to; Ilse, as always, and any other project, for another. If he published on them, he was concerned Vivian would know what he'd done.

Wynn was going to be using it today. It didn't keep scarring from happening as well as his usual healing methods did, but it worked much faster. He leaned in close to the jar and looked at the fish, who bubbled and swam happily in the dark ointment. 

"I'm going to abate the rest of those propultion jars tonight," he whispered. "I'm going to do it the same way as before. What do you make of that?" 

They enjoyed it quite a bit. He had more than enough to heal the wounds. 

-------

"He was feeding them only pain," Thilo said tersely over the phone. "I doubt this would have worked for him for more than a few years, Viv. This is a terrible concoction he's crafted, and one that would lose its efficacy quickly."

The hair on the back of Vivian's neck stood on end. It was 1969, and he'd found the container himself, rummaging for ancient paperwork Wynn had misplaced years ago. The ointment was so dark and thick he could barely see the animate fish underneath. He passed it off to Thilo without thinking. 

Vivian curled the phone cord around one finger and swallowed, thickly. "What...what on Earth was he using it //for?//" 

"Whatever he was doing with it, it wasn't your fault," Thilo said, instead. "He was sick, yes, he //is// sick, and has been for a very long time. But he was digging himself deeper on purpose. The fault for that lies only with him, and I would think he'd tell you the same."

"I could have stopped it," said Vivian. "He...Thilo, it //was// my responsibility--"

"It wasn't your responsibility any more than if he'd been an alcoholic. All the choices he made to stop his pain were his own, and he chose the easiest, riskiest ways. No more, no less." Thilo sighed. "I'm sorry, Vivian. You tell me Dr. Rydderech was a good communicator on his best days, but I have to disagree."

"I just...don't believe it," Vivian said.

"Then don't," said Thilo, softly, compassionately. "You don't have to. He was making bad decisions, and he knew what he was doing and how you would react if you knew, this isn't any information we didn't already have." 

Vivian Scout took a deep breath. He was standing on the scrambled line in his office, looking over one shoulder. It was seven at night, nobody here, and still, it felt like a horrible conversation to have. 

(Memory of Wynn, at the end of his doctorate, saying the worst things he'd ever heard from him. Memory of Wynn on a dark Cardiff beach, apologetic, and himself, trying desperately not to take him by the shoulders and shake him, or slap him, or something along those lines, whatever it took.)

"He hid it from me," he said aloud. His voice wavered. 

"He had to. He knew you would do anything to stop him. That's a reflection on you, as well, don't forget that," Thilo said. "He knew he was loved. That's why he hid it." 

Vivian brought one hand to his mouth. His eyes scanned the phone sightlessly, thinking. Then he gathered himself, cleared his throat, and said, "That's... fair. And what about the fish?" 

"The fish," Thilo said, as if he was allowing the grace of letting Vivian change the subject. "I'll put them in something quite a bit kinder then what he was feeding them. Pain satiates them, yes, but it doesn't feed them." The other man exhaled on the line. "I imagine it was the same for Dr. Rydderech. But I'll be feeding them some poetry, maybe, something nice in Russian they'll enjoy. If only it was that was always that easy." 

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1908-1996
++ I'd Like To Walk Around In Your Mind Someday. 

[[/=]]
[[/div]]

The first time Wynn had announced his intention to try electroconvulsive therapy, Scout had laughed. The first time he'd really believed it, he'd //almost// cried, and now he wished he had, he didn't think Wynn would have gone through with it if he had, but instead he said: If that's what you want. If you think that would help. If you want to try. 

On the road from Toronto back towards Sarnia in a pickup truck with a cover story paint job and military plates. Vivian, driving. Wynn, his body limp in the passengers' seat of the cab, asleep with his head nodded down towards his chest. The restraints had left soft red marks on his wrists barely visible under the cuffs of his shirt. 

Vivian had to help him with the buttons when it was over. Wynn told him while he was doing it that his head was clear; Vivian said, //I wish it wasn't,// and neither of them had spoken since, not out of animosity but because... Well. Wynn's head was clear, for once. It was like something had left him, something Vivian believed was crucial to Wynn as a person. His...his...

Vivian glanced at him again. Wynn Rydderech, limp, his breath slow and even in the passengers' seat. It had looked painful; it had looked exhausting; it had looked unhelpful, unscientific, and utterly inhumane. 

//His...Wynn-ness.// He'd seized silently and come out of it silently and spoke to Scout only once. //My head is clear, Viv.// 

He looked back at the road in silence. It had been the worst thing Vivian Scout had ever seen. 

He had no way of knowing what he had //yet// to see-- waking up with Wynn gone, finding the note, and the next four decades of his life after. It was the worst thing he had ever seen after Ilse trapped in the incinerator. The worst thing he'd ever seen since Wynn had that horrible encounter with the autoclave that knocked him out in '44. The worst thing including every anomalous nightmare encounter he'd ever had. The worst thing. 

He'd remember it for the rest of his life, that was the truth, Wynn in the leather restraints and electrodes. Winny, seizing.

Nail in his teeth, trembling on the road to Sarnia. Christ. 

-----

[[div class="page"]]
Wynn, 
@@ @@
I keep asking you to talk to me. We both know I don't actually want to hear it. I hope communicating that is as much of a relief to you as it is to me. 
@@ @@
You've managed to get two PhDs somehow, but I implore you to ignore any other ways out you can think of. None of them are viable. It's about time we stopped beating around the bush and talked candidly. 
@@ @@
The two options are:
[[/div]]

------

Why would he do that, Scout thought. Why would he //do// that. Why on Earth would he ever think it would be bad enough to warrant something like that. What kind of mental torment would make //that// worth it?

('Why would Wynn Rydderech do that', how many times in their illegal not-marriage had that very sentence crossed his mind? 'What on Earth would have //possessed// you to do that', how many husbands and wives on this planet thought the same everyday?) 

It was a doctoral thesis sort of question, from Vivian Scout's perspective. He liked to think he knew the ins and outs of Wynn Rydderech quite well, actually, including his melancholia and the ways it manifested, and he was aware that Wynn didn't always share how bad it got, no matter how much Vivian asked. What Wynn did was isolate himself. He retreated, he stopped talking, and for Vivian this already was unthinkable. 

You had to go poke and prod at him to make sure he was still alive, when it got severe and prolonged; sometimes Vivian could tell it was getting bad just by the language he used in his letters, how they reduced in length and became more self-deprecating and strange, more defensive of things Vivian hadn't even thought were an issue. Sometimes, when he and Wynn were apart, he would suddenly stop receiving correspondence from him at all, and after a few probing letters he would get a shockingly short response, just a few lines as opposed to a few pages. 

The most worrying correspondence he'd ever received from Wynn was along these lines. It had read:

[[div style="border:solid 1px #999999; background:#E2F4FF; padding-left: 16px; padding-right: 16px;margin-bottom: 16px;"]]

Vivian, 

Apologies! I'm not well.

-Wynn

[[/div]]

...After which came a full three weeks of silence. Scout sent more letters; he heard from colleagues about Wynn's brother's sudden death in London, and about Wynn taking a short leave of absence to travel to Wales to attend the funeral. 

Scout sent his condolences. And yes-- he had worried. But he would wait. He would make himself wait. 

One week passed. Then over one week. He heard Wynn had not returned yet after three weeks, and this concerned him quite a bit; it kept him up at night, thinking about it. Checking the mail, asking the couriers directly if they'd heard from him. Nothing. 

In another week, he heard Wynn had returned to Austria and was back at work, much to his relief-- but still, silence. Vivian sent slightly more strongly worded condolences. He sent somewhat pleading ones, as well. And then one day, a full month and a half after his last letter:

[[div style="border:solid 1px #999999; background:#E2F4FF; padding-left: 16px; padding-right: 16px;margin-bottom: 16px;"]]

Viv,

I am well! I'm developing a means to [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/15-a-clean-break remove temporal effects from Anachronic materials!] I've attached a draft manuscript

[[/div]]

(It was a 23 page piece of correspondence written across multiple weights and letterheads of paper, sometimes with different pens and inks and finished by a typewriter he knew for certain Wynn hadn't had before, accompanied by a 47 page handwritten manuscript and rough schematics in a manila file. The entire collection was nested in a package wrapped in brown paper and twine. He included chocolates from Cardiff. Vivian stepped outside to breathe.) 

