#Basira standing over Jon apologizing

[lickmycoffeecup]

MAG 167 is a trip for many reasons

But the realization that if Jon had died, and the others could have quit… They wouldn’t have hesitated. I feel that in my bones, they would have taken Jon out. And left the archives. Maybe even burned that place to the ground as a last middle finger to Elias.

I really don’t think they would have even stopped to think about it. And if they had found out about it before the destroying your own eyes method?

Yeah…. Just yeah…

[dathen]

For all of Jon’s prickliness and willingness to fire back when attacked, it’s fascinating how quick he is to drop a grudge*. The split second Melanie shows any vulnerability in TMA 63, he not only PERMANENTLY drops their feud (everything after that is 100% one-sided from her end), but he does her a favor!! No warming-up period required! Nothing asked for in return, not even an apology!

Like we have our much more drastic examples over and over through the series: Jon forgiving Basira’s treatment of him despite no apology offered, Jon insisting Georgie didn’t owe him friendship after she cut him off without warning when he needed help most, Jon saving Daisy and embracing her as a friend despite her trying to kill him and his lingering fear… But somehow, this completely mundane instant is what stands out the most to me. It’s before he loses all self-worth and values every other person above himself—this is just him, just everyday Jon.

As soon as she starts telling him about the others turning on her, he says he’s sorry for her, and commiserates (“I know what it’s like to be looked down on by your peers,” aka what she did to him from the start of their very first meeting, ironically), and turns his sights to take jabs at those who abandoned her. And then, of course, promises to get her library access like she needed. “You’re the closest thing I have to a friend, here,” she says awkwardly, and he quickly rises to the opportunity. And never goes on the attack against her again.

*s1 Martin aside, which Doylistically was established as a comedic note before Jon was even considered a character in his own right. On a Watsonian level, we could maybe argue that realizing the foolishness and harm of his grudge vs. Martin led to character development of him working against ever holding grudges again.

[lo-fi-charming]

you are what you are, and that's it

Done for day 3 of @jondaisy-week!

Read on AO3

(minor cw for mentions of daisy's weight loss)

===

“Jon. Can I ask you something?” 

Daisy’s been quieter than normal today. She’s already quiet — always tired and careful, trying not to intrude in Jon’s space, despite having her own corner of the office now. There’s a chair and a wobbly end-table they found… somewhere, Jon’s really not sure. A stack of boxes to give her another place to put things. Jon envies how she manages to wrangle any loose papers despite having so little space, and frowns at the mess on his own much larger desk. 

At her question, Jon pushes aside the old (horrible, useless, stale) statement he’d been combing through for research purposes and sits up. His spine sings a little song and Jon groans, leaning back in his chair. “Of course. What is it?” 

In the seconds before she answers, Jon thinks Daisy looks cold. The sweater she has on is her own, yet Jon has noticed her consistently adjusting it, trying to keep the neckline over her shoulders. Basira had to lend her a belt recently to keep her trousers from giving her similar problems. 

“Do you… When you look at me.” Daisy’s chair is turned towards Jon, but she’s not looking at him, searching the dusty corners of his office for the best way to say what she wants. “Do you still see the person who almost killed you?”

Ah. Unconsciously, Jon’s entire body tenses up. He forces his jaw to unclench and his hands not to shake. Daisy’s gaze flits over him, like a butterfly passing, there and gone again without any disturbance. 

“...Yes and no,” Jon eventually answers, once the ghost of fear has passed and he can properly think it over. 

“Can you explain?” Daisy asks, staring now at the papers in her hands, resting in her lap. Jon notices her feet are planted squarely on the floor, like she might get up from her chair any second. 

“Well…” Jon starts to say more, then stops, and frowns as he tries to think. “I mean, you’re… Yes, but, you’re different now. You were Daisy before, and you’re still Daisy now, but… not quite the same person.”

“Aren’t I?” 

As Jon predicted, Daisy stands. She starts to pace his office. “Everyone keeps talking like I croaked in the dirt and something else crawled out to replace me.” 

The wording makes Jon shiver, but he shakes his head. “That’s not it.” 

“All of you have said something or other like that,” Daisy tells him. Her tone isn’t accusatory, but her expression is troubled. “Basira doesn’t want to reconcile what I am now with who I was before. Even Martin tried to let me off the hook for things I’d done. Said it wasn’t me, not really. But he’s wrong. They both are. Right?” 

Jon leans forward with his elbows on his desk, rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses with a weary sigh. “You’ve never really stuck me as the type to dwell on the philosophical,” Jon jokes. Mostly for a lack of anything better to say, which he feels bad about. In a way, he understands exactly what Daisy is trying to convey, but— it’s too much. Too close to the questions he’s been asking himself so often, lately. 

“It’s not philosophy, it’s real. I’m— This is the same body that hurt you. Hit you, cut your throat.” 

“Daisy—”

“I won’t apologize,” Daisy tells Jon very softly. Like she’s trying to comfort him. When she glances at the hand now covering his neck, she holds on. Eventually their eyes manage to meet. “I regret what I did to you, Jon. But I still did it. Can’t take it back, can I? So why did you try blaming the Hunt instead?” 

Jon fidgets, but holds her gaze, if only to keep himself from cowering. Daisy doesn’t like looking him in the eyes; Jon hadn’t noticed, before. It was only while they were in the Buried, in the near complete darkness, when Daisy had stubbornly kept her eyes locked on Jon through a gap in the dirt, that it occurred to him. When they maintained eye contact, it made Jon feel… powerful. Bigger than her. Like he could hurt Daisy and she wouldn’t be able to stop him. In some ways, Jon supposed he already had. 

It should feel fair, Jon sulks to himself, then wants to laugh bitterly. No, of course not. Nothing in a world of terror gods would be fair. 

“...You know why,” he says grimly. Then the shame and shyness comes, and Jon looks away first. “It’s… disorienting, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Daisy sighs in agreement. “That’s a good word for it. I just hate the idea that any of me… isn’t me. I know it is. Even if I don’t look the same. Even if I’m different now. The Buried didn’t get rid of who I was, it… It brought everything back into me. Made me settle with it.” 

“Isn’t it frightening?” Jon can’t help but ask. He stares down at his hands now, at the ashy pink of his right palm. The taught, faint yellow pockmarks on his left. “To… to be… what you are? And that’s it?”

Daisy’s approach is slow, but Jon doesn’t move away. He watches her hand reach out to touch the back of his own. After a moment, Jon lifts his hand up, and Daisy slips her fingers beneath his, holding him. When he looks up at her, Daisy’s giving him a wan smile.  “Yes,” she tells him. “And no.” 

[wordsintimeandspace]

Somewhere to Belong

Until the incident with Jude Perry, Jon used to wear a black ring on his right middle finger. In the safehouse, Martin finally understands why and plans a little surprise for Jon.

Happy Ace Week! It’s been really wonderful to get into the TMA fandom last year, not just because of the representation but also because there are so many ace people here. So I wanted to put a little fic out there for the occasion. :) For anyone who isn’t familiar with it: an ace ring is a black ring that a lot of aces wear on the right middle finger as a symbol of their asexuality.

Jon/Martin, ~1.7k words, rated G. Read on AO3!

Jon wakes to a kiss pressed to the top of his head. He smiles and blinks his eyes open to find Martin standing over him, his cheeks red from the cold autumn air outside.

“Hey,” Martin says warmly. “Had a good nap?”

“Mhh. I did.” Jon stretches his arms over his head with a squeak, and shifts until Martin can sit down on the couch next to him. As soon as he’s seated, Jon plumps back down, his head in Martin’s lap.

Martin smiles down at him, brushing a strand of hair out of Jon’s eyes. Jon shudders at the touch and groans. “God, your fingers are cold.”

“I did just walk back from the village, Jon.”

“We need to get you some gloves,” Jon grumbles, curling closer until he can press his forehead against the soft wool of Martin’s jumper.

“Yeah, well. Didn’t quite expect to be still here in late October. We probably both need some winter clothes soon.”

“We can go shopping next time we visit the city. Did you get everything we need today?”

“Yup. Got milk and toothpaste and squash for the curry tonight. There was also a package from Basira at the post office.”

At that, Jon finally opens an eye and blinks up at Martin. “More statements?”

“Yeah. So, if you’re a bit, uh, peckish, I suppose-”

Jon snorts. “I’m alright, thank you. Don’t want to spoil my appetite before dinner.”

“Okay.”

Martin smiles, but now that Jon looks at him a bit closer, he can see that it’s a bit strained. Jon frowns. “Was there anything else? From Basira?”

“Not really? She just apologized for the delay. Apparently something was wrong with the latest batch, but she said she would handle it.” Martin lets out a sigh and shrugs. “Dunno, she was a bit cryptic about this.”

Jon watches him for a moment longer, registers all the little ways that are off about Martin - the crease between his brows, the nervous fumbling with the hem of his sleeve, and the fact that he doesn’t quite meet his eyes - and finally pushes himself upright.

“Martin, what is it?” he asks in concern and Martin’s gaze snaps to him. He looks a bit like a deer caught in the headlights, his eyes wide.

“Um, it’s- it’s fine, really. I- I just had another delivery. Nothing to do with the statements, don’t worry.”

“Martin?”

“I just-” Martin stops himself, taking a deep breath. A blush creeps into his cheeks. “I got something for you.”

That’s not quite what Jon expected. He’s become so used to horror and tragedy that something mundane like a present suddenly throws him off course. He blinks. “Oh?”

Martin nods and bites his lip before pulling a small box out of his pocket. Jon eyes it curiously - it’s a plain grey colour, maybe two inches wide with a lid on top. He can feel the Knowledge of the contents pressing in at the back of his mind, but he’s getting better at blocking it out. Even if it sometimes leaves him with a headache, it’s worth it for the thrill of a surprise. He can’t even remember the last time someone gave him a present.

“So, can I open it?” he asks, a little impatiently as Martin seems to hesitate.

“Uh, yeah!” Martin blushes even harder, and unceremoniously shoves the box into Jon’s hands. “Of course. I… I hope you like it.”

The box is light. Jon runs his fingers along the lid, and at Martin’s encouraging nod finally opens it.

Inside, protected by soft padding, is a ring. Jon’s heart skips a beat, his breath catching in his throat at the first implication that pops into his head - but no, it’s not that kind of a ring, although it leaves him speechless all the same. It’s a simple black band, a few millimeters wide. A design that’s more than familiar.

Eyes burning, Jon looks up. Martin gives him a soft smile.

“I noticed you used to wear one like these,” he says quietly. “Before… well, before you burned your hand.”

Jon nods. He gulps around the lump in his throat. “It- it was destroyed,” he finally says, a little choked up. “They had to cut it off me in the ER. I never got around to getting a new one.”

“I figured. I- I never understood what it meant to you until recently. And, well, the way you explained that you’re asexual and what it means to you after we arrived in Scotland, I felt that this is important to you. That people see and understand and accept it. And, uh, I said I support you, and I mean it, but I just… I wanted to show it as well.”

Jon lets out a shuddering breath. A few tears trickle down his cheeks, and he surges forward to wrap his arms around Martin’s waist and hide his face in the crook of his neck. Immediately, Martin’s arms are around him, holding him tight.

“Oh,” he says softly, breath tickling against Jon’s ear. “Jon, I’m-”

“You daft man,” Jon interrupts before Martin can do something ridiculous like apologize. “You already show me every day. You didn’t have to do that.”

“Maybe. But I wanted to. You deserve the extra effort.”

“Martin.”

“I- I wasn’t sure if it would cross a line to get you one. I mean, it’s such a personal thing, and maybe it would be better if you get a chance to pick one yourself-”

“Stop it,” Jon protests, pulling back to interrupt Martin with a firm kiss. Martin makes a choked sound of pleasure from the back of his throat, and gently cups Jon’s face in his hands as he kisses back. “It’s perfect,” Jon says when they pull apart, a little breathless.

Martin smiles hesitantly, brushing his thumbs over Jon’s wet cheeks. “So, these are good tears?”

“Very good tears. Thank you.”

Martin’s smile blooms into a bright grin and he leans in to press a kiss to Jon’s forehead. With a smile, Jon looks back down at the box still sitting in his lap. Carefully, he takes the ring out of the box and runs a finger over the shining black metal.

“The ring,” he starts slowly, searching or the right words, “it’s less about telling people I’m asexual, and more... a symbol of community and belonging, I suppose. Something I haven’t experienced a lot in the last few years at the Institute.”

“Oh, Jon…”

“I suspect that’s part of the reason why I put it off for so long. It would have felt too much like an empty platitude while I was feeling so alone. But now…” Jon trails off and looks up to find Martin staring at him, eyes shining with unshed tears. Jon smiles and squeezes his hand. “Put it on me?”

Martin’s cheeks turn crimson, but he still plucks the ring out of Jon’s grasp with only slightly trembling hands. His touch is careful as he takes Jon’s burnt hand in his, caressing the palm for a moment before he slips the ring onto Jon’s middle finger. Jon’s breath catches in his throat at the gentleness of it, and he blinks away a few more tears.

The ring fits perfectly onto his finger, despite the jagged scar that still remains after his encounter with Jude Perry. The sight leaves Jon a bit breathless. He didn’t quite realize how much he missed this, but seeing the black band marking his finger feels a bit like coming home.

“Do you like it?” Martin asks quietly.

Jon can’t help but grin, smiling up at Martin. “I love it.”

“Okay. Good.” Martin smiles and raises Jon’s hands to his lips, pressing a kiss to his knuckles. “I was a bit scared. You looked a little shocked there for a second when you first opened the box.”

“Oh, I wasn’t-” Jon stops himself, clearing his throat. “I mean, I just saw it was a ring, but I didn’t quite recognize what kind of ring it was, and, um…”

Martin blinks before his eyes widen in understanding. “Wait, did you think I was going to propose?”

“I- no, I just...”

“You did!” Martin laughs and Jon lets out a groan, hiding his face against Martin’s chest. “Jon, we’ve only been together for… what, three weeks? Four weeks?”

“Yes, yes,” Jon grumbles, his cheeks burning. “I know. No need to rub it in.”

Martin wraps his arms around Jon, his chest rumbling with laughter. “Maybe I should have expected that this is the pace you set in a relationship,” he teases. “Especially after you asked me to gouge my eyes out and elope-”

Jon pulls back to glare at Martin, even as he can’t help the smile tugging at his lips. “Shut up, Martin.”

Martin only grins wider. Jon huffs and climbs into Martin’s lap to straddle him. That alone is enough to take the wind out of Martin’s sails. He blushes, settling his hands on Jon’s hips. Jon cups Martin’s face in his hands and his eyes catch once again on the black ring he’s now wearing.

He tries to imagine what it would look like, to have another ring to complement the black one. A silver one maybe, with a shining gemstone set into it. He has to admit he quite likes the mental image.

“Just for the record,” Jon starts with a grin, “if you would have proposed, I might have said yes.”

Martin’s eyes widen, full of surprise and a bit of shock that is readily replaced by sheer delight, but before he can answer Jon leans in to kiss the dazed look off his face.

By the time they pull apart Martin looks thoroughly kissed, his cheeks flushed and his lips shining. He's looking at Jon like he still can't quite believe he gets to have this, and Jon has never been more in love with him.

Martin takes a few seconds to catch his breath until finally, Jon’s last words seem to catch up with him. He lets out a groan and buries his face in the crook of Jon’s neck. “Christ, Jon.”

Jon laughs, rubbing a hand up and down Martin’s back. “I just wanted to make that clear. In case it comes up again at some point in the future.”

Martin lets out a long breath that makes Jon shiver. When he pulls back his cheeks are still flaming, his smile shy, but his voice is steady. “I- I’ll keep that in mind,” he says. “For the future.”

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

In Search of Lost Screws (RQBB '21)

Here at last is my entry for the 2021 Rusty Quill Big Bang!

Fandom: The Magnus Archives Rating: T Word count: ~30k Warnings: Chronic Illness, Mild Body Horror, Internalized Ableism, Canon-Typical Spiders, Mention of Canon-Typical Suicidal Ideation, Alcohol Other tags: Cane-user Jon, EDS Jon, Canon-compliant, Season 5, Set in 180-181 (Upton Safehouse period) Characters: Jon Sims, Martin Blackwood, Mikaele Salesa (secondary), Annabelle Cane (secondary) Relationships: Jon/Martin Summary: While staying at Upton House, Jon and Martin accidentally break their bedroom’s doorknob, and can’t get back into the room until they fix it. Meanwhile Jon tries not to break into literal pieces without the Eye, and also to pretend he’s having a good time as he and Martin lunch with Annabelle, parry gifts from Salesa, and quarrel about whether Jon’s okay or not. He's fine! It's just that the apocalypse runs on dream logic, and chronic pain feels worse when you're awake. Excerpt:

“Have I mentioned how weird it is you’re the one who keeps asking me this stuff?” “I’m sorry. I’m trying to help? I just…” Jon closed his eyes, which itched with the warehouse’s dust, and rubbed their lids with an index finger. “I can’t seem to corral my thoughts here.” “Don’t worry about it. It’s actually kind of fun, it’s just—I’m so used to being the sidekick,” Martin laughed. “Besides, I miss my eldritch Google.” “Should I go back out there, ask the Eye about it, then come back?” Another laugh, this one less awkward. “No. That won’t work, remember? This place is a ‘blind spot,’ you said.” The words in inverted commas he said with a frown and in a deeper voice. “Right, right. I forgot,” Jon sighed. He lowered himself to the floor and examined the finger he’d felt snap back into place when he let go his cane. During the five seconds he’d allowed himself to entertain it, the idea of heading back out there had excited him a little. A few minutes to check on Basira, verify what Salesa had told them about his life before the change, make sure the world hadn’t somehow ended twice over. Give himself a few minutes’ freedom of movement, for that matter. Out there he could run, jump, open jars, pick up full mugs of tea without worrying a screw in his hand would come loose and make him drop them. He could stand up as quickly as he thought the words, I think I’ll stand up now, without his vision going dark. God, and even if it did, it wouldn’t matter! He would just know every tripping hazard and every look on Martin’s face, without having to ask these clumsy human eyes to show them to him. “Honestly, it’d almost feel worth it to go back out there just to formulate a plan to find them. At least I can think out there.” “Hey.” Martin elbowed him slightly in the ribs. Jon fought with himself not to resent the very gentleness of it. “I think I’ll come up with the plan for once, thanks. Some of us can think just fine here.” Was it just because of Hopworth that Martin’s elbow barely touched him? Or because Martin feared that Jon would break in here, in a way he’d learnt not to fear out there?

Huge thanks to @pilesofnonsense for hosting this event; to @connanro for beta-reading; and to @silmapeli for their amazing illustration, whose own post you can find here.

If you prefer, you can read this fic instead on Ao3. I won't link it directly, since Tumblr has trouble with external links, but if you google the title and add "echinoderms" (my Ao3 handle), it should come up!

Crunch. “Oh god. Shit! Oh god, oh no—”

“What’s wrong? What happened?”

A clatter, then a noise like a small rock scraping a large one. Jon’s heart plunged; halfway through his question he knew the answer.

“I—I broke it? Look, see, the whole thing just—take this.” Martin tore his hand out of Jon’s and dropped the severed doorknob in it instead. Then he dropped to the floor, diving head- and hands-first for the crack between it and the door as if that crack were a portal between dimensions. Jon closed his eyes and shook this image away, hoping when he opened them again he could focus on what was real.

He should have known this would happen from the moment they left for breakfast. Every time he’d opened that door its knob felt a little looser. Why hadn’t he warned Martin? Well, alright, he didn’t need powers to know that one. He just hadn’t thought of it. Been a bit preoccupied, after all. And even if he had thought of it, that was exactly the kind of conversation he’d been shying away from all week. Watch out for that doorknob; it’s a little loose, he would say, and yeah, probably Martin would answer, Oh, thanks. But there was a chance Martin would say instead, Why didn’t you tell me?—and all week Jon had obeyed an instinct to avoid prompting that question. All week he had made sure to enter and exit their room a few steps ahead of Martin, and hold the door open for him. Martin probably just saw it as Jon’s way of apologizing for their first few months in the Archives together, and once that thought occurred to him Jon had started to look at it that way himself. Maybe that’s why he’d forgot this time.

“Nooo-oooo, come on come on!”

“I don’t think you’ll fit,” Jon said, when he looked again and found Martin trying to wedge his fingers under the door.

(Martin used to leave Jon’s office door open behind him—perhaps absentmindedly, but more likely as a gesture of friendship and openness, which the Jon of that time would not suffer. Sasha and Tim, n.b., only left his door open on their way into his office, when they didn’t intend to stay long; Martin would leave it gaping even if he didn’t mean to come back. Every time Jon had sighed, pulled himself to his feet, and closed the door behind Martin, drawing out the click of its tongue in the latch. And a few times he’d closed the door in front of him, so as to exclude him from a conversation between Jon and Tim or Sasha that he, Martin, had tried to weigh in on from outside Jon’s office.)

“What are you looking for?”

“The—the screw, I saw it roll under there. It fell down on our side. Oh, my god, it was so close—if I’d reacted just half a second earlier, I could’ve?—shit.”

“Oh.” Jon huffed out a cynical laugh.

“I can’t believe it. I broke Salesa’s door! He welcomes us in to an oasis, and I break the door. Oh, god—I’ve broken an irreplaceable door, in a stately historic mansion!”

A few more demonstrative huffs of laughter. “No you didn’t.”

Martin paused. He didn’t get up, but did turn his head to look at Jon. “Yes I did. It’s right there in your hand, Jon—”

“I should’ve known. Check for cobwebs, Martin.”

“Oh come on.”

“This can’t be your fault—it’s far too neat. This is all part of Annabelle’s plan.”

“Do you know that?”

“W-well, no. I can’t, not here. I just—”

“Yeah, I don’t think so, Jon. Pretty sure it’s just an old doorknob.”

“Did you check for cobwebs?”

“Of course there are no cobwebs. A spider wouldn’t even have time to finish building the web before somebody wrecked it opening the door!”

“Then what’s that?” With the tip of his cane Jon tapped the floor in front of a clot of gray fluff in the seam between two walls next to the door, making sure not to let it touch the clot itself.

Martin rolled over to see where he was pointing, and almost stuck his elbow in it. “Ah. Gross. Gross, is what that is.”

“Christ, I should’ve known this would happen. I did know this would happen,” Jon reminded himself—“just ignored the warning signs because I can’t think straight here.”

“It doesn’t mean anything, Jon. It’s a corner. Spiders love corners. I mean, unless you can prove the corner of our doorway has more spiderwebs than anywhere else in the house—”

“Well, of course not. You forget she’s got her own corner somewhere, which we still haven’t found by the way—”

“So, what, you think Annabelle Cane lassoed the screw with a strand of cobweb.”

“Not literally? She could be sitting on the other side of the door with a magnet for all we know!”

Martin peered under the door again with an exasperated sigh. “She’s not.”

“Not now she’s heard us talking about her.”

God, what a delicate web that would be, if all he had to do to avoid the spider’s clutches was reach a door before Martin did. Perhaps if he’d knocked first that’d have saved him. Maybe Martin was right. How could Annabelle know him well enough to foresee this mistake? Most of the time he hated people opening doors for him, after all.

Why do people see someone with a cane and think, Only one free hand? How ever will he open the door!? They don’t do that for people with shopping bags—not ones his age, at least. Letting another person open a door for him felt to Jon like… defeat, somehow. Like admitting the dolce et decorum estness of this version of reality all nondisabled people seemed to live in where he couldn’t open doors. And that version of reality horrified him. Not so much the idea of being too weak to open them—that sounded merely annoying. Like knocking the sides of jar lids on tables and swearing, only with doors. He had beat his fists against enough Pull doors in his time to figure he could live with that. It was more the idea of becoming that way. Letting his door-opening muscles atrophy ‘til it became the truth.

But sometimes you just let a thing happen, and forget to hate it. That was the thing about pride. Sometimes your convictions and your habits stop fitting together—you believe Fuck this job with all your heart, but still tuck in your shirt when you come to the office. And then you fly back from America in borrowed clothes, and pop in at the Institute like that on your way to Gertrude’s storage unit, and that’s what changes your habits. Not the knowledge you can’t be fired; not your now-boyfriend’s plot to put your then-boss behind bars. A thirdhand t-shirt with a slogan on it about how to outrun bears.

On his way out this morning the doorknob had felt so loose in Jon’s hand he almost had told Martin about it. But Martin had been full of let’s-go-on-an-adventure-together-style chatter—like when they’d left Daisy’s safehouse, only, get this, without the dread of entering an apocalyptic wasteland—and listening to him put the door out of Jon’s mind before he’d had time to interject.

Their first day here—or at least, the first they spent awake—Jon had inadvertently taught Martin not to accept invitations from Salesa. The latter had bounded up after Martin’s lunch in linen shirt and whooshy shorts and was, to Martin’s then-unseasoned heart, impossible to deny. So Jon had spent thirty minutes on a creaky folding chair, lunging out of his seat on occasion to collect a ball one of the other two had hit wrong, and trying to keep Salesa’s too-bright white socks out of sight. He’d pretended he preferred to sit out, knowing Martin would worry if he tried to play. But he hadn’t done as good a job hiding his boredom as he thought. “Thanks for putting up with that. Sorry it went on so long,” Martin had said as they re-entered their bedroom. “I just couldn’t say no to him, you know? For such a cynical old man he’s got impressive puppy eyes.”

“It’s fine? You know me, I don’t mind… watching.”

“I just mean, I’m sorry you couldn’t play. How’s your leg, by the way? Er—both your legs, I guess.”

“It’s fine. They’re both fine. I didn’t want to play anyway, remember? I don’t know how.”

“Sure you don’t,” Martin replied, words tripping over a fond laugh.

“I don’t!”

“Come on, Jon. Everyone knows how to play ping-pong.”

Martin had turned down Salesa when he showed up the next day in khaki shorts and a pith helmet with three butterfly nets, without Jon’s having to say a word. More emphatically still did he turn him down when Salesa mentioned the house had an indoor pool, and offered to lend them both antique bathing suits like the one he had on, “Free of charge! A debtor is an enemy, after all, and in this new world I have no wish to make an enemy of” (sarcastic whisper, fingers wiggling) “the Ceaseless Watcher who rules it. I have nothing to hide from you,” he’d alleged, for the… third time that day, maybe? Each morning Jon resolved to count such references; he rarely missed one, as far as he knew, but kept forgetting how many he’d counted.

But Salesa was a salesman, and over time his efforts had grown more subtle. He stopped showing up already dressed for the activity he had in mind, and instead would drop hints at meals about all the fun things they could do if only they would let him show them. Martin loved how the winter sunlight caught, every afternoon around four, in the branches of a tree visible outside the window of their bedroom. “Ah, yes,” Salesa had agreed when he remarked on it one morning. “Turning it periwinkle and the golden green of champagne.” (He poured sparkling wine—the cheap stuff, he said, not real champagne—into an empty juice glass still lined with orange pulp. Over and over, without once overflowing. The oranges weren’t ripe enough to drink their juice plain yet, he said. But they’d still run out of juice first.) “If you think that’s beautiful”—he paused to swallow bubbles come up from his throat, waved his hand, shook his head. “No. On one tree, yes, it is beautiful. But on a whole orchard of bare trees in winter”—he nodded in the direction of Upton’s orchards—“the afternoon sun is sublime. You can see how the twigs shrink and shiver under its gaze; the grass rustles with a hitch in its breath as if it fears to be seen, but with each undulation a new blade flashes gold like a coin,” &c., &c.

“Wow. Sounds like you really got lucky, finding such a nice place to, uh. Sssset up camp?”

Jon knew Martin well enough to hear the judgment in his voice; if Salesa recognized it then he was an expert at pretending not to. “And it's only a two-minute walk away,” he’d said, instead of taking Martin’s bait. “It would be such a shame for my guests not to see it.”

“Oh, well. Maybe in a few days? It’s just, we’ve been outside nonstop for ages. It’s nice to be between four walls again. Besides, we don’t know the grounds as well as you do—and the border isn’t all that stable, you said? Right?”

“It is if you know how to follow it! I could accompany you—show you all the best sights, with no risk of wandering back out into the hellscape by mistake.”

“We’re just not really ready for that, I don’t think. Right, Jon?”

“Mm.”

“Are you sure? If it were me, a foray into a beautiful natural oasis would be just what I needed to convince myself that my peace—my sanctuary—is real.”

“If it is real,” Jon couldn’t stop himself from muttering.

Salesa remained impervious. “You would be surprised how difficult it is to feel fear in a place like that. I don’t think that is just the camera.”

“We‘ll think about it,” Martin conceded.

“Yes—you should both think about it. I am at your disposal whenever you change your mind.”

And so on that morning they had narrowly escaped. Would they had fared so well today. The problem was, on these early occasions Jon had interpreted Martin’s No thankses as being, well, Martin’s. But after a few more of Salesa’s sales pitches Jon began to second-guess that.

“Is it warm enough in here for you both?” Salesa had asked them last night at dinner. “I worry too much, perhaps. I only wish the place took less time to warm up in the morning. At breakfast time, in sunny weather like we've been having, I’ll bet you anything you like it’s warmer out there than in here.”

“It’s alright; we’re not too cold in the mornings either. Right, Jon?”

“Hm? Oh—no.”

“Perhaps we three could take breakfast out there, before the weather changes.”

“Ha—that’s right,” Martin had laughed. “I forgot you still had that out here. Weather changes. Brave new world, I guess.”

Salesa smirked and shrugged. “Well, braver than the rest of it.”

“R…ight. ‘We three,’ you said—so not Annabelle?”

“Mmmmno, probably not her. I have tried taking spiders outside before; they never seem to like it much.”

Nearly every day, here, Jon found a spider in their bathtub. The first time Martin had been with him. Martin had picked the thing up with his fingers and tried to coax it to leave out the window, but by the time he got there it’d crawled up his sleeve.

“Excuse me.”

Martin pulled back his own chair too and frowned up at him. “You okay?”

“Just needed the toilet.” He tried to arrange his mouth into a gentle smile. “Think I can do that on my own.”

The other two resumed their conversation the moment Jon left the dining room. Before the intervening walls muffled their voices Jon heard:

“I suppose that does sound pretty nice.”

“Pretty nice, you suppose? Martin, Martin—it’s a beautiful oasis! What a shame it will be if you leave this place having done no more than suppose about it.”

“It is a bit of a waste, I guess.”

“You wouldn’t need to sit on the ground, if that’s what concerns you. There are benches everywhere.”

He’d been just about to cross through a doorway and out of earshot when he froze, hearing his name:

“Oh, ha—not me, but, Jon might find that nice to know,” Martin said. “Thanks for.” And then silence.

Was that the whole reason he kept declining invitations to explore the grounds? To keep grass stains out of Jon’s trousers? Martin was the one who’d sat down on that godforsaken Extinction couch; why did he think—?

Not the point, Jon told himself as he sat on the toilet and set his forehead on the heels of his palms. He tried to watch the floor for spiders, but his eyes kept crossing. The point was that if—? If Martin was lying about wanting to stay inside—or, more charitably, if he was telling the truth but wanted that only because he thought Jon would have as dismal a time out in the garden as he had at ping-pong—then…?

He imagined holding hands with Martin while surrounded by green. Gravel crunching under their feet. Martin smiling, with sunlight caught in the strands of his hair that a slight breeze had blown upright.

“And if you get too warm,” he heard Salesa tell Martin, as he headed back into the dining room, “we can move into the shade of the pines! You know, they don’t just grow year-round? They also shed year-round. The floor under them is always carpeted in needles, so you need never get mud on your shoes.”

“Huh,” Martin laughed. “Never thought of it that way.”

“But of course there are benches there too,” Salesa added, his eyes flickering up to Jon.

As Jon hauled himself into his seat he asked, in a voice he hoped the strain made sound distracted ergo casual, “So, what, like a picnic, you mean.”

Not a fun picnic. Not very romantic, since their third wheel was the first to invite himself. Salesa neglected to mention how much wet grass they would have to trek through to get to his favorite spot; that there were benches everywhere didn’t matter since they couldn’t all three fit on one, so they ended up sat in the dirt after all—and n.b. it required a second trek to find a patch of dirt dry enough to sit on at this time of morning. Jon was so sick with fatigue by the time they sat down he could barely eat a thing, though he did dispatch most of Martin’s thermos of tea. His hands shook and buzzed, and felt clumsy, like they’d fallen asleep; he ended up getting more jam in the dirt than on Salesa’s soggy, pre-buttered toast. He felt as though the rest of his flesh had melted three feet to the left of his eyes, bones and mind. Eventually he elected to blame his dizziness on the sun. When his forehead and upper lip started to prickle, threatening sweat, he stood up and announced, “It’s too hot here.”

Or tried to stand, anyway. One leg had oozed just far enough out of its joint that it buckled when he tried to stand; indigo and fuchsia blotches overtook his sight. He pitched forward, free arm pinwheeling—might have fallen into the boiled eggs if Martin hadn’t caught him. “Jon! Are you okay?”

God, why was Martin so surprised? This must have been the fifth or sixth time he had asked him that question since they left the house. One time Jon had bent down to brush dirt off his leg and Martin had thought he was scratching his bandages. So he asked him were they itchy, had they started to peel, did they need changing again, were they cutting off his circulation (no, not yet, not yet, and no). How could someone be so attentive to imaginary ills and yet miss the real ones? At another point, an enormous blue dragonfly had buzzed past, and instead of Did you see that? Martin had turned around to ask Are you okay. Now, on this fifth or sixth occasion, for a few seconds of pure, nonsensical rage he wondered how Martin dared stoop to such emotional blackmail. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, Jon thought; aloud he snorted, as in malicious laughter. His throat felt thick, like he might cry.

“Fine, I’m just—sick of it here.” He pulled his arm free of Martin’s and overbalanced. Didn’t fall, just. Staggered a little.

“Should we move to the shade? We could try to find those famous pines, I guess.”

Jon sank back to the ground. “What about Salesa? Do we just leave him here?”

“Oh. Right,” said Martin. Salesa had eaten most of Jon’s share, and drunk both Jon’s and Martin’s shares of wine. Now he lay asleep in the dirt, head pillowed on one elbow, the other hand’s fingers curled round the stem of a glass still half full. “I guess, yeah? I mean he seems to know the place pretty well, so. It’s not like he’ll get lost out here.”

“We might, though.”

Martin sighed. “True. Should we just head back to our room, then? Maybe get you a snack.”

“Not hungry.”

“A statement, I meant.”

“Oh. Alright, sure,” Jon made himself say. “That sounds like—sure.”

So then they’d headed back, and only Martin had a free hand, and Jon was too tired by that point to distinguish his mind’s vague warning not to let Martin open the door from his usual pride on that subject—and that kind of pride never does seem as important when it’s your boyfriend offering. So he’d dismissed the warning and, well, look what happened.

When he got up from his knees and turned round Martin frowned at Jon. “Are you alright? You’re sat on the floor.”

Jon frowned, too—at the seam between the floor and the hallway’s opposite wall. “I was tired.”

“You hate sitting on the floor.”

“I sat on the ground out there,” Jon said, with a shrug that morphed into a nod in the direction they’d come from.

“Yeah, under duress,” Martin scoffed. “In the Extinction domain you wouldn’t even sit on the couch.”

There was something odd in Martin’s bringing that up now; somewhere, in the back of his mind, Jon could hear a pillar of thought crumbling. But he lacked the energy to find out which of his mind’s structures now stood crooked. “I think this floor is a lot cleaner than that couch,” he said instead, with an incredulous laugh.

“Even with the cobwebs?” Martin didn’t wait for Jon’s answering nod. “Fair enough,” he said, one hand on the back of his neck as he twisted it back and forth. He dropped the hand, sighed, cracked his knuckles. Looked at Jon again. “Yeah, okay. Guess we don’t have to deal with this right now. Let’s find you another bedroom first.”

“Maybe that’s just what Annabelle wants,” Jon muttered, deadpanning so he wouldn’t have to decide whether this was a joke.

Martin snorted. “I’ll risk it.”

Find was a generous way to put it; in fact there was another bedroom only two doors down. By the time Jon got his legs unfolded he could hear the squeak of a door swinging open down the hall. When he looked up, Martin said as their eyes met, “Nope—bed’s too small. You good there ‘til I find one that’ll work?”

“Seems that way.” Jon tried to smile, relief warring with his usual If you want something done right urge. In the quiet moment after Martin neglected to close that door and before he swung open the next one, Jon made himself add, “Thank you.”

“Of course. Oh wow,” Martin said of the next room, in whose doorway he’d stopped. “This one’s a lot nicer than ours. It’s got a balcony. Wallpaper’s pretty loud though. D’you think that’ll keep you awake?” Laughingly, “I know you don’t close your eyes to sleep anymore, so.”

“How loud is ‘pretty loud’?”

“Sort of a… dark, orangey red, with flowers?”

Jon shrugged. “I won’t see it at night.”

“Oh, god. I hope it doesn’t come to that. Should we do this one, then?” Instead of closing the door, Martin swung it the rest of the way open, then strode back to Jon’s side of the corridor, arm already outstretched. Jon managed to stand before Martin could reach him, but, as it had done outside, his vision went dark for a few seconds. He felt Martin’s hand on his shoulder before he could see his frown.

“You alright?” Martin asked yet again.

“Yes. I’m fine.”

“It’s just—you don’t usually blink anymore, except for effect.”

“Oh.”

Out there, none of the watchers blinked. At first, soon after the change, Martin had asked Jon to try, “Because it just feels so weird. Like I’m under constant scrutiny. Literally constant, Jon. You get why that feels weird, right?” (Jon had agreed—sincerely, though he wondered why Martin needed to ask that question in a world whose central conceit was that being watched felt weird. He’d also chosen not to point out that his scrutiny, like that of Jonah Magnus, was not, technically, constant, since he did sometimes look at other things. But he still rehearsed this retort in his mind every time he remembered that conversation.) Turned out it was hard to time your blinks properly when your eyeballs didn’t need the moisture. He’d forget about it for who knew how long, then remember and overcompensate by blinking so often Martin at first thought he was exaggerating it on purpose as a joke. It got old fast, in Jon’s opinion, but even after he learnt Jon didn’t intend it as a joke Martin still found it funny. “You’re doing it again,” he’d say every time, shoulders wiggling. Eventually Jon had asked him,

“You know you don’t blink anymore either, right?”

“Oh god, don’t I?” When Jon shook his head, with a smile whose teeth he tried to keep covered, Martin squeezed his own eyes shut and pushed their lids back and forth with his fingers. “Ugh—gross!” And for the next half hour he’d done the whole forget-to-blink-for-five-minutes-then-do-it-ten-times-in-as-many-seconds routine, too. After that they had both agreed to pretend not to notice the lack of blinking. Jon figured he couldn’t hold it against Martin that he’d broken this rule though, since Jon himself had broken it first, on their first morning here:

“You blinked,” he had informed Martin as he watched him stir sugar into his tea. Martin, who had not only blinked but broken eye contact to make sure he dropped the sugar cube in the right place, replied with a scoff,

“Didn’t know it was a staring contest.”

“No, I mean—”

“Oh! I blinked!”

“…Right,” Jon said now. “I’m—it’s nothing.”

Martin sighed. He closed his eyes, but probably rolled them under their lids. Jon used the inspection of their new room as an excuse to look away, but took in nothing other than the presence of a large bed and the flowered wallpaper Martin had warned him about.

“‘Kay. If you’re sure.”

Taking a seat at the foot of the bed, Jon looked down at his grass-stained knees and prepared himself to ask, Look, does it matter? I’m about to lie down anyway, so, functionally speaking, yes, I am fine.

“So, you’ll be okay here for a bit while I go figure out what to do about the door?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. I’ll come check on you as soon as I know anything, yeah?”

“Of course.”

“Although—if you’re asleep, should I wake you up?”

“Yes,” Jon replied before Martin had even got the last word out. He heard a short, emphatic exhale, presumably of laughter. “Wait—how would you know, anyway?”

“Oh. Yeah, good point.”

Jon looked down at his shoes. His fingers throbbed in anticipation, but he figured he should spare Martin the horror of getting grass stains on a second bedroom’s counterpane. The first shoe he pulled off without untying, since he could step on its heel with the other one. But he had to bend over to reach the second one’s incongruously bright white laces, biting his lip when he felt his right femur poke past the bounds of its socket as between a cage’s bars. On his way back up his vision quivered like a heat mirage, but didn’t go dark. He scooched himself up to the head of the bed. Made sure to face the ceiling rather than the red wallpaper.

