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late-to-the-magnus-archives · 2 years ago

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And Eat It, Too - Chapter Three: Double-Stitched

In which Georgie rocks, Jon is marked by the Slaughter, Elias is a bigger bastard than usual, and Michael tries its hand at some nifty new surgical techniques...

>>> NOW ON AO3!

Bastard Elias warning.

Slaughter-typical violence.

(Masterpost including playlist)

CHAPTER THREE

Going to work is the last thing he wants to do right now.

Jon wants to find the “last resort” Gertrude supposedly left behind.

Jon wants to avoid his coworkers, who no doubt hate his guts and will believe nothing he says.

Jon wants to go back to bed and sleep, except that will mean traveling through other people’s dreams again, watching their suffering.

Two were missing last night. He knows what that means. It means they died. The Fears finally caught them.

He’s ill as he tries to explain to Georgie what happened over toast and tea.

Not last night. No. He won’t touch that. She may not be able to feel fear, but he knows she’d call him an idiot, and she’d be right.

“What good are all these eye powers if nobody could find you for a month?” Georgie says.

“I’m still not completely sure they couldn’t,” Jon mutters. “Elias might have just left me there.”

Georgie looks suitably horrified. “You could have died.”

“Welcome to my life.”

“Jon. Quit. I keep telling you—”

“You know I can’t. We can’t. None of us can. It… it’s been taken from us, somehow.” He sighs. “Besides… I have to stop the Circus.”

“It shouldn’t all be on you, Jon,” says Georgie, and the look she gives him is why he fell in love years ago, it’s why he thought he could make it work even though he was made of spikes and sorrow.

“Well. It is,” he says. “Anyway, I… still need to look for a new place today.”

She sips tea. “Careful. The last time you said you were moving out at once, you disappeared taking trash to the bins.”

Kidnapped again, is what she isn’t saying. “Well, that was hardly my plan, was it?” he says.

“I don’t know. Was it?” And that look is why it did not work, and why their parting was less than amicable. “You weren’t being careful.”

“I didn’t know they were going to do that!”

“I think you should expect it, by now. Make your default mode going to be kidnapped.” She sips her tea. “I haven’t seen a lot of wise choices from you since you got here, Sims.”

Jon sighs. Definitely not telling her about last night. “I’m sorry, Georgie. About all of this.”

“Well, I’m not.” She clears the plates. “Let me know where you move.”

“No. You don’t deserve to be dragged any further into this.”

She plants her hands on the table and leans into his face. “Don’t insult me,” says Georgie Barker, What the Ghost podcast host, once the love of his life, and now the only person he truly counts as a friend. “You’re not the only one who gets to make choices here.”

“Now who’s making unwise decisions?”

“Not me. I’m not the one late for work.” She pauses, putting dishes in the sink. “If you’re gone before I get back, at least… feed the Admiral one more time. Put the key in the mail slot.”

“I will.” I still love you, but not like that. “Thank you.”

“Sure.” She doesn’t look at him again before leaving to dress for work.

It’s later that day that Jon realizes he can read French.

But he can’t read French. He was always rubbish at other languages, lacking the focus (or whatever magic it requires) to think through words in something other than his mother tongue.

But that didn’t stop him from reading and living François Deschamps’ recollection of the shit-show that was The Corruption seducing Benoît Maçon, filling him with bugs crawling out from under his fingernails and bliss he never realized was false as he let the thing consume him from within and become, become, become.

Jon read it. In French. And didn’t even notice.

It takes him a moment, but Jon decides this falls into creepy more than it does useful.

At least he knows where Gertrude went from there. Her laptop was finally proving itself worth the effort it took to crack.

New Zealand. Huh. “Right,” he mutters, scribbling notes. “Date range and country—maybe we can find something, some statement showing where she—”

“Jon?”

Jon hunches.

He’d managed to avoid everyone so far, but sure enough, Martin tracked him down. (In his office. Not much of a hiding spot.)

And he brought tea. “I… hello.” Martin inches in, stepping so quietly for such a large man, and places the tea on the desk.