------

Their worst fight had been over correspondence. It had been about something academic-- Vivian couldn't even remember what it had originally been about, only that it rapidly spiraled into the sort of personal grievances that build up in any romantic relationship, and eventually their angry letters to one another grew so numerous and clearly unscientific that the Foundation couriers simply stopped delivering them. 

Vivian had thought, at first, that something had earnestly happened to Wynn. When he learned through his colleagues that Wynn was physically fine in Austria and that the Abatement plant was still standing, he assumed it was a petty ploy meant to infuriate him, and it did; he sent Wynn one of the most irate letters of their relationship in response, and handed it off to the courier with the ink still wet in the envelope and fury still etched in his features. Two hours later he'd wished he hadn't sent it. When Wynn still didn't respond, he decided he meant every word and more. 

(He would learn later that Wynn, too, thought he was simply being ignored out of spite, but Wynn's melancholic response was to recede and sulk; his letters became shorter and more bitter than angry, taking petty shots he knew would get under Vivian's skin. It was here he threw the 'trading one goldfish out for another' barb at him, concerning Isle Reynders, and Vivian Scout would remember it for the rest of his life.)

Both of them kept sending letters. The letters grew angrier, then softer, then apologetic, then pleading; when the couriers finally resumed their delivery, they were each handed a crate of the outstanding inter-Foundation correspondence dated over the past two weeks, and spent the night half a world apart piecing it back together. 

They made up by trading two-page, purposefully businesslike letters, and then Vivian woke one morning to find a letter sent to him via Swiss mail.

(How he managed to get this piece of mail to Switzerland to be postmarked was beyond him. He //must// have sent it via //someone//-- Zwist? Would Zwist carry a letter to Switzerland for Wynn and not mention it? Did the two even know each other?)

He'd opened it and found it was the most lewd correspondence he'd ever read from the other man. The sort of thing that rendered him speechless. It was also incredibly, inexplicably emotionally raw, wrought, and honest. He spent an evening just reading it, and then rereading it, and then scratching his head and wondering what to do with it, and then rereading his favorite parts, much to his own fraught inner chagrin and dilemma...

It was true that Vivian considered every piece of correspondence they traded to be a love letter, if not to each other than to The Work, as it were-- but this, clearly, was a //love letter//. And it had no private return address for Vivian to do the same. 

Vivian's response, sent the next day via Foundation courier, had been something like: 

[[div class="typewriter"]]

Wynn, 
@@ @@
After considering the materials sent via telegraph, I am pleased with the results, but have infohazardous waste as a biproduct of the process. Will send on to Austria as such. Please regard with scrutiny.
@@ @@
-Vivian 

[[/div]]

And then he wrote a love letter back. It took him three days and an incredibly conscious effort to write it without restraint. He circumvented the couriers by marking and packaging it as anomalous waste, to be delivered to Wynn Rydderech and only to Wynn Rydderech, and marked the letter itself as a volatile infohazard sealed in a containment crate the size of a cereal box. Wynn received it unopened and apparently almost threw it into the abatement incinerator without a second thought; at the time, Vivian felt so embarrassed by the contents that he'd almost wished he had.

(It was, in fact, an infohazard of a certain kind. Scout didn't think he'd ever written something so sexually explicit in his life, and he //definitely// had never written down any long-plauging homosexual fantasies involving Dr. Wynn Rhys Rydderech. Words have power, good Lord, do they.)

When he rediscovered it in Wynn's things at the Site-43 Directors' Complex, he'd blushed horribly, much to Wynn's chiding glee. When he found it again after his disappearance, he held it in his hands and wept.

------

It had been Wynn who had bought him the novelized version of 'Foundation' by Issac Asimov when it was released in 1951. It was part of a long-time tradition they had with birthdays; Wynn kept an eye on the science fiction releases, and Vivian Scout ventured into a comic book store once a year for Wynn. 

(Vivian had long suspected his appearing in a comic book store to be part of the gift, from Rydderech's point of view. Wynn mail-ordered the books for Vivian from a catalogue at the same time he ordered inventory for the labs, and sent Falkirk upstairs with the order sheets in a packet to be sent off-- how was that an equitable experience?)

When 'Foundation and Empire' was released in 1952, Wynn did the same. Vivian finished reading it while watching the other man agitate himself into a lather over a journal article he was writing, and once Scout had watched him absorbed in the gridlock of his own notes and thoughts for another few minutes, he stood, walked over to the typewriter they shared in the Directors' Complex, sifted through the stack of completed sheets to Wynn's left, and told him exactly which bit he was missing. The Good Work was done by 9 pm and they both went to bed on time. 

When 'Second Foundation' was released in 1953, the two of them were in the middle of a messy bit of administrative business complicated by a web of internal affairs-- it drove Wynn mad, he had to let the other man recede into his caverns after about a week of rejected proposals and meticulous meetings, but Vivian got around to reading it once the dust settled. He finished that one while waiting for Wynn to come back upstairs-- and he did, later that night, with a few fresh caustic burns but otherwise unharmed. He fell asleep in Vivian's arms. 

When 'Foundation's Edge' was released in 1982, Wynn was on a streak of bad days, the sort of days Vivian hypothesized snowballed into more bad days. Their late night conversations looked like: 
@@ @@
[[div class="page"]]
i can't remember. i can't forget. 
[[/div]]
@@ @@
[[div class="danke site"]]
It's alright. You don't need to remember or forget, Wynn. You can just be. 
[[/div]]
@@ @@
This was something he reminded Winny of repeatedly when things were bad; just to slow down. He had to do this when the other man was above ground before, he had to do this when they'd been at Cardiff, he had always had to do this for him. Himself, seeing him squirm and pace in front of a typewriter while the answer was clear, stuck in his own head. It was a very Wynn Rydderech problem to have. 
@@ @@
[[div class="page"]]
i can't stop
i can't stop
i keep going around again
[[/div]]
@@ @@
[[div class="danke site"]]
It's okay. Tell me what has you stuck. I might be able to help.   
[[/div]]
@@ @@
The printer suddenly started running and went for 20 minutes. Once it was clear to Vivian he was printing off a book of some kind, as in, a coherent book clearly not written by Wynn, he slipped out to get coffee and came back with it still printing into the silent, empty room. Once he was done, and Vivian picked up the sheaf of paper from the dot matrix printer and saw it had Issac Asimov's name on it, he reverse engineered Wynn's train of thought as he was sometimes still able to do, and checked the title. 
@@ @@
[[div class="danke site"]]
Oh. I don't think this book will be published until 1993, Wynn. That's what the publication mark says. 
[[/div]]
@@ @@
The book was 'Prelude to Foundation'. And it would, in fact, not be published until 1993. It hadn't even been written. 
@@ @@
[[div class="page"]]
i'll never get it right. i never.
[[/div]]
@@ @@
[[div class="danke site"]]
Yes, you do, Wynn, you get it right. You meant to give me this for my birthday. That's today. You were correct. 
[[/div]]
@@ @@
[[div class="danke site"]]
Thank you. I love you. 
[[/div]]
@@ @@
It was true that sometimes Wynn was a broken clock that was right so many times a day he wasn't broken at all, just... frazzled. Sometimes Vivian wondered if Wynn was always right, but not for here and now. That worried him. 
@@ @@
[[div class="page"]]
no you don't. no you don't. 
why are you lying to me? 
[[/div]]
@@ @@
Well, almost. But this was classifiable under 'Preexisting Wynn Rydderech neuroses' to Vivian. 
@@ @@
[[div class="danke site"]]
I'm not lying. I love you. 
[[/div]]
@@ @@
[[div class="danke site"]]
Trusting me to say 'I love you' and know my own intentions when I say it is an act of love towards me, Wynn. It's an act of trust; I know that's hard, because you don't often trust yourself, but I'm confident in my own assessments. Do me the kindness of believing me. Please. 
[[/div]]
@@ @@

Or at least pretend to, he thought. At least pretend, like you used to. 

(Speaking of trust, he thought bitterly. Just pretending it was all alright; just pretending. Wynn, in pain far more than he ever let on, and not telling him, not giving him even the slightest chance to help. It gutted Vivian sometimes even now, it really did.)

No response from Wynn. After an hour of doing paperwork at the desk with the printer, he said he was going to bed and wished him goodnight, cleared the history of the terminal like he always did when he typed 'I love you', took the Issac Asimov manuscript, and left.  