A few months into his tenure in the Archives, Jon had discovered that if you close your eyes at your desk, even just for a minute, you can trick your whole body into thinking you’ve been gentle with it. But that trick didn’t work anymore. Out there, this made sense; interposing his eyelids between himself and the world’s new horrors couldn’t push them out of his consciousness, any more than it had helped to close the curtains at Daisy’s safehouse. Martin’s sentimental attachment to sleep had baffled him, as had his insistence on closing his eyes even though they’d pop back open as soon as his body went limp. Here, though, Jon sympathized with Martin’s wish. He too missed that magic link between closed eyes and sleep. Probably he should just be grateful for this rest from knowing other people’s suffering? The thing he had wished to close his eyes against was gone here. But now that most of his bodily wants had synced up with his actions again, it felt… wrong, like a tangible loss, that he couldn’t assert It’s time for rest now by closing his eyelids. That it took effort to keep them joined. Jon even found himself missing the crust that used to stick them together on mornings after long sleep.

That should have been his first sensation on waking, their first morning here. After seventy-one hours his eyelids should’ve been practically super-glued together. Instead, they’d apparently stayed open the entire time. It wasn’t uncomfortable—he hadn’t woken up with them smarting or anything. Hadn’t noticed one way or the other; after all, when not forced awake by an alarm, one rarely notices the moment one opens one’s eyes in the morning. He just didn’t like knowing that he looked the same waking and sleeping. It didn’t make sense. The dreams hadn’t followed him here, so what was he watching? He could see nothing but the ceiling.

He rolled over, hoping to look out the window. Doors, technically. Between gauzy curtains he could make out only wrought-iron bars and the tops of a few trees. A nice view, he could tell; when he got his second wind he was sure he’d find it pretty. For now he wondered how much more energy debt he had put himself in by rolling over.

Drowning in debt? We can help!

How had he not foreseen how horrible it would be inside the Buried? The inability to move or speak without pain and loss of breath—“Just imagine,” he muttered sarcastically to the empty air, as though addressing his past self. “What might that be like.” He’d lived for years with the weight of exhaustion on his back—heavier at that time than it’d ever been before. And he knew how it felt to risk injury with every movement. What an odd frame of mind he must have lived in then, to think his magic healing wouldn’t let him get scratched up down there. Had he thought it would protect him from fear? I must save my friend from this horrible place! But also, If I get stuck there forever, no big deal; I deserve it, after all. There seemed something so arrogant about that now, that idea that deserving pain could somehow mitigate it. That because monsterhood made him less innocent, it would make him less of a victim. How could he have thought that, when he’d known pulling her out of there didn’t mean he forgave her? He should apologize to Daisy for—

Right. Nope, never mind.

He began to regret rolling over. If he planned to stay on his side like this for long, he shouldn’t leave his shoulder and hip dangling. He could already feel their joints beginning to slide apart. But his body had started to drift to that faraway place from which no grievance ever seemed urgent enough to recall it—neither pain now nor the threat of greater pain later. Nor the three cups of tea he’d drunk.

After he and Martin had fallen asleep on Salesa’s doorstep, Jon had vague memories of being led up the stairs to their bedroom, though he remembered neither being shaken awake nor getting into bed. Just a seventy-odd-hour blank spot, followed by pain of a kind he had thought he’d left behind.

It wasn’t that watchers couldn’t feel pain, after the change. They could, but it was like how real-world pain felt through the veil of a dream. Your actions didn’t affect it as directly as they should. In the Necropolis Martin had asked him, “How exactly does a leg wound make you faster?” If he’d had the courage to answer, at the time he would have said something about his own wounds not seeming important now that he had to tune out those of the whole world. That wasn’t it though, he knew now. Pain just worked differently out there. When Daisy attacked him, it had hurt—but the wound she left him hadn’t protested movement. Not until he and Martin entered the grounds of Upton House. You could bear weight on an injured leg just fine out there, because it wouldn’t hurt more when you stood on it than otherwise.

Sometimes, when his joints slid apart while he slept, he could still feel it in his dreams. Up until 13th January 2016 (for months after which date he dreamt Naomi Herne’s graveyard and nothing else), his sleeping mind used to craft scenarios to explain its own pain and panic to itself. Running from an exploding grenade, staying awake through surgery, that sort of thing. But over the years, as the sensation grew familiar, his dreams about it became less urgent, their anxieties more mundane. He’d shout for help from passing cars, then feel like he’d lied to the stranger who opened their door to him when it turned out running to get in the car hurt no more than standing still.

Even before the change, it’d been ages since he’d had to worry about that. Since the coma, Beholding had fixed all these accidents, the way it’d fixed the finger he tried to chop off. They wouldn’t reset with a clunk, the way they had when he used to fix them by hand. It was more like his body reverted to a version the Eye had saved before the moment of injury. When he tried to pull open a Push door he’d hear the first clunk, followed by about half a second of pain, then after a gentle burst of static—nothing. Just a door handle between his fingers that needed pushing. If he tripped on uneven pavement he might still go down, but his ankle wouldn’t hurt when he stood back up, and the scrapes on his hands would heal before he could inspect them. Here, though, in this place the Eye couldn’t see, Jon lacked such protections. He didn’t have the dreams either? And that was more than worth it as a tradeoff, he was sure. But it still smarted to remember that pain had been his first sensation waking up in an oasis. Not birdsong, not sunshine striped across linen, not the warm weight of another person next to him. He knew he’d come back to a place ruled by physics rather than fear because he’d woken up with gaps between his bones.

“Jon? Are you awake?”

“Hm? Oh. Yes.”

“Cool.” Martin sat down on what felt like the corner of bed nearest the door. “I think I know how to do this now.”

“How to put the doorknob back on?”

“Yeah. God, I still can’t believe it twisted clean off in my hand like that. With no warning—like, zero to sixty in less than a second. I mean, can you believe our luck? The thing’s perfectly functional, and then suddenly it just—comes off!”

“Er…”

“Oh, god, sorry—I didn’t mean—”

“What? Oh—hrkgh”—Jon rolled around to face Martin, hoping the little yelp he let out when his leg slopped back into joint would sound like a noise of exasperation rather than pain. He found Martin sat looking down at the severed doorknob which poked up from between his knees. “No, Martin, of course not, I know—”

“Still, I’m sorry about—”

“No, it’s—it’s fine?”

On that first morning, Jon had managed to get his limbs screwed back on properly without making enough noise to wake up Martin. He’d limped out of their room and down the hall, pushing doors open until he’d found a toilet, whereupon he sat to pee and marveled that the flush and sink still worked. It was bright enough inside that he hadn’t thought to try the light switch on his way in—too busy contorting his neck to look for the sun out the window. On his way out, though, he flicked it on, then off. Then on again and off again. How could it work, when there was no power grid the house could connect to? Automatically Jon tried to search his mind’s Eye for a domain based in a power plant or something. Right, no, of course—that power did not work here.

When he got back to their room he found Martin awake. “Oh—morning,” Jon told him with a shy laugh.

“It—it is morning, isn’t it,” Martin marveled. Then he asked if Jon could hand him the map sticking out of his backpack’s side pocket. (What good are maps when the very Earth logic no longer applied here, after all. But Martin was rubbish at geography, so Jon still had to provide the You Are Here sign with his finger for him.) Jon grabbed the map on his way back to bed, and was about to tell him about the miracles of plumbing and electricity he’d just witnessed—not to mention the bathtub he’d admired on the long trek from toilet to sink—when Martin frowned and asked, “Why are you limping?”

“Am I?” Jon had shrugged, then cleared his throat when the motion made his shoulder audibly click. “Daisy, must be.”

“No, Jon. That’s the wrong leg.”

He slid both legs out of sight under the blankets and handed Martin the map. “It’s nothing. It just… came off a bit. Last night."

Before Jon could add It’s fixed now though, Martin said, “I’m sorry, what?”

Jon had assumed Martin understood the kind of thing he meant, but that he’d misled him as to its degree—i.e., that Martin objected to his talking about a full hip dislocation like it mattered less than what happened with Daisy. So he’d said,

“No, sorry, not all the way off—”

And Martin just laughed. “What, and you taped it back up like—like an old computer cable?”

“Sort of, yeah? It—it does still work, more or less.”

“Right, of course. No need to get a new one, yet; you can just limp along with this one. No big deal! Just make sure you don’t pull too hard on it.”

“I mean.” By now he could sense Martin’s sarcasm, his bitterness; that didn’t mean he knew what to do with them. So he'd said with a huff of laughter, “I can’t just send for a new one. That’s—that’s not how bodies work. You have to….” Wait for it to sort itself out was the natural end to that sentence. But he hadn’t been sure he could say that without opening a can of worms.

“Wait so… what actually happened? Are you okay?”

Only at this point had Jon recognized Martin’s response as one of incomprehension. What happened exactly? he had asked, too, when Jon told him the ice-cream anecdote. Did no one ever listen when you told them about these things?

“Nothing. Never mind. It’s fine.”

“Oh come on.”

“It’s. Fine! It’s not important.”

And then for days Martin kept alluding to it. Like some kind of reminder to Jon that he hadn’t opened up, disguised as a joke. Every time something came out or fell down he’d mutter, “So it came off, you might say.” Eventually they’d fallen out over it, and now neither one could come near the phrase without this song and dance.

“Don’t worry about it, Martin,” Jon assured him now; “I’m over it.”

“…Uh huh. Well, putting that to one side for the moment—I think I can fix this?”

“Oh? Great!—”

“—Yeah! It should be simple, actually. I think I just need to replace the screw that fell out? I mean, there doesn’t seem to be anything actually broken, just, you know,” with an awkward laugh, “the screw lives on the wrong side of the door now. But if we can just put a new one in the door should be fine.” He looked to Jon as if for help plotting their next steps.

“I—I don’t, um. Think we have one.”

Martin’s shoulders dropped; the corners of his mouth tightened. “Yeah, I know we don’t have one, Jon. I just mean, we need to find out where Salesa keeps them.”

“Oh!” Jon replied, in a brighter tone. Then he registered what this meant. “Oh. Right.”

“Y…eah.”

“Any idea where to look?”

They checked what seemed to Martin the most obvious place first. Salesa used one of the ground-floor drawing rooms as a sort of repository for everything he’d left as yet unpacked—all the practical items he hadn’t been able to repurpose as toys, plus some antiques he’d been too fond of or too nervous to part with. Two nights ago, Salesa had noticed the state of Jon’s and Martin’s shoelaces, and insisted they let him replace them with some from this little warehouse. “Please, come with me; I’ve nothing to hide. You can have a look around, see if I have anything that might help you on your journey….” As he said this he’d counted to two on his fingers, as though listing off attractions they should be sure not to miss.

Jon watched Martin perk right up at this. All week Salesa had kept pleading with them to tell him about any luxuries they had wanted while touring the apocalypse, so he could try to find something to fulfill those wants. “Well, I—I don’t know about luxuries,” Martin had ventured the third time this came up. “But I do think we might run out of bandages soon, so. If you’ve any extra?”

“Of course, of course, yes, how prudent of you, always with one eye on the future. Must be the Beholding in you.” (Neither Jon nor Martin knew what to say to that.) “But there will be plenty of time for that. I meant something for now, while you are here, while you don’t need to think of things like that.” And sure enough, each time Salesa had come to them with presents from his little warehouse (booze, butterfly nets, more booze, antique bathing suits, &c.), he’d forgot about Martin’s homely request for gauze and tape. Martin insisted they change the dressing on Jon’s leg every day; by now they’d run through the bandages he brought from Daisy’s safehouse. So when Salesa suggested they accompany him to his repository, Martin said,

“Sure, yeah! That sounds really helpful.” (Salesa clutched his heart as though he’d waited all his life to hear such praise.) “Er. The things in your warehouse, though. They’re not L—um.” Leitners, Martin had almost called them. “You don’t think they’ll develop any… strange properties, when we leave here, do you?”

“Of course not,” Salesa had answered, stopping and turning all the way around in the corridor to face Martin with a frown. “Martin, I promise, only my antiques are cursed—and even then, not all of them.” He’d resumed the walk toward his little warehouse, but turned around again and held up a hand, as if to preempt a question. “There are, indeed, yes, some items out there, touched by the Corruption, which can pass their infection on to other things they come in contact with. But, no,” he went on, his voice fighting off a joyous laugh, “no, the only item I have like that does almost the opposite.”

“Oh.”

Salesa nodded, but did not turn around this time. “Strange little thing. It’s an antique syringe that, so long as you keep it near you, repels the Crawling Rot. I like to think it helped dispatch that insect thing Annabelle chased away. But if you try to get rid of it,” he added in a darker tone, “all the sickness, the bugs, the smells, even stains on your clothes—everything disgusting that it’s kept away—they remember who you are, and they hunger for you more than anyone else. The man who sold it to me….” He shook his head ruefully, hand now resting on the door.

“Was eaten alive by mosquitoes,” Jon muttered.

“Something like that, yes,” said Salesa, as he jerked open the door.

Jon hated the way his and Martin’s shoes looked now. He hadn’t had to put new laces on a pair of old, dirty shoes since he was a kid, and the contrast looked wrong—the same way starched collars and slicked-back hair on kids look wrong. Jon’s trainers were gray, their laces a slightly darker gray, so these white ones wouldn’t have looked quite right even without the dirt. Martin’s had once been white, but their original laces were broad and flat, while these were narrow and more rounded. The replacements’ thin, clinical white lines looked something between depressing and menacing. Too much like spider web; too much like the stitching on Nikola’s minions. When they came undone on this morning’s walk, Jon had made sure to tread on them in the mud a few times before tying them back up. Poor Dr. Thompson’s syringe must have retained some of its power here, though, because they still looked pristine. Jon wondered if it had no effect on spiders, or if without it this whole place would have been draped in cobwebs.

Martin seemed pleased with their haul, though. Despite Salesa’s amnesia on the subject, his little warehouse held more plasters, gauze, medical tape, antibacterial ointment, alcohol wipes—the list went on—than one man could ever use. In a strange, raw moment Jon liked to pretend he hadn’t seen, Salesa had wrung his hands as his eyes passed over this hoard. His lip had quivered. He’d practically begged Martin to take the whole lot away with them. “What harm will come to me here? And if it does come, what good will it do, protecting one lonely old man from skinned knees and paper cuts? The two of you—where you are going—the gravity of your mission!” At this point he’d seized one of each their hands. “Everything I have that even might help, you must take it. Please.”

“I—yeah,” Martin stuttered. “This is—really helpful, yeah. We’ll take as much as we can fit in our bags.”

Salesa had let go their hands by this point, and crossed his arms. “Right, yes, bags, of course, the bags. Are you sure you don’t want my truck?”

“Oh, well, thanks, but I don’t think either of us knows how to—”

“To drive a truck?” Salesa uncrossed his arms and began to reach for Martin’s shoulder. “I could teach you—”

“It won’t work without the camera anyway,” pointed out Jon. “We have to walk.”

Martin sighed. ”That too. ‘The journey will be the journey,’ as Jon keeps saying.”

“I said that once,” Jon protested.

No such success on this return visit. They found a small pile of miscellaneous screws, one of which Martin said would work (though it was the wrong color, he alleged, and had clearly been meant for some other purpose), but the screwdriver they needed remained elusive. “I mean, I can’t be sure they’re not in here—the place is as bad as Gertrude’s storage unit. We could spend all day here and still not be sure—”

“Let’s not do that,” said Jon, pushing an always-warm candlestick with a pool of always-melted wax out of Martin’s way with his sleeve for what felt like the hundredth time.

“No arguments here.”

“Where to next?”

“I guess it makes sense that they’re not here. This room’s all stuff Salesa brought, and why would he bring home-repair stuff when he didn’t even know where he’d wind up.”

“Except for the screws.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t look like he keeps screws here, remember? There’s just a couple random ones lying around, like he forgot to put them away or something.”

Jon peered between the clouds in his mind, trying to catch sight of Martin’s thought train. “So you’re saying the screwdriver should be…?”

“Somewhere less… frequented, I guess? They’ll probably still be wherever they were when Salesa found the place.”

“Not somewhere that was open to the public, then.”

Martin sighed. ”I mean yeah, probably. Not that that narrows it down much.”

“Somewhere… banal, less posh.”

“Not sure how much less posh you can get than this place. But yeah, I guess. Have I mentioned how weird it is you’re the one who keeps asking me this stuff?”

“I’m sorry. I’m trying to help? I just…” Jon closed his eyes, which itched with the warehouse’s dust, and rubbed their lids with an index finger. Odd that his eyes weren’t immune to dust, when leaving them open for seventy straight hours hadn’t bothered them. And why didn’t the syringe keep dust away? In Dr. Snow’s day (not far removed from Smirke’s, n.b.), Jon seemed to recall that dust had been used as a euphemism for all waste, including the human kind Dr. Snow had found in the cholera water. It was like how people today use filth—hence the word dustbin. And hadn’t Elias once called the Corruption Filth? Jon opened his eyes and watched Martin swirl back to full color. “I can’t seem to corral my thoughts here,” he concluded.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s actually kind of fun, it’s just—I’m so used to being the sidekick,” Martin laughed. “Besides, I miss my eldritch Google.”

“Should I go back out there, ask the Eye about it, then come back?”

Another laugh, this one less awkward. “No. That won’t work, remember? This place is a ‘blind spot,’ you said.” The words in inverted commas he said with a frown and in a deeper voice.

“Right, right. I forgot,” Jon sighed. He lowered himself to the floor and examined the finger he’d felt snap back into place when he let go his cane. During the five seconds he’d allowed himself to entertain it, the idea of heading back out there had excited him a little. A few minutes to check on Basira, verify what Salesa had told them about his life before the change, make sure the world hadn’t somehow ended twice over. Give himself a few minutes’ freedom of movement, for that matter. Out there he could run, jump, open jars, pick up full mugs of tea without worrying a screw in his hand would come loose and make him drop them. He could stand up as quickly as he thought the words, I think I’ll stand up now, without his vision going dark. God, and even if it did, it wouldn’t matter! He would just know every tripping hazard and every look on Martin’s face, without having to ask these clumsy human eyes to show them to him.

“Honestly, it’d almost feel worth it to go back out there just to formulate a plan to find them. At least I can think out there.”

“Hey.” Martin elbowed him slightly in the ribs. Jon fought with himself not to resent the very gentleness of it. “I think I’ll come up with the plan for once, thanks. Some of us can think just fine here.”

Was it just because of Hopworth that Martin’s elbow barely touched him? Or because Martin feared that Jon would break in here, in a way he’d learnt not to fear out there?

“Oh—I know,” Martin said, clicking his fingers and pointing them at Jon like a gun. “We passed a shed this morning, remember?”

Jon squinted. “Not even remotely.”

“No yeah—on our walk with Salesa. I tried to ask him what it was for, but he kept droning on and on. By the time he stopped talking I’d forgot about it.”

“Huh,” said Jon, to show he was listening.

“That seems like a good place to keep screws and all, right? If it’s so nondescript you can’t even remember it.”

“Sure.”

“Great! Are you ready now, or d’you need to sit for a bit longer?”

“I’m ready.” This time he accepted Martin’s hand, not keen to trip on something cursed.

“Anyway, if we don’t find them and Salesa’s still out there, we can ask him on the way back.”

Jon’s heart shrunk before the prospect of inviting Salesa to be the hero of their story. Please, Mr. Salesa, save us from our screwdriver-less hell! They would never hear the end of it. It would inevitably remind the old man of the countless times in his youth when he’d been the only man in the antiques trade who knew where to find some priceless treasure. Let Salesa open their stuck door and they’d find Pandora’s bloody box of stories behind it. He winced and let out a grunt as of pain before he could stop himself. “Let’s not tell him, if we can help it.”

“Of course we should tell him,” Martin protested. “We can’t just leave it broken like this.”

“But if we can fix it without his help—?”

“What? No! Even then, he’s our host. We have to tell him. It’s his door, he deserves to know its—I don’t know, history?” Martin sighed, shoving one hand in his hair and holding out the other. “If he’s got a doorknob whose screw comes loose a lot, he should know that, so he can tighten it next time before it gets out of hand. I mean, we’re lucky it only chipped the paint when it—when it fell off, you know?” (Jon, for his part, hadn’t even noticed this chip of paint Martin referred to.) “And—and suppose he’s only got this one screw left,” tapping the one in his pocket, “and the next time it happens his last screw rolls under the door like this one did.”

“And what is he supposed to do to prevent that scenario? There aren’t exactly any hardware stores in the apocalypse.”

Big sigh. “Yeah, fair enough. I still think we should tell him. It just feels wrong to hide secrets from him about his own house, you know?”

“Fine,” sighed Jon in turn. ”Should we tell him about the scorch marks on the window sill as well?”

“No?” Martin turned to him with an incredulous look. “Tell me you’re joking.”

“I mean—I was, but—”

“Please tell me you get how that’s different.”

“Enlighten me,” Jon said wearily.

“Seriously? Of course you don’t tell him about the?—those were already there! If we’d put them there, then yeah, of course we’d need to tell him.”

“So it’s about confessing your guilt, then. Not about what Salesa makes of the information.”

“I mean, I guess?” Martin looked perplexed, lips drawn into his mouth. “Actually, no. Because those are just scorch marks, they don’t—you can still get into a room with scorch marks on the windowsill, Jon.”

“And yet if you’d left them you’d tell him about it?”

“Well yeah but if I told him about it now it’d just be like I was—leaving him a bad review, or something. It’d just be rude. ‘Lovely place you have, Salesa. So kind of you to share your limited provisions with us refugees from the apocalypse. Too bad you gave us a room whose windowsill could use repainting!’”

Jon laughed. “Yes, alright, I get it.”

Martin’s sigh of relief seemed only a little exaggerated. If he hadn’t wiped pretend sweat from his brow Jon might have bought it. “Okay, that’s good, ‘cause”—when Jon kept laughing, Martin cut himself off. “Hang on, were you joking this whole time?”

“Sort of?”

“Were you just playing devil’s advocate or something?”

“I mean—not exactly? For the first seventy or eighty percent of it I was completely serious.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know. It was just—fun. It felt nice to take a definite sta—aaaa-a-aa.” Something in Jon’s lower back went wrong somehow. An SI joint, probably? The pain caught him so much by surprise that when he stepped with that side’s leg he stumbled forward.

“Whoa!” Martin’s hand closed around his upper arm. Jon yelped again, from panic more than hurt this time, as his shoulder thunked in its socket. “Jon! Are you okay?”

“Don’t do that,” Jon hissed, trying lamely to shake his arm out of Martin’s grip. It didn’t work. The attempt just made his own arm ache, and produce more ominous clunking sounds.

“I—what?”

“It was fine. I don’t need you to catch me.”

Martin let his arm go. “You were about to fall on your face, Jon.”

“I’d already caught myself—just fine—with this.” He gestured to his cane, stirring its handle like a joystick.

“How was I supposed to know that?”

“I don’t know, look?”

“It’s not—?” Martin scoffed. “Look when? It’s not like a rational calculation. I can’t just go ‘Beep. Beep. See human trip. Will human fall on face? If yes, press A to catch! If not, press B to’— what, stand there and do nothing? It’s just human nature; when you see someone falling that’s just what you do. I’m not going to apologize for not calculating the risk properly.”

“Fine! Yes, okay, you’re right. Forget I said anything.” Throwing up his free hand in defeat, Jon set off again—tried to stride, but it was hard to do that with a limp. Even with his cane, he couldn’t step evenly enough to achieve a decisive gait.

It was fine, Jon reminded himself. He’d had this injury (if you could call it that) a thousand times before. When it came on suddenly like this it never stuck around long. Sure, yeah, for now every step hurt like an urgent crisis. But any second it would right itself as quickly as it had come undone.

“No, no, I understand! Point taken! Note to future Martin,” the latter shouted from behind Jon, voice troubled by hurried steps; “next time let him fall and break his bloody nose.”

Trusting Martin to shout directions if he went the wrong way, Jon pressed on, rehearsing comebacks in his mind. Is this not a boundary I’m allowed to set? You don’t let me read statements in front of you. Isn’t that part of human—isn’t that my nature, too?

Oh, yes, human nature, that must be it. You didn’t lunge after Salesa at ping-pong the other day, did you? I saw you opening doors for Melanie when she got back from India. You stopped for a while, did you know that? You all did, everyone in the Archives. And then—it’s the strangest thing!—you all started up again after Delano. Maybe you lot don’t see the common factor here; people always do seem to think it’s more polite not to notice.

So what if I had broken my nose? You nearly broke my shoulder, catching me like that. Does that not matter because you can’t see it? Because it wouldn’t scar?

They were all too petty to say aloud. Too incongruous with the quiet. He could hear his own footsteps, and Martin’s, and the clank of his cane’s metal segments each time it hit the ground, and a few crows exclaiming about something exciting they’d found on his right. Nothing else.

“Looks like Salesa went inside,” Martin shouted from behind him.

Jon stopped walking and turned around. “What?”

“Left a couple things out here, but yeah.” Martin jogged to catch up with him, from a greater distance than Jon would have expected given how much limping slowed him down. He must have veered off course to inspect the clearing Salesa had vacated. In one hand he carried an empty wine glass by its stem, which he lifted to show Jon.

“Huh.”

“Yeah.” When he caught up with Jon, Martin stood still and panted. “Guess it won’t be as easy to ask him about it as we thought. If we don’t find what we need in there,” he added, glancing demonstratively to something behind Jon.

Following Martin’s eyes, Jon finally saw the shed. Nondescript boards, worn black and white by the elements. Surrounded by hedges three months overgrown.

Turned out it wasn’t a shed anymore, though—Salesa had converted it to a chicken coop. “Explains the boiled eggs,” shrugged Jon.

“God, they’re adorable. Do you think it’s okay to pet one?” Martin crouched in front of a black hen with a puffball of feathers on top of her head. (Martin called her a hen, anyway, and Jon trusted his authority on animals other than cats). “I don’t really know, er, ch—hicken etiquette,” he mused, voice shot through with nervous laughter.

The black hen sat alone in a little box, and didn't seem to want attention. A little red one they’d found strutting around the coop, however, ventured right up to Martin and cocked her head, like she expected him to give her a present. While Martin cooed over her and the other chickens, Jon went outside and laid flat on his back in the grass under a tree. “Take your time,” he shouted. “I’m happy here.”

Sure enough, when Martin emerged from the coop and helped him stand back up, whatever cog in Jon’s pelvis or spine he had jammed earlier was turning again. And by the time they got back to the house, Martin had talked himself into the idea that maybe all the house’s doorknobs that looked like theirs came loose a lot, and Salesa had taken to keeping the screwdriver to fix them in, say, the hall closet, or in their toilet’s under-sink cabinet.

“I think we’re gonna have to find Salesa and ask him about it,” concluded Martin, when these locations turned up nothing they wanted either.

“If you’re sure.”

Jon sat down on the closed toilet seat. Hadn’t that been what he said just before the last time he sat down on the lid of a toilet before Martin? He’d dutifully turned away, that time, as Martin undressed, wanting to make sure he knew he’d still let him have some privacy. But then, of course: “Where should I put these, do you think? —Er, my clothes I mean.”

“Oh. Um.” Jon had turned his head to look at the stain on Daisy’s ceiling, for what must have been the tenth time already. “I can hold onto them if you like.” Which then meant Martin had to get them back on before Jon could undress for his own shower and hand him his clothes. As he’d piled his trousers into Martin’s hands a tape recorder fell out of one pocket and crashed to the floor, ejecting the tape with Peter’s statement on it. “Shit,” Jon had hissed and ducked to the floor to pick it up, trusting the slit in his towel to reveal nothing worse than thigh.

“Shit,” Martin echoed. “I hope that wasn’t your phone.”

“No—just the recorder.” Still on the floor, Jon clicked its little door shut and pressed play. Sound of waves, static, footsteps. He switched it off. “Seems alright.” Thank god, he stopped himself from adding. Jon didn’t want to lose this one, this record of how he’d found Martin, in case he lost him again. But he didn’t want Martin to hear the sounds of the Lonely again so soon, either. That was why he’d stayed with Martin while he showered, rather than waiting in the safehouse living room. He wouldn’t have insisted on it, of course. He didn’t exactly believe Martin would disappear again? But long showers were such a cliché of lonely people, and steam looked so much like the mist on Peter’s beach, and when Jon asked how he felt about it, Martin said that thought hadn’t occurred to him,

“But as soon as you started to say that, I.” He’d stood with his teeth bared, half smiling half grimacing, and bringing the tips of his fingers together and apart over and over. “Yeah, I think you’re right. Heh—it scares me too now, if I’m honest. That’s… a good sign, I guess, right?”

They had come a long way since then, Jon told himself. They were more comfortable with each other now. On their first morning here, they’d showered separately, but after (Martin’s) breakfast Jon’s irritation had faded and he had resolved to pretend along with Martin that this was a holiday. So they’d got to use the enormous bathtub after all— the one at whose soap dish Jon now found himself staring as he sat on the lid of the toilet. When the heat made him dizzier, as he’d known it would, he had relished getting to rest his cheek on Martin’s arm along the rim of the tub, where it had grown cool and soft in the few minutes he’d kept it above the water.

“Let’s have lunch first,” Martin said now; “you’re getting all….” While he looked for the right word he dropped his shoulders and jaw, and mimicked a thousand-yard stare. “Abstract, again. Distant. People food should help a little, yeah? Tie you back down to this plane a bit?”

“Probably,” Jon agreed, smiling at Martin’s tact.

But to get to the kitchen they had to pass through the dining room—where they found Salesa snoring in a chair at the head of the table. “Let’s just ask him now before he gets up and moves again,” maintained Martin. Jon shrugged his acquiescence and leant in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot. Why hadn’t he used the toilet before letting Martin lead him here?

”Um, Mikaele?” Martin inched a few steps toward him, but a distance of several feet still gaped between them. “We have something to ask you, if that’s—hello? Mikaele?”

A likely-sounding gap between snores—but nope. Still sound asleep. Salesa sighed, licked his lips, then began to snore again.

“Mikaele Salesa,” called out Jon from his post at the door, rather less gently. “Mikaele Salesa!” He turned to Martin, meaning to suggest that they eat now and trust the smell of food to wake Salesa, but stopped himself when he saw Martin creeping timidly toward Salesa with his hand outstretched.

“Sorry to disturbyouMikaele,” Martin squeaked out, so quickly that the words blended together. He gave Salesa’s shoulder the lightest possible tap with one fingertip, then snatched his hand back with a grimace of regret as Salesa’s own hand reached up, belatedly, as if to swat Martin’s away. “Oh, good, you’re—”

Salesa interrupted with a snore. Martin sighed and turned to Jon. “What d’you think? Should I shake him?”

Jon pulled out a neighboring chair and sat on it. “No need for anything so drastic. Try poking him a few more times first.”

“Right.”

Once he’d tired of rolling his cane between his palms Jon bent down to set it on the floor. He’d learnt his lesson about trying to hang it on the back of these chairs, though in this fog it had taken several incidents to stick. Every time it ended up crashing to the floor, when he scooched his chair back or when Martin tried to reach an arm around him. Then again—he conjectured, bent halfway to the floor with the cane still in his hand—if he did drop it, that might wake Salesa.

Two nights ago Jon had got up to use the toilet, and knocked his cane down from the wall on his way back to bed in the dark. It crashed to the floor; Jon swore and hopped on one foot back from it, imagining the other foot’s poor toenail smashed to jagged pieces as it thumped to life with pain. Meanwhile he heard rustling from the bed, and Martin’s voice, querulous with sleep. “Jon? Jon, what’s—happened, what—are you.”

“Nothing it’s fine go back to”—he’d hissed as his knee decided it had enough of hopping—“don’t get up, just. I’m gonna turn on the light, if that’s alright.”

“What fell? Are you okay?”

“The cane. I knocked it over in the dark.”

“Oh.”

He got no verbal response about the light, but guessed Martin had nodded.

From a distance his toe looked alright—no blood, anyway, so he could walk on it without risking the carpet. Jon picked his cane up from the floor and steered himself to the foot of the bed, where he sat down. His toenail had chipped, it looked like—only a little, but in that way that leaves a long crack. If he tried to pick it straight he’d tear out a big chunk and it would bleed. But if he left it like this it would snag on the sheets, on his socks, until some loose thread tore the chunk of nail off for him. What could he do for this kind of thing here? At home he’d file the nail down around the chip, then cover it in clear nail polish, and just hope that’d hold out until the crack grew out and he could clip it without bleeding. But here? A plaster would have to do, he guessed. They had plenty of those now.

Jon hated bandaging, ever since Prentiss—in much the same way that Martin hated sleeping in his pants. He’d had time to learn all its discomforts. How sweaty they got, the way they stuck to your hairs, the way lint collected in the adhesive residue they left. Didn’t help he associated them with that time of paranoia. They didn’t make him act paranoid, understand; he just habitually thought of bandage-wearing as what paranoid people do. It made an echo of his contempt for that time’s Jon cling to his perceptions of current Jon. On his first morning here, when the ones on his shin where Daisy’d bit him peeled off in the shower, he hadn’t bothered to replace them. After all, the bite only hurt when something pulled on it or poked or scraped against it, so he figured his trousers would provide enough protective barrier.

“That healed fast,” Martin had remarked, when he noticed the undressed wound in the bath—and then, when he looked again, “Yyyyeah I dunno, I think you might still want to bandage that. We don’t want dirt getting in there.”

“Do I have to?”

“Humor me.”

When they got back to their room he’d let Martin dress it himself. Martin had sucked air through his teeth. “This is days old—it shouldn’t be all hot and red like this.” According to him these were early signs of infection, which would get worse if they didn’t take better care of it—i.e., keep the wound freshly bandaged and ointmented. Jon refrained from pointing out that when the cut on his throat had got like that he’d left it uncovered and been fine. But he did ask what worse meant. “Really bad,” testified Martin. “I had a cut on my finger get infected once. Really disgusting. You don’t want to know.”

Jon smiled at him, raised his eyebrows. “After Jared’s mortal garden I think I can handle it.”

Martin smiled too, but wrinkled his nose and shook his head. “There was pus involved.”

“Oh, god! How could you tell me that!” gasped Jon, hand to his chest.

“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, it also hurt? A lot? And it can make you ill. So we should try to avoid it, yeah?”

He’d tried to disavow the disappointment in his sigh by exaggerating it. “Yes, alright.”

“Don’t know why you’d want to leave it exposed anyway. Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Well, sure, when you do that,” Jon had muttered, flinching away. As he asked the question Martin had lightly tapped the skin around the gash through its new bandage. A second or two later Jon added, “Less than when I got it? It’s hard to tell; it’s… different here.”

With a sigh that caught on phlegm and irritation, Martin asked, “Different how?”

He hadn’t been able to answer then, but he knew now, of course. It hurt the way things do when you’re awake. Not with the constant smart and throb it had when he’d first got it, but, it snagged on things now. Had opinions on how he moved. When he bent his knee more than ninety degrees, that stretched the skin around it painfully. Also if he knelt, since then the floor would press against it through his trousers. And stepping with that foot felt odd. Didn’t hurt, exactly, but sort of… rattled? Like a bad bruise would. This all seemed so small, compared to the moment of terror for his life that he’d felt when Daisy bit into him—that gaping wound in his new self-conception, which his healing powers had sewn up so quickly. The ritual of bandaging it every evening seemed so otiose, so laughably superstitious. He despised the thought of adding another step to it.

While Jon went on examining his toe, Martin asked, “What was the... thumping. It sounded like.”

“Oh—no—I didn’t fall; it’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“No—yes—stop, it’s nothing, don’t get up. I just forgot I left it on the—leaning against the doorwall” (he hadn’t decided in time whether to say doorway or wall and ended up with half of each) “so I walked into it, er, toe first.”

“Oh,” Martin said again. Jon could hear him subsiding against the pillows behind him. “It came down?”

Big sigh. Jon’s fingernails met his palms. He set his foot back on the floor, and when his hip whined in its socket he clenched his teeth and kept them that way. In his mind he heard days’ worth of similar jokes. When he couldn’t get a jammed jar open: So you’re saying it wouldn’t… come off? When they got back their clean laundry: Can you believe all those grass stains came out?—oh, sorry: that they came off, I meant. Always with an innocent laugh, like Jon’s original phrasing had been just, what, like a Freudian slip, rather than something perfectly comprehensible that Martin had refused to engage with, taken from him, and rendered meaningless on purpose. “No it did not,” he snapped, “and I would appreciate it if you’d quit throwing that back in my face.”

“Whoa, uh. O…kay. What’s… going on here exactly?”

“You—?”

His heart plummeted; his face stung with embarrassment. Came down, Martin had said—not came off. He’d just been confirming that Jon’s cane had fallen down.

“Oh, god—nothing, never mind. You did nothing.”

“Well that’s obviously not true.”

“I just—I thought you’d said ‘came off.’ I thought you meant, had my toe ‘come off.’”

“Oh,” said Martin, yet again. When Jon turned to look he found him still blinking and squinting against the light. “Do you… need me to not say that anymore?”

“Not when I—?” Not when I’ve hurt myself, Jon meant. But Martin hadn’t done that, so this grievance didn’t actually mean anything. He’d been seeing patterns where there were none, and now that he’d seen through the illusion Jon knew again that Martin never would say it like that. “No, it’s fine. Do whatever you want.”

Martin turned the tail end of his yawn into a huff of false laughter. “Nope. Still don’t believe you.”

“Everything you’ve said makes perfect sense with the information you have. It’s all just—me. Being cryptic again.”

“Okay, uh. Are you waiting for me to disagree? ‘Cause, uh. Yup—you’re still being cryptic. No arguments there.”

Jon just sighed, really scraping the back of his throat with it. Almost a scoff.

“Sooo do you wanna fill me in, or.”

“No?” With an incredulous laugh. “Well, yes, just.”

He hadn’t known how to start from there, while so tightly wound and defensive. It seemed cruel to raise such a sensitive subject when Martin sounded so eager to go back to sleep. Or maybe he just didn’t want to hear Martin whimper apologies. Didn’t want to deal with how fake they would sound. They wouldn’t be fake; he knew that. But they would sound fake, which meant it would take an effort of will, a deliberate exercise of empathy, to accept them as real. He wasn’t in the mood to hear yet another person say I’m sorry, I didn’t know; much less to respond with the requisite It’s okay; you didn’t know. It would take a strength of conviction he didn’t have right now.

“Y—you don’t have to explain it tonight? I’ll just, I’ll just not use that phrase anymore, and maybe in the morning you’ll be less in the mood to lash out at me for things that don’t make sense.”

And what was there to say to that? It had taken Jon three tries to force out, “Okay. I’m sorry.”

“Good night, Jon.”

“Good night. I still need the light, for.”

“That’s fine. Just turn it off when you come back to bed.”

“You won’t wake him up,” a new voice interjected.

Annabelle. Jon couldn’t see her, but he had learnt by now to recognize that voice, with its insufferable upbeat teasing inflection like every sentence she said was a riddle. He caught a glimpse of movement, then heard the click of her shoes on the floor. She must have poked her head round the doorway at the far end of the table while she spoke, then scuttled off again. At last he got a good look at her, as she put her blonde-and-gray head through the closer door.

“He’s a very heavy sleeper,” she informed them, with a smile and a shrug. “You can shake him all you want; it’s not going to work.”

Martin cleared his throat—trying to catch Jon’s attention, presumably. But Jon feared Annabelle would vanish again if he took his eyes off her. Not that he wanted her here, either, but?—he at least wanted to know which direction she went when she disappeared.

“What are you doing here, Annabelle.”

She shrugged two of her shoulders. “Just offering you some advice.” Then she used the momentum from the shrug to push herself backward, out of the doorway back into the corridor. Before the last of her hands disappeared off to the right, she waved to both of them.

“Well, how about some ‘advice’ about this, then—”

“She’s already gone, Martin.”

“Seriously? God—which way did she go?” Jon pointed; Martin bolted down the hallway after her. “Oi! Annabelle!”

“Shhh!”

“Annabelle! Do you know where Salesa keeps the—”

Jon did his best to follow him, praying all his limbs would go on straight this time. “Don’t!”

“What? Why not?” he heard, from the other side of the wall. Thankfully he could no longer hear Martin’s pounding footsteps. He overtook him in the hallway, just about able to make out his face around the dark swirls in his vision. “She’s as likely to know as Salesa, right?” Martin continued. “And it’s not like she’d lie about it. I mean, what would be the point?”

“I just don’t think we should give her any kind of advantage over us,” Jon snarled. The attempt to keep his voice down made the words come out sounding nastier than he intended.

Martin scoffed. “You don’t think maybe this is a bit more important than your stupid principle about not accepting help from her?”

“Is it?” Jon took hold of Martin’s sleeve, having just now caught up to him. “The new room’s fine. It’s even nicer than the old one, right? We could just stay there.”