“Martin,” says Jon softly, already feeling awful, the guilt from months of stalking and paranoia just lingering like disease.

Martin suddenly bursts. “I’m so sorry, John, I – Elias didn’t even tell any of us that you’d been kidnapped. I didn’t know –”

This is worse.

Jon raises his hands. “It’s all right! Martin, it… Elias didn’t tell anyone. There’s no way you could have known, and I wasn’t exactly here before, anyway.”

“No, you weren’t.”

It’s weird, that confirmation. Jon half-wanted the lie of social acceptability, the denial of his bad behavior, but Martin didn’t do that.

Jon decides that’s good.

“I mean,” Martin suddenly continues, “I’m sure you would have been, if you could.”

Jon makes a sound. He doesn’t deserve that grace.

“Are you all right? They… didn’t hurt you?”

Jon touches the bruises on his chin, hidden by poor lighting and dark skin. Thinks of warped calliope music, choking on a spray of water, plastic hands and violation. “No, I… I’m okay,” he lies, desperately searching for words, and suddenly has to laugh. “I mean, my skin’s in better condition than… ever. Is that… a weird thing to say?”

“A bit?” says Martin.

Jon could hug him right now. “It was basically all she talked about,” he says, floodgates opening with foolishness and enthusiasm. “Orsinov. I… it was…”

Martin’s face is a journey.

Don’t be so honest, Sims, he upbraids himself, lessons he learned as a child and has apparently forgotten now. “How has everyone been?” he asks instead.

And it’s about what he thought.

Tim is not okay. That’s an ache almost as bad as Sasha, except as long as Tim’s alive, maybe he can fix it.

Melanie (damn you, Elias, for hiring her) is a mess, subtly mutinous.

Basira is vibing. Who knew?

“And I don’t know where Daisy is, and that’s fine by me,” says Martin with the sweetest vindictiveness Jon has ever heard.

“All right.” Questions bubble, trying to burst from him like cooking oil, but he keeps himself to just one more. “Martin, does the rest of the Institute even know what’s going on down here?”

“Not really? I mean, Tim’s been going on about it to anyone who listens, but they just think he had a bit of a breakdown. I mean, they can quit.”

Jon sighs.

And then Martin talks about someone named Hannah whom Jon’s never seen in his life leaving to have her baby, and something about a milk incident in the breakroom, and he is lost, lost, and wonders if this is how people feel when they talk to him.

Martin seems to sense it and jumps back on topic. “So, are you coming back?”

New Zealand, Jon thinks. “I… I’m not sure. I may have to travel. Sort of a treasure hunt.”

“Oh?”

“In the sense of the world not ending, I mean.”

Martin looks exactly as shocked as Jon thinks is appropriate for that. “Oh.”

“I’ll keep in touch,” Jon promises, too little, too late, and then when Martin warms, makes it impersonal. “I need you digging into things. Researching for me.”

Martin’s warmth dims.

Jon misses it. “Um. Here. Anywhere in mid-2014, anything mentioning New Zealand. Can you, ah…”

“Sure, Jon,” says Martin, taking the post-it and brushing his fingers.

Martin goes red, stammers something indecipherable, and runs out of the office.

Jon stares at the door. “All right.”

At least Martin doesn’t hate him.

Jon doesn’t know why. Martin should. But he doesn’t.

Jon takes up all the statements he can find on the Spiral, and turns the tape recorder on.

Jon did not go to see Elias, and now, it’s far too late. Past eight; he’s missed his chance to look for a new place to live, too, and he’s kicking himself for it.

“Couldn’t just leave at a reasonable hour, could I,” he mutters, packing his things away with unnecessary aggression. “No, I had to stay until dark fell, because that’s the smart way to handle this, that’s the way to avoid getting kidnapped again.”

Fitting, he supposes, to lose track of time while studying the Spiral.

So many victims. The horror of doubting everything, from whether they really found a child’s tooth in their coffee to their own actual existence. It’s about fear, after all—the slow and terrifying loss of sanity, with awareness, bit by bit—and sometimes, Michael shows up. He’s not the only manifestation of the Spiral, but he is memorable: a charming, handsome blond man, smiling at them and invading their homes and laughing as they go mad and then die.