-----

In 1959 Wynn published a review called 'Acroamatic Abatement: Guiding Principals and Basic Procedure'. It was a huge, sweeping document bound in a binder for lab use, covering basics on every subtopic Wynn could think of, from the layout of an ideal Abatement facility to investigating unknown materials to handling emergencies and surprises-- save for the section on safety, which was contributed by Ilse and Vivian. 

It was quickly enshrined as a formative text, Vivian would come to learn, not just in Foundation circles but in wider anomalous ones. In some ways it was the first text of its kind; Wynn had written it because multiple of he and Vivian's colleagues had been bugging him to write a textbook since Austria, even going so far as to offer their services to edit and review it, and also because Ilse Reynders dared him to offhandedly one day. Naturally, the latter was the biggest influence in his choice to do so. 

It wasn't a textbook. It was something between a review of literature, an informal crash course, a set of condensed and incredibly useful data tables, a stack of blueprints, a spattering of unpublished case studies, a sheaf of mind-bending (literally) tolerance charts, and a shockingly sincere love letter to The Good Work at large. 'Guiding Principals and Basic Procedure', despite the bland name supplied by Vivian when Wynn couldn't think of anything better, was one of his favorite pieces of academic work his partner had ever produced, and it was so blindingly full of Wynn and who he was that it was painful for Scout to look at after 1966.

And then, yes, two weeks after publication: Vivian had gone down to tell him about Zwist somehow obtaining a book-bound copy, and found him weeping on a lab bench, alone in the caverns and pipes and flowstone circuits. Wynn had the systems running so high that night he could see the flocculation tanks shivering in their supports in the shadows, like he'd intentionally cranked up the system's speed just to make noise, and the clamor echoed and thrummed in the facility in a way that made Vivian desperately uneasy. 

"Wynn?" He called, when he saw him hunched there. He had to raise is voice over the din. There was a distant //boom// as the pumps turned on. 

"It'll never be enough," Wynn said. He banged a fist on the tabletop sharp and hard enough to make Scout start, then whipped to face him, his eyes filled with an inexplicable grief and despair. "It just won't //ever be!//"

And in the flocculation tanks behind him the metal arms churned fast and hot in the dark. They churned, and churned, and--

----

--The horses' legs churned, too, stepping carefully on the bottom of the streambed. The clear blue water was just high enough to be chest high for the animals and foot-high for the two of them; Vivian pulled his feet up reflexively to avoid getting his shoes wet. Wynn did not, but he was wearing what he deemed his 'lab shoes', which were already bleached with chemicals and the wear of a somehow even more reckless and stupid undergraduate Wynn Rydderech. 

("I waterproofed them," Wynn insisted. Vivian did not believe this in the slightest.) 

And Winny, singing in the warm, clear air. The tune was sweet, wistful. He rode the roan mare upright and confidently and water from the stream splashed on his pantlegs as he sang. 

= Ar lan y mor mae rhosys cochion, 
= Ar lan y mor mae lilis gwynion, 
= Ar lan y mor mae 'nghariad inne
= Yn cysgu'r nos a cho--

The horse pulled back and stamped in the water. Vivian stilled his own horse and watched, entranced, as Wynn ran both hands down the horse's neck and spoke to it in Welsh, softly, as if that was the only language it knew. Indeed, it probably was.

"What kind of song was that?" Vivian asked, once they got up the trail. 

"What does it sound like?" 

"I don't know. I assumed some kind of work song," said Vivian. He hadn't had a terribly musical childhood, nor a terribly tightly-knit or cultural one; sometimes he envied Wynn's catalogue of songs people sang while working, the sort of historical schema passed on in the most hands-on fashion imaginable, instead of imbibed through a book or class. 

(He'd later realize they were a gift. Knowledge of a whole world he would have otherwise never seen, words in verse that were freely gifted to him just as they had been gifted to Wynn. //Here is a song I sing as I ride, and another my father sang in the dark.// Words have power.)

Wynn glanced back at him over one shoulder and grinned. "That's no work song. A work song has more, y'know." He drummed his hands against the horse's neck in rhythm like a drum, flat-palmed and playful. Both of the horses, which Wynn borrowed from a friend of his in Cardiff, seemed unphased by this kinetic Wynn-ism. "A good work song has a pull to it, it keeps people singing." 

Wynn hummed the same tune for a moment, thoughtfully. Then he said, "Actually, I learned one drinking with the folks on the dock last year you might enjoy. They were Americans. Something like--"   

----

= Way down yonder in Tennessee, 
= They leased the convicts out. 
= They worked them in the coal mine against free labor stout. 
= Free labor rebelled against it, to win it took some time, 
= But while the lease was in effect, they made 'em rise and shine. 

Wynn didn't always sing like this in the abatement labs, that was to say, full-throated and focused on the singing just for the sake of it. Most of the times Vivian heard him sing, he was muttering it without noticing he was singing, or humming while deep in thought, or a combination of the two, and only a few words at a time would escape him in mumbled, muscle memory verse.  

That was what he dipped into as he and Ilse stood, their conversation paused, hands to incubator glass. The story of poorly-shrouded convict labor during the 1891 Coal Creek miner's strike went from a confident, strident lilt that carried through the chugging labs, to a soft half-mumble, half-whistle of a 'roll down the line' chorus as a hatch opened and its contents were examined, then another verse:

= --March them down to Lone Rock, just look into that mine.
= March them down to Lone Rock, just look into that hole. 
= Very next words the captain says, 'you better get your pole.'

'Pole', the long-handled pickaxe for driving bolts and wedges. And so on, so forth. It was true Vivian liked this one. He listened for a moment longer as he hit the chorus, then dove back down into muttering while opening another hatch. 

"Apologizes. He's in rare form," Vivian said to her. For a long time she couldn't hear him singing unless he was touching something by the incubator, but things had changed in the past few years-- now she might overhear him singing if she just pressed her hand to the glass. Neither of them could figure out why. 

Ilse smiled. Vivian was relieved to see it. "Those poor people have been going down to see the mine and get their axes all morning," she said. "I mean, I told you, I don't mind. I like hearing him sing." 

"And you can step away if you'd like. Sometimes I wonder what his research assistants think." Not that that would stop him, and Vivian was glad it didn't. Wynn's voice found the chorus again, and his voice echoed off the steel drums and hardened tanks, the buzzing pipes in their fittings and the whirring of machinery. Wynn couldn't read music and never had a formal musical education-- these were the only instruments he knew how to play.  

Ilse sighed. "I'm just glad he switched, you should have heard him all last night. He was on that frightening Welsh one about the man who plays the harp one last time before he dies."

She was referencing 'Dafydd y Garreg Wen', a much more mournful, haunting folksong from the Wynn Rydderech Musical Rolodex. //Last night an angel called with heaven's breath: 'David, play, and come through the gates of death!'//, and so on, or at least, that was what Wynn told him the translation was. 

Vivian raised an eyebrow. "Oh? He doesn't do that one very often." He sometimes wondered if Wynn sang it when he was thinking of Ashley. 

She nodded and leaned her head against the glass with a dull 'thunk'. "He's been singing it more recently. You should come down after ten at night, that's when I think he fancies it."

This was in late October 1966. And 'Ar Lan Y Mor' was a love song he'd never hear again. 

-----

'Acroamatic Abatement: Guiding Principals and Basic Procedure' originally included the black and white photo of Wynn's Set Animal burn, taken while it was still healing after the explosion in 1947. It was used as part of a larger section on runes, letters, and symbols, and how incomplete context of an unabated material often left workers in the dark. The proper procedure listed was to first seek out cultural context clues from the recovery itself, prior to any attempts at abatement, given the artifact wasn't at immediate risk of offgassing or further decay, and to approach those cultural clues with weight and respect. 

To the right of the image, on the same page, was a color photograph of the same burn in 1959, where the shape of the hieroglyph was long turned ruddy pink with scar tissue in a web of others Wynn had obtained. Scout made him add a footnote referring readers to the section on safety.

In 1975, Vivian thought he had it in him to take one last look over the draft of the newest edition before sending it off to be published. He barely made it through-- Wynn's voice was so vivid and exuberant in some sections it almost killed him to read it over again. 

