Reblogs A Nearly Four Year Old Post I Found While Looking Up Stuff About Gertrude’s Assistants. This

Reblogs a nearly four year old post i found while looking up stuff about gertrude’s assistants. This is now canon in my mind

Hey so like, apparently Emma Harvey was the one keeping Michael Shelley completely ignorant of all the paranormal nonsense going on at the archives. And it seems everyone (including me) interpreted this as ‘‘Gertrude Robinson never spoke about the paranormal stuff openly, making it easy for Michael to stay uninformed.’‘

But consider an alternative:

Gertrude isn’t super chatty around her assistants in general, however neither does she mince words around them. When she is off to try and find a way to disrupt the Flesh ritual, she just is putting on her coat and outright saying ‘‘Alright I’m going to go and snoop around the place that evil dark monster ate some children. Please leave any statements I need to look at on my desk while I am gone.’’ Michael is like 20 years old and he’s like, uh what.

‘‘I should be back in 3 weeks. Emma, keep that polaroid of me on my desk so if a changeling comes back pretending to be me you’ll know.’‘

Michael: ?!?!?!?!?!?!

Emma just smiles gently and says yes Gertrude, of course dear. And then once Gertrude’s gone and Michael is still shooting Emma alarmed looks, waiting for an explanation, she takes him aside.

“Ms. Robinson is… quite a character,’‘ Emma says with that lilt people make when they mean batshit crazy and should probably be in a home. ‘‘The Institute has always drawn in people with… unconventional beliefs.’‘

Michael understands instantly. “Oh,’‘ he says.

Emma grimaces. ‘‘It didn’t used to come up so much,’‘ she says. “But since Fiona disappeared… well. She’s started to see spooky things everywhere.’‘

And Michael just thinks that’s just the Saddest, you see. What a poor, tired old soul, warped into frenzied paranoia by the loss of her coworker. What a Tragedy. And so now, every time he sees Gertrude cutting out eyes from magazine clippings or recording conversations religiously on tape, his heart just breaks a little. He had a friend, once, who was always half-convinced he was being followed by things that couldn’t exist.

So Michael goes into Protect and Nurture mode.

So yes, Michael does hear Gertrude talking to Emma grimly about how she’s planning to ‘‘save the world.’‘ He catches a few conversations she has about Entities or Powers or evil books that eat you. But all it takes is a few Shared, Knowing Glances with Emma and he just wants to wrap this poor old grandma in a blanket and give her some tea and tell her yes, she is Very Brave and Very Hardworking but she can take a nap now :)

Gertrude, meanwhile, eventually figures out that Michael thinks she’s off her rocker but suddenly out of the blue going ‘‘I know you think I am crazy but really there are 14 eldritch fear powers, you have to believe me’‘ is 1) incredibly undignified and 2) will not make Michael believe her. So, resignedly, she decides having an ignorant assistant probably has its uses.

Does she suspect Emma? Yes. Does she ever have enough proof to confront her? No. No she does not.