Elias was right. This was a terrible idea.

He’s not right, and he can go to hell, Jon retorts, shoving it aside, and checks the cheap, prepaid phone he just finished charging. He’s proud of himself for remembering to pick this up on the way in.

(Not so proud of the fact that he thought burner phone like the spy novels, but it was thrilling at the time.)

His bank account is, fortunately, all right. Elias continued to pay him while he was on the run for murder. Go figure. Jon can afford a cab, and that seems a much better idea than dealing with public transport right now. He thinks he has enough for a deposit on a new apartment, too, if he doesn’t stay too close to the Institute—gods know, it’s expensive in Chelsea.

“Not fair, is it?” he mutters to no one as he stalks from his office, glaring around like an angry badger in case he runs into anyone else. “Not enough to deal with the end of the world, no, not enough to sleep with mind-eating monsters and dancing mannequins, but we’ve got to pay bills on top of it. Ridiculous.”

Up the stairs (maybe it’s all those Buried statements, but elevators feel bad right now), through the quiet, dark library, and he’s almost to the front door when he hears the shouting.

It’s Melanie. She’s screaming?

She’s cursing.

Someone is getting their ears torn out, anyway.

Jon’s hand is on the door. A step from freedom. He could just go. He could just do it—

“I’ll kill you!” he hears, and runs in that direction before he can think.

Her raging turns to true screams, and he drops his bag to run faster.

Rosie’s gone home, desk empty, but Elias’s office is lit, the door open, its glass shattered all over the floor.

The screaming stops just as he leaps in.

Melanie is on her knees.

She’s gripping a wicked-looking knife.

She’s also gripping her head, digging in with her nails so hard that she’s making her scalp bleed, and whatever she’s staring at is nowhere in this room.

“Melanie!” Jon cries, going to her.

Elias sits behind his desk, unruffled, eyebrows up. “I was wondering when you’d pop in for our chat. Pity you didn’t come sooner.”

What was this? What was this? “What did you do to her?”

“Nothing I would do to you, if that’s what you’re worried about,” says Elias.

Melanie screams.

It’s long, drawn until she’s out of breath, and then she just goes quiet again.

She’s cut into her own ear with the knife. Jon pulls it from her hand and drops it on the floor, relieved that she doesn’t fight him. “Melanie. Melanie, look at—”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Jon,” says Elias, who’s already gone back to scribbling on paperwork. “You don’t want her associating her current… predicament with your face, I assure you.”

“What. Did. You. Do?”

Elias sighs, puts down his pen, and steeples his fingers with a long-suffering look. “While you’ve been gone—”

“Kidnapped!”

“Yes. While you’ve been gone, she has tried to kill me three times.”

Jon blinks at him. “What?”

“She doesn’t believe me, you see—that my death would result in your death, and Basira’s, and everybody’s. Though the part of her that does believe considers it a fair trade.”

Jon looks back and forth, back and forth, out of words, feeling his experience being eaten by the Eye, feeling pleasure coursing through him as a sick and unwanted thank you for all the new horror, and turns away from them both, panting.

“What did you do, Elias?” he says to the floor.

“I showed her something she did not want to see.” So casual, backed by the scratch of pen on paper.

“Showed her? What, you… shoved… images into her brain?” Another power he knew nothing about?

“I warned her last time that if she did it again, I’d burn them into her memory,” Elias says in a near-whisper. “Well, here we are.” And he makes a genteel shrug, hands to either side, politely regretful with his whole body.

Melanie is shaking, crying silently. She seems completely disconnected, drowned in whatever Elias did.

Jon wonders if any of the Eye’s glaring gifts include setting people on fire.

“That’s more the Devastation’s thing, I think,” says Elias. “Now, we need to continue our discussion from last night.”

“We damn well do not,” says Jon, trying to lift her. “She needs a doctor.”

“She needs to sit in it and learn,” snaps Elias. “And we need to talk.”

“Go to hell, Elias,” Jon says, and pulls her up anyway.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Elias calls after them, but does not follow.