One tough decision later, Ilse had agreed to head the editing of all subsequent editions, and she would continue heading it after Vivian's death. The Set Animal burn (oh, Scout missed tracing the Set Animal burn with one finger, Wynn, in his arms), was now captioned: 'The Author's encounter with an anomalous explosion left this burn. Taken by Vivian Scout.'

Identifying him as the photographer was risky. He and Ilse debated it. He showed her, for the first time, the three pictures in their unaltered form: Wynn at their kitchen table, being foolish, miming horns on either side of his head; Wynn with a visible healing black eye kissing Scout, leaning in from out of frame as a smiling dark shadow, both of them identifiable; Wynn, grinning back over one shoulder, pleased that Scout had been foolish, too. They were some of the best photos he had of Winny, the Set Animal burn front and center in the photograph, their love written on the margins. They were fantastic. 

The caption went to print. Taken by Vivian Scout, that was true, no more, no less. 

In 1985 there was another edition and history still was coming around, slowly, hampered by the AIDS crisis as it hit Canada. In 1995 Vivian decided he'd had enough. He told Ilse the new caption, and Ilse changed it: the 1996 edition would say, 'The Author's encounter with an anomalous explosion, taken by his husband Vivian Scout, 1943'. 

The editors rejected the change. Ilse sent it back unaltered. They rejected it again. Vivian sent them a strongly worded letter, among the last he'd send in his lifetime. The journal would let it go to print, reluctantly. 

The 2017 edition published the full photographs in an appendix. Wynn Rydderech, grinning mischievously, his eyes alert and alight; Wynn Rydderech facing away, with his fingers on either side of his head like horns; Wynn Rydderech kissing Vivian Scout in the upper left of the frame. And The Set Animal burn, in all its necessary context, at center.
------

When the third edition had gone out, Vivian had strongly considered putting two more pictures into the section on safety, also taken with Wynn shirtless in their kitchen in 1959: one of Wynn's shoulder, which was still marred in the distant and fading scars of the autoclave blast, and one of his forearms and hands, which were most possibly the most scarred parts of him. Every kind of burn, the railroad track scars of stitches on his left forearm, the small dark dimple where the eleventh finger had been removed, a section that had been permanently altered in color from a chemical spill... The Work had been all over Rydderech. Vivian could lie with him and trace a hundred stupid decisions with one finger in the dark. Winny. Oh, Winny. 

He decided against it at the time because it felt voyeuristic, like he was putting his partner on display. And then time went on, and he thought about it more, and the little pilot light of anger and resentment inside him occasionally lit a thin stream of gas...

No, he still couldn't. There was an argument to be made about putting it in, saying in plain terms //this is what happens, safety is written in blood,// but Vivian wasn't convinced it was an Acroamatic issue. It was a Wynn issue. It was because he was taking too many risks on purpose, and there was still nothing inside Scout that lit him with fury faster than thinking about it. 

Why. Why? Oh god, //why?//

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1970
++ She Gave Up All The Secrets Of His Past And Said: He Lost Control Again.
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

“Did you know he had Spanish Flu?” Silena asked. 

“Who? //Wynn?//” Vivian said. They were in Stokholm, in her apartment above the abatement plant, much more stylish and well-kept than he remembered Wynn’s abatement lab apartment being in Austria. He was there for a conference, and more importantly there to meet her for the first time in person. She was pouring them tea. 

“That’s impossible. He told me he dodged it,” Scout continued. 

Silena smiled and set down the kettle. “He told an abatement conference in 1964 he came up with that anachronistic materials thing while he had it.” 

“That stupid bastard,” Vivian said, without hesitation. He said it the same way he would talk about the weather; ever since Wynn had gone down to the caverns below the Site, it felt more natural than ever to say something along those lines, even if he didn’t mean it, because he never did. It was something he said instead of bursting into tears; that stupid bastard, simply put; that scheming, conniving, dodgy bastard, the man he loved and missed and grieved more than anything else on Earth, of course he’d get the Great Flu that killed young men and not find it relevant to mention. He’d said it to Zwist more than once, with tears in his eyes: Oh, god damn that man. 

“He said he was in Cardiff, but he didn’t say why he was there. That confused me. I thought he was in Austria at the time.” 

“He was there for his brother’s funeral. October 1919, it must have been. Oh, damn it,” said Vivian. At least he’d had the decency to have a colleague write to Wynn when he’d been infected; Wynn had been terrified, he knew later, he’d felt bad about it, but of course he’d told him. If something happened, he deserved to know. 

He would have damn well remembered if Wynn had told him. Instead, well—he’d already dropped off the face of the Earth, that time. 

“They must have bled him. That was around when he started doing that, when we saw each other fairly regularly,” said Silena.

“They must have bled him,” Vivian repeated tonelessly. Bloodletting, terrible practice, if you’d asked him if Wynn would have allowed it maybe ten years ago Scout would have said of course not, it was a horrible and obviously scientifically baseless thing, they’d talked about it in sunlit pastures around Cardiff. But now…

Wynn, unconscious from the ECT. And also, Wynn, with scars all over him from carelessness. If fate should have it, if the opportunity presented itself…

Silena must have seen the rage and horror cross his features. She was a woman in silver, already past when she should have been retired, but they all were. People at the Foundation had trouble passing the torch. And she was stern-looking and as put together as he was. Maybe Wynn attracted certain types, was that it? 

“Did he tell you about that?” Silena asked clinically, but he could hear the distant rage in her own voice and felt it bolster his own. It was funny how quickly it came on, the rage and grief. They had been commenting on how funny it was they’d never met maybe ten minutes ago. 

She sat down across the table from him. “No,” he said. “I have no idea what you mean by that, Silena.” 

“I cleaned out a vent in this apartment last year, did you know what I found? From 1919, if your estimate is correct?” She asked. Before he could respond she reached into the pocket of her jacket and removed a small wooden box with a single brass latch, and Vivian recognized it instantly. As a former asthmatic child, he’d never been bloodlet himself but had seen it in the doctor’s bag and been terrified. 

He was terrified now. She set it on the tabletop where it looked worn and hidden in the light. She opened it.  

"That's all his blood," she said, tersely. "I'll show you that manuscript I told you about, the blood on that matches, too. I must have taken him by surprise and he stashed it. The bastard." 

------
[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1963
++ You Can't Do This To Me
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

The Set Animal was a creature of oil and coal. It stood waist high beside him in the cave dark of their home, outlined in presence by his own heartbeat and a thin ray of light from the kitchen, in silence, and in heaviness. It had mass. 	

“You can’t //do// this to me,” Wynn whispered. He saw it, in its many dire outlines merged with tar darkness and cave black, and said, “I’m too damn //old//. I’m a different man now, I have a damn career. You can’t keep //doing// this to me.” 

[[div class="page"]]

You can’t keep doing this to you

[[/div]]

Said the Set Animal. Everything the Set Animal said was said in the voice of limestone relief and stone. Weight and edges, light and pinpricks, blood. 

------

“Is that why you think he did it?” Vivian asked Silena. 

“Not precisely,” she said. “I think it’s a clue. A theme. I think it gripped him very tightly, sometimes. I think, maybe, to him at the time..."

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1966
++ Sorry, Vivian! The Only Thing Better Than Loving You Is Hating Me!
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

He woke up and thought: it's time. 

He had seen it in an electric dream. He was going to wake at 5, his typical schedule when he wasn't in the abatement ward all night, but he woke at 4:45 and stared behind him, at the window panes, where the faintest traces of dawn were beginning to come through. 

There were no windows in the Directors' Complex. It was underground. They were there because it was time. 

//Time,// Wynn thought. He rose like a set animal in the darkness. He looked at Vivian, also in darkness, in the bed across their bedroom, facing away from him, burrowed slightly like he had always done. The shape of Vivian Scout. 

Vivian hated him, he thought. He had gathered enough evidence to reject the hypothesis of their love. Or maybe not, he thought; maybe this was another passing phase, another nightmare-turning-cycle from which he would wake in due time, if he kept breathing, if he kept waiting, if he waited for the chemistry in his mind to churn like various pipes and modules had to be cycled in the AAF each morning at 6am. If he waited. 

He needed to work fast, Wynn thought, or he would lose the resolve. Things would be okay again. He wanted to be done with it, so he rose, and he appeared in front of the mirror like an apparition, and there was no emotion on his face but the light from the windows overlooking Cardiff, the windows from the mens' dormitory where they'd lived to his left. The dawn from an ocean away returned shadows to his face. His eyes were open. His eyes. 