“I already told you, Jon. I’m not just gonna leave it like this.”

“’Til Salesa sobers up, I meant.”

“If we have to, yeah, but—? All our stuff’s in that room. The statements’re in there.”

“I just don’t think we should show her that kind of vulnerability,” Jon hissed, shifting from foot to foot in his eagerness either to sit down or go somewhere else. “I don’t want to give Annabelle something she can use over us.”

“How does this make us more vulnerable than we are eating her food?”

“It doesn’t, alright? That doesn’t mean we should add more to the pile!” He watched Martin shrug and open his mouth, but cut him off in advance: “Last time we had this argument you were the one maintaining she was dangerous.”

It was on their first night here—their first awake here, anyway. They’d been heading back to their room, Martin lamenting that he’d not packed anything to sleep in when they left Daisy’s safehouse. “Won’t make much difference to me,” Jon had shrugged at first.

Martin had shaken his head, grimaced at something in his imagination. “I hate sleeping in my pants. It’s just gross. Dunno why anyone would choose to do it.”

“How is it gross?” Jon had laughed. He’d expected to hear some weird thing about its being unsanitary for that much leg to touch sheets that only got washed every two weeks, and to argue back that in that case shouldn’t he sleep in his socks. Disdain for the body seemed damn near universal, and yet manifested so differently in each person whose habits Jon had got to know up close. Georgie had heard that underarm hair helped wick away the smell of sweat—so she let that hair grow out, but shaved the ones on her stomach for fear they’d smell like navel lint. And Daisy, a woman who used to sniff her used-up plasters before throwing them in the bin, would spray cologne in the toilet every time she left it. Jon had enjoyed getting to know which of bodily self-contempt’s myriad forms Martin subscribed to.

But this turned out not to be one of them. Instead Martin explained, “It’s so sweaty. Like sitting on a leather couch in shorts, except the leather’s your other leg? Ugh. I hate waking up slippery.”

“That’s why I put a pillow between mine,” laughed Jon. “Suppose I will miss Trevor’s t-shirt, though. Now that I don’t have to worry about showing up in people’s dreams like that.”

“Oh, god, right—what is it? ‘You don’t have to be faster than the bear’—?”

“‘You just have to be faster than your friends,'” Jon completed, in the most sinister Ceaseless-Watcher voice he could muster. Martin snorted with laughter.

And then they’d opened the door to discover Annabelle had done them a fucking turndown service. Quilt folded back, mints on the pillows, and a pile of old-timey striped pajamas at the foot of the bed. “Huh. Cree…py, but convenient, I guess. Least they’re not black and white, right?” Martin unfolded the green-striped shirt on top, then handed it with its matching trousers to Jon. “These ones must be yours.”

“Mm.” Jon let Martin hand him the pajamas, then tossed them onto the chair in the opposite corner of the room (from which chair they promptly fell to the floor). The mint from his side of the bed he deposited in the bin under the bedside table.

“So who’s our good fairy, d’you think? Salesa, or.”

“Annabelle,” Jon hissed. “Salesa was with us all through dinner.”

Martin nodded and sighed. “Yeah.” He sat down on the bed, still regarding the other set of garments—these ones striped yellow and blue—with a puzzled frown. “God, I’ll look like a clown in these. You sure I won’t give you nightmares about the Unknowing?”

But Jon said nothing, still hoping he could avoid weighing in on Martin’s choice whether or not to accept Annabelle’s… gifts.

“It’s probably Salesa’s stuff, at least. Not Annabelle’s. I mean,” Martin mused with a brave laugh, “he’s got a lot of weird outfits on hand apparently.”

“Unless she wove them out of cobwebs.”

“That’s not a thing,” Martin groaned, making himself laugh too. “Spider webs aren’t strong enough to use as thread.”

“Not natural ones, maybe,” Jon said with a shrug and a careful half smile. With no less care, he turned the sheets and counterpane back up on his side of the bed, restoring the way it’d looked when he and Martin made up the bed that morning. Stacked the frontmost pillow back upright against the one behind it. Punched it a little, more as a way to break the silence than because it looked too fluffy. Then sat down in front of them and put his shoe up on the bedside table so he could untie it—glancing first at Martin to make sure he didn’t disapprove.

“I mean, I guess,” Martin mused meanwhile. “Not sure why she’d bother, though. Maybe it’s”—with a gasp and a smile Jon could hear in his voice—“maybe she’s put poison in the threads, and that’s why yours and mine are different. Mine’s got—I dunno, some kind of self-esteem poison, like, a reverse SSRI, to make me feel like you don’t need me, so when she kidnaps you I won’t try to save you. And yours….”

As Jon pulled off his now-untied shoe one of the bones in his hip jabbed against some bit of soft tissue it wasn’t supposed to touch. He gasped and dropped his shoe. It thudded on the floor.

“You alright?”

“Fine. Some kind of dex drain, probably.”

“Ha.”

After a silence, Martin spoke again: “Are you sure you’re okay staying here for a bit? Sorry—I kinda bulldozed over your objections earlier.”

Jon finished untying his other shoe, then paused to think while he shook the cramp out of his hand. “No,” he decided. “You didn’t bulldoze, you just…questioned. And you were right to.”

“Still, I mean. It might not be a great idea to stick around here with the spider lady who’s had it in for us since day one. Have you re-listened to the tapes from the day Prentiss attacked, by the way, since you got them back from the Not-Sasha thing?”

“Right—the spider, yes.”

“Yeah, exactly! You wouldn’t even have broke through that wall if it hadn’t been for the spider there!”

Jon nodded and scrubbed at his eyes, trying to muster the energy to match Martin’s tone. This was an important conversation to have, he knew. And a part of him shuddered with recognition to hear Martin talk about those tapes. He had re-listened to them—first at Georgie’s, one night in the small hours as he cleaned her kitchen, thinking clearly for the first time in months and trying to pinpoint the exact moment his thoughts had been clouded with paranoia, so that he might know what signs to look for if something else tried to infect his mind like that. And then again after Basira found the jar of ashes. That time he’d just wanted to suck all the marrow he could from the memory of Martin with his sensible corkscrew and his first answer to Why are you here, even if it did mean having to hear himself ask if Martin was a ghost. A few weeks later, however, after Hilltop Road, he’d done a fair bit of obsessing over the spider thing with Prentiss, yeah. He just wished he could remember what conclusion he’d come to.

All he could remember was going for those tapes yet again only to find them missing from his drawer. But he’d been chasing phantoms all day; it was late at night by then, and when he’d dashed out to tell Basira his fear Annabelle had stolen them, stolen his memories from him just like the Not-Them had, he’d stood there over her and Daisy’s frankenbag for what felt like an hour, mouth open, unable to utter a sound. It felt too much like going to wake up his grandmother after a dream. So he’d told himself to sleep on it—that he’d probably left the tapes in some other obvious place, and would find them in the morning. And when he remembered his panic, the next day at lunch, and checked his drawer again, the tapes were back, right where he expected them. He’d dismissed it as a dream after all. But no—Martin must have borrowed them. He must’ve been worried about the Web, too.

“It’s… it should be okay. I don’t think it’ll be like that here.”

Martin sighed. “Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“That thing where you just—decide how something is without even telling me why you think so. I mean it’s one thing out there, when you ‘know everything’” (this in a false deep voice) “and can’t possibly share it all, but here? When you’re just guessing, like everyone else? Why don’t you think it’ll be like that here? And what does ‘like that’ even mean?”

“I'm sorry—you’re right—I just mean, I don’t think she has her powers here. Based on what Salesa said about the camera, and on what happens when I try to use my powers….”

“Salesa just said the Eye can’t see this place, though. What about that insect thing he said found its way in?”

“I mean.” Jon shrugged. “We managed to find our way here without the Eye’s help.”

“Yeah, but if the Web has no power here then how could she have called me on a payphone? She had to have known where I was to do that, yeah? And she couldn’t know that from here unless the Web told her to do it, right?”

“Maybe? We don’t even know if the Web works like that.”

“Told her to do it, made her want to do it, gave her the tools to do it, whatever. You know what I mean. Look—we know the Eye’s not totally blind here, since it can still feed on statements. Right?”

Jon wondered now how either one of them could have been so sure of that. “Apparently,” he liked to think he had said—but more likely he’d replied simply, “Right.”

“So then by that logic the Web still probably likes it when she—I don’t know, when she manipulates people here. It probably still gets, like, live tweets from her about it. How do we know it can’t use that information to weave more plots around us?”

“If that’s even how it works,” Jon had replied again. “The other fears don’t work like that—they don’t plan, they just.” He tried to sort his intuition into Martin’s live tweet metaphor. “The fears just like their agents’ tweets, they don’t… comment on them, o-or build new opinions on what they’ve read. It boosts the avatar's… popularity, I guess? Their influence?” Jon hadn’t even logged into Twitter since before the Archives. “But unless the Web is different from all the other fears, it doesn’t—it’s not her boss. It doesn’t come up with the schemes, it just.”

“Isn’t it literally called the ‘Spinner of Schemes’, though? The ‘Mother of Puppets’?”

And Jon couldn’t remember what he’d said to brush off that one.

“Of course she’s dangerous,” Martin said now. “I just don’t see what sinister plot of hers we could possibly be enabling by asking her where to find screwdrivers.”

Jon scoffed. “She’s with the Web, Martin! The ‘Mother of Puppets,’ the ‘Spinner of Schemes’? You’re not supposed to be able to see how the threads connect. Anything we ask her gives her another opening to sink her hooks into.”

“So what, you just don’t want to owe her a favor?”

“Yes?” Jon blinked—on purpose, needless to say. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I mean—why do you think she’s here, Martin, ingratiating herself with us?”

“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because it’s the one place on Earth that hasn’t been turned into a hell dimension?”

Jon snarled and set his head in his free hand. The dizziness was coming back. “In her statement Annabelle said the trick to manipulating people was to make sure they always either over or underestimate you.”

“Okay,” granted Martin, as though prompting Jon to explain how this was relevant.

“She’s trying to humanize herself,” he maintained, scratching an imaginary itch behind his glasses. “We shouldn’t let her.”

“I mean, she is physically more human here.”

“Is she? She doesn’t seem to be withdrawing from the Web; she’s not—like this.” Jon turned his wrist in a circle next to his head.

“Yeah but she’s been here for months, right? Maybe she’s passed through that stage.”

A bitter huff of laughter. “So you’re saying she’s reformed.”

“No. I’m saying the fact she’s not all—loopy here doesn���t necessarily mean she still has any power.”

“She’s got four arms and six eyes, Martin!”

“And you sleep with your eyes open and summon tape recorders, Jon!”

“Well,” mused Jon with a wry smile, “not on purpose.”

“That’s my point! You’ve only got—vestiges here, yeah? I’m not saying we should trust her; I don’t wanna be friends or anything. I’m just saying I don’t think the actual concrete danger she poses here is what’s making you hate the idea of asking her for directions.”

“What about that insect thing Salesa said she chased off. Does that not sound spidery to you?”

“We don’t know that! Maybe she waved his syringe at it.”

Jon took a deep, shaky breath through his nose. He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to bring up this next part; he feared it might make Martin too afraid to stay here any longer. “I think she’s plotting against us.”

Blink. “Well, yeah. Of course she is. She’s been plotting against us for—”

“Here, I mean. I mean, I think that’s why she’s here. She’s been hiding from the Eye on purpose so she could lure us into her trap with her spindly little”—Jon thought of the earrings that dangled from Annabelle’s ears like flies, swinging with her every sudden movement. Unconsciously he struck out with his hand as if to catch one, closing his fist around empty air. “Without my being able to see either her or the trap. At best, she’s here gathering information about us so she can report it back to her master.” He pictured the thousand spiders he’d seen birthed during Francis’s nightmare crawling back and forth with messages between here and the nearest Web domain—

“I thought you said the fears didn’t work that way,” pursued Martin—

“And every little thing we tell her is one more thread she can use to pull on us.”

“Okay, but, even if you’re right, ‘Hey Annabelle, our doorknob’s busted, can you help us find the tools to fix it’ isn’t actually a fact about us.”

“But that’s just the best-case scenario, Martin! The worst-case scenario is that she predicted we’d get locked out of our room, or even loosened the screw herself—”

“Not this again—”

“—because she knew we’d have to ask her for help, and wherever she tells us to look for the screwdriver is where she’s laid her trap! Think about it—this couldn’t happen outside the range of the camera, right? It would only work in a place where I can’t just know where to find something. That’s the only scenario where we’d ever ask her for directions.” Martin sighed, crossed his arms, rolled his eyes. Jon looked right at him, hoping to catch them on their way back down. “What if her plan is to trap us here forever so we can’t go stop Elias? What if by trusting her with this, we give her the tools to keep the world like this forever?”

Again Martin sighed. He bit his lip, at last seeming not to have an argument lined up already.

“I can’t actually stop you from going after her”—Jon heard Martin scoff, but pressed on—“but I can’t take part in this.”

“You sort of already did stop me, Jon.” He lifted his arm, pointing vaguely in the direction she’d gone. “We can’t catch up with her now.”

That wasn’t quite true, Jon knew; Martin had chosen to stop and listen to him. Instead of pointing this out in words Jon smiled, meekly, and reached for Martin’s hand. “Guess that’s true. Are you, er, ready for lunch now?”

His answering scoff sounded fond, indulgent, rather than incredulous. “Yeah, alright.”

With Martin’s hand still in his, Jon turned around—an awkward business, while holding hands in such a narrow passage—and began to walk back towards the dining room. At the end of the corridor stood a tall, thin, many-limbed figure, holding a water carafe, a stack of glasses, and four steaming plates of food.

“You boys getting hungry?” As she stepped toward them her shoes clacked against the floor. How had they not heard her approach? And what was she doing back at that end of the corridor?

“How did you—?”

“I have my ways. I’ve brought lunch for you both, if you’re amenable.”

“Oh—well, thanks, you’re, you’re just in time, actually.” Jon didn’t dare look away from Annabelle Cane long enough to confirm this, but suspected Martin had directed that last bit at him as much as her. “Can I help you with those?”

Annabelle managed to shrug without dislodging anything from the four plates in her hands. “You can take the napkins if you want,” she said, extending toward Martin the forearm from which they hung.

Jon sat back down in the chair he’d left at a haphazard angle—though it felt weird, since he usually sat on the table’s other side. He thanked Martin when he handed him a napkin, and allowed Annabelle to set an empty glass and a plate of food in front of him. It was a pasta dish, with clams—from a can, he reminded himself. A can and a jar of pasta sauce. Couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes to put together.

“Salesa’s still out of it,” observed Martin. “Don’t think he’ll make too much of his.”

“A shame,” Annabelle agreed. She set a plate down in front of the sleeping Salesa anyway. “Maybe the smell of food’ll wake him up.”

“Are you going to eat with us?” Martin asked, as he and Jon both watched her deposit a fourth plate across the table from them.

“I may as well. We do still have to eat to live here, don’t we?” Jon could tell she meant this comment as an invitation for him to join their conversation, but he didn’t intend to take her bait. “Besides,” Annabelle went on, “this way you’ll know I’ve not saved the best for myself.” With one hand she picked up her own plate again; another of her long, thin arms reached out to take Jon’s plate.

He dragged it to the side, out of her reach. “No, thank you.”

“Alright. Martin,” she said, looking over at him with a patient, patronizing smile. “Will you switch plates with me?”

“Oh, my god,” Martin groaned into his hand. “Sure, why not.”

Something small and gray skittered across the table toward her. For half a second Annabelle took her eyes from Martin. Her nostrils flared; one of her eyes twitched; Jon heard a stifled squawk from behind her closed lips as she swept the skittery thing over her edge of the table. He made no such effort to hide his scoff. Did she think she could play nice, by declining to hold little spider conversations in front of them? That they’d think she was on their side as long as they couldn’t see her chatting to her little spies?

“Thank you,” Annabelle sing-songed meanwhile, returning her gaze to Martin. “You’re sweet.”

On their first morning here, after showering and then shuddering back into their filthy clothes, Jon and Martin had barely left their room before Annabelle dangled herself in their path, with cups of tea (Jon refused his) and an offer to show them to the pantry. From this tour Jon had concluded that all food in this place was tainted by her influence. And he didn’t actually feel hungry at that point? He remembered Martin remarking on his hunger before they’d both fallen asleep, but Jon had felt only tired. Surely that meant he still didn’t need food here, right? It’d been like that before the change, after the coma—he’d needed sleep and statements to keep up his strength, but could function just fine without… people food. So he’d resolved to accept nothing offered him here—or at least, nothing Salesa and Annabelle hadn’t already given him and Martin without their consent. No tea, none of Salesa’s booze, no use of the huge industrial washing machines, no food.

That resolution lasted about nine hours. He knew because on that first day time still felt like such a novelty he and Martin had counted every one. Once he’d tried and failed to compel Salesa—once he’d heard him give a statement and managed to space out for half of it, rather than transcending himself in the ecstasy of vicarious fear—Jon started to grow conscious of his hunger. After two hours he felt shaky; after four he started picking quarrels, first just with Annabelle when she showed up with snacks, then with Salesa, and then even with Martin; after six he felt first hot, then cold. Finally around the eight-hour mark he was hiding tears over an untied shoelace, and figured it was worth finding out how much of this torment people food could solve. He sat through dinner, flaunting his empty plate—then stole to the pantry for something he could make himself. Settled for dry toast and raisins. “Couldn’t you find the jam?” Martin had asked him.

“Didn’t think of it,” Jon lied, once he’d got his throat round a lump of under-chewed toast.

“You want me to get some for you? That looks pretty depressing without it,” Martin said, with his eyebrows and the line of his mouth both raised in a pitying smile.

“Better make it one of the sealed jars.”

“What, so Annabelle can’t have got to it?” Jon nodded, chewing so as to have neither to smile back nor decide not to. “You know she made the bread, right.”

Of course she had. Jon dropped his head onto his fists. “Fuck.”

“What did you think?” mused Martin with a laugh. “That Salesa just popped down to the supermarket?”

“I don’t know—that they’d taken it from the freezer, maybe?”

“I mean, that’s possible,” Martin granted with a shrug. “Should I get you that jam?”

Big sigh. “Fine.”

In reality he’d stared up at the row of jam jars in Salesa’s pantry for a full ten seconds before deciding not to have any. He feared spiders would spill out of the jar onto his hand as soon as he got it open. But he also feared he might not be able to open it at all—only hurt himself trying. Way back in their first year in the Archives together, Martin had once seen him struggling to get open the jar where he kept paperclips. Jon hadn’t realized he was being watched—or, that is, that Martin was watching him. In the Archives the sense of someone watching was so omnipresent one soon lost the ability to distinguish Elias’s evil Eye from other, more mundane eyes. Anyway, after three minutes’ effort and nothing to show for it but a misplaced MCP joint in his thumb, Jon had given up on paper-clipping the photos Tim had pilfered for him to their relevant statement and begun hunting through his desk drawers for a stapler instead. And then a high-pitched pop above his head made him startle so badly he gasped, choked on his own spit, and flung the picture in his hand across the room like a paper airplane.

Around the sound of his own cough he could hear Martin shouting Sorry, and Tim and Sasha laughing on the other side of the wall. Martin’s laugh soon joined theirs, though it sounded desperate, sheepish. He dove after the photo Jon had dropped, and then, when he came back with it, explained, “Got the paperclips for you.”

Jon frowned. “This is a photograph, Martin.”

“No, I mean—?” His laugh came out like a whimper; he picked the unlidded jar up an inch off the table, then set it back down. “Here.”

Okay, so, not exactly an auspicious start, but, it still became a thing? Martin opening his paperclip jar. At first he’d wished he could just remember not to seal it so tightly; he could get it just fine when he stopped turning it earlier. At least when the weather hadn’t changed since the last time he opened it. But then when they all started leaving the Archives less often, and the break-room fridge filled up with condiments that all seemed to have twist-off lids… he’d kind of liked that? Martin would hand him the peanut-butter jar, with its lid off and pinned to its side with one finger, before Jon had even finished asking for it. This seemed to be the pattern behind all his early positive impressions of Martin: the jar lids, the corkscrew, the way he managed to make mealtimes at the Institute feel like proper breaks. Martin had seemed like such an oaf to him at first—clumsy, absent-minded, always seeming to think that if he professed enough good will with his smiles and cups of tea and I know you won’t like this, but, then no one would notice his impertinent comments and all the doors he left wide open. All the dogs and worms and spiders he let in. He’d seemed to Jon the human embodiment of a fly left undone—more so than ever after the morning he’d walked in on him wearing naught but frog-print boxer shorts. But he had this easy grace with things that needed twisting off. Banana peels, bottle caps, wine corks, worms.

And then when he came back after the Unknowing Martin was never around. Jon and Basira and Melanie all lived in the Archives, like Martin had two years before, but by that point he wasn’t on Could you open this for me? terms with any of them. But he hadn’t needed people food anymore, and if he subluxed a joint it would heal instantly anyway. So he’d just struggled and sworn, feeling stupid for shrinking from the pain even after having chopped off his own finger. And it got easier with practice. By the time he and Martin reunited, he’d got so used to it that sometimes he’d hand jars to Martin already unlidded. Martin hadn’t seemed to notice. Finally, one evening a day or two after that row they had over the ice-cream thing, Jon had opened a jar of pasta sauce (he’d taken up people food again at Daisy’s safehouse, if only to make their time there feel more like a regular holiday), and reached out to hand it to Martin—then paused and retracted the hand that gripped the jar, remembering his promise to be more open about.

“This is, um.” He’d glanced up at Martin, then back to the floor as the latter said,

“Huh?”

“This is one of those things that’s got better since the coma. Since I became an avatar. I can, um. I can open jars now? Without.” He’d almost said Without hurting myself, then remembered that wasn’t technically true. Deep breath. “Without lasting harm. It—it hurts for a second? But the Eye heals it instantly. That's why I’ve been.”

“Oh,” Martin said, seeming to stall for time as he absorbed this information. He accepted the jar which Jon again held out to him, and turned it around in his hands, eyes on its label. “Yeah, I—I noticed, you’re really good at opening jars now,” he went on with a laugh. Again he paused, and blew a sigh out of his mouth. “Right. Okay. Thank you for telling me?”

“I’ll try and be better about….”

Martin nodded, turning back to the stove and beginning to stir sauce into the pasta. “Yeah. I, uh—I didn’t know that was why you used to need me to open them for you?” Since the other night’s argument, Jon had gathered as much. He nodded too. “I thought you were just, heh, you know. Weaker than me.”

“I mean, I am—”

“Well yeah but you know what I mean.”

“I do. I should’ve told you.”

“No, I—actually I think you’re in the clear on that one, if I’m honest. I just—it’s just weird? I thought I was done having to” (another blown-out sigh punctuated his speech) “having to reframe stuff I thought was normal around some unseen horror. Sorry,” he added when he’d finished beating sauce off Daisy’s wooden spoon; “that’s probably not a great way to.”

“No—it’s fine?”

“Suppose it sounds like an exaggeration, now, after all we’ve.”

Mechanically, Jon nodded, without deciding whether he agreed or not. Around an awkward laugh, he confessed, “‘Unseen horror’ might be the nicest way I’ve ever heard anyone describe it.”

“Er. Yikes? That sounds like you might need some better friends, Jon.”

“Maybe,” he conceded, laughing again. “I—I just mean, it’s nice to hear something other than?” Jon paused and pushed his little fingers back the hundred or so degrees they each would go. First the left, then the right. Other than what? Well, doubt, for a start. Though most of the doubt he heard from outside himself was implicit. Careful silence from people he told about it; requests people made of him seemingly just so he’d have to tell them he couldn’t do that; impatience, bafflement, suspicion from strangers. Why are you out of breath, the woman behind the Immigration desk had asked him at O’Hare, as if breathlessness incriminated him somehow. But that wasn’t the response he’d subconsciously measured Martin’s phrase against. What he had in mind now was more like… bland support. Hurried support. Assurances quick and dutiful, yet so vague he could tell the people who gave them were thinking only of the mistakes they might make, if they dared to acknowledge what he’d said with any more than half a sentence. The I’m sorry you’re in pain equivalents of Right away, Mr. Sims.

That was it—unseen horror was an original thought. Martin had put it in his own words, rather than either borrowing Jon’s or using none at all. “Other than a platitude.”

So at Salesa’s when Martin came back with the jam jar he handed it to Jon. Jon made a show of trying to open it, but could feel his middle finger threatening to leave its top half behind. It frightened him, in a way he’d forgot was even possible. For such a long time now, pain had just been pain? He’d grown so unused to the threat it held for normal people. The threat of actual danger, of injury. He’d set down the jar on the table in front of him, and crossed his arms in front of it.

“Can’t get it, huh?” Martin asked; Jon shook his head.

How much danger, though, he wondered. Earlier that day, after he and Martin got out of the bath, his left index finger had popped out while he was buttoning his shirt. It still ached when he used the finger, or thought about the cracking sound it had made—but didn’t throb anymore without provocation. Not much danger there; not even much inconvenience. He supposed if he hurt his middle finger too then he might have some trouble with his trouser button the next time he had to pee? Right, yes, what a cross to bear. I hurt myself doing x; now it hurts to do x. But it already hurt to do x, didn’t it? Didn’t x always hurt, before the change? Why did he so fear to face an hour or a day where it hurt more than usual, but not so much I can’t do it?

“So you’re saying it won’t… come off?”

“Ha, ha.”

“Sorry. Couldn’t resist.”

“What if I open it and it’s full of spiders?”

Martin had smiled, rolled his eyes, pulled the jar toward him, and twisted its lid off with a pop. “See? No spiders in this one.

“While you’re here, Annabelle,” Jon heard Martin say, “I don’t suppose you know anything about where Salesa keeps his screwdrivers?”

Annabelle tapped her chin and said, very pleasantly, “Hmmm. Perhaps they’re where he left them after the last time something broke.”

Martin’s lips drew closer together. “Yeah,” he nodded, “probably. Any idea where that might be?”

“Perhaps he keeps them next to whatever screw comes loose most often.”

“And do you know which screw that is?”

She shook her head, though who knew whether that meant she didn’t know or merely that she didn’t mean to tell him. “Perhaps he only uses the item when he’s alone,” she said, with a shrug and a sly smile.

“…Ew.” Annabelle cackled like a school kid pulling a prank. “Right, great,” sighed Martin. “Thanks a lot. Forget it. You done, Jon?”

Jon glanced sleepily down at his plate. Only half empty, but cold by now. “Yes.”

“Nice of you to grace us with your presence, Annabelle,” Martin said, sliding his and Jon’s plates toward her side of the table.

Instead of energy, lunch gave Jon only a slight queasy feeling—like one gets from eating sweets on an empty stomach.

“God”—hissed Martin, with clenched fists, as they ambled back to their room—“‘Perhaps he keeps them next to the screw that gets loose most often.’ Yeah, figured that out already, thanks! Can you even believe her? Sitting down to eat with us, as if she’s all ready to help, and then the best she can do is,” he paused and straightened, then said with a finger to his chin in imitation of Annabelle, “‘Oh, hm, guess he only uses it alone. Oh well!’”

“Don’t know what else you expected.”

Martin sighed, his arms crossed now. “Guess I should’ve done what you asked after all, since that accomplished nothing.” After a moment he went on, “Least it wasn’t a trap, right? I tried not to give her anything she could use against us.” With a smile Jon could hear without looking at him, “You notice how I pointedly didn’t offer to help clean up?”

“No, I didn’t,” Jon confessed, laughing a little.

“No?!” Again Martin paused on his feet, frowning, incredulous. Jon wished he wouldn’t; standing still made him dizzier, took more effort than walking, like that poor woman in Oliver’s domain. Daniela? Martin shook his head at himself. “Ugh—then who knows if she noticed, either. I thought I was being so obvious!”

“I mean—”

“Wait, hold up, let’s double back.”

“Are you going to go back and tell her it was on purpose?”

“No, just”—he echoed Jon’s laugh—“no, of course not. I just wanted to try that wing’s toilets next. Didn’t want her to see which way we were going.”

“Oh.” By this time Martin had turned around and started to walk the other way; Jon hung back. “Er. I thought—I thought we were going to our room first.”

“What, the new one you mean?” asked Martin, turning his head around to look back at him.

“…Yes,” Jon decided. Until this moment he’d forgot about that, and been daydreaming of their original bed.

“Sure, if you want. Do you need a break?”

“I… I think so, yes.”

Martin turned the rest of the way around, shuffled toward Jon and looked him over, with a concerned frown. He took his free hand between his fingers and thumb, brushing the latter over Jon’s knuckles. “Yeah, okay. You still seem pretty out of it. How are you feeling?”

“Not great,” answered Jon, though he smiled in relief at Martin’s willingness to change the plan for him.

“Food didn’t help?”

His stomach seemed hung with cobwebs; his mind, like a large room with half its lights burnt out. His light head seemed attached to his heavy, aching body only by a string, like a balloon tied to an Open-House sign. He still needed the toilet. “Not really?”

“Yeah, thought not. You need a statement, huh.”

Jon shrugged, avoiding Martin’s eyes. “Probably.”

In the interim bedroom Jon sat down at the edge of the bed, bent down over his legs, and untied his shoes, wondering why his life always came back around to this. His hip got stuck like a drawer that’s been pulled out crooked, so he had to lever himself back up with his arms, trapping fistfuls of counterpane between thumbs and the meat of his palms. It made his hands cramp, but that helped—the way it would have helped to bite his finger. When he’d got himself upright again he sat and blinked for a few seconds, hoping each time he opened his eyes that his vision would’ve cleared.

Martin sat down next to him and put his hand on Jon’s arm. “You’re blinking again. You okay?”

“Just… kind of dizzy? It’s an Eye thing.”

He let Martin pull him towards him until their shoulders touched. “Yeah. Makes sense. Nap should help. Statement’ll definitely help.”

“Right.”

They agreed to lie on the bed rather than properly in it, not wanting to have to put the covers back together afterward. Jon set his head on that squishy part of Martin’s chest where it started to give way to armpit, knowing to angle himself so the scar tissue pressed the hollow part of his cheek rather than anywhere bonier. It was normally dangerous to lie half on his back, half on his side like this, but he’d lately discovered he could use Martin’s leg to keep his hip from falling off. He could feel the muscles in his shoulder twitching and cramping, whether to pull the joint out or keep it in who could tell. But it’d be fine as long as he shrugged the arm every few minutes.

All the ways they knew to spend time in each other’s company had come together in Scotland, where he’d had none of these worries. Even after the change, on their journey, with nothing but sleeping bags between them and desecrated earth, he’d borne only the same aches he’d been ignoring since he read the statement that ended the world. Jon imagined lying next to Martin like this on the cold stone of a tomb in the Necropolis, surrounded by guardian angels’ malicious laughter. Not feeling the cold, or the grain of the stone against his ankles and the bandage on his shin—just knowing it was there, like when you watch someone suffer those things in a movie. Less vivid even than a statement about lying on a tomb; in Naomi Herne’s nightmare he’d felt the stone in her hands.

“Hfff, okay—ready to get back to it?”

“Mrrr.”

“…Jon, are you asleep?”

He shrugged his hanging shoulder. “No.”

Nose laugh. “Come on, wake up.”

“Mmrrrrrrr.”

“My arm’s asleep.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It won’t wake up ‘till you get up off of it, Jon,” said Martin, gently, between huffs of laughter.

“Hmr.” Jon rolled away to face the wall with the window, freeing Martin’s arm.

“Do you want me to go look without you?”

“Okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mhm.”

Cold air washed over his newly-exposed arm, ribcage, side of face, the outside of his sore hip. It was cold on this Martinless side of the bed, too. He rolled back over into the shadow of his warmth, but that still wasn’t as good as the real thing. Maybe he could pull the covers halfway out and roll himself up in them.

“Aaagh, no—Jon”—Martin’s cool hand on top of his as he tried to hook his fingers round the counterpane— “we’re trying to leave the room the way we found it, remember?”

“Hmmmrrgh.” He consented to leave his hand still when Martin’s departed from it. A few seconds later, a rustle against his ear, the smell of smoke and old clothes.

“Here.”

Jon crunched the jacket down so it wouldn’t itch his ear. “You won’t need it?”

“Probably not.”

“Hm.”

“I’ll be back for it if I have to go outside again, yeah?”

“Okay.”

In his mind’s eye they trudged into the wind, hand in hand. It blew Martin’s hood off his head, and inverted Jon’s cane like an umbrella. He shrunk himself further under Martin’s jacket, relishing the new pockets of warmth he created as his calves met his thighs and his hands gripped his shoulders.

“Ooookay…! Wish me luck?”

“Good luck,” managed Jon around a yawn.

Martin had been right about the wallpaper. Not only was the red too bright to look at comfortably; it also had the kind of flowered pattern just complex enough that every time you look back at it you’re compelled to double-check where it repeats. Every fourth stripe was the same as the first, right? Not every second? And that weird little scroll-shaped petal—he’d seen that one too recently. Was it the same as?—No, that one was a bud. He pulled Martin’s jacket up so it covered his eyes.

They’d put their jackets through the laundry with everything else, their first day here, but that hadn’t got the smell out. Enough time had passed between the burning building and their arrival here for the smoke to embed itself permanently into their jackets and shoes, like how duffel bags once taken camping always smell like barbecue. And everything they’d ever shoved in those backpacks still had some of that odd, sour, Ritz-cracker smell of clothes left unwashed too long.

Daisy used to smell like smoke and laundry, too, once she quit smelling like dirt. It was the smell of the old green sleeping bag she’d zipped up to Basira’s. She said she’d have showered it off if she could; she didn’t like it. To her it was a Hunt smell—it reminded her of her clearing in the woods. But there weren’t any showers in the Archives. She’d point this out every time, in the same wry voice, so Jon was sure she’d intended the metaphor. No showers in the Archives: you couldn’t hide your sins in a temple of the Eye. This had comforted Jon—or maybe flattered was the word, though he knew her better than to think she’d have done so on purpose. He just wasn’t sure he agreed. He’d hid his sins pretty well from himself, after the coma. It was easy; you just had to lose track of scale. No one could remember all of them at once, after all. Others had had to point the important ones out to him.

Were those footsteps he could hear out there? Not Annabelle’s—? No; her clicky shoes. These were blunter. Could be Salesa, awake at last, come to invite them to play a game with him. “How do you two feel about… foosball?” he would say, drawing out the last word in a husky whisper. Only then would he swing the door wide open to reveal himself in a shiny jersey, shorts, and studded shoes. He set his fists out before him and turned them in semicircles, pretending to manipulate the plastic rods of a foosball table. Jon curled still more tightly into himself at the thought of Salesa’s face, how his showman’s grin would crumple like a hole in a cellophane wrapper when he realized the fun one had gone and that he faced only the Archivist. “Oh—hello. Jon, is it? Where has your lovely Martin gone?”

“Oh, uh. Martin needs a screwdriver to fix our door, so I.”

He watched Martin march his silent way slowly, solemnly down a corridor that grew darker, grayer, vaguer with every step until the webs that lined its every side and hung in laces from the ceiling began to catch on his shoes, his belt, his glasses.

“I let him go off alone.”

Jon’s whole body flinched. He gasped awake—oh shit. How had he just let Martin go? He had to—couldn’t stay here—find Martin—keep him out of Annabelle’s clutches—

Stick-thin bristling spider legs tapped the floor of his mind like fingers on a table. Find Martin. Jon instructed himself to sit up, swing his legs over the side of the bed and reach down to grab his shoes. He twitched one finger. See? You can do this. In a minute he’d try again and be able to move his whole arm, push himself up onto one hand. Find Martin.

Also probably go to the toilet. With an empty bladder his head would be clearer, he could figure out which direction to look first.

After Hopworth, while he laid on the couch in his office waiting for the strength to throw himself into the Buried, Jon had imagined Martin and Georgie and Basira and Melanie all stood around that coffin, wearing black and holding flowers. Denise? No, it definitely had three syllables. A scattered applause began as Jonah Magnus emerged from his office, closed behind him the door printed with poor dead Bouchard’s name, and stepped up to the podium. Georgie, not knowing his face, began to clap; Melanie stayed her hands. Elagnus’s shirt, hidden behind suit except for the collar, was striped in black and white. A ball and chain hung from his sleeve like an enormous cufflink. He opened his mouth to speak, and a tape recorder began to hiss.

“What are you doing here?” asked Basira.

“Never underestimate how much I care for the tools I use, Detective. I wouldn’t miss my Archivist’s big day.”

“So they just let you out for this.”

Elias shrugged with false modesty. His chain jingled. “When I asked them nicely.”

“How did you even know he was dead?” interposed Melanie. “Basira, did you tell him about the—”

“She didn’t have to,” said Elias, raising his voice to cut Melanie’s off. “Nothing escapes my notice, and I like to keep an eye out for this sort of thing.”

“Well—it’s—good to see you.” Tim’s voice. Unconvincing, even then.

Jon steeled himself to hear his own voice stammer out, “Yes—y-yes!” but heard nothing except the hissing of the… tape. Yes, that was the wrong tape—the one from his birthday.

“Anyway. Somebody mentioned cake.” Elias jingled as he arranged his hands under his chin.

Tim scoffed. “They didn’t serve cake at my funeral.”

“I preferred going out for ice cream anyway,” pronounced Martin, his arms crossed and his nose in the air. Jon pushed himself up on shaking hands. Find Martin.

They had gone for ice cream at John O’Groats before the change, while living at Daisy’s safehouse. Martin had apologized on behalf of the kiosk for its measly selection—no rum and raisin. Jon pronounced a playful “Urgh,” assuming Martin had cited this flavor as a joke. “I think I’ll manage without that particular abomination.”

“Wait, what? Why did you order it at my birthday party then?”

Jon stood still with his ice cream cone, squinted into space, and blinked. “I did?”

“My first birthday in the Archives, yeah!”

“Huh. That’s… odd.” Martin placed a gentle hand on Jon’s back to remind him to resume walking. “I suppose I must have been—huh. Yes,” he mused, nodding slowly as his hypothesis came into focus between his eyes and the ground. “I must still have thought I was tired of all the good flavors at that point.”

He heard Martin scoff a few steps ahead of him. “What, and now you’re happy with plain old vanilla?” Then he heard arrhythmic footsteps thumping toward him from Martin’s direction; he looked up to find Martin reaching his napkin-draped free hand out toward Jon’s ice cream cone. “You’re dripping again,” he explained.

Jon mumbled thanks and shrugged a laugh. “I-I’ve, uh. Come back around on most of them.”

“Except rum and raisin?”

“No—I’ve come around on it, too, just, uh.” He tried to make the shape of a wheel with his ice-cream-cone-laden hand. It flicked drips of vanilla across his shirt. Martin came at him with the napkin again. “Thank you. I just disliked that one to start with.”

“…Right. Okay, so what revolution occurred in your life before the Archives that overturned all your opinions on ice cream flavors?”

So Jon had told Martin about that summer when his jaw kept subluxing. He’d used that word, assuming Martin was familiar with it already—incorrect, as he knew now. Presumably Martin had gathered from context that Jon meant he’d hurt his jaw, in some small-scale, no-big-deal way whose specifics he’d let slide as an unimportant detail. But then as the anecdote wore on he must have begun to feel the hole in his knowledge. And lo, at last Martin had invoked that dread specter the clarifying question.

“Okay but so your grandmother had no problem with you basically living off ice cream all summer?”

“Well, she did when I could chew. But not when it was that or tinned soup.”

“Ah—right. ‘Cause you hurt your… jaw, you said?” Jon nodded. “What happened exactly?”

“Oh. Uh. Happened? Nothing, just my—I was born, I guess. Just part of my genetic condition; I happened to get it especially bad in the jaw that year. I-it’s much better now, though,” he hastened to add when he noticed Martin’s frown.

“What genetic condition? You never told me you had one.”

“Didn’t I?”

At the time, the anger in Martin’s answering scoff had surprised him. “No, Jon, you never said.”

“Oh. Sorry? I—I mean, you’ve seen me with this for years—I just?—thought you knew.”

“Seen you with—what, the cane, you mean? I thought that was Prentiss!”

Jon glanced to the doorway to double-check that was where he’d left his cane.

“What? No,” he had mused. “Of course not. I’ve had this since….”

“But you never used it.”

“No—surely, I—”

“Not once before Prentiss.”