Melanie is hard to move. She’s stiff, unresponsive. Her whole body is a rictus of misery. And she’s panting.

“Come on, Melanie,” he mutters, knowing she can’t hear him. “Almost there. Don’t scream again. We don’t need police attention, or some… predator, drawn toward the sound. You’re all right. You can do this.”

She makes no noise at all.

He looks for a cab. No way she’s good for the tube right now, absolutely no—

Melanie attacks him.

She had a second knife somewhere (and he knew that, he knew that, some part of his Eye-brain knew that she did, but he’d ignored it), and she gets him deep in the shoulder and he goes down with a cry.

She screams at him, roars, raising both hands with the knife overhead like some kind of vampire slayer, and against the streetlights and cloud-dark sky, she looks completely insane.

Instinct curls Jon up, making himself as small a target as possible.

Silence.

He peeks.

She is gone. Off, into the night, who knows where.

“What?” he gasps. “She stopped?”

Did she go back after Elias?

No, he thinks. Even in her current state (and he knows somehow that this madness isn’t Elias’ fault, but he doesn’t want to believe that, so he doesn’t), she will go nowhere near the “heart of the Institute” for a while. In fact, Elias’ proximity might be why she ran.

His shoulder is beginning to feel…not good.

Jon sits up, panting. His hand comes away very wet and very red.

“I leave you alone for a few minutes, Archivist, and look what you’ve gotten yourself into,” purrs Michael from behind him, sounding on the edge of laughter. ��But then, I suppose you can’t be blamed for the Slaughter’s attentions.”

Fear leaps, juddering his already rapid heart.

All the statements he’s read flood through him, there and known in an instant, a half-dozen traumas in the blink of an eye. He swallows. “The Slaughter? Melanie? Since when?”

“Oh, I don’t know that,” says Michael, now crouching in front of him. His human guise is an insult, cherubic, still a large man, but far too innocent for the monster it hides.

Jon blinks once.

Michael is significantly closer without having seemed to move.

That, or blood loss is doing a number on him. I’m blacking out, he thinks, slightly panicked.

Elias has to be seeing this whole thing. They’re still on Institute property.

Jon knows he won’t be given aid. Not when all of this can feed the damned Eye.

I can do it myself, he thinks as he stands.That’s a lot of blood, he thinks as goes back down to his knees.

“It’s almost sad to see you like this,” says Michael, watching him with complete fascination. “Almost.”

“Either help me, or go away,” Jon snaps.

Michael laughs. “No?” it says, because both suggestions are funny, and Jon tries to crawl down the last of the stairs.

Melanie. He has to find her.

He has no chance of finding her.

The Eye could help him find her.

She’s infected by the Slaughter, somehow.

If he finds her, she’ll kill him.

If he doesn’t find her, she’ll kill someone else—or worse, infect other people.

Jon chokes and looks at his shoulder. Is he infected? Is he about to go mad, slashing at innocents?

“You do have some protections, you know,” says Michael, who has crouched again on each step as Jon’s achieved it, watching him at eye-height with the same unblinking interest. “A little wound like that won’t make you their servant.”

“Oh, good, I’ll bleed out with my own mind intact,” Jon says, and tries to stand again.

A car passes. A cab—

Jon couldn’t get its attention in time. Just raising his good hand is… a lot. “Ugh,” he says, and decides to lie down on the cold, stone step, facing the sky, and hope that rain comes to wash the blood away.

Michael leans over, ruining the view. “Are you done already?” it says, hair curtaining Jon’s face.

“If I say yes, will you go away?” Jon says.

Michael laughs, and Jon closes his eyes, riding it through, trying to find some place within it that doesn’t hurt so much.

And then Michael is close, so close that its breath tickles his face, and it has no odor at all. “You. Need. A door,” it whispers, and Jon falls through.

He lands in the Corridors with a thud and stares as a ceiling-door—yellow, of course—slams shut and disappears.

Or was it a ceiling-door?

Wait.

Is he on the ceiling?

Wait.

Michael laughs. “I do so love these first few moments, Archivist. I would keep you like this forever, if I could.”