Wynn leaned in. He had seen this in an electric dream, but this was not that electric dream; this was something to the left, a hallucination, a dreary deja vu of [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/63-de-tijd-vliegt a secondary time occurring now but in a different place]. He leaned so close to the mirror that his forehead nearly touched the glass, and he glanced sideways as if he could see through the glass to yet another time. The reflection on the other side had no secrets he didn't already know, so instead, he met his own gaze. 

He was not weeping. He felt nothing at all. This was a different electric dream. And then he felt the electric pulse of nervous need in his veins that had woken him up in the night ever since Cardiff, all those years ago. 

He needed to work. If he didn't work, he would implode. 

This time he would not be coming back from working; rusted belts, maxed out tolerance tables, couplings coming undone under the tormentous pressure of steam. He had been running it all too hard for too long, resetting the electric bill too often. He was going to fall apart. 

He thought about waking Vivian. Vivian would know what to do. He would tell Vivian everything. 

Wynn thought this last part just as his wrists began to fall asleep from the pressure of leaning against them on the rim of the sink for so long. His wedding ring was still there. He pulled away from the mirror and stood in the dim twilight and thought: //There is work to be done and it is not Good Work, Vivian. What I am doing to myself is not good.// He clutched the sink and saw his own eyes unfocused in the mirror like a shadow of a wraith. //I am attempting the Good Work and failing, Vivian.// Set animal crawl, dull roar of the abatement tanks, wire upon wire coiled through caverns to where he last lay. He thought: //Unlike you, some of us fail.//

He could wake up Vivian. He weighed it in his mind like a perfectly balanced chemical spoon, as if the weight of his permanent disappearance and the weight of waking Vivian Scout two hours before his alarm were equal and equitable costs. In his mind, they were-- waking Vivian for this, shaking himself from this delirious and hallucinatory conviction he'd come to consciousness with, it was unthinkable. He was waiting for 5. All dreams he had of this nature under the tanks began his falling apart at 5. 

He felt the clock turn to five. He was not in a suit; he was in his lab clothes, minus the white coat whenever he bothered to put it on, and his hair was orange. He was fine with that. And he was covered in freckles, no older than 26. His hands were dusted with coal.

Yes, this was a different electric dream. A variation on the same. 

Shadows grew over him. He disappeared the impossible windows and plunged himself into poorly-domesticated cave darkness. He had not been to the surface in eight months and he did not break the mirror. There was work to be done. 

--------

Ilse, conscious in her chamber, facing away from him in the same clothes she'd worn since 1944. He approached as if on a precipice. Ezekiel, etc: Give your only son Issac. The warped glass of the incubator was a false suggestion reflecting light. 

He was calm. He was purposeful. His face was neutral. He approached and rapped on the glass.

She turned. 

"Ilse," he said aloud, and his voice seemed so young it was absurd. "Why are you still in there?" 

"Someone seemed to have locked the door," said Ilse Reynders, his one and biggest question, his tormentous unsolved problem. "Who are you? Are you allowed to be in here?" 

Wynn pressed his hands, young and freckled, against the glass. His palms were pale and cool, but the scars he had accumulated remained. He wondered if she would be able to identify his body from the scars alone. Just the ones on his forearms. 

He said nothing. He pressed his forehead to the glass. "How have we not figured it out yet? You and I, and Vivian, and the others. It can't be that difficult," he said, in his impossibly young voice with the heavier Welsh lilt. 

Ilse looked puzzled. He let her look puzzled. Then, her eyes widened. 

"Dr. Rydderech?" she said. 

He put one muddy boot against the chamber. "I invented the science of destroying things like //that//." He pressed one index finger pad to the window harder, towards the orb, the silver mercury sheen of nearly abated material that haunted him. "I'm still the best there is." 

Ilse was silent. It did not matter what she said; he was reading from a script drawn in Welsh at the base of the pipes, scried from dreams and visions. When he spoke again his voice stayed even. "I can do something," he said, slowly, his fingers splayed, the coal dust leaving prints of his being there on the glass, he pressed it hard and spoke with wonder, "I //know// I can do something. I'm going to get you out of there." 

"You can't," said Ilse. She had found the script. She had found it because it was written here. They were reading it for no audience at all. 

Wynn's eyes flashed with intensity, something akin to anger in the ethereal glow of the 1944 perpetual incinerator bulbs. "I can," he said. "And I'm //going// to. And then I'm going to get Lys out, too." 

"Lys is dead," said Ilse. 

"I can fix that, too," said Wynn. 

He met her gaze, his eyes intent, emotionless, dry. 

Then he broke from the script. He did not say sorry; saying sorry would break his resolve, so he simply wasn't. He stepped back from the incinerator, leaving black dust streaked in his wake; he turned towards the corridor pointedly; and he walked to directly across the hall from Ilse, within her sight line, where a coal miner's elevator had appeared. It rattled open under the light of a single bulb. He entered and turned to face her in the shadows.

She was yelling and banging her fists against the glass. Wynn pressed the button. The cage rattled and slammed shut. It descended him into the earth, and Ilse's chamber disappeared behind eons of slick cave rock until all it had ever been was a dream. 

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1912
++ And His Thesis Was On Coal.
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

Wynn, beautiful and powerful in his tumult, working like a man possessed, like a man consumed by lightning in front of him in the Cardiff toxicology lab. Vivian had spent the last three days doing homework alone in their dorm, waiting, and waiting, and not seeing him; he'd finally donned his black greatcoat and made his way across campus, afraid of what he'd find.

And yes, he was afraid for what he found. 

The storm was dark and churning outside the window panes. Wynn was working by a mixture of haphazard candlelight and the oil lanterns above them. Papers were strewn everywhere, his sleeves were held up with garters and stained with... with his thesis topic. 

Coal. Wynn's doctorate had been on the abatement of coal. And Vivian hated what it did to him, in those years, because if there was anything on God's earth that couldn't be abated it was Wynn's father had mined. 

"Bad work. Shoddy at best," Wynn spat. His eyes were exhausted and filled with fire. He took a sheaf of papers covered in his own handwriting and equations and smacked them against the lab bench as if to emphasize. "Shit work, all of it, shit, it doesn't do //anything//. This is going to //kill mankind//, Vivian, and for //what?//" 

"Wynn," Vivian said, calmly. Wynn, dressed in browns in opposition to his own blacks and greys. Wynn, consumed. 

"The data doesn't lie, Viv. Any literature about coal will tell you it's a filthy mess that dooms humanity, and here we are just burning it like it's nothing. Like it doesn't kill anything and everything and every//one// it touches." 

"I'm not arguing with you, I agree. It's a messy business--" 

Wynn, suddenly furious, ripping through the sheets and books splayed open on the lab table until he found a Swiss journal article printed in monograph and ripped it to the top. "Here," he said. "Here!"

Vivian scanned it. At the time, he had legitimately thought Wynn had entered this frothing desperation about nothing, about what was reported as a predicted 3 to 4 degree rise in global temperatures in a single journal article from one source, coupled with Wynn recreating the calculations his own, both with ink to smeared coal paper and with frantic writing on the chalkboard beside him. It wasn't until long after Wynn was gone that Scout and Ilse would realize the full weight of what his partner had likely found doing his thesis in 1912, and the full effects would be known. 

(Wynn wasn't the only one to find it that early, either, and far from the first. But Scout would come to understand in hindsight... oh, Winny, one of the most gifted chemists he'd ever known, someone with such foresight and justifiable fury it was extraordinary. Of course he would be distraught beyond belief, of //course//, and so ahead of his time.)

"We need to get you home," Vivian said, instead, setting the journal article back on the counter with the gift of nonunderstanding. His own thesis was far less ambitious and, as a side effect, much less emotionally taxing. "Come on, Wynn, this is absurd. You've been here for days." 

Wynn jerked up to look at him in the eye, and for a moment Vivian got the sense he could see only darkness and terror. "They'll never stop burning it. As long as they can keep making money they'll never stop. People already pay with their lives for it, and what do they do?" He was getting choked up; Vivian opened his mouth to say something, anything, and Wynn moved to ignore him. "It should be //me// in those mines, Viv. What the hell am I doing here, acting like I'm better than them, like I'm some kind of scientist like-- like //you?//" 

"Wynn..." Vivian began. //You're a scientist, of course you're a scientist, what are you talking about,// is what he was going to say. Rydderech cut him off with one coal-stained hand. 