Even as he’d said the words, Jon’s memory of that time had returned to him and he’d known Martin was right. Before Prentiss attacked the Institute he’d brought his cane with him to work in the Archives every day, and every day left it folded up in his bag. All out of an obscure notion that if he’d used it before Elias and before his coworkers, they’d take it as a plea for mercy, an admission of weakness or incompetence. God, he was naïve back then. He’d used the cane often enough back in Research; why hadn’t he worried Tim and Sasha would find its new absence conspicuous? That they’d worry just as much about his refusal to use it? The whole thing seemed even more stupid, too, now that he knew Elias must have noticed the change. How it must have pleased him, to see his shiny new Archivist so obsessed with proving he was fit for the job.

“Yeah but,” Jon pursued, instead of voicing any of this, “Tim never—?”

Martin nodded and shrugged. “I don’t know; I figured Tim didn’t get them in the legs as much as you did. I didn’t see you guys after the attack, remember? Not ‘til you got out of quarantine.”

“Right, no, of course you didn’t. I’m sorry,” said Jon mechanically, already consumed with the question he asked next. “Martin—did you think it was the corkscrew?”

From Martin’s sigh Jon figured he’d been expecting this question. “Kinda? At first, yeah. Half for real, half just—you know, as a habit? Like, ‘Look, a way to blame yourself!’” He splayed out his hands, rolled his eyes.

“Yes—I do that too.” Jon barely got the words out above a whisper; he couldn’t not smile, but fought to keep it from showing teeth. A muscle under his chin spasmed with the effort.

“But then I noticed you switching sides with it a lot, so, yeah. I knew it couldn’t be just that.”

“Really?” He waited for Martin’s answering shrug. “You’re the first person who’s ever noticed that. Or at least commented on it.”

“Sorry?”

“No—it’s.”

This attempt to communicate a similar sentiment, Jon recalled as he reached for his shoes, hadn’t gone as well as the one a few days later (over unseen horror &c.). Beholding had at that moment presented him with the image of a fat, hunched woman in shorts. She shuffled forward a few steps in a queue at Boots, next to him, and shifted her weight so the cane in her right hand supported her nearer leg. He felt a strong impulse he knew wasn’t his own—one born partly of resentment, part exasperation, part concern—to tell the woman that was bad for her shoulder, that she should switch hands too. But knew if he tried she’d either pretend she hadn’t heard it, or tell him off for criticizing her. Jon didn’t know what she would say more specifically; the Eye didn’t do hypotheticals. It had given him no more than this single moment of preverbal intuition. After the change he could have sought out other conversations Martin had had with his mother, and they might have given him a pretty good idea. But he’d promised Martin not to look at things like that.

He managed to dislodge a finger while tying his shoe. The other shoe he’d pulled off without untying; in a fit of impatience he tried now to shove his foot into it as it was. No good—he got the shoe on, but it just made the other index finger, the one he’d hooked into the back of the shoe behind his heel for leverage, pop off to the side too. Jon was afraid to find out what shape it would end up in if he pulled his finger back out of the shoe like that, so he had to untie it after all, one-handed. Then carefully extract his finger. It sprung back into place as soon as he removed the offending pressure (namely, his heel), but he still whimpered and swore. The corners of his eyes pricked with indignation when he remembered he still had to pee.

In this case, for once, Beholding had told him the important part: that that was why Martin had noticed. Had he noticed Melanie, too, Jon wondered, when she got back from India? She would switch hands sometimes, too—but, of course, without switching legs. He wondered if that had picked at the same unacknowledged nerve of Martin’s that his mother’s habit had. It had bothered Jon, too, but in a different way. He’d resented it a little, but also felt humbled by it, the way he always did by others’ discomfort. Getting shot in the leg seemed so big? Like such an aberration. So uncontroversially important—probably because it was simple, legible. Georgie could convey its hugeness to him in three words. She got shot. Obviously there was more to the story than that; there were parts he could never…

Well, no. There was a part of it he felt he should say he could never understand: that she’d kept the cursed bullet because she wanted it. In fact he was pretty sure he did understand that. But he didn’t have the right to admit it, he didn’t think. And no reason to hope she would believe him if he did. The second he’d learnt the bullet was still in there, after all, he and Basira had rushed to dig it out. Surely, from her perspective that could only mean he didn’t and could never understand. Or maybe he just wanted her to see it that way—wanted her to get to keep that uncomplicated resentment of his ignorance. It made his perspective look stupid and ugly, sure. But the truth made it look self-absorbed and pitiful. The truth was that until Daisy insisted otherwise, he’d assumed only he could see his own corruption and assent to it: that the others must not have known what they were doing.

Then again, maybe even if Melanie knew that, she would see only that he had underestimated her. Maybe it didn’t matter how much she knew.

Melanie switched off which hand she held her white cane with now, too. But that was probably healthy? Jon knew no more than the average person about white-cane hygiene. He just remembered feeling the floor drop out of his stomach when they’d got coffee together during his time in hiding and he had seen her switch her original, silver cane from hand to hand. Part of him had wanted to scoff or rationalize it away. How much could the shot leg hurt, really, if she still noticed when her arms got tired? But another part of him shuddered at the thought one arm alone couldn’t compensate for the weight her leg refused to take—that she had to keep switching off when one arm got weak and shaky from supporting more weight than it should have to. It wasn’t that he hadn’t experienced pain or impairment on that scale. He had, though the thought of a single injury sufficing to cause it still made him feel cold inside. It was that he kept seeing proofs, all over, everywhere, that the parts of his life he’d only learnt to accept by assuming they were rare weren’t rare.

Leitner hadn’t made the evil books; he’d just noticed they were there. And then had his life ruined by their influence, like everyone who came across them. Jon had had no time and no right to deplore the holes Prentiss had left in him and Tim, because on the same damn day he learnt someone had shot the previous Archivist to death. Alright, so it was him, then, right? Him and Tim—just doomed, just preternaturally unlucky. Tim, handsome face half-eaten by worms, estranged (as Jon then assumed) from a brother who seemed so warm and accepting in that picture on his lock screen; Jon, saved from Mr. Spider only by his childhood bully, now fated to take the place of another murder victim—and also half-eaten by worms. But no; he and Tim had got off lightly. Look what had happened to Sasha the same fucking night. The very thing whose influence convinced him the world had it out for him? Had killed Sasha. Literally stolen her life. How many lives around him got stolen while he mourned his own?

“I want you to comment on it,” Jon had managed to clarify. But Martin had scoffed as he stood in the foyer of Daisy’s safehouse, hopping on one foot to pull off the other shoe:

“Yeah, well. You haven’t exactly led by example on that one.”

“How could I?”

He accepted Jon’s scarf and long-discarded jacket, hanging them up beside his own. “Gee, I don’t know—commenting on it yourself?”

“On… switching which side I used the cane on.”

“Don’t play dumb, Jon. On this ‘genetic condition’” (in a deep, posh voice, with a stodgy frown and fluttering eyelashes) “you’ve apparently had this entire time. Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“I thought you knew, Martin! Why would I mention it in a childhood anecdote if I didn’t think...?”

“Well I didn’t know, okay? You never told me. You never tell anyone anything about what’s going on with you, you just—you just make everything into another heroic cross to bear.”

“That’s not—?” He wanted to tell Martin just how little that made him want to say about it. But he guessed Martin was really talking less about the EDS thing, more about how he’d spent their whole first year in the Archives pretending to dismiss the statements that scared him. How he’d sent Tim and Martin home when he’d found out about Sasha. How he’d stayed away from the Institute even after his name got cleared for Leitner’s murder. “What do you want to know.”

“Why you never—?” In a similar way, Martin seemed to reconsider his initial response. “Yeah, okay, right. Object-level stuff, yeah?” Jon nodded and wanly smiled. “Okay, so. What’s it called?”

After taking a minute to ditch his shoes, wash the sticky ice-cream residue off his hands, and drink some water, he’d sat down on the couch with Martin and told him its name, what it was, what it did. What does that mean, though, Martin kept asking, so he’d explained how it applied to the anecdote about his jaw. Martin asked why it meant he needed a cane.

“Be…cause all my joints are like that.”

“Yeah, but why does it help with that? What is the cane actually for, is what I’m asking.”

Jon hated being asked that question. “It—it means I don’t fall over when one of my joints stops working? A-and… also makes walking hurt less. I suppose.”

“So, when they’re working right, that’s when you don’t need it?”

“No—yes?—sort of. Now sometimes I just need it when it’s been too long since I had a statement. I get sort of. Weak.” Quickly Jon added, “But I don’t need it for stability so much since the coma.” He’d shown Martin how now, when he pulled out his finger, the Eye would just sort of erase that version of reality—how the dislocation wouldn’t snap back, but simply cease to exist. As if his body were a drawing on which the Beholding had corrected a mistake. He put his palms together behind his back, in the way he’d been told one couldn’t without subluxing both shoulders, and told Martin to watch how the hollows between his shoulder bones vanished. He opened his jaw ‘til it jarred to the side, and told Martin to listen for the static.

But Jon had never shown Martin how these things worked before the coma. Martin had no reference for this kind of thing; he understood only enough to find the sights unsettling. “That’s—no, that’s okay, I’ll”—he stuttered as Jon fumbled with his kneecap in search of a fourth example—“I-I get it. I’ll take your word for it.”

“I just thought.”

“No, I—? I don’t need you to prove it to me, Jon.” (The latter nodded, blushing, trying to smile.) “I get… I’m sorry. I guess I get why it’d feel easier not to say anything if? If you think it’s either that or have to convince people it’s a thing.”

Again Jon nodded. He suspected Martin wasn’t through talking yet. But Martin still wasn’t looking at him, eyes squeezed tight against Jon’s party tricks. So, to show he was listening, Jon said, “Yes. Er—thank you, Martin.”

“I just don’t like it when you hide things from me.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You could at least ask if I want to know about them, yeah?”

Even at the time, Jon had doubted this. If they’d had this conversation after the change, he might have pointed out to Martin that when you mention something the other person has no inkling of, you make them too curious to decline your offer of more information, even if afterward they’ll admit they wish you’d never told them.

“Or ask me if I even recognize what you’re talking about, the next time you start going on about some childhood anecdote where you incidentally had a dislocated jaw. Honestly, would it kill you to start with, ‘Hey, did I ever tell you about x’?”

“No, it wouldn’t. You’re right. I’ll try. What… kinds of things did you—? For the future, I mean. What kinds of things did you want to make sure I tell you about.”

Martin sighed, in that way he did when he thought Jon was going about something all wrong. But after a pause to think, he did ask, “About this, or in general?”

“Either—both—first one, then the other.”

“Okay. I guess… I want to know when you’re hurt, mostly. Like—I can’t believe I even have to say this—that’s kind of important, actually? How am I supposed to know how to behave around you if I never know whether you're secretly in pain or not?”

This seemed weird—both now and at the time. Jon figured he must be missing something. If Martin thought he only needed the cane because of Prentiss then, sure, that might have affected how he imagined Jon’s discomfort to himself, but? Wasn’t the cane itself an admission of pain? Why did Martin think he owed him more than that—that he had owed him more than that at the time, no less? Did he not realize how fucking private that was? What a surrender of privacy the cane represented?

But, no, he reminded himself now; nondisabled people don’t realize that, unless you tell them about it. Repeatedly. Over and over. It only seems obvious to you because you lived it already.

“Er.” At the time he’d just shown Martin his teeth, with the points of his left-side canines joined. Nominally a smile, but more like a show of hiding the grimace beneath than an actual attempt to hide it. “That’s harder than you might think? Technically I’m always….”

“Oh.”

“Sorr—”

“—What do you mean, ‘technically’?”

“I’m—not always aware of it?” He disliked that phrase, in pain—how it implied a discrete and exclusive state. One could not be in Paris and at the same time in London; similarly, most people seemed to assume one could not be in pain and also in a good mood. In raptures. In a transport of laughter. That when one admits to being in pain, one implies that’s the most important thing they’re conscious of.

“Well that doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes, I know—‘if a tree falls down in a forest’—blah blah blah.” With a gentle smile to acknowledge he’d picked up this mode of speech from Martin. He turned his wrist in circles so it clicked like an old film reel. “Philosophically speaking, if you’re not aware of pain, you can’t be in it. Maybe ‘technically’ isn’t the right word.”

“Oh yeah ‘cause that’s the angle I want to know about this from.”

Jon sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. I just mean, it doesn’t always matter to me.”

“Well it matters to me,” Martin scoffed.

“Yeah—I’m getting that. Is there any way I can explain this that you won’t jump down my throat for?”

Martin sighed, groaned, pulled at his hair a little but made himself stop. (He doesn’t pull it out, Jon knows—he just likes having something to grab onto during awkward conversations. Usually emerges from them looking like a cartoon scientist.) “Okay, yeah,” said Martin. “I get it. I’m sorry too.”

“I mean—when you get a paper cut, that hurts, technically, right?”

“Well yeah, a little, but that’s not the kind of—”

“But just because you notice that hurt doesn’t mean?” He paused to rearrange his words. “You’re not going to remember it later unless someone asks why you’ve got blood on your sleeve.”

“Y—eah. Sure.”

“Is that…?”

“When you’re suffering, then. I want you to tell me that. And—whenever something weird happens? Like, before it stops being weird and you talk to me like I’m stupid for not already knowing about it.”

“What if”—this far into his question, Jon worried it might come off as a smart-alecky, devil’s-advocate thing. So he paused, pretending he needed time to formulate its words. “What if I haven’t decided yet whether it’s weird or not.”

“That in itself is pretty weird, Jon.”

“Fair enough.”

“I want to be part of that conversation. I want you to trust me enough to bounce ideas off me! It’s not like—? I mean why wouldn’t you do that?”

Jon had shrugged and grimaced, hands in his trouser pockets. “Not to worry you?” he’d suggested. But as he bit his lip and shimmied down from the bed Jon knew now that that was the sanitized version—and probably, if you’d asked him a day before or afterward, his past self would have known that too. Most things you told Martin, he’d either ignore them completely or latch onto them, refuse to let them go, and interpret everything else you said in the light they cast. Jon had learnt not to raise any given topic with him until he was sure he wanted to risk its becoming a long, painful discussion. This was part of why he hadn’t kept his promise, he told himself as he turned their interim bedroom’s doorknob. Why he’d said so little about anything weird that had happened to him at Upton House.

“Martin?”

“Oh hey, Jon—you’re awake.” Martin glanced in his vague direction but stayed bent over his work, so Jon could not meet his eyes.

“You found the screwdriver.”

“Yeah! And a screw that matches better, see?” He fished the first one they'd found out of his pocket and held it up next to the door for comparison. Jon supposed they looked a little different—bright yellowy gold vs. a darker gold. “They were in the library, of all places. There’s a little box full of ‘em that he keeps right next to his reading glasses, apparently. Guess he must break them a lot. How are yours, by the way? Any bits feel loose?”

Dutifully, trying to keep his dazed smile to himself, Jon pulled off his glasses. Folded and unfolded each arm, jiggled the little nose pieces. He shook his head. “Don’t think so. You can have a look yourself though, if you like.”

“Remind me later. Should’ve brought the whole box, probably,” Martin said, voice strained as he twisted the screw that last little bit. “There!” His open mouth broadened into a smile. “Time to see if it worked. You wanna do the honors?”

Jon shook his head, breathed a laugh through his nose. “You should do it. You’re the reason it’s fixed.”

“I mean, yeah,” shrugged Martin as his hand closed round the doorknob, “but I’m also the reason it broke.” It opened with a click. “Ha-ha! Success! Statements—our own clothes—our own bed! Er. Ish.”

Something tugged in Jon’s chest; he’d forgot the statements were why Martin thought this quest so urgent. He lingered at the side of the bed while Martin rummaged in his backpack, remembering for once to toe his first shoe off while standing.

“Man. Looks sorta underwhelming now, after the other room, huh?”

“Least our wallpaper’s better.”

“Tsshhyeah, and our view.”

Jon didn’t turn around, but surmised Martin must be looking out at that tree he liked. “Is it four already?”

“Uhh—nearly, yeah. You were out for a while; took me ages to find that damn thing. Here you go,” announced Martin as he slapped a zip-loc bag full of statement down on the bed.

(“So they won’t get water damage,” he had answered a few days ago, when Jon asked him why he’d individually wrapped each statement like snacks in a bagged lunch. “What? It’s not like we have to worry about landfills anymore. If I put them all in the same bag, you’d take one out and not be able to get it back in.”)

“What happened to my jacket, by the way? And yours?”

“Uhhh.”

“Right, okay,” Martin laughed; “I’ll go get them before I forget. I’ll put this away too, I guess” (meaning the screwdriver still in his hand). “Don’t wait for me, yeah? I don’t mind missing the trailers.”

Jon smiled. “Sure.”

As Martin hurried off, Jon sat down to untie and pull off his other shoe, threaded the lace back through the final eyelet from which it’d come loose, picked up the first shoe and untied that one, then stood up and set them by the door next to his cane. Both hips and all ten fingers behaved themselves throughout. As he walked by the vanity he grabbed the coins he’d removed to do laundry the other day and stuck them back in his trouser pocket. Useless, of course, but he’d missed having something to fidget with. He squatted down and peered under the vanity for the hair tie he’d dropped, for the fifth or sixth time since he’d misplaced it. Didn’t find it. That was fine; he had another one around his wrist. His knees felt weak, so instead of standing back up he crab-walked to the foot of the bed and sat down with his back against it. Straightened his legs out before him on the floor. Then he dug the coins from his pocket and counted them. Yup—still 74p.

Danika! Not Daniela—Danika Gelsthorpe. God, he would never forget one of their names out there. Never underestimate how much I care for the

“I'm back. What’s down there? Did you find the screw?” asked Martin as he hung their jackets up behind the door.

Jon shook his head. “Forgot about it. I was looking for that hair tie.”

“Well you’re on your own there; I’m done finding things today. The screw can wait,” Martin laughed—“he’s got a whole bag inside that box in the library. Do you need a hand getting up?”

He let Martin help him. Both knees cracked; the world’s edges went dark for a second. “Thank you,” he said, and it came out more peremptory than he’d meant it.

“Statement time?”

“Right. You don’t mind? I can wait ’til we’ve both had a rest, if you don’t want to be in the room while I.”

“No, I’m alright; I’ll stay here.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you hated statements.”

Martin shrugged. “Not these ones so much, now that. Heh—they’re almost nostalgic, if I’m honest. ‘Can it be real? I think I’ve seen a monster!’”

“They are a bit,” agreed Jon, looking down at the plastic-sleeved statement and making himself smile.

“Go on. Seeing you feel better will make me feel better too.”

That made it a bit easier to motivate himself, Jon supposed. From the moment he’d lain down on the bed he’d felt like he was floating on gentle waves—like if he let himself listen to them he could fall asleep in seconds. But that wouldn’t make Martin feel better. And no guarantee it would him, either, once he woke up again. He rearranged the pillows behind himself so he’d have to sit up a little; this might help keep him awake, and it meant he could rest his elbows on the bed while he held up the statement, rather than having to lift them up before his eyes. It made his neck sore, a bit, this angle, but that was fine. That might help keep him awake, too.

He sighed, readying himself for speech. Then heard a click, and felt a familiar buzz and weight against his stomach. The tape recorder had manifested inside his hoodie’s kangaroo pocket.

“Statement of Miranda Lautz, regarding, er… a botched home-repair job. Heh. Seems appropriate. Original statement given March twenty-sixth, 2004. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.”

[Image ID: A digital painting of Jon and Martin on an old-fashioned canopy bed with white sheets and orange drapes. Jon sits on the near side of the bed, reading a paper statement. He frowns slightly, looking down at the statement in his hands; he wears round glasses perched low on his nose. He’s a thin man, with medium brown skin dotted by scars left from the worms, and another scar on his neck from Daisy's knife. His hair is long and curly, gray and white hairs among the black. Jon sits supported by pillows—several big, white, lace-trimmed ones behind his back, and one under his knees. His right leg is slightly crossed over his left ankle, on which a clean white bandage peeks out beneath his cuffed, dark green trousers. He wears an oversized red hoodie and red-toed brown socks. Sat on the far side of the bed, next to Jon but facing away from both him and the viewer, is Martin—a tall and fat white man with short, curly, reddish brown hair and a short beard. He has glasses and is wearing a dark blue jumper and gray-brown trousers. Past the bed on Martin’s side, the bedroom door hangs ajar; in this light, it and the wall glow bluish green. On the near side, though, the light grows warmer, the orange canopy behind Jon casting pink and brown tints onto the white pillows and sheets. End ID.]

It seemed to be a Corruption statement, or maybe the Spiral. Possibly the Buried? A leak in Ms. Lautz’s roof caused a pill-shaped bulge to appear in her kitchen ceiling, about the size of a bread loaf. Water burst from it like pus from an abscess (as she described it. Nothing else Fleshy though, so far). Ms. Lautz repaired the hole in her ceiling, but every morning a new one reappeared somewhere else. Sometimes they appeared bulging and pill-shaped like the first one; other times she found them already burst, covering the room in water shot through with dark specks like coffee grounds.

Jon wished he’d refilled his empty water glass before starting to record. His mouth was so dry that every time he pronounced an L his tongue stuck to its roof. At this point he’d welcome a hole to burst in it and flood his mouth with water. Then again, he did still have to pee.

Eventually she and her spouse hired someone to find out what was wrong with the roof. She described hearing boots tramping around up there for half a day while they checked out all the spots where she and Alex had reported leaks. The inside of Jon’s trouser leg pulled at the bandage on his shin, making it itch. The repair men told Ms. Lautz it’d be safer and barely any more expensive to replace the whole thing. The ring and little fingers of Jon’s left hand were starting to go numb from having that elbow too long pressed against the bed. Miranda and Alex thanked the roof people and sent them off, saying they’d think it over.

He began to regret crossing his legs this way. He’d balanced his right heel in the hollow between his left foot’s ankle and instep, and in the time since he’d arranged them that way gravity had slowly pushed his foot more and more to the side, widening that gap. By this time he was sure it was hyperextended—possibly subluxed? It hurt already, and, he knew, would hurt more when he tried to move it. This rather ruined his fantasy of heading straight for the toilet when he finished reading.

Martin was right; these old statements seemed positively tame, now. He knew he owed it to Ms. Lautz to engage with her fate, but?

No. No buts. Whatever hell she lived in now, it looked just like the one she was about to describe for him, only worse. You can’t even pretend you’re sorry she’s living out her worst fear if you stop in the middle of reading that fear’s origin story. Never underestimate how much I

Once the repair men had left, Miranda Lautz wandered into her kitchen for lunch. She found her ceiling bulging halfway to the floor, with the impression of a face and two twisted arms at its center. Like someone had fallen through her roof, head first. Jon’s stiff neck twinged in sympathy. Miranda screamed and strode to the other side of the house in search of beer, figuring she'd find better answers at the bottom of a bottle than in her own head. When she got back to the kitchen with them, the beer bottles didn’t know what to do either, but said—

“God damn it. Not ‘ales’—‘Alex’. Obviously.”

He let the statement’s pages flop over the back of his hand, let his head tip backward until the top of it bumped against headboard and his eyes faced the ceiling. That settled it, then, didn’t it. If he had the Ceaseless Watcher looking through his eyes, he wouldn’t make a mistake like that—and he certainly couldn’t change position while recording. On top of his more substantial regrets, Jon had spent their whole odyssey before they came to Upton House ruing that he’d sat at the dining-room table to read Magnus’s statement, rather than on the couch or the bed. The chairs at that table had plain, flat wood seats—no cushion, no contouring for the shape of an arse. When he opened the door to the changed world, the cataclysm had preserved his bodily sensations at that moment like a mosquito in amber. He’d had a sore tailbone and pins and needles down his legs for untold eons. Right up until he and Martin crossed from the Necropolis onto the grounds protected by Salesa’s camera, where his tailbone faded out of awareness and his head filled up with cotton.

“Ohhh. ‘Alex’. Okay, that makes a lot more sense,” laughed Martin meanwhile. Jon could feel Martin’s shoulder bouncing against his. “She must’ve written it in cursive, huh.”

“I can’t do this right now, Martin.”

“Oh—okay, yeah. You rest; I’ll finish it for you.”

Jon closed his eyes and let air gush out from his nostrils. But you hate the statements, he knew he should say. Wouldn’t this make it easier, though? To let Martin have out this last bit of denial first?

The tape recorder in his pocket still hissed, still warmed and weighted down his stomach like a meal.

“Thank you,” he said.

The operator on the phone said she and Alex should wait for the ambulance to arrive, rather than try to free the man in the ceiling by themselves. Jon turned his neck back and forth, hoping Martin couldn’t hear its joints’ snap/crackle/pop. He picked his elbow up off the bed and shook out his hand. But when the paramedics cut the ceiling open, only a torrent of water gushed into their kitchen—water flecked with a great deal of what looked like coffee grounds. A day or two later the roof people called, to ask if they’d decided whether to have the roof repaired or replaced. They assured her none of their employees had gone missing. At the time of writing, Miranda and Alex still hadn’t decided what to do about the roof. A week ago, they’d found a squirrel-shaped bulge in their bedroom ceiling; they’d packed their bags and come to stay with Alex’s sister in London.

“Right! That wasn’t so bad.” Martin set the statement down and stretched his arms over his head. “Huh.”

“Hm?”

“Oh, I don’t know, just—it’s been a while. Thought it might feel, I don’t know, worse than that? Or better, I guess, since the Eye’s so ‘fond’ of me now.”

“I don’t think they work here.”

“What?”

“The statements. The Eye can’t see their fear.”

“Oh.” Jon could feel Martin deflating. He let himself avalanche over to fill the space. “You don’t feel better, do you.”

“No.”

“Maybe it’s just—slower here, like it’s taking a while to load or something. Remember how long the tape recorder took to come on last time? It was like—you were like— ‘“Statement of Blankety Blank, regarding an encounter with”—Oh, right,’ click.”

That was true. The tapes had known Salesa would give a statement before it happened, but with these paper ones they’d seemed slow on the uptake. Martin had also sworn the recorder that manifested to tape Mr. Andrade’s statement was a different machine than the one Salesa’d spotted that first morning. Jon wondered which machine the one in his pocket was.

Not relevant, he decided. He shook his head in his palm, stroking the lids of his closed eyes. “No—if they worked here I wouldn’t be able to stop in the middle of one.” As soon as he said it he winced, bracing himself for argument.

After the change he remembered wailing to Martin about how he couldn’t stop reading Magnus’s statement—how its words had possessed his whole body, forced him to do the worst thing any person ever had, and forced him to like it, to feel Magnus’s triumph as they both opened the door. Martin had pressed Jon’s face into his clavicle, rubbed his nose in the scent of Daisy’s laundry soap, covered the back of Jon’s head with his hands. Tried to interpose what he must then have still called the real world between Jon and what he could see outside. He’d said over and over, I know, and We‘ll be okay. Jon had known that meant he wasn’t listening, and yet still hadn’t been prepared for the argument they had later, when he mentioned in sobriety the same things he’d wailed back then.

“Hang on”—Martin had pleaded—“no, that can’t be true. I’ve been interrupted in the middle of a statement loads of times—and I know you have too.”

“By outside forces, yes, but you can’t decide to stop reading one. Believe me, Martin, I wouldn’t have—”

“Tim did.”

“No, he didn’t—”

“Yes he did! He was gonna do one and then Melanie—”

“No, Martin, I’ve heard the tape you’re talking about. Tim introduced the statement but didn’t actually start—”

“He did so! He read the first bit, and then stopped. ‘My parents never let me have a night light. I was—’”

“‘Always afraid, but they were just’....” Behind his own eyes he’d felt the Eye shudder and throb with gratitude. Just that sort of stubborn, it had seemed to sing, in a bizarre combination of his own voice with Jonah’s with Melanie’s, which doubled down when I screamed or cried about something, instead of actually listening.

“Yeah,” said Martin, forehead wrinkling. “And then he said, ‘This is stupid,’ and stopped.”

“You’re right.”

Jon still had no satisfying answer to that one, and cursed himself for having opened that can of worms back up again. It had been Tim’s first-ever statement, he reminded himself, and maybe Tim had never intended to get even that far. Maybe he’d been waiting for someone to interrupt him, as Melanie eventually did. Even out there, the Eye couldn’t really show him things like that. He could find out what Tim had said—could look it up, as it were—and what he’d thought, but motivation was a bit too murky, multilayered, complicated. It wasn’t real telepathy? The vicarious emotions the Eye gave him access to worked in broad strokes, generalities—just like common or garden empathy. Sure, he could imagine other people’s points of view more vividly, now that he could see through their eyes. But he still had to imagine them to life, based on the clues around him and what emotions those clues stirred in him. It didn’t work well for situations like this; he could hear Melanie’s footsteps and feel Tim’s reluctance to read a statement, but that was it. Enough to concoct plausible explanations; not enough to pick out the truth from a list of them. Plausibilities were too much like hypotheticals.

In the timelessness since that argument with Martin, though, Jon had also wondered whether it mattered if Tim had read the statement before recording it. He didn’t have footage, as it were, of Tim doing so; either the Eye had more copies of the statement’s events than it needed already and so had deleted that one from storage, or, conversely, perhaps it could no longer see versions of it that relied too heavily on the pages Mr. Hatendi had written it on, since Martin had burned those. But Tim’s summary, before he started reading. Blanket, monster, dead friend. It was bad, sure (like the assistants’ summaries always were, a ghost of past Jon interposed). But it sounded like the summary of a man who’d read it with his mind on other things. Inevitable and gruesome end. How he tried to hide; he couldn’t. Not at all like that of someone skimming it for the first time as he spoke. He did rifle through the papers though? So Jon couldn’t be sure. The suspicion ate at his mind, especially here. Could he have kept the world from ending just by—reading Magnus’s statement, before he went to record it? The way he used to way back at the start, before he trusted himself to speak the words perfectly on the first try? You didn’t mean to record it, did you? No, I’m sure you told Melanie and Basira you were just going to

“Guess that makes sense,” Martin said now. “So, you’re still feeling…?”

“Not great?”

“Yeah.”

“I… I feel human, here.”

“Oh wow. That’s—”

Jon told himself to put the hope in Martin’s voice to bed as soon as possible. “I know I’m not—not fully.” He allowed a smile to twitch the corners of his lips, flared his nostrils around an exhale that almost passed as a laugh. “Most humans don’t spontaneously summon tape recorders. Or sleep with their eyes open.”

“Yeah, but still, you don’t think maybe—?”

Again Jon hastened to cut Martin off. “A-and even if I was, it’s. I know that should be a good thing? But—”

At this point Martin interposed, “Should be, yeah! You don’t think it might mean you could—I don’t know, go back to normal? If we stayed here for a while?”

“Maybe? I-I might stop craving the Eye so much, but we’d still have to go back out there eventually, to face Elias, and. To be honest with you, Martin?” He huffed a laugh out, bitterly. “My ‘normal’ wasn’t exactly...”

“Right.” Martin sighed. “So you mean you feel like you used to, as a human. Which was…”

“Not great.”

“Right.”

“I haven’t been very well, here.” Jon shrugged for the excuse to duck his head. He could feel himself blushing, the heat spilling from his face all down both arms. Good thing the tape recorder in his pocket had gone cold.

Next to him, Martin puffed air out of his cheeks. “Yeah, I know.”

“I’m dizzy and confused without the Eye, and it—it can’t fix me here? When I.” He drew in breath, lifted his heel off his ankle and set that leg to the side, letting its foot roll into Martin’s shin. Bit his lip and scrunched his nose in preparation. Flexed the other foot’s toes, trying to isolate the lever in his ankle that would—there. Clunk. Then a noisy exhale: “Jyyrrggh. When that happens,” he choked out, voice strained by both pain and nerves. “It’s like before I became an avatar. I have to fix it myself, and it doesn’t just.” Magically stop hurting, he hoped went without saying; already he could hear Martin sucking air through his teeth. It made Jon’s cheeks itch. “Shouldn’t have let myself get used to a higher standard, I suppose.”

“What? No—of course you should have. Did you think I was gonna say that?”

“No, of course not; I just meant—”

“You deserve to feel healthy, Jon.”

“Do I? Health is clumsy, it’s callous, it, it lets terrible things happen because they don’t feel real—it can’t imagine them properly, can’t understand what they mean….”

“Okay, first of all, ouch.” Jon snarled a laugh at that, without knowing whether Martin meant it as a joke. “Second of all, that is not why you—why the world ended, okay? Especially, ‘cause, you weren’t ‘healthy’ then. You read Elias’s bloody statement because you were starving, remember?”

“Hmrph,” pronounced Jon, to concede he was listening without either confirming or denying the point.

“And thirdly, you’re not ‘callous’ out there? You don’t”—a scoff interrupted his words. “You don’t ‘let things happen because they don’t feel real’—that’s sure not how I remember it. Okay? I remember you crying for—god, I don’t know, days, maybe? Weeks?—about how you could feel everything, and couldn’t stop any of it. That’s the thing we’re hiding from here, Jon, so if you don’t actually feel any healthier here then what even is the point?”

In a voice embarrassment made small Jon managed, “I mean? I’m still kind of having fun.”

“Really? You don’t seem like it—”

“Not today, maybe—”

“Right, yeah, no; spending all day trying to fix a doorknob isn’t exactly—”

“But I don’t want to leave yet. I should still have a few good days left before the distance from the Eye gets too….”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” For a few seconds he tried to think of something better to say, then gave up and told the truth, though in a jocular voice to hide his self-consciousness. “Always was the person who got ill on holiday.”

“Oh, god, of course you were—”

Voice growing higher in pitch, Jon pleaded, “It didn’t usually stop me from enjoying it?”

“What about America?” laughed Martin. “Did you still enjoy that one?”

“Of course not—I got kidnapped.”

“I mean, yeah, but you were pretty used to that too by then, right?”

“God.” Jon sniffed, crunchily, reeling back in the snot he’d laughed out. “Besides. That was a business engagement.”

Martin acknowledged this comment with a quick Psh, as he turned himself around on the bed to face Jon a little more. “Can I trust you to”—he stopped.

“Yes.”

“No, let me—that wasn’t fair; I can’t ask you that yet.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Martin; I didn’t—”

“Of me, I meant, it wasn’t fair.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. I’ve been ignoring your distress all week because I wanted it not to matter.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it ‘distress,’” pointed out Jon. “Plus, I have been sort of, er. Secretive, about it.”

The exasperation in Martin’s sigh was probably meant for him, not for Jon, the latter reminded himself. “Yeah, but you’re not subtle. I can tell when you’re hiding something. It wasn’t exactly a big leap to figure out what. But I told myself it was temporary, and that you were acting like.”

Jon laughed preemptively. “Yes?”

“Like a little kid in line for a theme-park ride.” Again Jon laughed—less at the comparison itself than at how much Martin winced to hear himself say it. “I’m sorry. I should’ve taken you more seriously.”

“And I should have told you what was going on with me.”

“Yup,” concurred Martin at once.

“I know you hate it when I keep things from you.”

“I do—I hate it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry too.” Martin waved this away like a fly. “I just—you said you think we’ve got a few more days, before it gets too much or whatever.”

“Yes.”

“Can I trust you to tell me when we need to leave?”

Jon tried not to answer too quickly, knowing vaguely that that might sound insincere. “Yes,” he said again, after pausing for a second. “You can trust me.”

“Okay? Don’t try to spare my feelings, or anything like that. Like—don’t just go, ‘Oh, well, he’s having a good time. That’s fine; I don’t have to.’ Yeah? ‘Cause I won’t have a good time if I’m worried you’re secretly suffering.”

This Jon did know; it sent a thrill of recognition down his spine, as he remembered their first day’s ping-pong adventure. “Right. I’ll do my suffering as publicly as possible.”

“Uh huh.” Martin’s arm tightened around Jon’s shoulder. “Just don’t worry about disappointing me? I mean, sure, I like it here, with the whole ‘not being an evil wasteland’ thing, but I’d much rather be out there with you happy than with you than spend one more minute in paradise with her.”

With a smile, Jon replied, “That might just be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Yeah, yeah. Come on. We’ve got a job to do.”

“I suppose we do.”

As they walked on out of the range of Salesa’s camera, Jon glanced backward one more time and thought, Yes, that makes sense—but couldn’t quite recall what he had expected to see. It was like when you look at a clock, and tick Check the time off your mental to-do list, then realize you never internalized what time it was. “Pity,” he mused.

“What?”

“It’s, er, going away. That peace, the safety, the memory of ignorance.”

“That’s… Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Do you remember any of it? W-What Salesa said? Annabelle?”

“Some, I think. It’s, uh… do you mind filling me in?”

“Wait, you need me to tell you something for once?”

“I guess so. It’s, er… it’s gone. Like a dream. What was it like?”

After a pause Martin said, “Nice. It was… it was really nice.”

“Even though Annabelle was there?”

“I mean, yeah, but she didn’t do anything,” shrugged Martin. “Except cook for us. That was weird.”

“She cooked?” Jon watched Martin nod and smile around a wince. “And we let her do that? I let her do that?”

With a scoff Martin answered, “Under duress, yeah.”

“Huh.” Jon twirled his cane in circles, wondering why he’d thought he would need it. “Well, she didn’t poison us, apparently.”

“Nope. And believe me, we had that conversation plenty of times already. Er—maybe just let me put that away for you before you take somebody’s eye out, yeah?”

Jon nodded, folded his cane and handed it to Martin, then made himself laugh. “Was I… a bit neurotic about it.”

“About Annabelle?” Again Jon nodded. “Oh, we both were. We kept switching sides—one day I’d be like, ‘But she’s got four arms, Jon!’ and the next you’d be like—”

“She had four arms?”

“Yup. And six eyes. But your powers didn’t work there, so we thought maybe hers didn’t either? Never did find out for sure. God—you remember the day we got locked out of our room?”

“Er….”

“So that’s a no, then.”

“Sorry.”

Martin’s lips billowed in a sigh. “No, don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.”

“So… what happened? Who locked us out? Was it Annabelle?”

“No, no, no one locked us out. It was just me, I uh—I sorta broke the doorknob? God, it was awful. Went to open it and the whole thing just came off in my hand, like” (he made the motion of turning a doorknob in empty air, and imitated the sound Jon figured it must have made coming off) “krrruk-krr.” Jon fondly laughed; he could imagine Martin’s horror at breaking something in a historic mansion. “It was just one screw that came loose, though, so you’d think, easy fix, right? Except the bloody screwdriver took forever to find. Turns out Salesa kept them in the library, of all places.”

“S-sorry—what does this have to do with Annabelle?”

“Oh—nothing ultimately, just.” Martin grimaced at his own recollection. “God, we had this whole argument over whether to ask her about it, and when I finally did can you guess what she told us?”

“What?” managed Jon; his throat felt small and weak all of a sudden.

Martin put a finger to his chin, and blinked his eyes out of sync. “‘Perhaps he keeps them next to something that breaks a lot,’” he recited, with an inane, self-congratulating smile. For a fraction of a second Jon could recognize it as Annabelle’s I’ve-just-told-a-riddle expression. But the memory faded and he could picture her face only as he’d seen it in pictures before the change.

“O…kay. And was that… true?”

“I mean, yeah, technically. Useless, though. And after we spent so long agonizing over whether it was safe to ask her….”

Jon allowed himself a cynical laugh. “Are you sure she didn’t orchestrate the whole thing?”

“Ugh—no, it wasn’t her. We had this conversation at the time. You made me check for cobwebs and everything.”

“And you… didn’t find any?”

“Of course not, Jon; it was a doorway.”

“Right. Doorway, yes.”

“Are you sure you’re feeling better? You still seem a bit….”

“No, I’m—I feel fine, I just can’t seem to. Retain anything concrete about… where did you say it was? Upton House? God that’s strange, that it would just be….”

Part of Jon felt tempted to deplore it as a waste of space, on the apocalypse’s part. These stretches of empty land were one thing, but a mansion? Couldn’t they at least get a Spiral domain out of it?

“I mean, not really. He told us all about it, remember? With the magic camera?”

“Right, yes,” Jon agreed.

“Well, we got it all on tape, if you want to listen to it later.”

“Yes, that sounds—all of it?”

“Well not the whole week or anything. It just came on whenever it thought it was important, I guess.”

“So not the part about the doorway.”

“Nope.”

“Pity.”