His shoulder is throbbing. His heart is racing. “Let’s see Elias talk to me in here,” Jon challenges no one for no discernable reason, and then moans as Michael prods the wound.

“S-stop that,” Jon says. “It hurts.”

“No,” it says.

Prod, poke, stab.

Jon decides he has enough energy to roll away from it.

Michael stays crouched there. Blood paints its long fingers—his blood—and it seems more interested in him than ever.

“What the hell did you do that for?” Jon says with more courage than he feels, and then realizes what Michael did.

His shoulder has been stitched.

No, not sane stitches. That pattern means something, makes the eyes spin if looked at too long, but by gum, the wound is closed.

He’s stunned.

“I have made you speechless,” observes Michael, deeply pleased. “We’ll add that to the tally, shall we?”

“Wh… why did you…”

“What will you do now, Archivist?”

Jon scowls. “How should I know? I… I need to find Melanie.”

“You do know she’ll return on her own, don’t you?” says Michael. “She is marked by the Slaughter, but she still belongs to the Ceaseless Watcher. You only need wait.”

“You are not the reasonable one in this conversation,” snaps Jon, thinking of a victim who couldn’t sleep until her heart gave out, thinking of a priest convinced he was possessed because the Spiral tricked him into eating parishioners, thinking of—

“You’re very concerned with my dietary choices,” says Michael.

“You had no right to eat them,” he snaps. “They were innocent.”

“Innocent? What is innocent? I am fear, Archivist; fear of madness and delusion, fear that they create themselves. I only drink it, like a flower drinks the light. What is innocent? They create, I take. That is the natural order of things.”

“It’s wrong, is what it is,” Jon says, shaky, aware he’s inside Michael right now, aware that he’ll have no egress unless Michael lets him go. “Those people didn’t deserve to be driven mad and then destroyed.”

“Oh?” Michael tilts its head and smiles, smiles, its face splitting like some sort of alien’s, its darkness spilling out through its lips and its ears and its eyes and its pores until it is a writhing mass of smudgy black, veiling the human form. “And who, in your opinion, does? Not that your opinion will change things, you understand. But I am curious.”

“I am not assigning victims for you!” Jon says, pressing back against the wall (it’s papered, why does it feel like flesh, why does it feel like skin) and then lurching forward again, shuddering.

“Then you cannot critique my choice of them.”

How did this happen, how did he get himself into this mess, is Michael actually asking, will it take advice if given, would it ever stop taking people (Jon knows that’s a no), does he actually have the right to declare who deserves death and who does not—

“Archivist,” sings Michael.

“I’m thinking,” Jon says.

“Do you wish to sleep here?”

That takes a moment to parse. “What, in your stomach? No!”

“Then I shall take you away. If I leave you bleeding on the street tonight, something will just come and kill you. And that pleasure is mine, someday.”

Jon groans. Returning to Georgie’s now feels like some kind of defeat. “I don’t want to.”

“Oh, Archivist,” says Michael, having gone back to looking human. “I don’t want you there. You have to be quiet there, and I dislike it.”

“I said I’m not sleeping in the Corridors.”

Michael grins. Behind it opens a door.

There is a room. A fancy one.

It’s some kind of penthouse. High up, the far wall entirely of glass and framing London’s skyline, a stunning view across the Thames and a glimpse of Westminster Palace.

The only lights are ambient, from the city, and he can only see what’s immediately beyond the door.

Jon could not fight this curiosity to save his life. He has to snoop.

It’s largely empty, furniture wrapped in sheets, dark and cool and slightly golden from the nightlights of the city. Jon wanders to the windows and stares down at the narrow, tree-lined street without cars, across the glittering water, at the distant lighted places of government.

He barely hears traffic. It smells like nothing.

He turns.

Michael has commandeered one of the sheet-covered couches and lies there, watching him.

Don’t do it, Jon tells himself, then goes to explore, anyway.

The kitchen has more (and fancier) cooking implements than he could use for the rest of his life.

The bedrooms have the same glass walls, but darker, as if covered with some kind of film for privacy. They are also furnished, and one closet is full of clothes.