"You don't love me," he said, and his eyes were wild and haunted, "You never loved me, did you? You always hated me? Because I wouldn't blame you if you did. I want you to know that." 

The extreme hurt and confusion hit him so heavily Vivian felt breathless, like the other man had ripped something out of him. Just the way he said it, so confidently and stridently as if he knew how much it would hurt. Vivian swallowed hard, worked to keep himself from tears, and said, "Wynn, what on //Earth// are you--" 

"I knew it. I always knew," said Wynn, and his own love for Wynn was so great, so intense in his heart Vivian simply could not express it, and if he expressed it he wasn't sure the other man would believe him. "I should be in the mines, Vivian. I shouldn't be here. What am I even //doing// with all of this? What kind of wasted time is //this?//" he gestured to the coal, to the chemicals, to the papers and books and journals. 

He was all over the place, Vivian thought. "Wynn," he repeated, and reached to touch his shoulder. Wynn shrugged him off. He picked up the sheaf he'd discarded and found only completely ordinary, if not exceedingly competent calculus, chaotically blended together with notes and streaked coal dust across the page.

"I should die, is what I should do," Wynn said. "The world would be better off if I just //killed myself.//" 

"Winny," Vivian said, quietly.

Wynn still had some kind of concoction boiling on the Bunsen burner to their left, and for a moment its reduction in the glass flask was the only noise, aside from the rain pelting the windows and the sound of distant thunder. 

Vivian removed his glasses. He turned his head to the side, and wiped his eyes silently for a moment. This wasn't the first time he'd seen Vivian cry; it wasn't even the first time he'd //made// Vivian cry. They'd had their fights, their disagreements. But this time felt different, somehow. 

When Scout looked back at him, a raven in black, his eyes were ringed with red, and he was biting his lip to keep it from trembling, trying to compose himself. Something in Wynn's stomach sunk like a stone. He cleared his throat as Wynn found himself waiting for a response. "Winny. Please. //Please// don't say that."

"It's true, isn't it?" Wynn said. He was more than angry; he was convinced. And anyone who said otherwise was a liar. 

"No. No, it isn't." He was surprised to hear anger, genuine anger in Scout's voice. "We need to get you out of here, right now. No more chemistry." 

"The chemistry isn't the problem," said Wynn. 

"You've been up for three days with the chemistry. I don't think the chemistry is helping," said Vivian. "This is serious, Wynn. What you just said." 

Wynn clutched the edge of the lab bench and leaned over The Work, the terrible mess of it before him and let out a sob through gritted teeth before he could stop himself. Vivian's hand found the back of his shirt, between his shoulders. 

"Just... words, Viv. I'm sorry," he said. 

"Not just words. If they were just words you wouldn't have said them." Vivian clutched his shoulder tightly. "No. Damn the work. It's not worth it." Vivian, suddenly invigorated with intention, kissing him on the top of his head. "Damn it. Damn all of it." 

"The world doesn't improve without the work," said Wynn. And there was so, so much to be done. 

"The world doesn't improve without //you,// god damn it, I //need// you. Come home with me." Coal, covering Wynn's hands, his shirt, the lab bench. Coal. 

Wynn began to weep in earnest. Vivian reached across him and turned off the Bunsen burner, bringing the reaction to a stop as if to make a point; then he held Wynn in his arms as both of them cried. 

---------

"Why do you wish you were dead?" Vivian asked. He asked it so sweetly, so softly and sincerely, that Rydderech was genuinely taken off-guard. 

It was the next day. Yes, they had skipped recitation with no notice. Yes, it was unusual for them, and probably suspicious. 

But Vivian Scout had been stalwart: no chemistry. They would figure this out, together. he said, which was another shocking statement for Wynn, and another that filled him with no small amount of horrible dread for the ensuring conversation. 

They'd been walking down the rocky shore in silence for maybe fifteen minutes when Vivian finally asked. Wynn felt his guts curl up inside himself horribly. He took a deep breath of the sea spray, sighed, and ran his right hand through his matted red hair. 

"I wouldn't blame you if you never spoke to me again after that outburst, if I'm speaking plainly," said Wynn. 

"I can't imagine anything you'd say that would make me do that," said Vivian Scout, the slow and patient tide in his life, an unexpected and altogether unearned stable onlooker. Audience to the worst outburst he'd had in years in front of another person-- yes, it was true, Wynn had had more in private, that was how melancholia worked, in his experience. But they hadn't been like this. 

Wynn scoffed. "You're going to try and tell me that me suggesting suicide wasn't entirely out of line and ridiculous?" 

Vivian's eyes were grey. The glasses he'd had back then were round and thin, like a sheen of razor wire, and he wore them with an ease Wynn failed to understand. The other man maneuvered his head so they were in the least intimidating position, so his eyes were clear and visible through the lenses and betrayed a sort of odd, doe-eyed innocence, and he said, "It //was// out of line, Wynn. But not for the reasons you cited."

Vivian Scout took his hand. The fingers were cold and scarred, but at least the coal dust was off, and the skin under them was pale and slightly freckled among the chemical burns and accumulated scrapes and reckless scars.

Set animal.

"Why do you think you should die?" Scout repeated. "Yes, the suicide, Wynn, it was... I just..." He was at a loss for words, his eyes strange and sad, confused. He squeezed Wynn's hand softly. "I would be broken without you," he said, and there were tears in his voice. 

Wynn's stomach dropped painfully with guilt. It wasn't scolding, was the thing-- he could handle it if Vivian had scolded him, that was fine. But it was earnest, and confused, like Vivian had watched him kick a dog on the street or something similarly senseless and pointless. 

It's all your own fault, his mother had said. Wynn swallowed hard, and stopped walking, because Vivian had stopped walking and was pulling him back towards him on the shore. He allowed the other man to position him where he needed to be for this conversation: directly in front of him, toe to toe, with Scout's back facing the overcast sea. 

Vivian shook his head, slowly, as if in disbelief. His grey eyes shone with tears. Oh god, he should shoot himself with here and now, Wynn thought idly, because the thought was routine to him, it had no bite or malice, he had always wanted to die. He forgot Scout didn't think the same. 

"I'm sorry. I spoke out of turn," Wynn said earnestly, and then he instantly regretted it. They both were well aware it wasn't the fact he'd //spoken out of turn// that upset Vivian. It was what he'd said. The way he'd said it. 

"I just want to know //why//," said Scout. 

"I've always wanted to," said Wynn. Stupidly.

"That... that makes no //sense//, Wynn." Vivian's fingers had always been cold back at Cardiff, and they were cold now. The other man-- his other half, really, his better half-- took a deep breath and steadied himself for a moment. Then he continued. "I'm sorry. I'm just trying to understand why you say these things about yourself. They're just so...so terrible, and then what, you're just going to kill yourself? Talking like that, what on Earth do you //mean?//" He sounded angry again. 

Wynn stood at a loss for words. In his mind he reached for something, anything, to explain himself, but there was nothing to reach for. For once, he was making like Vivian: he was telling the truth. 

Wynn didn't even think much of that truth. Of course he wanted to die; wasn't it obvious why? 

(It wasn't.)

Vivian shook his head, slowly, and the distress and disgust of the suggestion was written so hard on his features it made Wynn's stomach churn. He had learned as an undergraduate that men would forget being worried about you if you kissed them, but the same thing wouldn't fool women as easily, and it had worked just often enough with Vivian in the past he'd thought he'd give it a shot just to end this horrible charade: Wynn looked up and down the beach to check for onlookers, found none, and kissed him instead of answering, hard and firm on the lips. 

Vivian kissed him back, first hesitantly, then more firmly. When he pulled away, the worry was still in his eyes, and they were tinged red around the edges. He took Wynn's hands in his own. 

He was a monster, actually. He was a monster for making Vivian Scout cry at all. Twice in two days was unthinkable. 

"Don't cry," Wynn said, stupidly. Fumbling through life, the exact opposite of Vivian and his elegance. No intentionality, no control, acting without grace or coordination except when actively being consumed. Vivian had everything. He could //do// everything. 

Vivian blinked quickly. "It scares me that I didn't know. You didn't even tell me." 