[dykesprentiss]

ok so. i know a lot of this has probably been said before, but i wanted to put my two cents in. very rambly and disorganized because i am just like that.

i think everyone in this fandom needs to examine the way they interract with male vs female characters. why is it easier for you to focus on and create content for male characters that have appeared in 2 episodes maximum, then it is for the women that are in the main cast? why do you gravitate towards ships between two male characters who have never met (specifically jonah and like. his harem of old british men. usually based on one single line of dialogue) then the actual, canon wlw relationships?

like dont get me wrong, when lonely eyes first started cropping up it was funny! i enjoyed it, i enjoyed the multiple divorce jokes, because it was a small fandom in joke that made fun of some old bastards. and now its the second most popular ship in the fandom. now its so popular, people think its canon before they start listening. why are you unable to muster that same kind of enthusiasm for any of the female characters? gertrude and mary have very similar appeal to lonely eyes, and yet its a fringe ship that nobody ever talks about. gertrude and agnes have very significant moments and mentions in the podcast, and yet the only people i see talking about them are wlw.

or we could talk about michael and helen! helen who, as of this moment, has become a key player in the storyline. helen who yeeted michael out of existence, who took over the power of the distortion by her own choice, and with her own strength. and so often i see her relegated to "vodka aunt that coos over jonmartin" is that a bad take on her? of course not! but having her only purpose be to comment on the male characters rubs me the wrong way.

lets talk about elias and mary. elias gets praise, and love, and devotion, regardless of the horrible things he does. the entire fandom has the reputation of eliasfuckers now because everyone goes so crazy for him. mary is just as evil, has just as sexy a voice (i assume lol cause tbh? eel eyes does not do it for me and never will), and people just. hate her. full stop. why is that?

it seems like manuela has been. completely forgotten. i Never see anyone talk about her. she has just as much appeal as the male avatars, so why are you so uninterested in her? sasha and tim have the same amount of importance, and both have died, but there is So much more focus on tim. why.

daisy/basira and melanie/georgie are incredibly well developed relationships, their stories are as beautiful and tragic and intimate as jonmartin, but the f/f and m/m fic ratio on ao3 is abysmal. because it seems to me that the only people writing about them are wlw.

which happens.....a lot. het relationships and gay relationships are for everyone, but lesbian ships? thats just for gay women. everyone goes head over heels for mlm movies, regardless of sexuality, but wlw movies never receive the same kind of treatment. why.

this isn't even touching on the. blatant and disgusting fetishising of mlm. elias is evil because hes gay and skanky. tim is bi so he must sleep around. tim and martin are both mlm in the same vicinity of each other so they must have had a friends with benefits relationship. jon/elias and peter/martin have significant age differences and power disparities, so they must have an incredibly fucked up sexual relationship. jon is ace, but yall just fully ignore that so you can write horny fic of him. (and im going to be completely honest, if you get legitimate joy from writing manipulative r*pe fic involving these characters, Especially involving an ace character, ( edit: i apologize for my wording here, i didnt intend to compare trauma between ace and non ace ppl. my point is that jon seems to be the main target in these fics, and that they seem to be a direct response to his asexuality. fic like this is bad regardless of who is targetted). than that is a big problem. you arent "exploring dark topics in a meaningful way" youre writing fucked up porn for your own sick enjoyment. get angry at me all u want lmao but i stand by that)

i could go on about this forever, but what im really asking is for people to look inward and ask yourselves why you are so against connecting and interracting with female characters? no one is saying you cant like the men, but if theyre the only ones you care about? thats a problem. there are more women in tma then there are men, but they still feel like the minority because of the way the fandom acts. this isnt just a tma problem either! you can put as many rounded out female characters as you want into your content, and every time without fail they will be pushed to the side in favor of the men.

and dont come at me with "oh if you want content of the women you should make it" like we fucking are. the issue is that wlw are the only ones doing it. just take a second and think. are you ignoring the female characters in favor of the men? why? why is that your first instinct? why do you not feel the need to go against that instinct?

[cardboardqueen]

tma spoilers up to 197, tl;dr at the end

It’s long been my personal headcanon that martin will have to kill jon at the end of the show (or allow him to die, or prevent him from living, etc) for a few reasons

At this point we know Jon has a self sacrificial streak, jon dying wouldn’t be much of a surprise. But we also know that Martin is rather protective and has already gone to great lengths to keep Jon safe (going after him in S2, working with peter, etc)

and in s5, there’s been an emphasis on martin’s agency that I��ve really enjoyed with respect to them being equals in their relationship, but I think there could be more to it

I’m especially thinking of their conversation in 169 about whether to go into the burning building.  The “don’t make it my decision” and both of them learning that they need to communicate their feelings and desires better.  martin refused to make that decision and it was a bad time for both of them (in that their relationship was strained, martin was hurt, and killing jude perry did nothing for her victims).  Martin knows that standing back and letting things happen isn’t useful at this point

and time and time again, martin has shown an ability to contradict the world as it is now. 

He pushed for jon to leave the cabin

he wanted to talk to the soldiers in the slaughter domain

tells jared to lay off of jon in ‘The Gardner’

he is able to break jon out of statements (if with some difficulty) which we know jon can’t do by himself but can with martin’s help

with annabell cane’s first phone call he just fully “nope’d” out of a conversation with an avatar of the web

he sits on the extinction couch! the whole point was the fear of inevitable degradation and pollution and he’s just like ‘yeah its a bit gross but im tired’

he apologized for bumping into people in the processing line

after he’s grabbed by trevor we learn that the reason he could be killed was because trevor was the prey, not the hunter, even with his knife to martin’s throat

he’s able to find his anchor and leave the house in 170 even after being drawn into the lonely’s effect again (something that we’ve not seen from any other victims, even basira’s on her own hunt now)

he had a fairly normal rational conversation with the embodiment of his own suffering and misery and was able to walk away fairly easily

there are others, but it feels a bit like martin’s in the wrong genre, basically.  jon is such a part of the apocalypse that he couldn’t escape if he wanted to, melanie and georgie are immune to the fears’ effect for very good in-narrative reasons, but martin just repeatedly opposes the apocalypse in many small ways that would otherwise feel very out of place if he hadn’t been doing it all season, and the more we learn the more important it feels. 

I think martin’s trip with annabell told us a lot of things, but among them is that martin’s not scared to venture out on his own.  He’s scared of losing jon, sure, but he doesn’t feel dependent on him for safety and is at least somewhat comfortable leaving him and doing things that he knows jon would disagree with.  Over the course of the season he’s developed his own firm opinions re: eyepocalypse, evidenced by the evolution of his feelings about jon killing people. 

some very good screenshots by @lumberyjack​ point out that jon has been referred to both as “the archive” and “the eye’s pupil” in the past, and if what annabell said is true and they have to be destroyed simultaneously, then either jon and martin are going to have to split up to do it (which seems unlikely as they’ve just been reunited), or they’re in the same place

the importance of anchors has been well established in breaking the fears’ control of a situation, jon has already said that martin is his “reason” for being able to go on and stay human and as we got closer to the watchtower he’s been able to keep jon from slipping into a statement or replacing jonah in the eye.  Martin is the reason Jon’s resisting his place at the top of the watchtower, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that he could combat the apocalypse itself

Martin is one of the only people to actively defy the new world order in S5 and in ways that continue to break genre tropes.  He loves Jon and is protective of him, but he’s already said he won’t doom the world over it.  And Jon’s comment of ‘nobody gets what they deserve, not even me’ still feels like it’s yet to come back around and bite us.  Jon may think he deserves to die to save the world but I doubt he wants to die by Martin’s hand and Martin certainly doesn’t want to kill him.  I just think he’s the only one who can.

tl;dr martin has repeatedly set himself apart in this new world as someone who won’t stand for its bullshit.  i’m fairly sure jon will have to die, or at least that destroying the archive will kill him.  I think that martin is going to be the only one capable of killing jon and making sure that he stays dead

[ghostbustermelanieking]

reunions

post mag 196 spec/au fic: jon and martin emotionally reunite and hug: the fic

this is entirely self indulgent and not at all meant to speculate canon. playing into my trend of writing the season 5 scenarios i want to see in the world, i wanted to write a fic that's entirely just martin and jon reuniting and hugging, just in case this never happens in canon. this assumes things go relatively all right after jon and basira arrive at htr and everyone gets a chance to talk things out. also can be found here at ao3!

The moment that Annabelle's explanation ends, when she steps away from the spot where Martin is held down, Jon lurches forward to free him. The web stretched over the abyss wobbles precariously at his sharp movements, and the way Martin's eyes widen with panic makes Jon's chest ache. "Careful," says Annabelle, voice thick with amusement, "or you'll bring the whole thing down."

" Martin, " says Jon, clutching at Martin's hand from where it sticks out of the strands of web. Martin clutches back, his grip desperate around Jon's hand. 

The sick feeling that had emerged in Jon's stomach when he and Basira arrived to see Martin stuck in a precarious web (that almost resembles the ribbons of a tape recorder) hasn't subsided yet; it sharpens, actually, seeing how far the fall is. He hasn't taken his eyes off Martin since he got here, hasn't been able to stop staring at the web and the strands around Martin and the whole of it, his relief at Martin being alive coupled with his panic over where he is. His voice is still raw from where he'd shouted at Annabelle to let Martin go. 

Jon grips Martin's hand tighter, and fumbles at the places where the web is holding Martin down. He wants to believe Annabelle when she says that she won't hurt them, that her plan will actually help them, but it's hard, considering all of it—especially with Martin suspended thousands of feet above a chasm to nowhere. "Martin," he says, voice strangled, "hold on, just… it'll be all right, j-just..." 

" Jon, " Martin chokes out, his fingernails digging into Jon's wrist.

Jon finds a knife, somewhere in his pocket, and snaps through the strands around Martin, hands shaking with the effort of trying not to cut through the web that's actually keeping them from falling. The whole thing is shaking, suddenly, as Martin is freed—either because Jon has cut too deeply or from the exertion of their movements—and Jon's hands close in a frantic motion around Martin's wrists, as if he can actually pull Martin back when they're both balanced on the same precarious ledge. 

For a moment, it feels like it's just the two of them, clutching at each other's wrists, staring desperately at each other as they tremble on the edge of a cliff, and Jon can only think, panicked, that if Martin goes down he is going with him. But then he feels a hand close around the back of his jacket and yank backwards—Basira, from her spot on the edge of solid ground, hauling them towards solid ground. They both scramble back with the motion, Martin's feet scrabbling uselessly against the strands of web, Jon yanking upwards so hard that his muscles ache with the strain of Martin's weight. But something gives way, and they manage to land on solid ground just as the strands of web keeping them up snap free. 

" Christ, the two of you," Basira snaps, wearily, her hand landing reassuringly on Jon's shoulder for a moment. "Can't stage a rescue mission without both of you almost collapsing into some… s-some other dimension. "

"I wouldn't have expected anything less," Annabelle says pleasantly, still sounding like she might be laughing at them. 

Jon rolls onto his side, panting, and wrenches himself into a sitting position. His eyes yank immediately to Martin, picking himself up, pulling strands of web away from his wrists and ankles ringed in red from the restraints. Martin's head swivels towards Jon; his own eyes are wide, nearly brimming with tears. 

Jon isn't sure which of them moves first. Maybe it is both of them at the same time. All he knows is that a moment later they are colliding together, on their knees, embracing. Martin's arms are so tight around him that Jon's ribs ache, but he doesn't care. Jon's clutching at the back of Martin's jacket, his face pressed into Martin's neck—Martin's pulse, Martin's heart beating because he is alive —and he's mumbling frantic apologies: I'm sorry, Martin, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. It takes a few moments to register Martin's voice, warm and cramped and frantic in Jon's ear, murmuring apologies of his own. 

"We'll give these two a moment," says Annabelle to Basira. 

Jon barely registers this, either, or the sound of their retreating footsteps. All that matters is that Martin is here, here and whole and warm in his arms. Jon shuts his eyes, feels the warm slide of tears down his cheeks. Tugs Martin a little closer, somehow, holding onto him tighter. A part of him had really thought he might never see Martin again. 

He says this—voice breaking, fumbling upwards to press a hand against Martin's cheek, he says, "I-I… thought I might never see you again. Martin, I was so scared. " 

Martin makes a choking sound. He leans into Jon's hand, covers it with his own shaking one. "Jon… Jon, I'm so sorry. I… I didn't mean it, I… I was afraid I'd lose you, a-and I overreacted, but I… I didn't… and then I left, and I-I-I didn't mean to…"

"Martin, n-no, Martin, I…" Jon jerks back a little, looks up at Martin. Wipes a tear from Martin's cheek with his thumb. "Martin, I'm sorry. I… You were right. I w-wanted to tell you that, you… I shouldn't have… I-I came too late, I never should've left, but I wanted to tell you…" 

"No, Jon, you don't understand, I…" Martin shakes his head. Links his fingers with Jon's, squeezes his hand and kisses the palm gently. "I left on purpose. W-well, not really, Annabelle, she… bl-blackmailed me, or something, she said she'd leave if I tried to find you, she… but I left willingly. I-I tried to hang behind, sl-slow us down so you'd be able to catch up but I, we, we were too fast and I… I'm so sorry , Jon. I wasn't thinking. I didn't know what else to do, b-but I never should have…" 

"Martin, don't… it doesn't matter, all right? I-it doesn't matter, it… you're here, you're all right." Jon wraps his arms hard around Martin again, turns his head to kiss Martin's cheek. He'd thought he might never see Martin again, he really had, but here he is. Here he is, alive, and the rest of it doesn't seem to matter somehow. Martin's here now. 

Martin seems to soften in Jon's grasp; he kisses Jon's fingers again before hugging him back just as tightly. "She… she said she had a way out," he says softly. "Annabelle. One where we don't… die, o-or take Jonah's place, or… T-that was why I went. I… If there's any other way, I…"

"I know," Jon says quietly. 

Martin's fingers tangle gently in Jon's hair. "Do you… can you… See? Is she telling the truth?"

"No. No, it's too muddled, the Web is clouding my vision. But…" Jon shudders a little, presses his face hard against Martin's shoulder. "I-it's not good, I don't think. Not entirely. I… I-I don't know what… maybe we'll both make it through, maybe… b-but I don't think it'll be something we… want to do." 

Martin sighs, his eyes sliding shut. "Of… of course it isn't. Of course it isn't."

Jon sighs, too, pulls back a little to look Martin in the eye again. "But… if there's any chance…"

Martin nods. "I… I meant it, Jon, when I said I wouldn't doom the world for you. Or I… I wanted to, I thought I did, but I… I didn't think…" He swallows hard, sniffles a little and seems to compose himself a little. "B-but, yeah, if there's any chance of… of you, o-of both of us…" 

"Y-yes, yes," says Jon. "Anything. Any chance at all. W-we'll hear her out, we… m-maybe it really can fix things." 

Martin laughs a little, softly, and Jon can't help but laugh, too, the stunned, awed sort of laugh. They're here, they're both here, and maybe they have a chance. They press their foreheads together, breathing in time; Jon squeezes Martin's hand again. "I love you," he whispers. "A—and I won't leave you again. I promise." 

Martin squeezes back before letting go. "Wh-whatever happens?"

"I promise," Jon repeats. "Whatever happens, w-we'll be together." For a moment—here, back with Martin again—he allows himself to hope that things might end all right for them. Maybe. 

Martin pushes hair away from Jon's face, brushes his fingertips over Jon's jaw. Smiles just a little, wobbly, and Jon smiles back. "I… I can live with that. I—I love you, too. I love you, and I promise I won't leave you, either. Not again."

"Guys." Jon turns to see Basira, standing a few feet away, the expression on her face somewhere similar to what it was in the Wonderland Hospital, after the Hunt domain, when they'd taken a moment. She shrugs at them, a bit sharply. "Annabelle says it's time."

Jon sighs again; a large part of him is unwilling to step away from this, this brief peace they've created at the edge of a chasm at the end of the world. "All right. We're… we're coming," he calls. He slides his hand down to take Martin's again and holds on tight, like the webs are going to snap up and pull Martin away again. He isn't sure how much time they have left, but he knows he doesn't want to lose track of Martin again in the process of it. Not that, never again. He won't let it take him away again. 

Martin leans into him, just a little, before they get to their feet. "Together?" he whispers into Jon's hair. 

Jon nods, presses a kiss to the soft crest of Martin's shoulder. "Together," he says. 

They get to their feet, still clasping hands, and follow Basira across the sharp landscape of the cavern at Hill Top Road, to where Annabelle Cane is waiting. 

[janekfan]

Too Much

https://archiveofourown.org/works/26972698

When Jon stalked back into the archives the fierce conviction in his face belied his ragged appearance. Tim wasn’t stupid. He’d known there was something shady happening in this place probably before Jon did, considering. It didn’t stop him from purposefully hardening his heart against his pallid skin and bloody throat, his poorly bandaged hand, his filthy, mud-covered clothes.

“Jon?” Martin’s voice was soft and it set off a trembling in him that Tim could see from across the room. “Hey--” Without warning, Jon bent double over the nearest wastebasket, going down hard on his knees as he emptied his stomach painfully, shaking so hard the bin rattled. “Oh, oh, Jon.” Hands fluttering over his back, Martin hovered close, unsure of what to do, before settling next to him on the floor to hold his hair back, plaiting it loosely to keep it out of the way.

“Nngh...s’sorry.” Jon collapsed the rest of the way, resting his weight over the bin, his forehead on the arm slung across the top. “I, I...clean. Clean it up.” Shuddering, voice thick and wavering on a heavy breath. “God, I. I’m so, so sorry.” Another bout of dry heaving cleaved through him, Martin’s hushed reassurances making the ire in Tim rise to vitriolic levels and if he stayed any longer in this room he knew he’d do something to upset Martin. Physical violence had never been the way he preferred to resolve disputes but the confirmation of being trapped here. Trapped by Jon made him desperately want to lash out. Scream. Kick. Throw a tantrum and that wouldn’t do, even if the anger and dissolution flooding into every empty space left behind by the deaths of Danny and Sasha and his freedom begged him to take it out on the one thing left that represented it all.

“Tim, where are you going?” Martin’s attention was still focused primarily on the man panting under his palms, but he spared him a glance.

“Can’t be here for a while.” He flashed a bitter smile. “Guess I’ll be back, won’t I?” He was suffocating and if he stayed here one second longer he’d explode and Martin didn’t deserve that.

Martin had his hands full of a sick and shivering Jon so had no choice but to let Tim go. It was probably best at the moment. He’d been sniping at Jon even before he’d disappeared and the fury flashing behind his eyes wouldn’t help anyone right now. And besides, Jon was going to pass out any minute by the look of it.

“Jon?” His head jerked up and he swayed where he kneeled.

“Sorry, s’sorry…” the slurred apologies certainly weren’t a good sign. “‘L’get this cleaned up.” When he moved clumsily to do so, Martin stopped him with a hand on his cheek, ignoring his temperature for now in favor of attempting to catch his unfocused gaze.

“Let me worry about that later.” And Jon looked stricken, but when Martin pulled him to his unsteady feet he was more concerned with staying upright, embarrassment shoved unceremoniously to the back of his mind. “Can you stand?” Whole, long seconds passed and Martin almost asked again, but Jon took a wobbly step only to topple into the taller man who caught him up and held him close.

“S’sorry.” Martin hitched him a little higher. “Dizzy. Jus’...ah.”

“It’s alright, Jon.” Who knew having a cot in the archives would prove to be so useful and Martin was grateful for it now, lowering him as gently as he could. “Nothing to be sorry for.” The hiss of pain sucked through his clenched teeth didn’t bode well. “I’ll be back.” With the first aid kit, warm water, maybe a change of clothes--he was pretty sure he had a few things. They’d be big on him but certainly cleaner than what he was in now. When he returned with his supplies, Jon had tipped onto his side, apparently asleep, and Martin was careful to wake him slow, worried when he didn’t seem to remember where he was or what was happening. With him so sluggish and lethargic, Martin wasn’t sure where to start (maybe a 999 call), deciding top to bottom was as good a plan as anything. Forcing cheer into his tone, he talked about what had been happening while he'd been away, dipping a cloth, wringing it out, and wiping the muck off his skin, noting the pallor in his face underneath all of the dirt. He had the start of a pretty intense fever and looking at him it wasn’t hard to puzzle out why but the only thing for it right now was water and rest.

Jon pushed him away when he began on his neck and it took Martin several minutes to talk him back down, convince him that he was safe before he was allowed to hold a warm compress over the gash across his throat to loosen the blood. It was deeper than it looked and longer than he’d have liked; another brutal scar to add to his growing collection and how was any of it fair? Butterfly stitches applied and covered over with clean bandages, Martin gave Jon a break and kept urging him to drink. He was so silent, focused on pulling in short and shallow breaths, and Martin kept his questions to himself, trying to ease the ruined jumper over his shoulders when it became clear that he was too sore to do it on his own. Each centimeter bared developing bruises just beginning to black and Jon’s breath hitched the higher he was forced to raise his arms, exposing more over his stomach, his ribs and Martin couldn’t help himself.

“What happened?”

“Mm?”

“These bruises?” He ran a delicate thumb over the edge of one, watched him shiver in response.

“Oh…” Martin got the impression Jon was answering from somewhere far away and didn’t blame him. “Asked questions.” He didn’t elaborate and Martin moved on to his hands, draping the blanket over him while he unwrapped old dressings and examined the burn spanning his entire palm and fingers. He didn’t want to think about the shape of it, like he’d shaken hands with the wrong sort, and instead examined the broken blisters lining the long, ruined fingers of both hands, cleaning them gently and applying salves and more bandages before slipping a worn jumper over his head and joggers onto narrow hips, tying the cords to keep them secure. Jon was too pliant, too submissive, more than spent after whatever he’d been through and he sighed in heavy relief when he was finally allowed to lay down.

“Better?” Martin brushed some stray curls out of his face after tucking him in and he nodded.

“Tired.”

“You can sleep, it’s alright.” Jon forced heavy lashes apart, closed them again when Martin swept light fingertips over them. “I’ll keep watch. You’re safe.”

Late into the next day, Martin saw Jon back to Georgie’s flat where he immediately curled up in bed with the Admiral, clutching his borrowed clothes, so baggy they dwarfed his small frame and made the vulnerability in him that much more. He shared a cup of tea, spoke with Georgie in a hushed voice and urged her to keep an eye on him if he’d let her. She nodded resolutely and wished him luck when he left to return to the institute.

“Well?” Basira accosted him immediately as soon as he stepped through the door.

“Christ, Basira!” Hand over his heart, Martin calmed his racing heart, suddenly surrounded by the lot of them.

“Well?”

“He’s exhausted.”

“Aren’t we all?” Martin ignored Tim’s comment. It wasn’t a competition, just a bad situation all around, and after treating and cataloging all of Jon’s myriad injuries, he didn’t feel like continuing along that track. It wouldn’t help anybody. It wouldn’t convince them that Jon was as much a victim in all this as they were. That he didn’t want this. Instead.

“He’ll be back in a few days. Or probably tomorrow, knowing him.”

“Wonderful.”

“Tim!” Martin pinched the bridge of his nose, already exasperated. “Tim, just. Go easy, alright?”

“Oh, I’ll go easy.” Full of grief and anger and heartbreak with nowhere for all of it to go, it had sharpened into a blade Tim wielded with deadly precision. Jon had been at the other end of it for a long time and despite his own frustrations with him, Martin wanted to shield him from the worst of it even if he knew he wouldn’t be able to. If Tim wanted to hurt Jon, he would, and it made him want to weep.

Sure enough and right on time, Jon dragged himself into the archives, mumbling a breathy ‘thank you’ to Martin as he passed by him to his office on new fawn’s legs. It didn’t escape his notice that he was still wearing the jumper, bundled up in it with his bandaged fingers tangled in the sleeves.

And work began again as though they’d never stopped.

Jon could have spent the next eternity wrapped up in bed, bundled in the comfort of Martin’s clothes and hiding from his very new and very real responsibilities. He ached, deeply, profoundly, in a million different ways, crushed by the weight of it all and barely able to breathe. Georgie was disappointed by his decision to go back to the institute but he had to do whatever he could to protect the rest of them, even if that meant playing into Elias’ hands until they came up with a solution together.

If they would have him back.

Reading the statements was going slow, too slow, the pounding in his head increasing whenever he tried to focus. Jon kept the lights low, avoiding the hallways with their cold fluorescent bulbs beaming down at him from above, bowing his back, trying to push him into the floor, keep him there like an insect pressed between pages and he would gladly succumb if it meant he could rest.

“Oi!” He jumped at the sharp voice, groaning when the stabbing hurt all over his body intensified.

“T’Tim?”

“‘Y’yeah.’” He mocked, tossing a stack of folders onto the already overflowing surface of the desk.

“What, what’re these?” Though his hands were shaking and sore, Jon picked up the pile, paging through distractedly.

“How the hell should I know. Martin said you asked for them.” He had?

“I don’t. I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”

“Tch. Of course. Busy work to keep us preoccupied so we don’t have time to plot?”

“Wha--no, no!” It seemed his paranoia continued to have lasting consequences and he supposed it was only fair. “No, I wouldn’t. I. I’m sure I asked for them.” Reasonably sure, though for the life of him he couldn’t remember when. He couldn’t remember asking Martin but there was no reason for Tim to lie. Fingers snapping in front of his face jerked him back to the present.

“What’s wrong with you?” His eyes were narrowed and he was standing so close, too close, and suddenly Jon was on his feet, swaying into the wall and pushing past Tim in a desperate bid for the loo, head pounding enough to make him ill and only just making it in time to rid himself of the tea he didn’t remember drinking. Shaky, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaning back against the wall and willing the spinning to stop or slow or do anything that might make it less overwhelming. He washed his hands, his face, letting the cool water drip from his chin and closed his eyes against his reflection in the mirror. When he returned Tim was gone and Jon was thankful, tears prickling, threatening, as he sat back in his chair and rested his forehead on his folded arms for only a moment.

It was better in the stacks, dark and still, silent save for the rustling of statements and that didn’t make any sense at all even though something in the back of his mind insisted it did, encouraged him to pick one up and devour it. But the letters swam on the pages and his legs refused to hold him up any longer and he slid to the floor, hugging the folder to his chest and breathing in the stale scent of old, yellowing paper and ink. He felt so poorly, so tired, and he didn’t remember curling up on the floor but he must have, because he was, the statement still crushed in his arms like a safety blanket. How long had he been asleep? Getting up seemed too monumental a task and he let his eyes slip shut with a sigh, breathing through all the pain of his injuries.

Too much. This was all too much.

But it was quiet here among the boxes and envelopes, tucked with his back against the shelf grounding him, taking away some of that awful wooziness, the feeling of vertigo he hadn’t quite gotten rid of after his encounter with Mike Crew. He was safe here underground; underground was the opposite of up, the opposite of falling endlessly and he breathed in, out, slow, measured. Until his physical self seemed to drop away with everything else.

Plucked like a weed, Jon was lifted into the air, hauled up by his collar and set clumsily on his feet, pressed forcefully into the shelving. If it wasn’t for the hand at his throat (his throat, she was going to slice him open, bleed him like a game animal) he would have fallen and he was so scared of falling, no air in his lungs, just the deafening rush of it in his ears, so he scrabbled desperately, the statement fluttering away somewhere in favor of holding onto wrists attached to arms attached to shoulders attached to Tim. The world tilted on its axis, rolling like a ship at sea and he was desperately afraid of being released into that endless void.

“--Hiding down here?” How long had he been speaking? His face, features so twisted in revulsion of him he almost didn’t look like Tim, was close enough that he could feel his breath on his face. “Martin’s been worried sick looking for you!” Why was he yelling at him? He’d, he’d been here, not hiding, not doing anything. Just trying to, to, stay on the ground. Everything blacked out when Tim shook him roughly, shouting something else, and Jon didn’t know what he wanted, what would make him leave him alone, stop being so angry with him. He was going to be ill, too dizzy even when mercifully held still again and he was torn between letting go and taking his chances with Crew and sticking to Tim like a burr. But Tim made the decision for him, shaking him off, dropping him to his feet and shoving him forward and Jon knew he shrieked, shameful, loud, but he was falling, falling, falling and he hurt where he’d been pushed, like his bones were trying to make room by doing their level best to yank themselves free.

But he was plunging down, straight down, unmoored, unanchored, too much space, infinite space and nothing to grab to slow himself and he was going to fall forever and ever and ever and--

“Jon!”

No. He’d. How.

“Martin…” Whimpering, voice choked with tears, more of them streaming, pouring down his face, and he clung to Martin, solid, strong, holding him.

“Tim, what did you do?”

“M’falling...m’falling, Martin.” Clutching, clawing, he was going to hurt him if he wasn’t careful but he was too frightened, he had to be hurting him. Sobbing, selfish, stupid, and he couldn’t stop.

“You’re not, I’ve got you, Jon, I won’t let you fall.” Murmuring gently, embracing him tightly and it hurt, but he’d rather hurt than fall forever. “You’ve got to take a breath, Jon.” But all the air was rushing past him, too quickly to drink up even a sip, let alone breathe any into his seizing chest. “I’ve got you, try for me.” And he did, he would swear it, he’d try anything for Martin but he’d always failed in the most important tasks. He’d always failed the most important people.

At least he wasn’t falling anymore.

“Tim, what did you do?” Martin shifted Jon, passed out over his shoulder with bandaged fingers still tangled in his jumper and he was surprised he hadn’t torn it in his panic. Gently he pulled him into his lap, boiling with heat beneath his hands and heaving hard-won, gasping breaths.

“I--” He swallowed, shock naked in his expression. “I found him here, on the floor. Uh, pulled him up?” Tim raked his hair back. “I was rough, but. I didn’t mean.” Martin could only hope he looked as angry as he felt and Tim stopped speaking, following him to document storage like a lost puppy.

“Mm…” he held Jon tight, secure, relieved that he’d come around as quickly as he did even if he was groggy, setting him firmly on the cot, exerting pressure on his shoulders, an unspoken ‘I’m here, you’re here, no one is falling.’ He ducked his head, hiding from the light and groaning low.

“Jon, look at me.” He hadn’t noticed before, the black of his dilated pupils swallowed up by deep brown irises, but with the light, and his sensitivity to it, Martin suspected a head injury. “Jon?” Gently he tilted his face up with the tips of his fingers under his chin, trying to catch his dazed stare as it slipped over him like water over a stone.

“Hey! Stop ignoring him!” Jon flinched, hands clapping over his ears and curling even farther into himself while Martin glared. “Sorry.” Tim mumbled, arms crossed, leaning against the wall to give them some space.

“S’okay, Jon.” He inched closer. “Did you hit your head? Does your head hurt? Can I check?”

“Check?” Before Tim could do much more than scoff, Martin shushed him. If he wasn’t going to help, then it would be better for him to leave.

“Yep.” He didn’t wait for much more confirmation, just carefully reached forward under Jon’s wary gaze and buried his fingers in thick, unkempt curls, smiling softly when he leaned into the touch. Bolder, he cupped his face with his other hand, stroking along his cheek and watching his eyes drift closed with a hum. “Ah, oh, Jon.” Right at the back of his skull there was a large swelling, painful to the touch if Jon’s reaction was anything to go on. “Were you hit?”

“Hit?” Jon’s wrapped, burned fingers brushed against his own when he went to check for himself. “Daisy hit me.” Just a stated fact that chilled Martin to the bone and he watched his other hand come up to touch the column of his bandaged neck. “Daisy cut me.” He glanced back at Tim, trying to gauge his reaction, relieved to see horror blossoming in his expression and when he turned to Jon again, it was as if he was seeing Martin for the first time. “Martin?” He let his weight fall into his palm, and when his dark, damp eyes slipped shut, tears ran down his face. “Don’, don’think m’well.”

“Okay, it’s okay. I’ve--” his eyes flicked towards Tim. “We’ve got you.” Jon swallowed and Martin could feel it against his palm, literally holding his cut throat in his hands. "Can you tell us what's wrong?"

“Hur’s. Spin...falling, m’falling.” He paled, clutched at the linens, his breath shallow and fast and even Tim came forward in concern.

“I’ve got you, won’t let you go anywhere, Jon.” To Tim, “Don’t think he can tell which way is up. Vertigo? Concussion? We’ve got ice packs in the freezer yeah?”

“Anything else?”

“Ginger tea? If we have it.”

“M’tin…” He brushed stray curls back away from his forehead. “Stay? Please?”

“Of course I will.” Gentle and soft and Tim returned with tea and cold compresses quickly, passing off the mug to Martin, going so far as to sit beside Jon. “I’ve got to let go of you now.” And the look of panic and sorrow and resignation told him more about his state of mind than anything else.

Martin promised he would stay.

Martin was letting him go.

Jon was not surprised.

Just sad, so, so sad.

Prepared to be tossed aside.

“‘Course...s’sorry.” Another swallow, another and another, swallowing it down, how frightened he was, how lonely. Tears slipped over Jon’s skin, over Martin’s. “M’sorry, sorry.”

Too many.

Too much.

He watched Jon pull away, swaying, woozy, grip tightening on the sheets such that his knuckles were bone white. Alone again. Alone always. How dare he think or hope or dream otherwise.

“Got’chu, boss.” Martin waited until Tim had him ‘round the shoulders, pressing him into his sturdy side, before removing his hand and holding the mug to his lips.

“Drink this down and then some sleep, I think.” Together, they tipped him carefully sideways, grabbing his hands when they flew out to the side in an attempt to break a nonexistent fall, and Tim pressed a cold pack to the back of his neck, a shadow of a smile crossing his face when Jon relaxed into the pillow.

“You’re alright, boss. Won’t let you fall.”

[captaincravatthecapricious]

Feverish and Teary & How Long Has it Been Since You’ve Eaten- Prompt Fill

@thatonekidellis​ Jon, Tim, and Martin have a rough time after the Unknowing. Especially Jon.  I hope this is kind of what you were asking for?  

@janekfan​ you get a ping because this is your au!

CWs: nausea, vomiting, fainting, fever, food mention, alcohol mention, canon typical mentions of Tim's pre-unknowing mindset, canon typical Jon not taking care of himself.

I am still accepting bingo prompts, so let me know which character, which prompt, and if you want a drawing of a fic!  Bingo card by the wonderful @celosiaa​!  This one is twice my usual length because it is two prompts and I did not want to cheat!

The Unknowing blows up.  

As simple as that.  

All according to plan.  

It really is as simple as that.  

Jon, Tim, Daisy, Basira.  Piled back in Daisy's car.  Ears ringing.  Soot slowly settling.  Trying to drive away before the actually police get there.  

It hasn't been Jon's problem how to avoid arrest.  

He is even more glad it isn't his problem now, as he slides down the beat up seat in the back of Daisy's car.  Ash streaks the window, mixing with the light rains that is starting to fall.  

Jon tries not to vomit the nothing he's eaten in the last couple days.  Nothing in him but frayed nerves and statements.  Hadn't even managed to stomach dramamine before their trip.  

Jon just wants to sleep.  

They still have their hotel reservation for another couple hours, so Daisy drives them back there to clean up before heading back to London.  Yes they have to go back today, it's less suspicious.  Jon isn't sure if that is actually true, but he doesn't have the energy to argue.  

Tim showers.  Jon sends a text to Martin.  'Alive.'  

He doesn't answer Martin's near-immediate call because just then he's dry-heaving into the small bin in the corner.  Stiff and shaking and sweaty and miserable.    

Jon showers.  Too dizzy to stand, he sits on the shower floor.  He hates that.  The tub feels filthy.  He feels filthy.  He scrubs his skin raw.  He stands.  He throws up more nothing.  He scrubs himself again, leaning heavily on the wall.  

He wants to talk to Tim.  He wants to tuck himself into Tim's arms and never move again.  Christ, he's running an impressive fever.  Probably.  It's hard to tell.  And his brain is swimming too much to even think about asking the Eye.  

He's cold.  He shivers in his threadbare joggers and stolen jumper (Martin's).  

He wants to join Tim on the bed by the window, but Tim ...looks too deep in a melancholy thought to even notice.  Somewhere between losing his drive for anything, adrenaline crash, and losing the last hope of a last glimpse of Danny, if Jon were to guess.  

Jon could say something.  He knows he could.  But, hasn't he caused enough of a fuss?  Made Tim and Martin trail after him after the ...the.... with Daisy and... that.  If he'd have just stayed quiet and stayed still... well Tim would still hate him... and might not be alive... but ....but he's caused so much worry with that.  And then with... his other kidnapping No.  He can't think about what that... what... not without puking again which... the point is not to worry Tim.  Which means he should try some medicine again.... if he can keep it in him half an hour he'll survive the drive back.  Probably.  

Christ, when is the last time he bothered to drink anything?  

He lays there in a daze until Daisy bangs on the door telling them it's time to leave.  

Tim sleeps on the drive back.  Finally giving into the last few sleepless nights.  Jon is jealous.  

Last night had been spent tangled together, shaking, awake, and silent.  Anxiety too thick to slice with words.  Not even nothing to turn off the lights, because the fear is a little easier to manage in the light.  Jon couldn't stop thinking about Nikola.  He couldn't stop thinking about plastic hands on him.  Couldn't stop thinking about how many things could go wrong and how he could lose Tim and Martin when he only just got Tim back.  

Jon was pretty sure Tim hadn't been sleeping the last few nights.  Jon knows he hasn't.  Not that he has slept well in a long time.    

In any case, Tim sleeps.  Jon doesn't.  

Daisy glares at him through the review mirror.  Jon isn't sure if she is still waiting for him to prove himself monstrous so she can attack, or if she is making sure he isn't ill in her car... again.  (He really wishes he could forget his first ride in her car.  Really really really wishes.  It was not a pleasant experience for anyone, and Daisy had made him pay the cleaning bill.)  

It doesn't matter, he slides down further in his seat and closes his eyes tightly.  

His head hurts.  

Thankfully the medicine knocks him out soon enough.  

Martin greets them at the institute door.  Melanie by his side.  

Jon hazily wakes up to Martin gently touching his shoulder.  

"You actually made it!  I'm so glad you're safe... I was so worried, Jon why didn't you answer your phone, I've been so worried, I mean I know you would have said something if something had happened, but Christ I've been so worried about you, come here."  

Jon starts mumbling some apologies, but is interrupted by Martin gently gathering him in a hug.  Jon sinks into it, fervently hoping Martin doesn't notice the heat rolling off of him.  

Thankfully Martin is too distracted, gathering Tim in a crushing embrace.  Likely very relieved that Tim didn't die, and knowing Tim is harder to break than Jon with his delicate bones and fragility following many incidents.  

Jon... doesn't really know what he's trying to accomplish.  Just... get out?  Or go in?  Or get to the cot?  Or just curl up on the cold tile of the basement toilets?  Get away from people he will inevitably worry?  

Just go somewhere where he can fall apart without taking anyone else down with him.  

It looks like Martin has been crying.  Jon hopes it isn't over him.  

Tim needs to recover from the emotional toll of the last few days without having to pick up the pieces after Jon Again.  

Jon slowly backs away.  

His head is swimming, but that's okay.  If he can just reach the Archives.  The cot.  Anywhere.  Anywhere away from this moment.  This breath.  

His vision swims violently, and there is no doubt in his mind that he is going to be very well acquainted with the pavement in a matter of seconds.  Either that or he's going to be ill?  No.  Sidewalk.  He's going to eat the sidewalk.  Heh... first thing he'll have eaten in days.  

He isn't sure if he loses consciousness or not.  It's hard to tell in the blur of motion and sounds and his spinning head.  Sound is almost gooey in this state of almost unconsciousness, but he thinks someone might be shouting.  Or several someones.  He should maybe worry about this?  But in actuality, he is praying he properly passes out to save himself any more embarrassment and save himself from his unsteady insides.  

His face hurts.  

Someone is holding him.  

Jon fights to open his eyes.  They don't seem to want to look in the same direction, rolling in their sockets instead of doing what he wants them to.  He blinks hard a few times, failing to bring things into focus.  Glasses?  Does he still have those?  Did they break?  No... still there.  Skewed on his face.  Just... too dizzy to see, then.  

Daisy and Basira are glaring at him.  Melanie is walking away.  Possibly.  Hard to tell when the world is tilting with unsteady regularity.  

Jon closes his eyes again, pressing a groan against the nausea that threatens to overcome him, despite the medicine.  

"Jon?"  

"Burning up."

He's too hazy to put a name to a voice.  The words dripping in the air around him, tightening around his chest, silly string sitting on his skin in fibrous heaps that jiggle uncomfortably, cold and clammy.  

Shit, thinking in gibberish.  That can't be good.  

“Does anyone know how long he’s been ill?”  

Someone grunts.  

Footsteps.  Two sets?  I’m asking away.  Leaving him.   

“I.... I don’t know.  I don’t think he was feverish last night?  But... I haven’t exactly been... It’s.  It’s been hard.”

“Jon?”

He’s being jostled.   He whines.  Stomach flopping dangerously.   

"Jon?  Are you awake?  Can you open your eyes for me?"  

"Oh shit, he's gonna puke."  

He's being lifted, shifted on his side, bin shoved in his hands.  Where he throws up more nothing.  

He's crying now, feeling like utter shit, and unfortunately more awake.  