The bathroom is bigger than Georgie’s whole apartment.

He looks for a sign of who owns it, tries to determine if it’s someone Michael has killed, tries to find any indication of what the hell this is.

Nothing. He storms back out. “What is this?”

“It belongs to one of us who is.”

“You’ll have to explain better than that.”

“The worker-of-clay is gone, Archivist,” says Michael, and its tone is bad again, its tone bitter, like when it told its story in the Circus, and Jon listened without breath. “When Gertrude succeeded, and the altar to me fell, he tore out his veins to dissolve himself in crimson mud, and all we had built was scattered. Some of us were cast to all the places that aren’t. Some… survived, though Sanikov Land did not. One of those who lived owns this place. I asked, and he has given it to me.”

“Given it to you? What—someone touched by the Distortion has a job?” Jon has no idea why that didn’t occur to him before. Even Gabriel (the worker-of-clay, indeed) must have had a source of income. Still, it seems absurd. “I doubt you’ll be paying the property tax,” he snaps, fighting the sorrow he hears in its voice, striving not to know the regret and loss at the failure of its ritual, but he cannot help it, cannot push it aside, and he sits on another sheeted thing as he takes it all in.

It had been so happy when the Great Twisting almost came true. Weirdly, innocently happy.

Ivo Lensik's father, he reminds himself, fighting compassion. The man on the stair who wasn’t there. Deborah Madaki and her entire sculpting class.

“Do you think I deserved to fall, Archivist?” says Michael in a light tone.

“Yes,” says Jon, softly. “But I’m…” Not sure? “You’re evil.”

“What is evil? Do you blame the sun for for burning? The water for drowning? Lions, for hunting gazelle? I am a what, Archivist, not a who—and cannot be bound by your definitions.”

“Michael, that’s not true,” Jon says, frustrated.

Michael laughs. “That is a name.”

Jon puts his face in his hands. His shoulder hurts. He feels woozy. “Take me back,” he says, muffled. “I can’t handle your conundrums tonight.”

“No,” says Michael.

“Then I’ll walk out of here,” says Jon.

“Any door you choose will become me, Archivist,” says Michael.

“Why? Why would you do that? You’re trapping me here until I go mad?”

Michael finds his panic hilarious, apparently, and gives it voice.

Jon leans forward, breath shallow, riding it out. He’s almost found it, he thinks: the place to go where Michael’s laugh isn’t so horrid, though he’d be hard-pressed to explain it to anyone.

And Michael answers him. “Because you are not well. Because you will try to chase down a servant of the Slaughter who knows your face and blames you for her pain. Because you have lost more blood than you realize—believe me, your delirium is delicious—and while I will eventually kill you, I do not wish you to die tonight. You are far more pleasing alive, for now.”

Jon sighs and lies back on the sheet. He thinks this might be some kind of settee.

“Rest, Archivist,” Michael soothes.

This is suicidal.

On the other hand, Jon’s not sure he has the strength to go anywhere else right now.

The Eye will do its thing; by morning, he’ll be fine, wound halfway to scarring, blood renewed. Tonight, he thinks he’d make it halfway down whatever fire-escape stairway he could find before passing out.

Assuming Michael even let him enter the fire escape.

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” he murmurs, and just to be stubborn: “I don’t even have my things.”

Michael dangles his bag. When the creature had a chance to grab that, he’ll never know.

An idea surfaces.

It feels awful. Worse than worse, like he’s betraying a friend—but like so many moments in his life right now, he feels he has no choice. “Could you hand me my phone, please?”

Michael does, the small, black rectangle delicately pinched between its sharp fingers.

Jon dials.

“Basira,” he says. “I’m sorry to bother you. Do you know where Daisy is? Right. There’s… something you need to know.” He rubs his face. “Please tell Daisy… don’t kill her. I don’t know what’s happened, but Melanie’s been infected by the Slaughter.”

(part four)

#tma #the magnus archives #tma fic #the magnus archives fic #tma fanfic #long fic #jonathan sims #michael distortion #melanie king #the slaughter #and eat it too

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