//Of course I didn't tell you,// Wynn thought. //I don't want to make you cry. Or worse, have you leave me.// But he heard in Scout's voice that it was this that was the biggest betrayal; Vivian 'Never Accuse Me of Silence' Scout, Vivian 'We Love Each Other And I Think You Think The Same Way I Do' Scout, Vivian 'I Trust You' Scout--

"You need to tell me when you're hurting. Please?" Speaking to a brick wall, an utter, uncomprehending void of silence and noise, like yelling into a cavernous rift in the earth. "Promise me?" 

Wynn kissed him again, and this time, Vivian pushed him away and said, "You're a bastard." His voice was cold and serious. 

"Oh? Do you want me to show you how much of a bastard I am?" asked Wynn, sensually. He was very good at hiding, and sidestepping, and deflecting, and miscommunicating on purpose, and he grinned at Scout, and Scout looked at him with tears in his eyes, genuine, helpless tears. 

//Catch me, Scout,// He thought. //Catch me by my tail, I dare you.//

(And you can't. I'm too good; I'm too quick.) 

"I'd say you're already showing that," said Scout. His voice wobbled. 

Anger flared in his chest, aching like Scout had touched a dry-healing wound, but not for the jab. For the fact Vivian had the audacity to be upset at all. For this fruitless exercise in consequence; or at least, that was what Wynn thought of it. 

"What are you going to do, Vivian? I suppose that's my real question. Tell me. What //are// you going to do about it? Put me in an asylum?" Catch me by my tail. Catch me.

Vivian stepped forward and wrapped his arms around him. It was maybe the tightest embrace Wynn had ever gotten from Vivian, save from the ones in private whenever they hadn't seen each other for years, and his arms were pinned at his sides, and Vivian's hand was in his hair.

"I..." Vivian swallowed hard and he felt his adams' apple bob against his shoulder. "I don't know, Wynn. I really just don't know what to do with you, sometimes."

(What will you do now, Vivian. What will you do about it, Vivian.) 

"Oh, let me guess. You want me to tell you, so we can have this same dreadful conversation all over again, Viv? Forgive me if I don't see the point."

Scout pulled back suddenly. "We'll have this conversation as many times as it takes," he said. "Whatever it takes to pull you out of your own head, Wynn, that's what I'll do. I'm not locking you away and getting rid of you, and I'm not leaving, either."

"You should leave me. It would be easier," said Wynn. 

"God damn it Wynn, I //know// it would be easier," said Scout. "But... damn it, no, there's more options. There's always another solution that doesn't involve you killing yourself or burning a bridge. I'd say most of the solutions available for any problem involve not doing those things. But you //have// to talk to me, //please,// you //can't// just assume I don't ever want to hear it." 

He took a breath, huffed, wiped at his eyes and pushed his glasses up in the process. "You //do// realize, I hope, that when you say these things, that's my best friend in the world you're talking about hating, right? It's not just some fellow on the street, it's someone I would fight for and love, and you're saying he should die-" Vivian's voice cracking again, Jesus wept, "-and you hate him, and you're claiming //I// hate him too, just these... completely //absurd// claims! Yes, it upsets me! It hurts me when you say those things!" 

Wynn made to respond. Vivian cut him off. "Don't you know what your problem is, Wynn? You have no //evidence.// You keep saying these things about how the world, and about how you're doomed and there's no point, and there's just no basis. You're two weeks from your dissertation, you //know// this, you //know// it's not logical, you //need to fight it.// And you //need// to let me fight with you, or... or I don't know, Winnie, I'll lose my fucking mind!" 

It was the use of 'fucking' that snapped Wynn out of it, this time. The whole speech from Scout was commendable to him, but Scout never cursed so severely. Electric shock; wake up, Wynn Rydderech. Vivian is crying. 

"It's not your fault you're sick," Vivian said. He //was// crying, tears running down his face in a way that was shockingly inelegant, incredibly untenable. "It's not your fault it gets worse sometimes. It's not anybody's fault." I don't blame you for your distance, I don't blame you for your pain, "But please fight it, for the love of God, I need you to fight it. I //need// you to, or I just don't know what I'll do." 

"It's not that easy," said Wynn. 

"I know it's not," said Scout. 

"I don't always win," said Rydderech. This part, oh, this part hurt to admit; he didn't always win. Sometimes it ended worse than it started, with marks. 

"I know," said Scout, and Wynn thought, //no you don't. You don't because I hide it.// "Just tell me before you lose, won't you? Give me a chance to come in with the cavalry? Damn it? Fucking god damn it?" 

Wynn felt tears in his own eyes, and at the back of his tonsils. He hated crying even more than Scout did. But it was true. "I'm so sorry," was what he said, somewhat oddly, as if he had nothing else he //could// say. 

"I'm going to take care of you!" said Scout. "That's an actionable threat, eh!? Don't go in the dark without me!?"

"You should get a goldfish instead. I hear they're much easier," said Wynn, his voice cracking on the delivery.

Scout both caught the levity and threw his arms up in the air. "//Oh damn it, I know they are, Winny!//" he shouted at the top of his lungs, so that he and the crash of the waves against the shore competed for space. 

He turned from Wynn, his dark jacket flapping in its misfit strangeness; a corner of his shirt had come untucked when he threw his arms above his head, and it betrayed a shocking carelessness for Vivian. He balled his hands into fists and locked them behind the back of his head so the elbows showed their need for patches. He screamed into the wind and crashing tide below them. He picked up a stone and threw it into the cascade. He screamed again, a general shout of frustration. 

"I love you and you drive me mad! You really do!" he shouted at the Atlantic ocean, in all its vast darkness and endless depths. And then he knotted his fingers in his dark hair, Vivian Scout, a small and dark shadow on the edge of all things, and took a deep breath and let out one last bellow, so forceful his voice cracked. 

Then, he put his hands on his knees and worked to catch his breath. He fell into the grass dramatically. 

Wynn moved to his right. "You got that out of your system, I take it?" he said. 

Scout rubbed his face, his fingers working their way under his glasses as they would in an infirmary far away. "Yes," he said. 

"I love you, too," said Wynn. Vivian smiled bitterly, his eyes shining, his shirt untucked and his glasses askew.  

Wynn waited until his chest stopped rising and falling quickly. Then, he crouched down and offered a freckled hand. Vivian took it. He lifted him to his feet with ease. 

------

And then it was him, in the Directors’ Complex, with blood smeared on the intercom paging buttons in their bedroom, and blood dripped on the carpet in a trail, and blood everywhere in their bathroom, and himself, sitting there in shock on the edge of the bathtub, and whatever he’d been using discarded beside, and Vivian in the threshold. Vivian Scout, in an electric dream that for some reason stood out to him more than all the other timelines he’d witnessed, an entity in black stumbling into what Wynn regarded to be a pathetic absurdist comedy skit, an insane scene of evidence and symbols and lost confidence, a landscape that screamed I AM BOTH FUNDAMENTALLY INCOMPETENT AND NOT WHO YOU OR I THOUGHT I WAS, THIS IS THE WORST SIDE OF ME, a scene of failed abatement, essentially. A scene of mortifying horror and violence. 

We don’t talk about violence much, do we. And who would? What sane, well adjusted partner //would?//

He didn’t have words for it—he let Vivian piece the scene together on his own. And then he said, “I’m so bloody sorry.” And then he said, “Not like that.” And then he said, “I don’t know what happened,” and then he said, “I didn’t mean for it to be like this,” because he hadn’t—he hadn’t meant for it to be this //bad//, when he’d started the process, he’d been thinking to himself that it was fine, that he’d show restraint, that the past fifteen years of careful control was time that meant nothing, and he didn’t have words to make up for how quickly it had collapsed back into day 0. He didn't think it was even possible-- or maybe he had, if he'd looked at what he'd been doing instead all this time. 

Vivian stepped back for a moment, one hand on the threshold. There was another bloody handprint on the threshold that was already there and still wet and Vivian looked at this, too, his eyes wide. 

“I’m so sorry,” Wynn repeated. He was still crying, but for some reason it was eclipsed by the sheer immensity of his own shock and horror, and then he said what made him want to vomit, what he was absolutely certain would happen next: “I wouldn’t judge you if you left, Viv. I told you—I //promised// you, the last time—” 

(There had been a last time, in this timeline. There had been discussions. He had been more honest.)

“Oh, Winny,” Viv said. 