He isn't sure if eyes swimming with tears is better or worse than the unsteady world tipping around him and making him feel worse.  

"Christ, Jon!"  

He finally pries his eyes open.  Martin and Tim solidify above him.  More or less.  Still fuzzing in and out of focus.  

Now that he's crying, he just... can't stop.  Fistfuls of Martin's sweater.  

"Oh Jon..."  Martin's arms circle him, carefully.  Gentle not to jostle him more.  

"Buddy.  Think we can get you off the sidewalk?"  Tim.  Cupping his face.  Smoothing back sweat and tear soaked hair, long since escaped his bun, still not dried from his earlier shower.  "My flat isn't far, you know?  Didn't bring my car here, though.  Still... wasn't..."

Tim cuts himself off, but even addled as he is, Jon can fill in the rest of the sentence.  

So can Martin apparently, because Martin frowns.  It's never been more apparent that he's been crying quite recently.  "Still weren't sure you were coming home...  Tim..."  And his eyes start looking damp.  

Tim is tearing up now.  "Martin... let's not in the street...  I can carry Jon back to mine, it isn't far.  You can come too.  We'll get some take out.  Drink some whiskey.  Get Mr. Smoking hot cooled off.  We can talk then.  It's.... it's been a rough week."  

"Jon?  Can I carry you?  I think that might be less rough than a cab ride?  Do you need a few minutes?"  

Martin's voice is soft, and Jon thinks he could sleep right there.  In fact, he might.  So he nods.  

Martin lifts him carefully.  His head swims again.  This all is feeling rather familiar.  Jon takes a deep breath and closes his eyes.  He tries to relax despite the lingering anxieties about heights.  Martin feels safe.  Tim is also safe now.  He lets himself drift.  

He wakes briefly on the trip.

"Hey bud, how are you feeling?"  Tim.  Tim seems off.  Too many things crossing his face to parse out, probably even for someone with a better sense than Jon of what those subtle face changes mean.  But Jon is too hazy to think.    

Jon's mouth feels gummed up.  His eyes feel gummed up.  

He's thankful his mouth doesn't taste like something died in it, though.  Although he is very aware how unhealthy it was that he's spent a good portion of the day with his body trying to turn itself inside out, and he couldn't so much as produce bile.  

Jon feels sick thinking about it, so stops.  He drifts again.  

He wakes to a damp rag on his forehead, no memory of anything past the explosion. 

How did he get here? 

"Sorry, that looked like a nice sleep, but you'll feel better with some medicine in you, and some water.  We can try some tea later, once the meds work.  And some food hopefully."  

Martin helping him sit up.  Just enough to get a few sips and some pills into Jon.  Which, Jon thought was probably optimistic, but he'd try it for Martin.  

"When was the last time you ate?" Martin again.  

Jon blinks at him in confusion.  "Is it over?"  

"Is what over?"  Still Martin.  

Where's Tim?  Where's Daisy?  Where's Basira?  Where's Melanie?

His breathing picks up, and that makes his head spin again, and makes him wonder just how long he can keep the medicine down.  

"Is it over, what happened?"  He's panting now, halfway to a panic attack.  

"Jon?  Jon!  Calm down.  Can you take a breath for me?"  

How did he get here?  Where is he?  This looks like Tim's flat, but there is Tim?  Did he survive.  

Jon reaches for anything.  But comes up blank.  

"Where's Tim?  What happened?"  He gasps out.  It feels like his ribcage is shrinking, being laced up the front. fighter than the corset he had worn in acting class in uni.  

"Tim's... taking a moment.  As soon as we got you here... he.... it's been rough on him, you know?  He did all this for... and I know he said he wanted to live.  He wants to live... but he's... not been in a good place and it's helped that you two are talking again... and that he's had company more... but he saw an old picture with.... with his brother.... and that polaroid with ... with Sasha.  Well, he keeps going between you know tearful and sorry and cackling about how everything blew up.  It's... probably a lot to have three revenge schemes going at once for the same.... not a person really... but ... Her.  And then... having it sorted.  But...  Listen Jon I don't know.  What don't you remember... or what's the last thing you remember?"  Martin edges on histerical near the middle, but takes a turn for the sad near the end.  

"I remember the... the world was all wrong.  Then... then it blew up.  Is it over?  Martin are you real.  Is everyone alive?  What happened to you?"  He's desperate.  Desperate breaths too shallow.  Words interrupted by jagged pulling of too thin oxygen.  He's going to pass out.  

He does.  

He wakes feeling... clearer.  The last period of wakefulness a distant and flighty thing, dancing just out of his reach.  The rest of the embarrassing day back in vivid detail.  Tim's sitting over him.  Or rather, curled around him.  Jon's hair is being played with.  A stray curl looped around Tim's finger as he laughs softly to himself.  Muttering that he's alive.  That Jon's alive.  That Martin is alive.  he didn't lose anyone else.  That that clown is finally dead.  Finally.  

Gentle and warm hand on his face, refreshing the cloth.  Checking his temperature.  

"I..."  Tim chokes on a sob.  And Jon tries to remember how his arms work so he can let Tim know he's there.  

"Tim?"  

"Hey bud... sorry."  Tim wipes his eyes on his sleeve.  "It's been a hell of a week.  I... don't know how to feel about it.  Fuck I need a drink....  And to check in with Martin.  I... he hasn't told me what happened, but he's upset.  And.  Fuck I should have noticed you were ill, why didn't you say anything?"  Tim's voice starts to rise, and Jon tenses.  All the times Tim yelled at him still too fresh in his mind.  He trusts Tim.  he does... but Christ he is still afraid.  Afraid that it can't last, that it isn't real.  Where it be a trick of his mind, or some manipulation tactic to an end Jon can't see, he doesn't know.  

"Hey.  Hey.  Buddy... Jon.  I'm sorry.  didn't mean to yell.  It's just... been a day.  I'm not mad at you.  I just... I'm worried about you and Martin and I...I don't know how to feel about everything that happened.  I'm sorry you feel like shit."

Jon feels... like shit.  Marginally less nauseous, however.  A little less like he's going to pass out again.  Probably been given plenty of pills by Martin.  

"Sorry."  He croaks.  Voice probably shredded with smoke.  And fever.  

"He, bud, don't apologize.  I'm sorry I didn't notice you weren't well.  I... I thought I knew better than to be that preoccupied.  I mean... I guess I didn't make it worse this time, but..."  Tim sighs.  "I'm disappointed in myself because I don't want to fuck this up again.  And no don't apologize again part of that was on me and yes part of that was on you and we've done apologies to death.  All we can do now is keep going.  I just wanted to protect you and I couldn't see you were fading in front of my eyes.  Again.  I know you haven't been eating or sleeping, but I haven't been either so I didn't want to call you on it, and I didn't want you to call me on it, but I should have noticed.  I know I couldn't have done much, but I didn't do anything but shut you out again.  I could have told someone to stop to get you medicine, or food or even a bit more rest.  I know that would have done fuck-all, but I still could have offered you a little comfort and warmth and had us brought straight back here."  

Tim's crying properly now.  Jon is too.  Not sure if it is the fever, or just... everything.  There is so much to feel and think and worry about and yes they saved the world but that the fuck comes next.  

What comes next is that Martin enters with tea for Jon and a bottle of whiskey.  

Jon scrubs at his eyes.  "Martin what happened?"  Jon can see he's been crying again.  That is starting to scare him.  It's a goddamn miracle he hasn't pulled an answer out of anyone yet today.  

"It's... well it isn't fine.  I... well our plan worked here too.  Just... you know... Elias.  He can.... He can do things.  It's fine.  It's worth it."  Martin swipes at his eyes furiously.  

Jon pushes himself up, ignoring the room tilting around him, and hugs Martin.  Jon's still crying.  Martin sniffling.  Tim also crying.  It's... a very damp hug.  And Jon knows he's too warm to be comfortable to hold, and he's shivering hard enough to rattle Tim and Martin.  

"I'm... I'm so sorry Martin."  Jon chokes out.  

"It's alright.  It was worth it.  And you both.  Christ I am so glad to see you again... I thought... I thought.... I didn't..."  Martin is fully sobbing now.  Tea set down on Tim's bedside table, the whiskey being pried from his hands by TIm.  

Late that night the bottle is empty (and so are a couple more), Tim and Martin have killer headaches, and Jon is still feverish, but less so.  A lot of tears have been shed.  And Jon has been plied with enough liquids that he feels a little less like a crumbling husk.  

By the time that Tim and Martin are ready to think about food, Jon is finally feeling like he can maybe stomach something.  They order takeout.  Jon... has some broth. 

By morning Jon manages a few bites of leftovers.  

By afternoon, Elias Bushard is arrested.  

[voiceless-terror]

20. “I can’t see anything!” for Jonmartin if you are so inclined. I so enjoy reading your fics.:)

Hello there! Thanks so much for the prompt! I also got a similar request from @balanced-to-a-tea, so this is for the both of you. Post Season Four, but Martin managed to disrupt Jonah’s ritual, and these are the consequences. Hope you enjoy!

“Martin, tell Tim I need that follow up as soon as possible.”

“Okay, Jon.”

Sometimes, it’s easier to play along. When his mother was deep in the throes of her dementia, they told him to stop correcting her, to stop asking what she remembered. There’s no use in making someone relive their trauma all over again, like a new and open wound.

Martin made that mistake with Jon.

“Love, Tim...Tim’s not here. You know that, right?” Jon’s brow furrows and those cloudy, unseeing eyes don’t blink.

“I- I don’t understand-”

“He’s...he died, Jon. Remember?” As soon as the words left his mouth he ached to take them back. It took all night to calm Jon down and even then he stormed off to their room, stumbling over unfamiliar terrain. 

He never really gets used to being blind. Mostly because he never remembers he is.

Martin had been in the other room when Jon began to read the statement; the familiar, gloating cadences alerting him to Jonah’s attempted ritual. He managed to wrestle it out of Jon’s hands, trying to hold it out of his reach. The look in his eyes was wrong, filled with a sort of desperate, primal need as he screeched and yelled until Martin grabbed that lighter- the one with the strange, twisting web design- and set the thing alight.

Then, he went quiet. And Martin watched in horror as his eyes went from that strange, bright green to a cloudy white and Jon collapsed on the floor.

He hasn’t been the same since.

It’s like situations...meld together, for him. Like the Eye lets him see some things, but only in his mind and never the right ones. Sometimes he’s back in the archives, playing at being Head Archivist. Martin will set him in a chair, put some papers in front of him. Bring him tea. He hates these times worst of all. Because it means soon, he’ll have to feed him a statement. And Jon hates statements now, but he needs them all the same. 

When things get bad, he sits him on the couch. Makes sure he’s comfortable, ignores his confusion as Martin starts to read a statement aloud. He holds down his hands when they inevitably move to claw at his eyes and cover his ears. But soon Jon settles and listens, like a child sitting rapt at a campfire while someone narrates a ghost story. He comes back to himself, remembers where he is. Apologizes, goes quiet. They get a few days of companionable grief- a sadness that comes with a shared history like theirs. Jon gets used to the cottage again and doesn’t flinch at the touch of Martin’s hands. It’s nice. And then it starts all over again.

Jon tries to light a cigarette and almost burns the house down. Martin doesn’t know how he found the lighter, tucked away as it is. And he doesn’t know where the cigarettes came from. Jon apologizes, face bewildered. “I didn’t mean to,” he stutters but Martin only sighs and tells him it’s okay.

Basira calls. No sign of Jonah, no sign of Daisy. She’ll send more statements when she can. Is everything alright? How’s Jon?

Everything’s fine. Jon’s fine.

Today he finds him outside, standing in the sun. Jon likes the heat. Just a few weeks back Martin remembers the two of them strolling through fields, basking in the sun. But now the light shines on his silver strands and he’s crying, tears streaming down his face in two neat little lines. He looks beatific, like some sort of blinded saint from a painting or a stained-glass window. 

“I can’t see,” he weeps as Martin gathers him in his arms and takes him inside. “I can’t see anything.” When it's early days, Martin can remind him. Give him little nudges in the right direction and Jon puts the pieces together himself. It’s an odd, liminal space between awareness and illusion. Martin never quite knows where he stands at those moments. Jon pulls away and he feels desperately lonely once again. 

The house gets colder. Jon wanders. Martin makes tea and calls Basira and tells her everything’s fine. The cycle repeats.

Perhaps it's some sort of punishment. A divine retribution from the Eye. Martin heard enough of the statement to know Jonah’s machinations, what he’d been preparing Jon for. How much horror he holds with no way of releasing it. Jon makes no statements, records no follow ups. He just sits and lets Martin spoon-feed him these bits of knowledge that barely sustain him. The days he’s lucid remain few and far between now, each period of relief lasting only a day or two before he’s somewhere else entirely and Martin is alone again.

Maybe he should have let it happen, he thinks in his most desperate moments. What would the world be like? Would Jon still be Jon? Would he have him back, powerful and knowing but still him? He curses himself for such selfish thoughts. The destruction of the world is not worth the happiness of two people. Damaged and barely living, at that.

When Martin wakes that night, the bed is cold.

That’s not right, he immediately thinks. This is their only sanctuary, where even in his far away moments Jon clings to his warmth, desperate for any kind touch. Martin will wake with Jon’s limbs entwined with his and raven hair in his face. But tonight it’s freezing and the bed is empty. There’s no Jon to be seen. 

He calls his name. No answer. The words echo and the house is unbearably big, cold and uncomfortable. The window’s open.

When did he let the fog pour in?

It’s all over the house, in every room and every corner and he’s back, back there where Jon came for him and pulled him back but Jon’s not pulling him back this time, there’s just an endless sea of fog and he’s gone-

It should feel comfortable, though. Gentle. But it doesn’t, because Jon is out there somewhere, lost and afraid. And Martin’s going to find him.

There’s a beach by the cottage. There shouldn’t be. He follows the coast for hours, calling Jon’s name until his voice grows hoarse. He can feel him in here, somewhere between the salt and the brine and the numbing sea spray. 

When he finally finds him he’s sitting on a rock, completely unresponsive, his eyes finally closed. He doesn’t turn at the sound of Martin’s voice, doesn’t so much as show a sign of living until Martin takes a cold hand in his, squeezing it tightly. 

“I can’t see you,” he finally whispers, his voice a shade of what it once was. Martin remembers the man who once strode on this beach, destroyed Peter Lukas in his seat of power and smiled gently at him, taking him by the hand and leading him out. “I can’t see you.”

“I know.” The words are a cold comfort, but he cannot give Jon his sight back. He can only give him this strange half-life, terrible as it may be. “But I can see you.”

Martin pulls him to his feet, tries to rub warmth back into his arms as the fog dissipates. “C’mon. Let’s go home.”

“How?” Jon asks, though he follows Martin’s lead as he turns them toward the land. He stumbles but Martin catches him when he falls, urges him on.

“Don’t worry. I know the way.”

The cottage is still cold but the fog is gone. Martin lights a fire, throws a blanket around Jon’s shoulders and talks of nothing in particular. Jon has yet to smile but the color is returning to his cheeks and he leans into his side. It’s a start. Martin will call Basira tomorrow and give her an update.

Maybe he’ll be a bit more honest this time.

ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27633482

[bluejayblueskies]

Your HK au post is so well thought out and I love it but as someone who has seen many hours of HK clips on Youtube, I am curious which cast members you can see making the most iconic mistakes. Who overcooks like a dozen wellingtons in one service? Who overcooks and throws away about 5lbs of pasta? Whose signature dish makes Elias physically sick even though they insist customers always love it? Etc.

oh i'm glad you like it!!! in no particular order:

- any time jude is put on the meat station, she burns the lamb. it's like a curse. she tries to make lamb for a challenge once before she gets sent home in an effort to redeem herself but she burns that one too. the night she gets sent home she burns three lambs in a row and elias sits her down and forces her to eat her burnt lamb at the chef's table.

- on the flip side, jane gets put on meat her first service and only puts out raw meat. she's like 'it's not raw it's rare!' and elias is like 'the fat isn't rendered and it's cold what do you mean it's not raw???' (she puts out raw chicken two times in a row and elias almost loses his mind)

- martin. i love martin. but his signature dish does not go over well at all. elias takes one look and is like 'this looks like you upended a trash can on this plate and sprinkled some chives on top of it. what is it supposed to be?' and then he eats it and spits it out almost instantaneously. martin's so nervous, all he can think to say is, 'it's something i serve all the time, people love it!' and elias is like 'remind me never to come to your general area of the country. zero points. next'

- poor gerry. the man just cannot cook scallops to save his life. elias is like 'they're rubber do them again!' and then gerry tries again and this time they're stone cold. the next time they stick to the pan. gerry gets kicked out of the kitchen, goes back to the dorms, and sits on the couch with his head in his hands like fuck.

- jon has mostly good services. but. his big mistake comes somewhere near black jackets when he gets up in his head about things. he slices a wellington, is like 'shit this is over' and is so afraid to bring up overcooked wellington or admit to it that he just... throws it away. he does this for two more before elias gets impatient and goes over and is like 'what are you doing??' and pulls perfectly cooked wellingtons out of the trash and is like 'these are perfectly cooked!! why are we throwing away perfectly cooked food!! you're better than this jon' and jon is convinced he's going to get kicked out even though it's his first real mistake in service.

- jared is the person who doesn't communicate at all. he either says absolutely nothing or gives conflicting answers ('two minutes on the fish' [one minute later] 'three minutes on the fish chef!') and likes to blame his communication mistakes on other people, saying that they didn't talk to him.

- mike puts up a lot of undercooked risotto (like... consistently) and eventually it gets to the point where he's put on apps and his teammate is like 'dude just- just let me do the risotto please' and in the cut-away interview portion, mike is like 'what the fuck dude, i know how to cook a goddamned risotto, get off my back' when clearly he doesn't lol

- tim has no palate. he does very poorly at all the 'taste it now make it' or palate challenges. elias gives him banana to taste and he guesses carrots. he gives him chicken and tim guesses egg whites. it's awful.

- manuela does the classic 'i didn't realize the stove/oven wasn't on!' not once, but twice in her time in hell's kitchen. she sits there stirring risotto over a cold burner for ten minutes before elias finally goes over and is like 'it... it's not even hot manuela!'

- agnes almost burns down hell's kitchen. twice.

- helen/michael (i think they would use both names, but i haven't decided yet) just can't remember the orders that elias calls out. he'll call 'two wellingtons one halibut one new york strip' and he'll ask helen/michael to repeat it back and they'll be like *dial up noises* 'two wellingtons, one- one tuna, um...' and elias is standing there like 😐

- in all of oliver's time in hell's kitchen, elias doesn't like a single original dish he does for any of the challenges. oliver, in his cut-away interviews, is like 'well, clearly he just doesn't recognize talent' when quote-unquote 'talent' is like... two weirdly butchered overcooked fillets and pomegranate mint pink peppercorn sauce.

- daisy sends up so much raw fish. the kind that elias slams down on the table and smushes beneath his hand because he's so frustrated. she has basira check it, basira says it's not ready, and for some reason she walks it up anyway. once (and only once) she sends up overcooked fish and elias is like 'finally, some fucking variety in your mistakes'

- julia talks back to elias, and when she gets cut, she says right to his face, 'you're making a huge mistake and you'll regret it' and then stomps away just to stomp right back when he says, a bit snidely, 'get out of my fucking kitchen.' she is escorted away by security. everyone else is like 😳🤐 it is silent in that room.

- basira is extremely meticulous in her cooking. this also makes her a very slow chef who tends to get in her head as a way to cope with the insanity of the kitchen around her. she'll often be like a brick wall when people try to talk to her and then pick up a pan and say 'walking scallops to the pass!' when the risotto still has three minutes to go.

- naomi is the unfortunate pasta-waster. she also basically falls apart on garnish, sends up raw eggplant three times in a row, can never remember what garnish goes with which thing. when they're prepping the kitchen she's standing with a little list trying to remember what goes in each dish.

- sasha is... not very good in the beginning, but around episode three there's such a sudden shift in her cooking that people swear she's not the same person anymore. the main way sasha avoids elimination in the beginning is her team not losing dinner services, despite the fact that she sends up near-consistent rubber scallops and salty risotto. the audience is surprised when she's in the final four, but she says in the cut-away interview, 'i just realized what i needed to do and i did it. i'm a different chef right now than i was when i came here, that's for sure'

- georgie once butchers thirty racks of lamb incorrectly during prep and they have to throw all of them away. she also has a tendency to struggle with cutting lamb and is often like 'melanie, just. can you do this for me' because melanie is frighteningly good at cutting meat in one slice.

- melanie is the contestant who gets in arguments with nearly everybody all the time but then next episode is friends with them again. this happens sometimes in the span of five minutes with jon, and people just cannot decide if they're friends or not. (they are.) she also makes a signature dish that elias refuses to eat because her steak is so raw it's 'still mooing' and she's like 'well if he'd just tasted it he'd know that my flavors were good.'

- jordan drops an entire pan of wellingtons. ten wellingtons just. rolling all over the floor. elias is furious and he has to go over to the other kitchen, borrow some wellingtons, and apologize to the other diners for the now-thirty minute wait time. then, he has jordan go out and apologize directly. jordan's cut-away interview is just him hanging his head and whispering, 'fuck me'

[eldritchteaparty]

Chapters: 21/22 Fandom: The Magnus Archives (Podcast) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist Characters: Martin Blackwood, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Tim Stoker (The Magnus Archives), Sasha James, Rosie Zampano, Oliver Banks, Original Elias Bouchard, Peter Lukas, Annabelle Cane, Melanie King, Georgie Barker, Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Basira Hussain, Allan Schrieber Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Fix-It, Post-Canon Fix-It, Scars, Eventual Happy Ending, Fluff and Angst, I'll add characters and tags as they come up, Reference to injuries and blood, Character Death In Dream, Nudity (not sexual or graphic), Nightmares, Fighting, Spiders

Summary: Following the events of MAG 200, Jon and Martin find themselves in a dimension very much like the one they came from--with second chances and more time.

Chapter summary: It’s time.

Chapter 20 of my post-canon fix-it is up! Read above at AO3 or read here below.

Tumblr master post with links to previous chapters is here. 

***

Sasha hung up her phone and turned back toward Jon and Martin. “Well, that’s it then. They’re ready.”

She was referring to Allan and Elias, who were at Hill Top Road; Allan had wanted to take a few last-minute measurements, but mostly he’d wanted to be there to record what was about to happen.

Tim looked down at his own phone. “And Melanie just confirmed there’s no one left in the building—no one she and Georgie have been able to find, anyway.”

That morning, Jon had called Basira and asked her to shut down the Institute under the guise of further police investigation; she’d done so with remarkably little questioning. Martin didn’t know what Jon had told her they were doing, and he didn’t want to. He’d wondered for the first time that morning if she had been seeing him in her dreams. Now Georgie and Melanie were in the Institute, somewhere above them, waiting.

Sasha nodded. “Ok. Jon, look, I want to be completely clear—you can still change your mind. No one’s telling you you have to do this. You can still back out.”

“I understand,” Jon said. “And I’m not backing out.”

Sasha sighed. “Ok. Um—what’s next, then?”

Jon met Martin’s eyes for the first time since they had made their way in through the tunnels; he looked back at Sasha and Tim. “Would you give us a moment?”

“Yes—yes, of course. We’ll—um—”

“Don’t go too far. Stay in sight.”

“Right. Come on, Tim.”

Tim looked at Martin like he wanted to say something, but decided against it. Sasha spoke to him quietly enough that Martin couldn’t hear her words, and they turned their backs as they walked slowly toward one of the tunnels that converged on their current location in the Panopticon.

“I hate this place,” Martin said. It was the first thing that came into his head.

“So do I.”

“Do you, though?”

“Yes.”

Martin looked away, crossing his arms over his chest. He didn’t want to fight with Jon right now, but the only words that came to his mind were angry and bitter. They were words he might have used to try to stop this, if he’d thought he could, but he knew they were well past that.

“I’m sorry,” Jon said, reaching a hand to Martin’s elbow.

“I’m—Jon, I’m scared.”

For a moment, just a moment, Jon faltered; he pulled his hand back slightly, and drew in a quiet breath. In the next moment, though, it was like it had never happened; Jon set his jaw and squeezed Martin’s arm.

“Are you ready?”

“No.” He nodded, though, because he knew Jon needed to see it.

“All right,” Jon said softly, before turning toward Tim and Sasha. “It’s time.”

Sasha took a deep breath. “Where should we—”

“Where you are,” Jon said. “That’s good. You should be safe if—you’ll have a chance to run if I’m not fast enough.” Martin assumed Jon was referring to the possibility of a tunnel collapse; if the apocalypse actually started, there was not going to be any outrunning it. “Martin, if there’s any chance you’d join them—”

“Absolutely not.”

“I didn’t think so.” Jon paused. “I—I have to say the words. I’m pretty sure you don’t—”

“I don’t,” Martin said. He brought his hands up to his ears and closed his eyes.

What happened next happened quickly, or at least it felt that way to Martin. It wasn’t at all like he’d imagined it would be. He was waiting to feel the terror, the darkness, the heavy weight of the apocalypse; it never came. Instead, there was stillness and quiet and tension. When he looked again, Jon stood in front of him, just as he had before.

“Jon?”

“I’m still here,” Jon said, but Martin wasn’t sure he agreed. Jon was looking at him, yet looking through him at the same time.

“Is it—”

“Yes.”

“This—this isn’t like before.”

“No. This part—this wasn’t for us. It was for him. For Jonah.” Jon’s voice was even, his words controlled; he didn’t sound like himself. “This time it’s mine.”

“Jon—”

“Hey,” Tim shouted, and Martin was pretty sure it wasn’t the first time he had tried getting Jon’s attention. As he remembered they weren’t alone, he looked up. Something was happening; there was a faint shimmer from the edges of the tunnels, almost but not quite beyond his range of vision.

“I thought you would only have a moment,” Tim said.

“This is only a moment,” Jon replied.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re already gone. Everyone outside of—of here, they’re already gone. They’re safe.” Jon smiled, but it wasn’t his smile, not really. Martin liked Jon’s smile; he didn’t like this one. “Just as long as I can—”

“What do you mean, this is only a moment?” Tim repeated.

“I meant—that it’s only a moment.”

Martin knew what he was trying to say. “Time isn’t—it’s different, Tim. It’s different in here.”

“Yes,” Jon said.

“Jon.” Sasha was visibly fighting to keep the fear out of her voice. “Jon, are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I’m—I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” Martin said. “What’s happening?”

“It’s fine.” Jon was quiet; he sounded very far away.

“Come on,” Sasha said. “Jon, come on. Talk to us.”

“It’s—it’s getting harder now that—I can do it, though. Just—just give me—”

The shimmer Martin had seen at the edges of the tunnels was slipping closer now, moving toward them. A static hum began to rise, although he couldn’t trace it back to anything in particular.

“They’re already too weak to escape. I just need to—I just—”

“Jon, what’s happening?” Martin stepped closer to him. “Tell us.”

“I can—” Jon swallowed; as he did, the calmness in his voice wavered. “It feels like—”

“Jon, please.”

“It’s like—it’s like pieces of me are—oh god.”

“Jon, just—just hang on.”

“Martin, I’m—I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, just—”

“I won’t be leaving here. When it’s done.”

The words didn’t hit Martin as hard as he thought they would. In fact, he realized, he had been expecting them. He felt something very much like relief, now that they had been said.

“Jon, don’t.” It was Tim who was angry. Martin wasn’t entirely surprised; he understood, not for the first time, that Tim would always choose anger. “Don’t just give in like that. Fight it.”

“I—I can’t. I’m not—this is where I’m supposed to be.”

Tim grimaced; Martin watched as he struggled, as he attempted to walk toward them, but he couldn’t.

“Martin,” he called out. “Come with us.”

Martin shook his head. “I’m staying with Jon.”

“No. You’re not.” Jon was working harder to get words out now. He seemed pained. “You can’t survive here. You’re not—listen to Tim. They’ll take care of you. You won’t be alone.”

“But you would be.” Unsure of whether Jon’s unfocused eyes could even see him, he took Jon’s hand. He wanted Jon to know he was there.

“Martin, don’t do this.” Tim called to him again. “Don’t be stupid. He’s—he’s gone.”

“If he’s gone, I am too.”

“Don’t make that choice.”

“You let Jon make his. I get to make mine.”

“Martin—”

Sasha put a hand on Tim’s shoulder. “Tim, I know it’s—it’s awful, but—he’s right. We can’t make him leave.”

“But it’s wrong. It’s the wrong choice.”

“That’s not your—”

“Jon,” Tim tried again. “Do something, make him—”

The shimmer grew brighter, closer; the static grew louder. Although he could no longer see where they had been standing, he was sure Tim and Sasha were gone.

“Did you just—”

“Yes. They’re safe now. Please, Martin—”

“Are you going to do that to me too? Just shove me off into the next dimension?”

“I—I can’t.”

“You tried?”

“Yes.”

“Jon, how—how could you?”

“I just want you to be all right.” Jon was gasping now. “You have to be all right.”

“Then come with me. You already said they’re too weak to leave. You’ve won.”

“Martin, there’s too much of me that—that’s them. It’s too much.”

“Could you leave? If you wanted to?”

“I—it’s not—” Jon panted between his words. “I deserve to be here.”

“Well then, you know the deal. I don’t know if this is coming from you or—or something else, but you’ve always known the deal. That’s it.”

“You can’t,” Jon said.

“I can. I am.”

“Martin, you’ll—you’ll die.”

“I don’t care. And until I do, I’ll be with you."

They stood together, locked in a battle of wills. Martin could feel the pull now, the draw of whatever place the rest of the world had gone to; he resisted it. The static was very loud now. He wondered how long Jon could last like this, how long he could keep the door open. He hoped it wasn’t much longer.

“Well. This is not going very well, is it?”

Martin couldn’t see anyone—he could barely see where he and Jon were standing anymore—but he knew that voice well enough.

“Ignore her,” Jon pleaded desperately. “Martin—ignore her.”

He intended to ignore her, he really did, but she had found some foothold in his mind, hiding inside the static, and he couldn’t displace her.

“He’s lying to you, Martin.” Annabelle’s voice filled his head. “Well, not lying, he’s never been very good at that—but hiding things, now that’s a different matter entirely.”

“Shut up.”

“You’ll have to forgive him; he truly is in a lot of pain. I can’t imagine what it must be like. Having to choose between two parts of yourself as they are literally being torn away from one another.”

Jon. He grasped tightly at the hand that he still held in his own; if there was any response, he couldn’t feel it. If Jon was talking to him, he couldn’t hear it.

“It will be over soon enough.”

“Go away.”

“I intend to. I just wanted you to know first that if you stay, part of you will survive. And he knows that.”

“What?”

“You wouldn’t know about it, of course; you wouldn’t be conscious of it. The Archivist is telling the truth, in as much as you couldn’t survive in a—well, traditional way. You’re not one of us. That’s probably a good thing for you. He’s just made things very messy.”

“Wait—I don’t understand—”

“Concentrate, Martin. I know it’s hard. There is a part of you—that part of you that is tangled up in the Archivist—that would survive. That part would stay here. With him.”

“What do you mean, with him?”

“We’re going to be here for a very, very long while, Martin. I don’t know if we’ll die—I don’t know if we can—but it is going to get quite lonely here for someone who was once a man. Are you listening?”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Does it matter?”

Martin thought about it, or he tried to; the pull he felt was growing stronger, more insistent. Certainly, she wouldn’t be here if making sure he stayed if it weren’t in her own interests. He had already been set on it; there was more to it, for her to risk this kind of intervention.

But it doesn’t matter, does it? The realization settled on him; he believed her, and that was enough. He wouldn’t let Jon suffer that mindless torment alone if he didn’t have to. Whatever else that brought, whatever the consequences were—whatever Anabelle wasn’t saying—it wouldn’t change anything about his decision.

Although the static continued to rise, the pull of the other dimension seemed to weaken, become less. He didn’t know if it actually had—if Jon himself was finally weakening—or if Annabelle’s words had pushed him harder to resist it. Perhaps it was both.

“Martin.” Jon’s sudden, renewed grip on his hand was painful. “Look at me. Tell me where you are.”

His eyes were clear again; his voice was steady. At least I can say a proper goodbye, Martin thought.

“Jon. I’m—I’m here. I’m with you.”

“You need to go. Right now.”

“I’m not leaving you.” He smiled; he wanted Jon to know it was ok, although he didn’t have the words anymore.

“You don’t have to. I’m coming with you.”

“What?”

“I’ve changed my mind. I’m going. But you need to go first.”

“I—I don’t believe you.” The finality that Martin had felt, the peace of knowing it was over, that it was decided, began to give way to uncertainty. “You’re lying.”

“Martin—please. I’m not lying. I will follow you. I want to.”

“If you’re really going, just—just take me with you. Like you did last time.”

“I can’t.” Jon brought his palm to Martin’s face, and the rippling static subsided just a little. “I can’t. It’s—once I leave here, leave them, that bond between us, it’s—it’s broken. I can’t bring you with me. You have to go first.”

“Jon—"

“I’ve already let this go too long. Maybe, though—if you go now, we can still—”

It wasn’t fair. It was never fair. “I—”

“Martin—trust me. Please, just—just trust me.”

The buzz of static was wearing him down; it was too hard to think. He was tired. He was confused.

If he stayed, then Jon would stay too; Jon wouldn’t be alone.

If he left—

Trust me. Jon’s voice broke through the static.

Trust me. Martin wanted to; he always wanted to. It was just that—

Trust me.

“Ok.” The sobbing, panicked voice he heard didn’t feel like it belonged to him. “Ok.”

Jon’s forehead pressed against his. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Jon kissed him.

Martin closed his eyes; he made his choice.

[bubonickitten]

Summary: Jon goes back to before the world ended and tries to forge a different path.

Previous chapter: AO3 // tumblr

Chapter 15 full text & content warnings below the cut.

CWs for Chapter 15: mentions of Buried-related trauma (claustrophobia, etc.); a somewhat lengthy discussion of recurrent suicidal ideation (including some informal safety planning); panic/anxiety symptoms; mild self-harm (as a stim to distract from anxiety/intrusive thoughts); swears; mentions of starvation & restrictive behaviors re: Jon’s statement dependence (also some internalized ableism re: the substance dependence/addiction parallels); internalized victim blaming; post-traumatic stress reactions/flashbacks re: Jonah-typical awfulness. SPOILERS through Season 5.

Also, apologies in advance, but ADHD!Jon Went Off for several paragraphs at one point in this chapter and I (and by extension Martin) just let him run with it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Chapter 15: What Comes After

Jon sits on the floor with his back to the wall, waiting as Basira helps Daisy wash away nearly eight months of grime. Through the closed door and underneath the rapid drumbeat of water, he can make out a steady stream of murmured conversation, punctuated by the occasional sob or bitten-back groan of pain. The words are indistinct, but Jon doesn’t need to Know what is being said to guess the gist of it.

Eventually, the shower turns off. It takes several more minutes before the door opens. Even though Jon knows what to expect, he has to suppress a sympathetic grimace when he lays eyes on Daisy.

She sits hunched forward on the closed toilet lid, damp hair hanging limp around her face and dripping onto the tile floor. There is a sickly pallor to her skin, mottled with bruising and scrubbed-raw patches of pink. The clothes she’s wearing are her own – Basira never could bring herself to discard her things – but they no longer fit. Her shirt practically drowns her emaciated frame now, hanging loose off of one shoulder and exposing the hollows of her collarbone. The dark shadows under her puffy, bloodshot eyes might just rival Jon’s.

“Better?” Jon gives her a weak half-smile.

“Cleaner,” Daisy says hoarsely, staring listlessly at the floor.

“Your turn,” Basira says, meeting Jon’s eyes and jerking her head back towards the shower. “Left the shower stool in there for you. Clean clothes are on the counter.”

“Thanks,” Jon says, but he doesn't move. Part of his brain is telling him to stand; another, more reasonable part is just now realizing that sitting on the floor in the first place was probably a bad idea.

“Do you, uh – need help?”

“No,” Jon says hurriedly, “that – won’t be necessary.”

“No, I wasn’t suggesting –” Basira sighs, flustered. “I just meant that maybe you want to wait until Georgie gets here?”

Now that the adrenaline is fading, Jon’s skin is crawling with every moment the Buried still clings to him. Every slight movement sends loose dirt raining down onto the floor. He needs a shower.

“If you could just help me stand up, I should be able to handle the rest.”

Basira gives a curt nod, quickly recovering from the awkward moment, and hauls him to his feet. Steadying himself against the wall with one hand, he tests putting weight on his bad leg.

“Daisy still needs to see a doctor, and –” Basira frowns, watching Jon wince as he takes a step forward. “Are you sure you’ll be alright? You’re not going to – pass out and drown in two inches of water, are you?”

It wouldn’t kill me, Jon tries to say, wry and only half-joking.

“Not enough to kill me outright,” he says instead. When he feels that familiar static-laden filter slide into place in his mind, he freezes. Before the fear can properly move in, though, Basira’s voice cuts through his stirring panic.

“You’re alright, Jon,” she says, authoritative but without heat. “Just breathe through it, remember?”

Jon nods distractedly, shutting his eyes and focusing on his own breathing. It takes a minute, but the pressure eventually eases enough for him to hear himself think again.

“Are you okay?” Daisy asks, brow furrowed.

“Yes. Sorry.” Just those two simple words are a struggle to vocalize, but once he manages, the rest of the weight lifts from his thoughts. He glances at Basira. “I’m sorry, it just – slipped out, and –”

“It’s fine.” Basira looks him up and down. “I think maybe you should wait for Georgie, though.”

“I’ll be fine. It’s just my leg, and I’m used to dealing with that on my own.”

“I thought you injured your ribs.”

“Archivist,” he says with a shrug – a mistake, he realizes a moment too late, as it disturbs his injuries. He just barely manages to avoid flinching. “I heal quickly.”

The truth is, his ribs are unlikely to fully heal until he gets a statement in him. In fact, the last time, his weakness only started to fade after he’d taken a live statement. He’d rather not dwell on that right now, though.

“Hm.” Basira fixes him with a skeptical look.

“I’ll be alright, I promise. You should see to Daisy.”

“No,” Daisy says. Both Basira and Jon glance over at her. A noticeable full-body shiver sweeps over her, and Basira grabs a dry towel from the small stack on the counter.

“You need professional medical attention,” Basira says firmly, wrapping the towel around Daisy and adjusting it to cover her bare arms. “I’m taking you to A&E.”

Daisy ignores her, raising her head to look at Jon instead.

“I was thinking I could – stay, if you want?” She casts her eyes down again and her voice drops to a low murmur. “It’s just – the shower, it’s – a tight space, and – and it might…”

Jon bites the inside of his cheek. It’s true: the shower stall is tiny. Claustrophobic. The room itself is small and poorly ventilated; steam builds up within a minute of the shower being turned on, turning the air thick and stifling with humidity. The single dim light in the ceiling has a tendency to flicker; the bulb has been known to come loose from time to time, plunging the area into near-darkness.

It isn’t the Buried, but there’s enough here to bring the Coffin to mind on a bad day – and especially right now, less than two hours out of the place.

The last time, Daisy never could manage to use the shower without someone else in the room to keep her company. When Basira was unavailable, she would turn to Jon. Eventually, he got comfortable with her returning the favor. It became a routine, but…

“I’ll be okay,” he says again. Unconvincingly, judging from the way Daisy’s eyes narrow at him.

“Do you really want to be alone right now?”

“I…”

No, I don’t. I really, really don’t.

“Look, I’m not trying to make it – weird,” Daisy continues, fiddling with one corner of her towel. “It’s not like I’ll see you through the curtain. I just thought – maybe you could use some company? Don’t say ‘I’m fine,’” she says as he opens his mouth to respond. “Just because you can deal with it alone doesn’t mean you should have to.”

“Well, yes, but –”

“Do you not want me here? Because if you really want me to leave, I will, but –”

“No, I wouldn’t mind the company, honestly, but –”

“Then I’ll stay.” She looks at Basira, as if daring her to object.

Last time, she did object, Jon remembers. Now, though… Basira simply sighs.

“Fine. But,” she adds emphatically, giving Daisy a severe look, “I’m taking you to A&E as soon as Georgie gets here, and you don’t get to argue.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Daisy says with a tired grin.

“Liar,” Basira says, shaking her head with a fond, amused sort of resignation. “I’ll be just outside if you need me.”

As Basira leaves, Jon catches Daisy’s eye.

“Thank you,” he murmurs.

“Thank you,” Daisy says at the exact same time. “For not leaving me.”

Their tentative, exhausted smiles are mirror images of one another as understanding passes between them.

Someone upstairs has a statement.

