“Iris?”
“Look, I just—” SCP-105 turns around to face him where she’s standing in front of his father’s old desk, and Draven sees the red stain on the floor next to her and can’t stop himself from gagging sharply, cutting her off. He leans against the door frame in the early hours of the morning two days after his father’s suicide and is glad he hasn’t had the appetite to eat in the past 24 hours, because his entire body finds everything about his father’s newly uninhabited office to be nauseating, revolting, everything from the coffee cup still on the nightstand from where James got his father water in the night to the empty chair behind it. He swallows a few times, not really expecting to have this kind of reaction to it — being in the task forces, he’s seen plenty of gore, but this is the first thing that he’s seen in years that has brought him to almost vomiting.
“Are you okay?”
Draven swallows again, and again, and eventually feels the dizziness pass enough to respond to her.
“Yeah, no. I’m okay,” he says wearily, trying not to look at it. The room smells like bleach and the orange soap the janitors use to clean up blood, so much that it’s suffocating. “…Just a little fresh in my mind is all.”
“I can tell,” she replies, and he knows that it’s also the fact that he’s dressed in his boyfriend’s grey sweatpants and t-shirt and the fact that he hasn’t shaved. He looks rough — Draven will be the first to admit this, given that he just rolled out of bed to come get this over with — but he’s coming to pack up his dad’s stuff, not to go to work in the full-tactical-gear-over-black-jumpsuit Iris usually sees him in. It occurs to him that this is probably the first time that she’s seen him without his visor or helmet in years. What an impression he must be making.
“So who put you up to this?” he sighs, letting go of the doorframe to wander into his father’s work space. “Eskobar?”
“Myself,” she replies, and he sees that she already has three cardboard boxes of files loaded up, printed with ‘CLASSIFIED’ or ‘UNCLASSIFIED’ on the top in black sharpie. He spends a dumb second hazing over the fact that she’s an SCP, shouldn’t be seeing those, security breach? before he realizes that she’s a Safe-class semi-employee who’s lived here since Draven was around seven. His dad had signed the paperwork for her low-level clearance himself. She has the red authorized security card clipped to her uniform and everything, and he briefly thinks I really should have let James do this. Draven had left him a note and a kiss on the forehead instead. Better to let the poor guy get some rest.
“You volunteered to do this?” Draven asks, picking up a cardboard box from the pile provided, briefly imagining some kind of dystopian straw-pull or bingo game. Person who wins gets to help the sad kid clean out his dead dad’s office.
Iris looks at him with tears in her eyes, and he winces.
“Your dad,” she says slowly. “Saved my life more than once.”
Draven nodded, distantly. His father was a big advocate for humanoids. He treated them well, and again, it wasn’t perfect, but it was something, anything.
“He…did that a lot,” he drones numbly, moving to the bookshelf on the other side of the desk across the room, more out of avoiding the cot and the stain than anything else. Without thinking, he just starts at the top left and drops the first three books in the box with a heavy thwump.