“This is no way to run a Site,” Wynn snapped. “Not with one of us—with one of us doing //this//, my God. It’s just not—” He sobbed, “—It’s just not //responsible//, it’s not damn—” 

“Put your arm out. Let me see it,” Vivian said, suddenly a figure alive with urgency that seemed unfathomable to him, Vivian Scout with his shirtsleeves still rolled down, fumbling for a clean towel in a drawer. Wynn didn’t extend it—Vivian grabbed his hand and pulled it away, took a sharp breath when he saw the damage that made Wynn want to kill himself or at the very least do more, and then Viv’s other hand was on his shoulder, pushing him up to his feet, and Wynn’s entire body was shaking, he was a wreck, and it was 3 in the afternoon, and above ground the sun was shining and the birds were singing and people were waiting to get off work, and the Directors’ Complex was normal, a home of two people who lived there and loved one another, and the blood, the disruption, the horror. And Vivian Scout, holding his arm under running water to see the depth of the wounds the Set Animal and its contusion of foul portents and delusions only said should ever be deeper in an endless logical fallacy. 

Vivian, his breath catching again, this time looking like he might burst into tears like Wynn was, “Oh, Winny, you’re in bad shape, aren’t you.” Vivian, pressing the dry towel to the wounds, “You need to get this looked at,” Then looking at him through his round glasses, “You’re //getting// this looked at,” sternly, like he’d done it on accident, then, “I’ll go with you.” And then, “Oh, it’s not your fault, Wynn.”

“Now //that’s// a bit of a //dubious claim,// don’t you think?” Wynn hissed. The anger was at himself, at the sheer stupidity. The way it left him so exhausted and raw and wanting more of it more than ever—he’d feel like shit for days, chemically, like the high of it came from releasing all the stored dopamine in his brain at once and it would take his body time to rebuild it, and that would make him want to do it again, more, and he’d feel like shit after. Repeat, like when he’d been young, after he’d been so ill and Ashley had just died and he’d been so naive to its tricks and illusions.  

“Fine. It’s your fault you did it, but it isn’t your fault how you //feel//, is that the specificity you wanted?” Vivian said, and then he said, “Oh, Wynn, I’m not leaving you, don’t be ridiculous. Hold that there, put pressure on it. It’s alright.” Day 0. Fifteen years without it, this time. “You’ll be okay,” he said. He’d never done it so directly on his forearms before. “This has nothing to do with the Site and you know it,” said Viv, with blood now spotted on his sleeves. The Set Animal would be back. It would be back harder and faster than ever. The first week was the hardest. Could he remember how he stopped doing it last time? Did he still even have it in him? 

“You’ll be alright,” said Vivian, as if answering him. It was three in the afternoon. “Thank you for calling for me,” he said. The sun was out far above them, and the lake, and fish and people and dogs on the shore of the lake. People getting off work soon. Cars honking in Toronto, people coming through customs to the south, children on summer vacation, and the comic book store somewhere up there. A thousand hotel event centers with stale coffee and good company in conferences. The abatement plant in Austria. Gravel roads outside of Cardiff. Stars. 

The impossible mass of the Set Animal. It was nothing in comparison. Why did it seem like it was, when the shadows hit it right, when the stars over Lake Huron aligned in such a way, when he was alone and the factory churned and worked and all things settled into nothing? Why was it so damn //convincing// when all it ever did was insist on more?

------

[[div class="danke site"]]
There is no power on this Earth which could cause me to forget about you. 
@@ @@
In all the years I've been alive, I have never been close to anyone as I have been with you. I would never allow such a thing to happen; it would cheapen what we've shared, and almost nothing would give me more pain than that. 
@@ @@
If I have never loved [INCOMING MESSAGE CORRUPTED. ERROR CODE: 𓃩 CONTACT TERMINAL REPAIR] you, then I have never loved [ERROR: 𓃩]. I know that you love [ERROR: 𓃩] me, and I know that if it were possible, if invisible forces we do not control would allow it, we would be together [ERROR: 𓃩] now. We've been apart before, but it only brought us closer together [ERROR: 𓃩]. 
@@ @@
I don't blame you for your absence  [ERROR: 𓃩]; I don't blame you for your pain  [ERROR: 𓃩]; I don't blame you for what you felt you had to do  [ERROR: 𓃩], for the distance  [ERROR: 𓃩] you need to keep and the walls  [ERROR: 𓃩] you had to put up between us. I could never hate you; even as brilliant [𓃩] and powerful [𓃩] as you are, you would be powerless to lower my estimation of your strength [𓃩], your grace [𓃩], and your drive [𓃩] to do the right thing. If I can't have you here, beside me, I will take you as you are [𓃩], because I will never stop needing you. 
@@ @@
Even if it **𓃩** [𓃩][𓃩][𓃩][𓃩][𓃩]--

[[/div]]

------

[[div class="one column"]]
[[=]]
+ 1966
++ The Bad Work
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

It was the most painful thing he had ever done. So painful he felt he couldn't breathe. And the paper before him said: 

[[div class="page"]]

That's why you did it. 

[[/div]]

"Yes," said Wynn, aloud, to the caverns. 

[[div class="page"]]

Yes.

[[/div]]

said the caverns to Wynn. 

[[=image yesedit]]

[[div class="page"]]

Because it was the most painful thing that could be, yes. 

[[/div]]

Almost all things said yes. They were very nearly in consensus. Divining rods and null hypotheses, the stars in limbo, the immense weight of the lake at its newly-formed control points, its hatches, and himself in the undomesticated and wild cave darkness. Sestina silence and electric pain ripped through his chest. 

"Pole axe," Wynn sang, halfheartedly. "Hand me my pole." 

Nothing. The thin wires of his exploration hung limp in the darkness like sinew. They were not, as much as he planned, sufficient to catch his fall. He did not need them to be real. 

[[div class="page"]]

But the abstract is ravenous and clear. 

[[/div]]

"...Quite nearly," said Wynn, possessed. But something wasn't right. Something wasn't how he thought it would be. 

[[div class="page"]]

Do we reject the null hypothesis of love?

[[/div]]

“No,” said Wynn. 

[[div class="page"]]

No?

[[/div]]

said the Set Animal. 

“No,” said Wynn. His body was young and capable. There were sunshine and dogs up on Kettle Point, god fucking damn it, he knew they were all up there, god damn it, it was a trick. It was a trap. It was the same thing, it was always the fucking same, and he’d just fallen for it again. 

[[div class="page"]]

It’s over now

[[/div]]

Said the Set Animal. Nothing left to fight for, was what it meant: end of the line. Bloodletting, over and over and over again, after Ashley’s death until Silena broke into his apartment and threw everything away and told him he was out of bloody control.

//Do I look like a// winning //prizefighter?//

Wynn gripped the cave floor. It was smooth and dark and cold. The elevator shaft was gone behind him. There //was// nothing left to fight for; he //was// out of control; it always //seemed// so damn convincing, didn’t it? 

On a chalkboard at Cardiff: WHERE IS YOUR EVIDENCE?

Wynn pushed himself up. Coal on his hands; coal on his body; but not in his blood. Vivian, in that vision, the one he knew had the highest potential to be true if he’d been brave enough to let it be: //It’s not your fault how you feel, Wynn.// Vivian, so focused on getting him help, not even noticing when the blood got on his clothes. Vivian Scout, leaning far over a retaining wall, stroking a lamb; Vivian Scout, nude in slow flowing water; Vivian Scout, unyielding. 

(That would make him the other one, wouldn’t it? Bird in hand, Ornithologist too?) 

[[div class="page"]]

What will you do? 

[[/div]]

Taunted the Set Animal. He had never fallen this far before, never had the power to burn this many bridges all at once. Wynn realized he only distantly knew what he wanted to do. 

“I’ll get you,” he said. His eyes were open but no light hit them. His pupils, pinpricks. Tea leaves and divining rods. The impossible grief and guilt in his stomach. Vivian would be devastated; what the hell had he been thinking?

[[div class="page"]]

You came here to fall apart

[[/div]]

said the Set Animal. 

“I’ve fallen apart before,” said Wynn. “I’ll do both. I’ll fall apart and I'll take you with me.”

“Then come and get me,” said the Set Animal, aloud. It was his father’s voice. Wynn stood, and the factory came alight with the selfish roar of pain.

[[=]]
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Abatement Failure 1966

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