The Archivist Knew the moment she mounted the steps to the Institute. She was marked by the Spiral, the Hunt, and the Lonely in quick succession, but the Archivist can only barely make out the edges of the story: how she was pursued through a nonsensical, constantly-shifting maze of alleyways by a hulking thing that always stayed one step behind, never letting her escape but never deigning to actually catch her.

There was no one in that place to hear her screams. Now, all she wants is to be heard.

The Archivist can give that to her. It would be so easy, so right. She came to the Magnus Institute of her own volition, didn’t she? She’s here to give her statement. The Archivist can take it from her and preserve her voice and relive her story for the rest of –

Jon twists his fingers in his hair and pulls until it hurts.

“You need to sit down,” Georgie says for the third time in as many minutes.

“Just keeping warm.”

It’s not necessarily a lie. The perpetual damp chill of the tunnels seeps into Jon’s bones in spite of his three layers of clothing and Georgie’s scarf wrapped twice around his neck. Beyond that, though, fevered movement is the only thing keeping him from falling to pieces. If he stops or slows, it will become all the more obvious how badly he’s trembling and all the more difficult to ignore the hunger gnawing away at him.

“You’re not even pacing, you’re just – limping.” When he doesn’t reply, Georgie reaches out and touches his shoulder. “Sit. We have some time before Martin gets here.”

With a sigh, Jon finally capitulates, sinking into the nearest chair. Immediately, he starts to jiggle one leg, fingers tapping restlessly on his knees.

“Talk to me, Jon,” Georgie says, taking a seat opposite him. “What’s on your mind?”

“I… I don’t know. It’s – a lot, and…”

He trails off, unsettled at the sound of his own voice, shaking almost as badly as the rest of him. His mouth has gone too dry to comfortably swallow, and every passing thought feels blurry around the edges, too ephemeral to translate into the spoken word. The only thing coming through loud and clear is the need and the knowledge that he has the means to sate it, if he would only embrace it.

There are no words to describe the experience, nor does he wish to verbalize it in the first place. As for the rest of it…

“Of course now I can talk,” he says with a weak laugh, “I suddenly don’t know what to say.”

“Take your time.”

Jon hunches forward, allowing himself to rock back and forth in slight movements as he tries to gather his thoughts.

“I’m –” Hungry. Terrified. Exhausted. Weak. Hungry, craving, needing, wanting – “At a loss.”

“About why you can talk again?”

Yes. Sure. He can go with that. It isn’t a lie, and it feels like a safer topic than all the rest.

“In part. I don’t understand why I have my voice back, or what that means, and of course my mind is immediately going to the worst-case explanations, and” – now he’s started, he rapidly gains momentum, his speech growing pressured and frantic – “I should just be grateful that I can use my own words again, but I can’t just let it go, because when have I ever been able to just let something go, and –” He tugs on a lock of hair again, letting out a self-deprecating chuckle. “Unsurprisingly, I hate not knowing.”

“Well… how about starting with that? Give me some theories. Might help to get them out of your head for a minute.”

“Most of it comes down to… I don’t know – why now, I suppose? I don’t have an answer to that, which just makes me think – did I have a choice all along?” It’s a question that has been plaguing him for hours, sitting poised and ready to spring in the back of his mind, but as he finally speaks it aloud, a chill comes over him. His voice fractures like a crack spreading weblike through thin ice. “This whole time, was I just… not trying hard enough?”

“I don’t think –”

“It was the same with taking statements,” he blurts out, wide-eyed and wound taut. “When the others discovered what I was doing, I stopped, which means I – I could have done all along, and just – didn’t.”

“You implied before that you were sort of – influenced?” Georgie’s voice is thoughtful, not accusatory; her expression searching, but not judgmental. Jon can feel his shoulders relax just slightly.

“‘Influenced’ is one way to put it, yes. But not controlled, exactly – not quite. It was – instinctual, almost? And once a story starts, it’s sort of like – being in a trance, I suppose.”

“I remember you having a kind of… faraway look to you, when I was telling you my story.”

“It wasn’t like that in the very beginning,” he says, watching his fingers curl on his bouncing knees. “I don’t know when they started having that effect on me. I… didn’t even notice the change. Didn’t notice that I was physically dependent on them until I was traveling. Started to get sick the longer I went without them. And when I woke up… just reading statements wasn’t enough anymore.” He draws in a measured breath. Gathers his thoughts. Exhales slowly. “The first time, I was just shopping. I felt – unwell, hazy. Then he was there, and I just – Asked, before I even realized what was happening. The next time was just after Melanie stabbed me –”

“She what?”

“It was – sort of deserved,” Jon says, waving it off. He continues before Georgie can get another word in. “I felt – drained, after. Thought I just needed some air, so I went for a walk. Wasn’t long before I crossed paths with my next – victim. Didn’t realize until much later that I must have been… hunting, subconsciously. Like a fugue, almost. But just before I Asked, I had this moment where I – I knew what I was about to do, and I just – did it anyway. And then the third time was –”

“After the Coffin,” Georgie guesses. The look on her face is that mixture of sadness and pity that haunted Jon in their shared nightmares for so long.

“Yes.” Jon keeps his eyes downcast. “And the fourth time was after I – well, I tried too hard to Know something, and it sort of – took it out of me.”

“So the trigger is being injured, or weakened?”

“Maybe in the beginning. The last time, though… I was feeling weak, yes, but there was no specific incident that precipitated it. Basira needed me at full strength for a mission. So I Knew where I could find a statement, and I made sure to be in the right place at the right time.” He wrings his hands in his lap. “But the mission was just the way I rationalized it to myself. I was just hungry. I would’ve fed regardless, and reached for whatever excuse was closest to hand, and felt guilty later, and – well, rinse and repeat.”

“You didn’t quite answer when I asked before, but… is it an addiction, or is it sustenance?”

“It’s a… need.” Jon bites his lip in thought. “Feels like addiction sometimes, but the compulsion is worse than nicotine cravings ever were. And when I tried to stop, it – it wasn’t only withdrawal. I actually was starving. Still don’t know if it would have actually killed me, but…” He shrugs. “Suppose we’ll find out.”

“Jon –”

“But I – I need you to understand,” Jon says, jolting up straight in his seat. “I’m not making excuses. I’m done making excuses, there are no excuses, just – explanations. I was influenced, yes, and it often felt like being – enthralled, but I still… I knew that I was dangerous, that what I was doing was wrong. If I thought I couldn’t help myself, I should’ve told the others from the start and they would’ve done what was necessary. I always felt ashamed after, but I still – kept doing it, until I was forced to stop.”

He’s ranting at full-tilt now, breath quickening and heart stuttering in his throat.

“I didn’t just need it, Georgie, I wanted it. I – I liked it. It felt good. And I know for a fact that it still would, if I let myself do it again. I’ve seen the consequences of becoming – that, and I still…” His shoulders sag. “I miss it. I’m afraid I’ll never stop wanting it, I hate myself for that, and it changes nothing.”

“You’re hungry now, aren’t you?” Georgie asks gently.

Jon tsks and pinches the bridge of his nose. “That obvious, is it?”

“Mm.” She gives him a sympathetic smile. “You seem more jittery than usual. And you’re shaking.”

“Ravenous,” he says with a bitter laugh. “Worst I’ve been in – a long while, and it’s only going to get worse.”

He lets his gaze drift to the floor as he briefly debates whether to share the details. She should probably know what manner of monster she’s dealing with.

“Actually, ah – someone upstairs has a statement,” he says before he can lose his nerve. “She was writing it out just before we came down here, and I could See the shape of it, but not the whole story, and now I can’t See her anymore, and I – I need –” He runs a frustrated hand through his hair, scraping ragged fingernails against his scalp. “Christ, Georgie, it’s all I can do not to rush up there and rip it out of her.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

“Not yours, either. Don’t,” Georgie says, cutting him off when he opens his mouth to launch into another tirade. “I’m not saying that you were justified in hurting people. But you didn’t choose to be… this.”

“I may not have wanted it,” he says flatly, “but I did choose it.”

“How so?”

She sounds genuinely curious, not confrontational, which keeps him from going on the defensive. Instead, the question gives Jon pause.

“I… I don’t know how to explain it,” he says slowly, frowning. “Just – something Jonah said to me, and it – feels right.”

“He said that to you?” Georgie’s eyes narrow as she watches him. “Those words?”

“Yes?” Jon squirms in his seat; sometimes, Georgie’s scrutiny is on par with that of the Beholding. “A long time ago. Before the Unknowing, even. When I realized that I was becoming something – not human, and confronted him about it.”

Georgie taps a knuckle against her lips, looking down at the floor in thought.

“Jon, I’m going to say something, and I want you to think about it – really think about it, don’t just discard it offhand. Alright?”

“Okay?” Jon says, apprehension flooding him.

Georgie takes a breath and looks him in the eye.

“Supernatural flavor aside, that’s just how abusers talk in order to groom their victims.”

Jon recoils as if struck and shoves the information away from him almost as soon as the words leave her mouth.

“Does it really matter?” It comes out far more harshly than he had intended, closer to a shout than a comment, and he cringes. “Sorry. It’s just – he had a point.”

“Jon –”

“No, I chose to keep looking for answers at every turn,” Jon says, gesticulating wildly. “I’ve never known when to just stop, no matter how many times people get hurt from it. I was a perfect fit for the Beholding, the perfect candidate for Jonah to do with what he will, and I – I still am. Doesn’t matter if I wanted this outcome. I still sought it out. Moth to a fucking flame.”

“Doesn’t mean you chose it, and it doesn’t mean you deserved what happened to you,” Georgie says. For some reason that Jon can’t quite pinpoint, the quiet confidence with which she speaks grates on his nerves. “And anyway, it seems to me you’re doing a decent job at controlling yourself now.”

“Yeah.” He huffs. “Only it took Basira threatening to kill me.”

“She what?”

“Not recently. In my future. It was warranted,” he says with a dismissive gesture. Then he sighs, slouching in his seat. “And I don’t know if even that threat would have stopped me forever. Didn’t have to find out. I managed to end the world first, and then I had all the fear I could ever want.”

The moment he stops speaking, his mind once again drifts to the statement ripe for the taking just upstairs. His bitter expression turns anguished and he buries his face in his hands.

“I want to kill the part of me that misses it. That might just kill all of me, but honestly, Georgie, I don’t – I don’t know if that would be such a bad thing –” He chokes on his words and looks up at her with wide, frantic eyes. “I – I’m sorry, I didn’t – I shouldn’t have said –” He takes a deep breath and forces assurance into his voice when he says, “I’m not suicidal.”

“I won’t be angry if you are,” Georgie says evenly, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I’m not suicidal,” he says again, but he looks away as he does, unable to meet her eyes. “I don’t – want to die. I just feel like as long as I’m around, everyone – everything is in danger, and – what right to I have to make that decision for the world? It’s – selfish, and – I really don’t deserve a second chance, especially when part of me still…”

Jon swallows hard. Once again, he wonders if the woman with the statement is still here. He pinches the skin of his arm and twists. Noticing the tic, Georgie frowns and opens her mouth to redirect him, but he carries on speaking, undeterred.

“I think the only reason I chose to wake up again is because I needed to help Daisy and Martin. I think the only reason I’m still alive now is because I don’t want to leave Martin alone. Or – no, that makes it sound out of obligation or – or guilt. It's not that. It's – I – I want to be with him, I do. I actively want to – to have a life with him, just – live, be. If not for that, though, I… I’m tired, Georgie.”

Tired of hurting and being hurt, of watching and being watched. Tired of hunger and want and an existence that hinges upon the misery of others. Tired loss and scars and nightmares. Tired of having to settle for not wanting to die instead of wanting to live. Tired of just surviving instead of actually living.

“I’m just tired,” he says, putting his head in his hands again. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to hear this.”

“I would rather you talk about it than keep it bottled up.”

“I just don’t want you to think that I’m not trying to get better.”

“Recovery isn’t linear. I’m not going to leave just because you have bad days. It would be different if you were closed off, denying you have a problem, but… you’re not.” When he doesn’t answer, her frown deepens. Her next words sound almost affronted. “I’ve been suicidal, Jon, you know that. Why do you think I’d hold it against you? I know you can’t just flip a switch to make it go away. Why are you so afraid –” Realization dawns on her face. “I left last time, didn’t I?”

“I never regained autonomy in the nightmares, so I didn’t get a chance to talk to you before I woke up.” Jon shrugs halfheartedly. “You didn’t expect me to wake up. Then I did, and I didn’t have any of the complications to be expected from a six-months coma. Not even a coma, really, just – everything but brain dead. A corpse coming back to life – I think it was too much for you. You told me I needed people to keep me human, and by the time I took that advice there was no one left to turn to, and now I wasn’t human anymore. It kept me from dying, but you didn’t think it was a second chance.”

“I said that to you?”

“The, uh, last bit,” he says reluctantly. He doesn’t blame Georgie for leaving, but he can’t deny that her parting words to him on that day still sting, even now – a resounding condemnation that he can’t quite shake. “But you weren’t wrong,” he says, rushing to reassure her when he sees the horrified look on her face. “It wasn’t a second chance, it was just… the next phase of the Archivist’s development. Anyway, you were tired of watching me self-destruct, you knew there was nothing you could to do change my trajectory, and you didn’t want me to drag you down with me. Or Melanie. Her life had – has, I suppose – been nothing but misery since the day she met me. She was trying to get out, to get better.”

“And you?”

“I wanted to, but I just… couldn’t see a way out. I couldn’t leave, but I…” He bites down hard on his lower lip, struggling with his next words. “I don’t think I was choosing to stay involved, either.”

“And I thought you were.”

“You weren’t the only one. And it wasn’t an unfair assumption. I was” – am, his brain corrects – “in too deep. I didn’t” – don’t, he reminds himself –“belong in normal life anymore. I couldn’t” – can’t, he does not say aloud – “reverse the change. Even when I found out how to quit… I couldn’t just leave Martin here alone. Also, I know now that it wouldn’t have worked for me anyway.”

“It would’ve killed you,” she guesses.

“No such luck,” he says with a short laugh, then feels his blood drain from his face. He looks up and fixes her with a panicked, apologetic look. “Sorry, I – that was in poor taste, it’s just – that was what went through my mind when I first realized it.”

“It’s alright.”

Jon clears his throat, still somewhat shamefaced.

“What I mean is that I, ah, tried to blind myself during the Ritual. Turns out I heal too quickly for it to have any effect on my connection with the Beholding. Otherwise I’d have tried it again the moment I woke up in the hospital.”

Georgie says nothing. When he chances a glimpse of her, he sees no judgment or anger, just more of that familiar, gentle sadness. He has to look away again.

“I don’t blame you for walking away back then. You didn’t have the whole picture. Neither did I, but even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have given you all the details, and you knew that. I can’t fault you for not wanting to stay involved when you didn’t know what being involved would actually entail.” He looks up and meets her eyes. “Honestly, Georgie, even if you’d stayed, I probably would have made all the same mistakes. I would have continued putting myself in danger and downplaying it. I would still have gone into the Coffin, and I wouldn’t have told you where I was going beforehand. I would likely have distanced myself from you on my own, because I’d have convinced myself it was in your best interests without asking you how you felt about it. I’ve… changed since then, but at the time, I probably would have continued retracing the same patterns. You would have only gotten hurt, even if it wasn’t my intention.”

“Maybe.” She frowns, chin propped on her fist as she considers. “I can’t speak for a version of me that doesn’t exist anymore. But for what it’s worth, I’m sorry you were alone.”

“And I’m sorry I didn’t realize how much I didn’t want to be alone until it was too late.”

“It’s not too late now, though,” she says with a cautious smile.

“No, I suppose not.” Jon’s answering smile fades as he gives her a serious look. “None of this obligates you to stick around, by the way.”

“I know.”

“I’m serious. I’m glad you’re here, but…” It’s more than I deserve, he almost says, but stops himself when he imagines Georgie’s reaction to that. “I don't want things to become – toxic, between us. If it gets to be too much, I’ll understand.”

“If it does, it won’t be just because you had a setback. Just – try not to wallow too much when you do, alright? You’re not good company for yourself when you’re like that.”

“Yeah,” Jon concedes on a long exhale.

Georgie sighs, a pensive look on her face.

“I think I may have given you the wrong impression before. When I made you promise that you didn’t have a death wish, it wasn’t because I was going to leave if you’re suicidal. It was because I don’t want to be lied to about it if you are. I don’t want to be blindsided by your self-destruction, or made complicit in it. It isn’t fair to me.”

“I don’t want that either,” he says softly. “And I – I wasn’t lying before, when I promised you that the Coffin wasn’t a death wish. I just… I thought…”

“You thought you could make the decision to live once and be done with it.”

“Sounds foolish when you put it like that, but… yes, I suppose so.”

“Would be nice if it worked like that,” Georgie says with a rueful smile. Then she sighs. “I’m not expecting you to get better overnight, and neither should you – especially when you’re still in the thick of it. I’m just expecting you to communicate when things get bad, rather than throwing yourself onto the nearest grenade as – atonement, or punishment, or some misguided belief that you have to earn the right to live. I won’t be a party to that. I can’t. I don’t… hold it against you personally, I get it, I’ve been there – but that’s why I can’t be around it. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“To be clear,” she says emphatically, waiting until he meets her eye before continuing, “I don’t mind hearing about those thoughts. I take issue with you acting on them with no regard for yourself or the people around you, and then minimizing the consequences. And that – that isn’t a value judgment. It’s just… watching you get trapped in that cycle, it takes me to a bad place.” Georgie chews on her lip for a moment, and then nods, as if coming to a conclusion. “If you were looking for a boundary, there it is. I know you can’t avoid danger entirely, but when you’re feeling like this, can you at least promise to talk to someone before making any drastic decisions? You have to let us know if you’re in a bad way, because it will affect your judgment.”

Jon lets out a long exhale. “I will.”

“Okay. I can live with that.”

“Thank you,” he murmurs, self-conscious.

“About your voice, though.” Jon gives her a quizzical look. “I thought it was wholly a supernatural thing, but…” She looks up at the ceiling, gathering her thoughts, and then adopts a delicate tone. “Have you considered that it might also be a – a trauma response?”

“I didn’t before.”

“And now?”

“I… I don’t know. It first started partway through the apocalypse. The more I experienced, the more the Archive asserted itself. I was still me, most of the time, but I was also – more, I suppose? It’s… complicated.” Jon rakes his fingers through his hair as he works on his phrasing. “The human mind was never meant to contain that… much. The Archive’s purpose is to – well, to archive. Every instance of fear and suffering in that place was a statement. Billions of them, every moment recorded live – and when I read or take a statement, I live it vicariously. My own experience of it is… an essential part of the recording process.” He blows out a puff of air. “So I had a lot going through my head at any given moment. The human in me couldn’t be conscious of all of it at the same time.”

“That’s… horrible.”

“Yes. And it felt right.” He rubs one arm absently, looking off to the side. “I don’t think I was meant to survive – the human part of me, that is. I was just one mind; I should have gotten lost in the multitude. And I did, sometimes, but… I always found my way back. Martin always called me back. If not for him…”

If not for him, Jon would have lost his sense of self in the Archive, given up and accepted the role assigned to him, much like he suspects Gertrude would have. When he lost Martin, Jon almost did lose himself as well.

“Either way, I was – above all else, I was still an Archive. I learned to compartmentalize, to an extent, but I was never meant to have my own voice. At some point, it got lost in all the noise. If I wanted to communicate, I could only use the stories hoarded away in the Archive.”

Jon frowns in consideration, actively weighing the most likely theories as he talks himself through the evidence.

“I… don’t think it was purely a psychological response,” he says slowly, gaining in confidence as he speaks the words. “I think it was a consequence of what I was in that place. The Archive was part of that world’s fabric, so to speak. But this reality operates differently than the one I came from. Its natural laws aren’t dictated by the Beholding. It has… less prominence here. Case in point, I’m significantly less powerful now than I was in my future.”

Georgie raises an eyebrow. “How powerful are we talking?”

“I was an apex predator among monsters. A direct conduit of the Ceaseless Watcher. Oh,” he adds offhandedly, “and I Knew everything.”

“What.”

“Well – almost everything. And not all at once. It was more that I – I was able to Know almost anything if I looked for the answer.” He allows himself a small grin. “Post-apocalyptic Google, so to speak.”

“Sounds… useful?”

“In some ways. It’s awful to say, but I miss it sometimes. Having control over it, mostly. I could stop myself from Knowing things about a person, give them more privacy. But I also couldn’t opt out of Knowing entirely. I just… had more control over what I Knew and when. And there were still things I couldn’t Know. The Beholding will hoard almost any scrap of information, but it has a clear preference for the horrific. It was utterly silent on anything related to an after – an afterlife, a reversal of the apocalypse, any sort of escape or release from the nightmare.”

“God,” Georgie murmurs, almost to herself.

“Jury’s out on that one, too.”

“No, I just meant –” Georgie pauses when she sees Jon smirk. “Oh, I see. You’re just being a smartass.” She shoots him a grin and nudges him with her foot. “What about now? Do you still –”

“I don’t have near as much control over it as I used to, no. I can remember the things that I consciously chose to Know then, but… that sea of knowledge, all those potential answers to any hypothetical questions – my access to it is limited now. And I’m Knowing things unintentionally again.”

“What about the Archive – the statements?”

“When I first woke up, it felt – the same as it did in the future. A sort of – wall of static that lowered whenever I tried to use my own words. It lifted in the Buried, because I was cut off from the Eye – from the Archive. I thought it would reassert itself when I came back – and it did for a minute – but now it’s…” Jon stares down at his hands, clenched tightly in his lap. “I still have recall of all the statements I already had archived. Not all at once, more like a – like a database, I suppose, but – they’re there if I look for them. The Archive is still there, and sometimes it slips through, but… it’s not as dominant as it was before. And seeing as I can speak at all, apparently state of mind is more of a factor than I thought. At least right now. Not sure about before.”

“Well,” Georgie says, “even if you have more control over it now, it doesn’t mean you always did. Sometimes circumstances change.”

“Maybe,” Jon says, his thoughts already beginning to stray.

Georgie sighs in exasperation.

“Just because there’s a future where things are better doesn’t mean you’re a failure for things being bad in the present. Jon, look at me.” He does, albeit reluctantly. “What you’ve gone through isn’t something that you just get over. It’s always going to be there. That doesn’t mean things will never get better. It just means that you need to make peace with the fact that you’ll have ups and downs. If you turn on yourself every time you’re struggling, you’ll never notice the moments of progress. And if you see every instance of progress as an opportunity to berate yourself for not achieving it sooner, then, well – I’m sorry, but things aren’t going to get better.”

“I – I know. It’s just…”

“Difficult. I know. I’ve been there.” Her expression softens. “I’m not trying to be harsh. I don’t expect one conversation to change the way you think. It takes years of practice to break that sort of pattern. But when you need reminders – and you will, and I won’t be disappointed when you do – I’m going to keep giving them to you. I’ll ask you to at least consider them each time before dismissing them outright. Does that sound fair?”

“More than,” Jon says, giving her a weak smile.

“Good, because I seem to recall you making the same request of me once upon a time.”

Did I? Jon thinks back and draws a blank. Not for the first time, he curses how unreliable his memory can be.

“Still,” he says, “I’m sorry to be such a –”

“If you say ‘burden’ or anything to that effect, I actually will be cross with you.”

“Noted,” Jon says with an embarrassed chuckle. “But – sincerely, I – I know that right now I’m –” Dead weight, he almost says. Volatile. Fragile. Tiresome. Untrustworthy. A walking doomsday button. Georgie gives him a warning look, silently urging him to consider his next words carefully. “Struggling,” he opts for. “But I do want to be there for you if you need me, in whatever way I can, so… open invitation to confide in me, or ask for help, or – or anything you need.”

“That was eloquent,” she replies with a teasing smirk. Jon rolls his eyes.

“Ironically, I think I was more eloquent when I was the Archive.”

“Eloquent in a poetic sense, maybe,” Georgie says with mock thoughtfulness, “but it didn’t lend itself to clarity.”

Another hunger pang rips through Jon's mind and he clenches his jaw, curling his shaking hands into fists.

“Hey.” Georgie prods his foot with hers again. “You ready to see Martin?”

“I, ah…” Jon gives a nervous laugh. “I want to see him more than anything, but I’m also – terrified? I know things won’t be how I remember them, I know I have to adjust my expectations, but I don’t know what to adjust them to, and I don’t know what to expect from myself, either, and…”

And the hunger is eating away at him from the inside out, an incessant undercurrent of need-want-feed running parallel with every other thought vying for his attention. He brings his hands to his face, puts pressure on his eyes, grounds himself in the ache. Almost immediately, his brain latches onto the words pressure and ground and suddenly he’s comparing the cravings to being buried alive, to drowning in noise, to being suffocated by the crush of stories that was – is – destined to comprise the entirety of his being. He’s being drawn over the threshold of that ubiquitous, baleful door in his mind: hated and feared, yes, but completing him all the same.

Guess that’s the thing about being the chosen one, Arthur Nolan’s words echo in the Archive’s halls. At the end of it, you’re always just the point of someone else’s story, everyone clamoring to say what you were, what you meant, and your thoughts on it all don’t mean nothing.

Jon tries to dislodge the statement, but there is no stop button to corral the Archive, and the story continues on: It seeds us with this… aching, impossible desire to change the world, to bring it to us.

There are hundreds of thousands of words pounding on the door now, none of them his own, an endless stream of them queuing up in his throat, cramming into his lungs – and with a painful lurch, he’s falling down, down, down –

Breathe, comes the familiar mantra.

On the one hand, he’s glad for how quickly and mindlessly that coping mechanism kicks in by now. On the other hand, he wishes he didn’t have so many opportunities to practice that it’s become so ingrained in the first place. There is something different about it this time, though. Usually, he imagines the command in his own voice, or occasionally Martin’s. Just now, he could pick out multiple tones, all overlapping: Martin. Georgie. Basira. Daisy. Himself.

The effect is potent. It allows him to walk himself back from the edge in record time. The hunger still scratches impatiently at the door, but he manages to tear his attention away from it long enough to remember where and when and who he is. When he glances back up, he realizes that only a few seconds have transpired – a storm so brief that apparently even Georgie didn’t register its passing. Instead, she’s staring over his shoulder. She catches his eye, raises her eyebrows, and nods, indicating something behind him.

“Well,” she says with a smile both amused and reassuring, “I think you’re about to find out.”

Another stab of panic shoots through him, shattering his momentary calm. Time stands still. When lightheadedness overtakes him and his vision starts to pixelate, he realizes that he’s been holding his breath. He lets out a juddering exhale, and turns around.

When he lays eyes on Martin, Jon is speechless all over again.

Martin startles when Jon’s eyes lock onto his, still unaccustomed to and unsettled by such direct eye contact. He immediately regrets that reaction when he watches Jon recoil and avert his eyes. The reflexive urge to vanish overtakes Martin then – and he feels himself begin to panic a little more when it yields no results. He had been accessing that power up until moments ago, when he dropped the veil; why is it out of reach now?

“Hi, Martin,” Georgie says, apparently unperturbed by the awkward atmosphere. “I was just keeping Jon company until you got here, but I’ll give you two some privacy now.” She stands, stretches, and brings one arm down to touch Jon’s shoulder. “I’ll be here for a while yet. If you need me, I’ll probably be in Melanie’s usual spot.”

Martin can see Jon incline his head slightly. If Jon sees her reassuring smile, he gives no indication. Georgie gives his shoulder another pat and starts to walk towards the ladder. Martin steps aside, giving her a wide berth – force of habit – and watches until the trapdoor closes behind her.

For what feels like an interminable moment, the stale air hangs heavy with silence. Martin stands rigid, mind drawing a blank. Could cut the tension in here with a bread knife, he thinks to himself, somewhat hysterically.

Jon, for his part, is staring steadfastly at the ground, utterly unmoving – and Martin’s heart wrenches painfully in his chest at the sight.

Of all the adjectives that could be used to describe Jonathan Sims, unmoving has never been one of them. When he’s not running his hands through his hair or scratching at his skin, he’s bouncing his legs, tapping his fingers, biting the insides of his cheeks, pacing, rocking in place – an endless rotation of fidgets and stims, flowing one into the next. When he’s excited, his eyes light up, intense and intelligent and impossible to break away from; he interrupts himself in his rush to translate his thoughts into speech before he loses them entirely; he’s a flurry of animated gestures and borderline manic pacing. Even at rest, his eyes are bright with questions and his hands flutter when he talks; even exhausted and lethargic, his mind is a hummingbird flitting from thought to thought with frantic abandon, eager to catalog every detail and cover every angle.

Sometimes, it’s vicariously exhausting to witness; most of the time, Martin is hopelessly endeared. In all the time that Martin has known him, the coma was the first time he ever saw Jon entirely still. Martin used to wish on occasion that he had more chances to just look at him. Up until that point, he’d had to make do with furtive glances and stolen moments when Jon was too engrossed in a task to notice Martin staring. In the hospital, Martin finally had a chance to really study him freely.

Stillness doesn’t suit him, Martin remembers thinking – and another piece of his heart chipped away.

Unconsciously, Martin finds himself studying Jon again now. He sits hunched forward with his arms folded tightly in front of him, a white-knuckled grip on each elbow, his narrow shoulders pulled in and forward. Judging from the predictably mussed state of his hair, he must have been combing his fingers through it nonstop recently. His lips are chapped and torn from chewing; the dark circles under his eyes seem to have shadows of their own. His multiple layers of clothing do nothing to hide the gauntness of his frame or the frailness of his wrists.

Jon is awake now, yes, but still he looks… distant. Listless. Too close to lifeless for comfort; too reminiscent of deathbeds and silent monitors and grey hospital linens. So Martin breaks the silence.

“Jon.”

He doesn’t raise his head, but his eyes flick upwards to gaze at Martin through his lashes. Sharp eyes, haunted eyes, more and more so with every passing day – and now, they’re downright bleak. Still, though, they’re beautiful: a rich brown, dark and deep enough to fall into, and Martin could lose himself in them gladly. Then, Jon breaks eye contact again, curling in on himself even further.

How is it that he manages to look more run down every time I see him? Martin thinks, and then he notices Jon’s hands, trembling in his lap now.

“You’re shaking.”

“Yes.” The word cracks on its way out, coming out as little more than a croak, and Jon clears his throat before trying again. “Just, ah – just hungry.”

“You’ve been back a few hours now, haven’t you eaten yet?” Martin replies automatically, the caretaker in him taking charge. “Jon, you were in there for over a week, you need to –”

“Not – not that kind of hunger.” Jon finally raises his head, but his eyes still dart away from Martin’s every few moments.

“Oh,” Martin says quietly. “Statements.”

“Yeah.” Jon scuffs one foot against the floor.

“W-well, I can wait, if you want to go record one?”

“No, I –” Jon clears his throat again, sitting up straighter in his seat. “I’d prefer to talk. If that’s alright with you. I’m – I’m sure you have questions for me.”

Martin considers. On the one hand, his instinct is to insist that Jon take care of himself first. On the other hand, he knows how stubborn Jon can be. Arguing about it wouldn’t change his mind, only waste time and ultimately leave him waiting longer for a meal.

“Yeah,” Martin says with a reluctant sigh, “I guess.”

“R-right. Well…” One end of Jon’s scarf trails in his lap, and he runs his fingertips over the weave, in the same way that one might pet a cat. “I – I’ll answer them as best I can.”

“Right,” Martin echoes.

“Would you like to sit?”

Martin nods wordlessly and takes a seat opposite Jon, but his mind goes blank again.

“Georgie said she explained things?” Jon tries tentatively.

“Sort of. She said she was working on an incomplete explanation herself.”

“Yes, that was – that was my fault. I was having some –”

“Speech difficulties, yeah. She said.”

“Which is also why my message to you was so…” Jon sighs. “I would have preferred to use my own words.”

“But did you mean it?” Martin blurts out. He feels his face heat in an instant and he has to look away.

“Yes,” Jon says quietly. Confidently, Martin notes privately, and blushes more deeply. “The sentiment was all mine. I know it may seem – out of the blue, from your perspective, but I – I meant it, all of it.” Jon ducks his head, but doesn’t look away. “I, uh – I still do.”

It’s Martin’s turn to break eye contact, keen to look anywhere other than into Jon’s eyes and the open, sincere warmth living there.

“I’m not the person you remember,” Martin says stiffly.

“Neither am I,” Jon replies, his voice softer than Martin has ever heard it.

Martin’s throat works as he swallows hard.

“I’m not the person you fell in love with.”

Jon’s expression softens and he gives Martin a beseeching look.

“I disagree,” he says, with more of his earlier assurance.

“I’m not,” Martin insists. “I don’t know what the me of the future was like, but I’m not – I’m not him. Whatever he did to make you fall for him, it’s – it’s not me.”

“Martin, I fell in love with this version of you,” Jon replies, his voice tremulous. “With every version of you.”

Martin just stares. Jon smiles at him: soft, sad, sorry, sincere.

“I – I know it’s difficult to believe. I treated you – horribly, and for so long. Took you for granted. Never gave you the respect or care you deserved. I… I don’t think I’ll ever stop being sorry for that.” He maintains eye contact, and Martin once again finds that he cannot look away. “I’ve never been… good at this sort of thing – putting words to how I feel. In retrospect, I was falling for you even before the Unknowing. I just – didn’t realize how much until I woke up and you weren’t there. There was a – an empty space where you used to be, and I couldn’t… I was almost too late. I almost lost you –”

His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. Martin is startled to see the sheen to his eyes.

“I… I did lose you, eventually, and it nearly…” His voice is rough with held back tears. He clears his throat, and when he speaks again, there’s an intensity to his voice that Martin just now realizes he’s missed. “But not – not until much later. Not here. Not now. Not to Peter fucking Lukas.”

Martin lets out an amused huff at the venom with which Jon says the name. Jon looks up, tilting his head slightly – and Martin can feel one corner of his mouth turning up ever so slightly at the familiar mannerism.

“Sorry,” he says. “Just – don’t hear you swear much.”

“Well, he deserves it,” Jon replies, half-scathing, half-embarrassed.

“Can’t say I disagree with you there,” Martin says with a tired chuckle.

“About – about Peter.” Once again, the name sounds poisonous on Jon’s tongue. “He’s lying to you –”

A bolt of annoyance shoots through Martin at that.

“I’m not an idiot, Jon.”

“No,” Jon says hurriedly, his hands fluttering in agitation, “I didn’t mean to imply –” He breathes a heavy sigh, flustered. “I know that I – I underestimated you for far too long. But you’re clever, and capable, and you understand people in a way that I find endlessly impressive.” To his chagrin, Martin can feel himself redden at the unexpected praise. “You’re not gullible enough to trust Peter for a moment. I know that. And” – Jon grins at him with such open affection that Martin wants to flee – “last time, you outmaneuvered him so seamlessly that I – after seeing the look on Peter’s face, I think I fell a little more in love with you, impossible as it seemed.”

Martin’s face is on fire now, must be.

“I trusted you then, wholeheartedly, and I still do,” Jon continues. “I… I’ll respect whatever decision you make going forward. Even if it means you continue working with Peter. But,” he adds, licking his lips nervously, “I have information now that we didn’t have the first time around, and I – I’d like you to know the whole story. It could have implications for whatever strategy you decide on.”

“You’re talking about the Extinction.”

“Among other things, yes.”

“Is it a real thing?”

Jon lets out a long exhale, looking off to the side with a pensive scowl. Martin can feel himself smile at the sight of that oh-so-familiar crease between his eyebrows, a telltale harbinger of a Jonathan Sims dissertation. Resting his chin in his hands and leaning forward, Martin settles in for an earful.

“Yes,” Jon says after a moment’s hesitation, “but – it’s more complicated than Peter assumes. It’s real insofar as it’s a pervasive terror for large swathes of the human population. Justifiably so, I think it’s fair to say. And it’s possible that, given existential threats like global climate change, nuclear weaponry proliferation, pandemics, war, artificial scarcity, structural oppression and inequality embedded in society worldwide…”

He counts off on his fingers, the line between his eyebrows deepening as he builds momentum.

“And of course we have a twenty-four-hour news cycle inundating us all with that reality, and – entire genres of literature and film utilizing those apocalyptic themes… well, suffice it to say, the fear of a world without us might eventually reach a point where it could be considered on par with Smirke’s Fourteen.

“But Smirke’s taxonomy is also an oversimplification. The human experience is far too varied and complex to be split into neat categories. The animal experience, rather. It’s likely that the Fears have existed since before the advent of modern Homo sapiens, and if we consider the origins of the Flesh – it would be anthropocentric to assume that only the human mind is subject to them, and” – Jon shakes his head – “I'm veering off topic. Point is, the Fears bleed into one another. It’s why a Ritual for a single power was never going to work, why Jonah – Elias’ Ritual was predicated on bringing through all Fourteen at once. Or, case in point, perhaps Fifteen. The Extinction did have a domain of its own after the change, it was just… less sprawling than the others, and there were fewer instances of it. And no Avatars dedicated to it, as far as I could tell.”

Jon taps two fingers against his lips, leg bouncing restlessly as he ponders his next words.

“As for an Emergence, though… I really don’t think there is such a thing as a grand birthing event. The Extinction is already here, in a way. Many of the statements feature more than one Fear at a time, precisely because the boundaries between them are so indistinct. Some of the statements that Adelard Dekker collected – I do think that they contain genuine examples of the Extinction as a coherent Fear of its own, just… mixed in with other Fears. I imagine the Extinction’s trajectory might be similar to that of the Flesh – arising as times change, as more and more minds collectively experience that flavor of fear.

“It might be a quick evolution – similar to how anthropogenic climate change has followed an exponential growth curve, aptly enough – but I don’t think that the Extinction is or – or will be somehow more formidable than the other Fourteen.” His speech turns rapid-fire as he bounces from one thought to the next. “It can’t exist independently of the other Fourteen any more than the others can, so a Ritual on its behalf would collapse under its own weight. If there is a grand extinction event – well, when, I suppose; nothing lasts forever, the End claims everything eventually, time continues its slow crawl towards the inevitable heat death of the universe, et cetera –”

Jon is counting off on his fingers again. Martin shakes his head fondly.

“But it won't occur because of an Extinction Ritual,” Jon goes on. “There was an apocalypse where I came from, and it had nothing to do with the Extinction. Just… a very human flavor of monstrosity: the pursuit of power and personal gain, even at the cost of unimaginable suffering for everyone else.” He gives a humorless laugh. “Fittingly enough, though, it all started from a place of fear – of mortality, of subjugation, of the unknown.” Jon’s expression falls, and his voice drops to a near whisper. “And – and my own fear led me to the eye of that storm, so to speak. All of it can be traced back to that foundational fear of the unknown, can't it? The roots just… branch outward from there.”

Jon’s already trembling hands twitch abruptly, as if snapping something in two. He doesn’t appear to notice the gesture, too lost in his own thoughts. Before Martin can voice his concern at the shift in demeanor, Jon shakes his head and forges onward. He reverts to his previous hyperfocused, almost academic manner, but an undercurrent of anxious energy lingers.

“Anyway, I actually suspect that, much like the End, the Extinction wouldn’t benefit from a Ritual even if one could work. It thrives on the potentiality of a mass extinction event, not the fulfillment of one. The Fears will cease to exist when there are no longer minds to fear them. Of course, it doesn’t have to be humans, or any creature currently living. If something does come after us, the Fears will likely survive and adapt, but otherwise –”

Jon finally makes eye contact with Martin for the first time in minutes and stops short.

“Oh,” he says, sounding mortified, “I’ve been… rambling, haven’t I.”

“I don’t mind,” Martin replies, unable to fight back a smile.

“W-well, anyway…” Jon rubs the back of his neck, looking thoroughly embarrassed. “I don’t believe that the Extinction is the world-ending threat that Peter claims, so if you were planning on continuing to work with him because of that…” He shrugs. “Also, his plan for you was never about the Extinction. Not really. He was – is – genuinely worried about the Extinction, but his plan to stop it is to have the Forsaken destroy the world first. But it hasn’t been long since his last Ritual failed; he knows it will be some time before he can try again. His immediate plan is all about one-upping Elias, taking control of the Panopticon, and accruing power in order to increase the chances of success for his next Ritual attempt.”

Jon exhales another humorless laugh, and his voice takes on an odd, breathless quality as he continues.

“Not all that different from Jonah Magnus, really. His allegiance to the Eye began when he realized that his peers would continue attempting their own Rituals. His solution was to destroy the world before they could. So afraid of his own mortality that he was willing to subjugate the entire human population for his own benefit.” Jon folds his arms again, tucking them against his middle and leaning forward, as if trying to make himself smaller. When he speaks again, there’s a noticeable waver in his voice. “Somewhere along the line, he went beyond justifying his actions – jumped right to taking pleasure in them.”

Jon’s sharp eyes go unfocused. The rise and fall of his chest quickens.

“I’m sorry,” Martin says gently. He doesn’t know what else he can say.

“For what?” Jon asks, coming back to himself after an overlong pause.

“Georgie told me what he did to you. I mean, she didn’t go into detail, but she mentioned that he possessed you and used you to –”

“It wasn’t possession,” Jon interrupts, a desperate edge to his tone. “Not in the conventional horror movie sense. It was the same compulsion that takes me when I start reading any statement, just – more intense. I couldn’t – couldn’t control my body, but he wasn’t actually in my head, it just – felt like it, like he’d crawled into my skin along with his words. Then again, I –” Jon laughs, gripping one wrist with his other hand, fingernails digging grooves into scarred skin. “I suppose I was possessed in a way, in the sense of being someone else’s possession. Have been for a long time – haven’t belonged to myself since the moment he chose me, still don’t –”

Jon’s gaze goes distant yet again, and Martin watches with burgeoning worry as his pupils dilate and constrict with the fluctuation of his voice.

“…he posited a future where – humanity was violently and utterly supplanted –”

“– marked me as a part of that, without my understanding. Or consent –”

“Jon?” Martin says, apprehensive.

“– keep me in the dark just so I wouldn’t stop being useful – made me complicit in a thousand different nightmares, and lives ruined for the sick joy of some otherworldly voyeur –”

“– any future I might have had, sacrificed to his –”

“Jon, what’s –?”

There’s a singsong tenor to his voice and an intensity to his eyes now, reminiscent of the look he gets when he records –

Oh, Martin realizes. Statements.

“– I swear I could still feel those – eyes follow me – a grin of victory playing upon his lips –”

“Jon,” Martin says again, more insistently, reaching out on impulse to place a hand on Jon’s knee.

Cognizance flares to life in Jon’s eyes and his hands fly up to cover his mouth. He seems to struggle with himself for a minute, stolen words muffled beneath the hands pressed tight to his lips. He makes a noise that sounds almost like choking, or sobbing; he looks at Martin with wide, watery eyes, then takes a deep breath in. A quiet whimper chases the air out on his exhale, and Martin’s own breath catches in his throat. He’s seen Jon scared, but he’s never heard him make a sound quite like that – not while bleeding out from a fresh stab wound, not with a gash in his neck, not fumbling to apply ointment to a burned and peeling hand, not even with worms burrowing through his flesh and a corkscrew tearing through the tunnels they left behind.

“You’re okay,” Martin says, willing it to be true.

“I don’t – I don’t want to talk about him anymore,” Jon says abruptly, sharply. He winces and shoots Martin an apologetic look. “Sorry, that was – I didn’t mean to sound cross, I just –” He flaps his hands, lips moving wordlessly.

“It’s okay, I understand.”

Jon nods, but his breaths are still coming fast and shallow. One hand seeks out Martin’s, still resting on his knee; he grips it tight, fingers slotting between Martin’s like they belong there. The direct skin-to-skin contact sends pins and needles radiating up Martin’s arm, but he fights the impulse to draw back.

“We can talk about something else,” Martin says, forcing calm into his voice.

Jon inclines his head again, gulping down air. Even as his breathing begins to even out, the shivers coursing through him only grow more violent, the tremor in his hands becoming more and more pronounced.

“You need to eat something,” Martin says.

“N-no, I –”

“Yes, you do –”

“No!” The exclamation cracks like a whip and ricochets off the walls, echoing down the tunnel. Jon’s face crumples and he shrinks in on himself again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to shout, I –”

“It’s fine –”

“It’s not.”

“We can argue about it when you’re not literally starving. I’ll go fetch a statement, and –”

“It won’t help.”

“What do you mean?”

Jon brings his free hand to his mouth and bites down on his knuckles.

“Jon?” Martin says again, more sternly. “What did you mean?”

“I’m – not just the Archivist, Martin, I’m the Archive. All of the statements stored upstairs, I already have them, every single one of them catalogued in my head, and – re-experiencing them takes the edge off while I’m reading, but as soon as the recording stops, the hunger comes back even stronger, and I want…” Jon gives him a pained look. “Did Georgie tell you about…?”

“She mentioned something about you putting yourself under house arrest because you’re afraid of hurting people.”

“It’s necessary,” Jon says, almost defensively.

“What will happen if you don’t take in new statements?” Jon says nothing, and Martin sighs. “Jon.”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you starve?”

“I don’t know.”

“Please don’t lie to me.”

“I don’t know,” Jon says, pulling his hand away from Martin’s and rubbing his eyes furiously. “It feels like starving, but I don’t know if it will actually kill me. But I don’t want to hurt people just to keep myself from hurting. I don’t want to be like –” He cuts himself off with a sharp intake of breath. “I’ve caused untold suffering as it is. I don’t want to hurt anyone else.”

“There was a woman giving a statement upstairs earlier –”

“I’m not taking her statement.” Jon’s reply is automatic, almost like a practiced line. It sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself more than Martin.

“I wasn’t suggesting –”

“Her name is Tricia Mallory,” Jon interjects. “It’s her birthday next week; she’ll be twenty-eight. She has two cats, and a parakeet, and a girlfriend named Shona, who has an engagement ring hidden in the bottom left drawer of her desk –”

“Why are you –”

“Because I’m so far removed from humanity at this point that I need to actively, continuously persuade myself not to see other people as cuts of meat.” Martin would have preferred snappish to the resigned, matter-of-fact, tired tone in which Jon gives that confession. “Her name is Tricia Mallory,” he recites again, in that same rehearsed manner. “She lost her voice in a minotaur’s labyrinth. She’s finding it again, slowly, but it will never be the same. Her nightmares are horrific enough without adding another monster to the mix. I’m not taking her statement.”

“What about just reading her written statement?” Martin asks. Jon blinks, slow and catlike, and Martin can see the uncanny glint of hunger in his eyes. “Have you already heard her story?”

“No,” Jon says after a sluggish pause. “I don’t think her statement ever made it down to the Archives the last time. And the knowledge of its content didn’t consciously come to me after the change. There were – so many other statements in progress by then. So much to See.”

“So it would be something new for you.” Jon is silent, staring off into the middle distance, unblinking, glassy eyes riveted on something only he can see. “Would that be enough to hold you over for now? It – it won’t be live and in person, but at least it won’t be… I don’t know, stale?”

“I…” Jon’s pupils dilate. Constrict. Dilate.

“She’s probably left by now,” Martin continues insistently. “I can go track down the statement and bring it back here.” Jon looks as if he’s warring with himself. “Please, Jon. It’s just a reading. You won’t hurt anyone.”

Blood wells up on Jon’s lip where he’s been biting it. Eventually, he gives a tiny nod, his shoulders going limp as if in defeat. Jon needs to eat, but Martin wishes it didn’t feel so much like pressuring someone to break sobriety.

“Okay,” Martin says, fighting back the surge of guilt, “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Please don’t go anywhere, alright?”

“Alright,” Jon replies in a nearly inaudible whisper.

Martin tosses a glance over his shoulder as he leaves. Jon is eerily still again but for the persistent shaking. He looks small, and haunted, and lost; fragile, precarious, with a posture that brings to mind something broken and taped back together in slapdash fashion.

First things first, Martin tells himself, and tries to focus on the task at hand.

Once the trapdoor closes behind Martin, Jon buries his face in his hands.

That wasn’t how he wanted this conversation to go. Just judging from his demeanor, Martin has shaken off the Lonely more than Jon had expected, but still, Jon should be the one comforting him. It took the Martin of the future ages to acclimate to the idea that he deserved to be cared for, too; to unlearn the reflex to reverse any attempt Jon made to take care of him for once. Right now, Martin needs to be shown that care, and yet Jon can’t manage to redirect his one-track mind away from his hunger for more than five minutes at a time. Selfish, selfish, selfish –

The slow creak of a door cuts through the silence, and Jon’s blood runs cold when Helen’s playful lilt rings out behind him.

“Archivist,” she says with unrestrained glee. “Long time no see.”

Jon had been dreading the Distortion’s inevitable reappearance. He should have known that she would make her entrance when he’s at his most vulnerable. Like a shark to blood, he thinks to himself, swallowing around the lump in his throat.

“Brooding, are we?”

“Hi, Helen,” he manages, struggling to stay impassive.

It doesn’t matter; he jumps anyway, when several long fingers – too many angles; too many joints – curl around his shoulder. As if her touch was an unpaid toll, she removes her hand once he provides payment in the form of that momentary burst of alarm. Her headache-inducing laugh is made all the worse by the acoustics of the tunnel.

“Now, then” – Jon doesn’t look around at her, but he can practically hear her lips curl in a grin – “pleasantries aside, I believe we’re due for a chat.”

End Notes:

Citations for Jon’s Archive-speak: MAG 010; 134/111; 154/144; 098. And Arthur Nolan’s statement is from MAG 145.

I’m hoping Jon’s ramble wasn’t Too Much lmao,,, it is admittedly part self-indulgence (read: shameless projection) on my part, but also: ADHD is just Like That sometimes. I’m still navigating how to strike a balance between having something like that flow well and be, well, readable from an audience perspective, while also trying to capture the reality of how an ADHD ramble often does lack coherence from an external POV, because so much of the associative reasoning never gets verbalized (Thought Train Goes Brrr from Point A to Point Q and Does Not Show Its Work). All this is to say: I know that whole section is meta-heavy NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL TANGENTS. I don’t know if I achieved what I was aiming for, but it was fun practice. Hopefully the end result wasn’t too disjointed or too much of a slog. (I actually edited a lot out, believe it or not, lol.)

Also, in Jon's defense, he Really Needs A Snickers. And he hasn't been able to SPEAK FOR HIMSELF for months. He deserves a little infodumping, as a treat.

Thanks for sticking with me through the slower update schedule. We're back to full shifts at work now, so chapters are taking me longer to write. And apparently I've just decided all the chapters are gonna be 10k+ words now, whoops.

[sam-roulette]

on dreams and intimacy. 

in which s2 Corruption victim (?)Tim refuses to feed God

At first he’s sleeping very little; just enough to barely function the next day, after pouring as much sugar as will satiate the growing buzz at the back of his throat into coffee and after a good amount of time staring at the filing cabinets, counting the drawers. The number never changes. His thoughts stay still long enough that Tim feels comfortable opening the handcuffs and rubbing circulation back into his wrist. He’s usually too tired to drift.

Then the wasp in his throat realizes, and on a morning where he’s still sleepy in the middle of getting the handcuffs off, pours enough venom into his blood to make him float away. 

(The next thing he knows, he’s standing near the end of one hallway of disordered documents, giving himself papercuts as he gently pages through the reams. Martin is staring at his blood as though it’s ambrosia, as though he’s a word away from allowing himself closer to mouth at the seams where skin has delicately split open and white pearls are pushed up from underneath. He makes sure Martin doesn’t touch him as he crushes the dots between his fingers. Tim locks himself in document storage the rest of the day and slides a note under Jon’s office door telling about the eggs on the statement.)

At first he’s sleeping a lot more, keeping the lights off in the windowless backroom so that when he wakes he has no sense of the time. He doesn’t check his phone, because the bright light attracts the wasp in his throat and makes it curious of the source. He doesn’t read the statements either, because anything to do with the Eye makes him itch in a way that feels like a warning. 

He buries himself in the blankets whenever he wakes up and goes back to sleep, trying to kick away dreams and keep his thoughts wholly blackened; shut down, no room to think, feel, or sing. 

It’s cold in document storage even with the blankets. He tells himself it’s enough.

(The next time he wakes he’s been singing in the breakroom, having Basira’s unwavering eye contact from where she previously had her head buried in a record she’d come from the precinct to get. He doesn’t know why he knows this. The wasp might have told him in his sleep. When he stops singing, she’s still staring, but it’s not a blank glance of interest anymore. Not when the terrible realization sets in.)

So he doesn’t deny himself dreams anymore. If he dreams, he isn’t singing. 

So it goes like this.

He’s holding someone he knows in his arms. Sometimes it’s Martin, and sometimes it’s someone he doesn’t know, and sometimes it’s Jon. He holds them close to his chest in the early dredges of the night when no daylight stains the sky and when the soft neon of buzzing nightlife cozies itself against the glass of the window. Martin’s breath is warm against his chest where he curls, tucked in and safe and shivering from a confession.

“I really don’t deserve this,” Jon says, and his thin lips are rough against the skin of his collarbone, and Tim aches down to his bones.

“You deserve everything,” Tim promises, because S̨̕̕̕͡à̷̕͘s̛̛҉h͠͏a͏҉̴ does and because she’s here now, being so close and vulnerable that it makes everything fit together the way it should. 

Jon presses his scarred face closer and Tim wants to trace along the freckles that dot their way to his reddened curls, cropped and soft under his fingers. She’s so lovely, finally taken from the walls that usually guard her and even when hiding her face away, showing him that he’s worthy of even that amount of trust. 

Tim doesn’t push him to say anything more- Jon’s always been so, so shy and worried, always worrying over tea and his own failings. Martin’s been so cruel to him lately. (It’s Tim’s fault. Tim is trying to make up for it. It helps that he’s stopped talking.) 

(Tim is still angry somewhere, he thinks. He is still angry at Jon, and what he’s done. He’s still angry at Martin, for his support being false, tainted by Tim’s voice. He’s still angry at the thing that wasn’t Sasha who couldn’t handle the sound of his voice anymore and tried to silence it. Angry at Melanie for being foolishly present and Basira and Daisy and most of all, is angry at himself for having the audacity to try and speak, in the beginning, when he’d only the smallest inkling of something wrong but didn’t yet know he was the cause.)

So it continues like this. And Martin begins to weep softly into his arms as Tim smooths a hand down the protruding vertebrae of his back and                whispers apologies against his skin as though Tim can lift her sins from her back and cradle them himself. Tim does carry his sins, and he carries Jon’s despite how they burn because even Jon deserves this softness that Tim knows. Deserves to be the gentle weight in his arms that can be gently rocked and brought to shore, to be loved in all the ways Tim desperately wanted to forgive. (He wants so desperately to forgive but he’s no saint and there’s no heaven except for the poisonous thing in the back of his mouth. There’s no heaven.)

So he takes them in his arms and he sings them a lullaby, and he makes sure that they’re warm and comfortable, like he would have done before. He reminds them of the family that doesn’t love want remember them, but never on purpose; only touching on the implication because he’s despairing over the fact that anyone would be foolish enough to not love them. 

He wants to take them all home and keep them safe. But he loves them.

So he sings, and sings, and sings them to sleep. Their breath becomes one as they settle safely in his arms, rocked on the rolling tide of that which adores them so and which wants so desperately to forget these horrible times where this kind of touch burned.

And then his children eat them from the inside out.

He wakes up and every time, the wasp whispers, we could be a family, you and I. And it takes all of Tim’s willpower not to tear out his own throat for fear that if the wasp can’t use his voice anymore, it will make use of the rest of him. He checks to be sure that he’s once again securely tied to the bed before he forces himself through another dream, gagging around the creature scuttling up his tongue. And that’s how it goes.

[celosiaa]

steady, love (chapter 8 - end)

Summary:

Martin is not doing well.

Jon is there with him through every step.

(because I became obsessed ™ with the idea of Martin dealing with the physical and emotional aftermath of leaving the Lonely)

Complete work is up on ao3 under the same username!

(The EYE speaks in glitched text.  Jon’s thoughts are italicized.)

WARNINGS: illness, mild body horror

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

“Ooh, sorry—”

“It’s alright, hang on—”

Martin leans away from Jon, panting and resting heavily against the side of the cottage while Jon unlocks the door.  Dusk has begun to fall, casting their stoop in shadow, and Jon squints at his ring of keys to find the right one.

Should really just get rid of them.  They’re not of much use, anymore.

Upon seeing his continual improvement over the afternoon, the doctor had decided to send Martin home with a course of antibiotics, fever reducers, and an inhaler, provided he check in with the clinic if anything were to go wrong.  While Jon is thankful not to have to make the journey to Aberdeen, he can feel frustration bubbling up in him nonetheless.

I just need some sleep.

His hands shake.

And the statements.

At last, he finds Daisy’s key and swings the door wide, draping Martin’s arm over his shoulders once again before they stumble inside.  Martin’s breathing has become rapid, shallow, and crackling, his face visibly pale even in the dark of the unlit room.  When Jon deposits him on the sofa, he immediately leans forward, bracing his upper body over his knees.

“Do you need the inhaler?”

Martin pauses for a moment, considering, before shaking his head.

“Wait it out,” he chokes between gasps.

“Alright.”

Walking around the coffee table, Jon sits beside him, listening intently as his breaths gradually slow, deepen, and come to rest in a more comfortable pattern.

Jon’s head is pounding.  Reflexively, he reaches a hand up to massage his right temple, and Martin regards him carefully, with eyes no longer fever-glassed.

“Jon, you…you look awful.”

Jon’s instinct is to bristle, to snap, to push Martin away.  It is only with monumental effort that he shoves it down.

He chooses honesty instead.

“I know,” he replies lowly.

Martin angles his body toward him in concern.

“What’s going on?” he asks, voice ticking upward.

“Look, we—we don’t need to talk about this right now, just don’t worry—”

“Jon.  Talk to me.”

Martin’s voice leaves no room for argument.  With a burdened sigh, Jon replies.

“Basira sent me some statements and they’ll be here in the morning.  So I’ll be alright.”

“You’re hungry?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“That is not the same thing.”

At this, Jon looks away, exhaling sharply in frustration.

Calm down, just leave it be, he’s only trying to help.

“You should have told me,” Martin continues, tone drifting into scolding.

The anger hits Jon like a tidal wave, and he turns back, snarling.

“If you haven’t noticed, Martin, we’ve been a bit busy of late.”

Martin’s eyes blow wide in shock.

“That’s not— right.  Okay, then,” he replies, short and terse.

Grunting a noise of frustration, Jon stands abruptly, striding toward the kitchen.  He stares out the window, fuming, clawing desperately at his anger in attempt to tear it down.

His head throbs.

Behind him, Martin takes a shaky inhale, before erupting into a deep coughing fit, forceful and exhausting.  Even with his building worry, Jon cannot bring himself to turn around.

Martin collapses back against the sofa before speaking between pants.

“Look—why don’t you just—”

Suddenly breathless, he breaks off, lungs gurgling audibly.  At this, Jon’s head whips around, brows furrowing when he sees Martin pitch forward again, gagging, a hand rubbing into his chest.

“Jon, I—I think I—I need—"

Jon tenses, ready to move.  “You need the inhaler?”

“S-Sorry.”

Jon growls as he crosses the room to grab it, hands balling in anger that he knows is both irrational and misplaced.

“Just—stop apologizing.”

“S—okay.”

His soft reply sends a lightning bolt of guilt through Jon.

What is wrong with you?

Christ’s sake.

Collecting the inhaler from his bag, he shakes it well before handing it to Martin.  Jon watches as he pushes out all the air he can from overflowing lungs, before pressing down on the inhaler and drawing a long breath.  As he exhales unsteadily, the heavy crackling morphs into coughing once more, and Martin presses a tissue quickly over his face, finally able to get something out after a massive effort.

He remains hunched over, regaining his breath, shoulders trembling in exhaustion.  Jon is rooted to the spot, senseless irritation preventing him even from reaching out a hand of comfort.

At last, Martin looks up, giving Jon a quick nod before leaning back and dropping his gaze anxiously.

Lͧoͧ̄o͖͒k̭͎̎ ̈́͗͋̇w̗̑͑ͣh̻̪̩̞a͍̓ͯ͒̚t̤̗͐ͩ̃ ̥ͣͬͬ̑y̙̌̈ͦ͆o̙̞̔ͥ̈́u͓̮̜̾̆'̟͓̃̆v͍̓̓̚ȅ̦ͭ ͚ͣ̋d̃ͅőn̉e, the Eye says with glee.

D̅oͭ̍ ̌̔ͩỵ̫̅ó̂̿͌u̳͓̓ͭ ͇͍̮ͤ̈ŵ̜̫͋͋a̰̩̩͖̩̘nͦ̀̉̉͆ͤẗ̩̬̣ͪ̅̑ ̲͕̖͎̒ͦ̂t̪̦ͧ̄ͫ̌ͣo̗̻͇̍ͭ̎̎̓ ͕̮͓͎̤̋͛̑s͚̱̫̘̲͗̌̈́e̳͇̙ͣ̾ͭ̆͑e̻̫ͫ̏͌̈̾̚ ͇͚͉̍̅͒͌̑w̬̼̓̅ͧ̅ͦ̂h͈̜̻̲̿̈́̑a͕̯̘ͯ̔ͧ̎t̩͓̲ͨ̑̇ͤ ͉ͩ͐͂̊́̃h̠̙̄ͦ̐̎a̗̝̔ͧ̉ͫp̟̥̿ͬͧp̯̩͉ͯ̔e̖̒̓̚nͥͯ͒s̯̙͋ ͐̌nͅeͅxt?

D̚õ͎ ̮̖͊y̥̠ͭȯ́̾͋u̩̙̭̚ ̹̙̰̒̓w̟̼͛͗ͥ̚a̘̻̣̖ͯ̈́n̖̦͑ͬ͒ͨ́t̠̋̐̓ͦ̆ͦ ̟͈͍̝̼̬ͨ͂t͈͕̘͙̲̋͌̂ȯ̲͕̮͙̤̓̚ ̙̥͔̫̺ͥͭͅͅḴ̻͙͉̟ͫ̿̽ͅN̩̬̦̍̇́͋͛͋O̝̪͈̬͎̹̠ͫ̓W͚̩̝͙̊ͦͩ̂̄ ̤͓̒͐̋̉̆ͣ͂w͙̫͕̩ͯ̄̌̐͗h̪̘̞̘̾̐̂͒͂a͓̺ͥ͐̔̇̇̐ͥt̼͖͉ͥ͂̓̈́̚ͅ ̱͇̦̀̿̆ͫ̃̏ỷ̥͙̩̽̑̏̀ͣo̜̗͔̩̲͚̎͋͐u͈͙̠͉͙ͦ̈̈́'͍̺̮̌͐ͪ̀̃r͚̹͔͉̘͒ͮĕ͓̬̟̻̑̊ ̣͈̽͐̑̿̓d̲̖͉̓͗ͬȏ̤̤͔̎ͭi̱̠̦͑̅ṅ̫͋͑g͚̻͐ͩ ̖̣ͣt͋̐o͖ͫ ̾him?

GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT

Jon fights back as much as he is able, forcing his body to sit on the edge of the coffee table, at a right angle to Martin.

I need to apologize.

I͚ ͇̑c͙͋a̪̚n͕̊'͊tͩ.

Devastated, Jon buries his head in his hands.

“Look, why don’t you go for a walk or something.  Get some air.”

Jon turns, looking at him incredulously, but remains silent.

“It’ll do you some good.  I know how…upset the hunger makes you, and you’re clearly exhausted, so…just go, give yourself some space.”

Martin’s words are kind, but his tone has tensed.  Furious at himself, Jon tries desperately to will away his pulsing anger.

He’s too good for me.

“You’ll be alright here for a bit?” he asks, as gently as he can muster.

“Yes, Jon.  Go.  It’ll do you good,” Martin replies, voice kept intentionally flat.

Jon knows he’s right, Knows he’ll be calmer afterwards—and makes a decision.  He needs to communicate his remorse to Martin somehow, no matter how much the Eye protests it.  Leaning over, every instinct screaming at him to stop, he plants a kiss on top of Martin’s head.

“I love you,” he murmurs, voice muffled by curls.

Jon strides quickly across the room and out the door.

Shivering, Jon pulls his hands inside his jacket sleeves and tips his head down to brace against the cruel wind.  Night has truly fallen, and he has been walking for the better part of an hour beneath the glow of resplendent constellations.  A sense of awe envelopes him.  In a meditation of sorts, he’s been naming each one as he finds them, choosing to focus on the magnificence of this part of creation that even the Beholding cannot fully understand.

Now, however, he is just cold.  Cold, calm, and filled with regret.

Martin was right.  As always.

Reaching the front door, his numbed fingers fumble with the frosted metal for a moment before he manages to open it.  Heat washes over his face as soon as he enters, the tips of his ears and nose burning as they regain feeling.  Even with the warmth, the house is entirely shrouded in darkness.  Jon flips on the light over the entryway, revealing Martin where he lies on the couch, having propped himself up on a mountain of pillows.  Soft snores echo around the cottage.

He’s too good for me.

With a sigh, Jon leaves his coat and boots in the entryway and walks as quietly as possible to the refrigerator, taking out the leftover soup to reheat it.  It’s not enough, not nearly enough to cover over the hurt he’s inflicted, and he knows it.

But it might be a start.

Within a few minutes, the simmering soup fills the cottage with fragrance, wafting into every dust-laden corner.  Jon turns when he hears Martin stirring behind him, groaning as he sits up.  Immediately, he reaches out a shaky arm for a tissue, dissolving into yet another fit of churning coughs that Jon knows will bring him no relief.

A hot knife of guilt stabs through him.

YͬOͩ͋Ṳͭ ̙͇̮M̬̮̹ͅẠ̞̥̾D̺̩͛̅ͬE͍̱̔̌͆ ̣̝̃͊̅̋I͈͕͙ͤ̏ͬȚ͕̟ͪ̋ͮͣ ͚̩͕̝͑̈̚W̺͒ͬ̒̂̉̆̋O͙̣̘̽̈́̑̀̚R̺̖̻͙ͩ̾̇̾͛S͈̻̗̲͇ͭ͋̈́ͦE̖̞̫ͮ̅͛̓̔͂ ̝̝̬͈̞͔͒̎̇͛Ỹ͕͈̱̘͓̥͓̏ͨÔ̮̑ͯ́ͪ̋̾͛̈U͈̟̰̼̪ͪ̓̇̽̂ͥ ͎̳̖̠́̿̒̑̒̉ͬM͍̹͔͍̦̎̍̈͂ͨ̚Ạ̣̖̋ͯͧͭ̒ͤ͋ͧD͖͇̳̼̳̈́̽ͪ̿̈̊E̻̠͖ͫ͒̋͐͋̇͛̚ ͎̬̭͋̇̑͂̐̐͑̓I͈͉͔̒̽̈́ͭ̈ͩͣ̊Ṱ͈͆̆ͥ̐̀̾̽̉ͅ ̤͍̣͉̦͍͂̑̑̎̈W̳̫̰͑͆ͪ͆̔ͣͯ̂O̬̘͇̺ͤ͂̊͐̾͊ͅR̙̰̒ͮ͂͗͒ͫ̎ͪS̪̰̻̻͍ͥ͊ͩ̚ͅḚ̱̤͌̔̐͌͒ͪ̀ ̮ͧͦ̽̃̽͂͂̊Y̱̻̌̔͋͌̌̌̚Ő̮̥͈̭͙̲͊̎U͕͚̩͕ͫ̒̐̾ ̭̟̜͆̓̽̈́ͅM͕̯̓̍̊̈̈A̮ͯͭͩ̓̅̚D͚̗̞̩̙̏E͓͈̿͊̂ͯ ̟̮̤̝̼I̱͈ͬ́̾T̺̳ͧͫ ̫̩ͯ̓Wͧ̎ͩŎ̊R͖̜S͋Ẹ

Jon gives himself a moment, taking a few measured breaths with eyes closed.

STOP. Breathe. Focus.

As the fit comes to an unproductive end, Jon steels himself, and brings Martin a glass of water along with his prescribed fever-reducers.  He stares in silence for a moment as Martin looks up, regarding him warily.

“Are you…are you alright?” Jon asks hesitantly.

Martin’s eyes soften a bit at this, though the look of suspicion has not entirely left him.  Nodding, he reaches out to take Jon’s offerings and mouths a “thank you.”  Jon shifts his weight uncomfortably as he watches Martin’s movements, still a bit unsteady as he swallows the pills and downs the glass of water.

“Would you like some soup?  I’ve reheated it, I-I can bring it to you.”

Martin clears his throat painfully before replying, voice wrecked, and the beginnings of a smile on his face.

“That sounds lovely, dear.  Thank you.”

Dear dear dear dear

Heart skipping a beat, he practically bounds back into the kitchen to fetch a bowl for both of them, spilling just a bit on his shirt in the process.  He hurriedly places Martin’s bowl in front of him on the coffee table before nervously taking a seat on the opposite end of the sofa, desperately hoping it’s the right decision.

Martin huffs out a laugh, turning to face Jon with an amused grin.

“I suppose you ought to call this ‘Apology Soup.’”

Jon’s eyebrows shoot up into his hair, and Martin continues his half-hearted, uncomfortable laughter.

“M-Martin, I—”

Martin stammers over him in a rush, anxiety dripping from every word.

“Look, we all have our moments, Jon, a-and I know you’ve got a lot to shoulder right now.  You’re hungry, for god’s sake.  And exhausted, because of me, a-and—”

Jon shakes his head violently at this, interrupting him immediately.

“No! No, Martin, it’s not…it’s not because of you, ever, I swear.”

Martin meets his gaze tentatively, eyes starting to brim—from illness or emotion, Jon could never be sure.

“I mean, it’s true in part—I am hungry, and the Eye is not pleased with me, but…none of that is yours to bear.  None of it.  Looking after you while you’re ill is…well, it doesn’t come naturally to me, but…I want to do it.  I want to show you that I care for you, always.  But the Eye—”

“—the Eye wants to cause you pain,” Martin finishes, balling up a fist.  “And it’s using me to do it.”

“…perhaps.”

Martin nods, thinking for a moment while running a hand through his hair.  With a sigh, he continues.

“Look, it—it wasn’t…nice, and I’d prefer it hadn’t happened, but…I forgive you.  Because I know you’re sorry—”

He gestures at the soup.

“—and I know it’s not entirely your fault anyway.  It’s the Eye, and it’s hungry, and…I understand how draining it can be to suddenly become a caretaker.  You can’t deny that, not…not with me,” he says, eyes filled with intense sincerity.

Jon shakes his head incredulously, turning bodily to face him.

You’re too good for me you’re too good you’re too good

“Martin, I…I had no right to take it out on you.  There is no excuse, not even the hunger, not even the Eye.   I…I love you, and I’m so sorry.”

Jon’s voice breaks for just a moment, and he blinks away the sudden moisture pooling in the corners of his vision.  Martin reaches out a hand, placing it on Jon’s knee and gazing deeply into his eyes.

“I love you too, Jon.  You’re forgiven,” he says, before giving Jon’s knee a small shake.

This, at last, pulls a smile onto Jon’s face, and he allows himself to relax into the sofa as they eat in silence.

The next day finds Martin utterly spent, and Jon battling a pounding headache he had been sure would fade with sleep.  It takes him all morning to work up the energy, but Martin eventually manages to drag himself from the bed, leaning heavily on Jon as they trudge down the stairs.  Neither can manage to do anything but sit in silence, Jon curling up in the armchair while Martin stretches out on the couch.

Jon’s getting desperate now, his entire body shaking.  All he can think about is the terrible, gnawing hunger, constantly clawing at his insides for control.  His thoughts are cyclical and uniform:

They’re coming they’re coming they’re coming

Just hold on just hold on just hold on

They’re coming they’re coming they’re coming

At last—

A knock at the door.

Static immediately fills Jon’s head, and when he looks down, he’s standing at the door with thick envelope in his hands.  With horror, he feels a sickeningly wide grin plastered across his face, saliva spilling between his teeth, eyes opening on all corners of his face.

“Jon?”  Martin calls from the sofa, sounding slightly alarmed.

D͓ọ̹n̬̺'̦̦͗t̲͆̚ ͉͛̓ͭt̺̀̅ͩũ̾͂̄r̪̈͒͆ň̀ͥ̄ ̖̘̍ͦa̘͍̗r̘̬̍ő̰ṳ͗n̖d͆

Hͮe̻͑'̬̔l̻͂ͩl̘̙ͨͮ ͊̈́ͬ͂b̯̓̾͌ͫë̮͕̖͖ ͙͓̺͇ͥ͂f͕̐́̀͌͒r͓͙͚̳̈͗i̪̮̦ͬ̀̄̉g̪̗̲ͣ̍͛̈́h̯͈̣ͥ͂̈̔t̰̥ͬ̉̃ͬ̊è͍͍ͬ̉̍̀n͔̣̤̭̽ͭͅe̼͙̎̐ͪ͂ͅd̳̲̞̟̈́̔̉ ̦̝̭ͣ͒̀͒ĭ͕̮̿̒̚ͅḟ͎̰̱͙͂̍ ̗̣̆͌̈́̉h̟͒̄ͧ̃̂e̠͊̐̓̓ͅ ̟̫̰ͧ̊s͈̐̒̽͒e̤̥̣ͦe̩̍͐̐s͓̖͐ ̘ͪy̥͈o͇û

Jon shoves the corners of his mouth down, wiping it with his sleeve.

Monster.

“I’ll just go upstairs and do this, Martin.  Don’t…don’t look at me, alright?  I’m going to turn around now,” he replies, voice shaking with effort.

He does.  Martin has refused to look away.

Eyes growing wide beneath his glasses, his mouth falls open in surprise.

But not fear.

“Well, that is…certainly unexpected,” he says, initial shock melting into a warm smile.

Jon cannot reply, mouth hanging open in astonishment for a moment before he snaps it shut.

“What?  It’s hardly the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” he continues as he roots around on the couch beside him for a moment, then waves his headphones in the air.  “Come sit down.”

Jon can’t help but bark out a laugh.

Unbelievable.

Martin swings his legs over the side of the sofa, straining to pull himself upward to sitting with significant difficulty.  At this, Jon’s trance seems to break, and he crosses the room quickly, pushing Martin’s shoulders gently back against the pillows.

“No no, don’t—just lie back, darling.”

He then sits at the opposite end of the sofa, pulling Martin’s legs to rest over his lap.

With a giddy grin, Martin slips on his headphones and pulls his blanket closer.

At long last, the Archivist drinks his fill.

Oh, damn it all.

Should have known.

Tucked away in the bathroom for the moment, Jon rubs at his steadily dripping nose, willing it to stop being useless.  All day, he’s been downing glass after glass of water, trying to ease the persistent tickle that’s made its home in the back of his throat.  He’s quite sure he’s got a fever now, if the sheen on his forehead is anything to go by.

Wonderful.  Just wonderful.

Martin has made significant improvements over the past few days, using the inhaler less and less as time passes.  His coughing is still painful and deep and awful, and he’s not able to move around much without becoming winded, but his fever is just barely perceptible now.

Jon, on the other hand, is finding it increasingly hard to focus.

Later that day, Jon stands in the kitchen, washing the dishes from their lunch.  His vision swims dizzyingly as the tickling at the back of his nose and throat pulls tears to his eyes, and he constantly sniffs at the building fullness of his sinuses.  When Martin begins coughing loudly from the living room, Jon can’t help but feel overwhelmed with relief.  He hastens to grab a paper towel, blowing into it hastily, hoping the sound will be drowned out.

His hopes are proven to be in vain, however, when this involuntarily pulls a dry, hacking cough from him—one that he cannot stop in time with Martin’s.

Shit.

He can feel Martin’s eyes boring into him even before he turns around.

“Oh no.  Did I get you ill, love?” he asks, guilt lacing up every word.

“No no no, it’s just allergies,” Jon stammers, washing his hands.

“You’ve never had allergies before.”

Jon turns back around in surprise.  “How would you know?”

“I’m really quite observant, dear.  And we have worked together for a number of years.”

At this, Jon sighs wetly, tipping his head back in exasperation.  The movement causes something to shift, and he scrambles to tear off a paper towel in response, pressing it to his face—

Several forceful sneezes tear their way out, leaving pulsing, painful sinuses in their wake.

“Bless you, love.  That sounds awful.”

Jon sighs miserably.

Nothing for it now.

With reluctance, he slinks back into the living room, flopping down on the couch morosely.  Martin pushes the box of tissues toward him wordlessly, and Jon mutters his thanks before trying to clear his head.

When all is said and done, he leans back against the sofa, sighing.

“Jon, I am so sorry,” Martin says, anxiety touching every word.

Jon can’t help but laugh.

“Martin, don’t be ridiculous.”

“I am, though.”

“You’re what?  Sorry or ridiculous?”

“Well…both, I suppose.”

Jon grins widely at this, and Martin can’t help but mirror him.  After a moment, Jon scoots closer, laying his head to rest on Martin’s broad shoulder.  Planting a kiss on his burning forehead, Martin gently stretches his own blanket them both.

“Stop it, Martin, sit back down!”

Jon’s voice is in tatters, but he puts as much force behind these words as he can muster, pulling at Martin’s arm from where he’s curled up on the sofa.

“You stop it, Jon.  You’re ill,” Martin says matter-of-factly, before pressing a hand against Jon’s forehead, frowning at the heat he finds there, then walking determinedly toward the kitchen.

Jon throws his arms wide, sputtering in disbelief.

“You’re ill, for Christ’s sake!”

Martin huffs as he flicks on the kettle, turning around with one hand on his hip.

“Sure.  My fever’s gone, though.  Can’t say the same for you.”

Jon groans in exasperation, sniffing heavily before resting his head in his hands.  Rubbing at his painful sinuses, he begs silently for something to loosen, before moving on to his throbbing temples.

He hears Martin puttering in the kitchen, shaking pills out of a bottle.  Turning to look, he watches as Martin fills a glass of water, picks up the fever reducers, and—stops dead in his tracks.

He sways before slumping heavily into a kitchen chair, breathing hard and rapid.

“Martin!”

Jon is on his feet in a split-second, and goes immediately for his inhaler, shaking it as he half-jogs over to him.  Martin takes it gratefully, hands trembling, and Jon sinks down into the chair adjacent to him.

Face ashen, he draws the medicine into his lungs, before beginning yet another painful, congested fit that leaves him exhausted and gasping for air.  Jon shakes his head frustratedly as he watches.

Stubborn fool.

After a few minutes of regaining his breath, Martin looks up at Jon sheepishly, leaning his head onto one fist.

“We’re a right mess, aren’t we?” he smirks, eyes streaming.

Jon can’t help but chuckle in spite of himself as he stands to finish making their tea.

Two weeks later finds them strolling through the Highland countryside.

Martin still tires easily, and Jon makes sure not to push them too hard, enforcing a slow pace with many rests.  Although his Jon’s illness has been entirely gone for several days now, Martin’s got them both bundled up, insisting that Jon wear a hat with an obscene orange pompom and a matching scarf.  For his part, Jon knows better than to argue when Martin’s fussing.

They’ve been walking without rest for nearly twenty minutes now, the longest Martin has gone to date.  Autumn wind whips up the fallen leaves along the path, swirling around them in a vortex of orange and yellow and red, drawing delighted laughter from Martin.  Jon can’t help but beam at him.

God, I love him.

Looking at him now, his soft smile has become near permanent, freckled cheeks rounded and rosy beneath his glasses.  Jon has recently trimmed his hair, cropping the sides close and leaving long curls on top, which now blow in the crisp breeze.  Dark roots are beginning the process of replacing the faded white, and the fresh stubble of his beard is following suit.

Though he knows he’s staring, Jon cannot bear to pull his eyes away.

He is the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.

Martin has walked ahead of him now, unaware that Jon has not followed until he’s reached the bottom of the small incline.  Looking around for him, the face that greets Martin is lopsided, grinning, adoring, scarred, and—

Jon.

“What is it?” Martin calls out, giggling.

Jon blinks for a moment, stock still, before joining Martin at the bottom of the hill.  Slipping a hand into Martin’s gloved one, he lifts himself to his tiptoes, brushing their wind-chapped lips together.

“Nothing at all, darling,” he murmurs against him before lacing his arms around Martin’s neck, deepening the kiss when he lets out a noise of pleasant surprise.  His hands snake around Jon’s waist, drawing him closer, sending lightning through Jon’s entire being.  Arms still firmly hanging around him, Jon pulls away for a moment to look at him, greeted with the warm hazel of Martin’s eyes.

“Just that…I think you’re it, for me.”

Martin flushes scarlet at this, grin widening before he whips Jon around swiftly, pulling him into a dip, causing Jon to clutch at him in surprise.  Strong arms suspend him above the ground effortlessly.

“Woah, M-Martin!”

They lock eyes, the sun above illuminating Martin’s head like a halo.

It takes Jon’s breath away.

“I think you’re it for me too.”

The world around them, everything that grows darker with each day, fades away in the warmth of their embrace.  They are certain of only one thing—

Whatever comes, they will weather the storm as one.