#like. its literally no ones fault so i should not be this fucking resentful.

[no27-autonation-honda]

another weekend, another job rejection!

[opens-up-4-nobody]

You don't understand how unhinged I feel trying to construct an ending for Bleach that I personally would enjoy while knowing Bleach does not deserve my time and also not remembering enough to actually make anything coherent. And yet here I am.

[seramilla]

I have two images of Charlie learning Vaggie used too date Emily. One is back off she's mine. The other is guilt did she steal Vaggie from Emily the two had been dating before Vaggie fell and its not like they stopped because they broke up but because Emily thought Vaggie was dead and had no way to contact her. Is she keeping Vaggie from who she should be with. (I suspect after learning about everything Sera and Emily offered to let Vaggie stay in heaven where it's safe and also with Emily but Vaggie turned it down because she didn't want to abandon the hotel when they need it most.) It’s probably a mix of the two Charlie feels guilty whenever she thinks about it but has her horns out whenever she sees Emily around Vaggie.

Charlie is still reeling from the sheer chaos that had been her and Vaggie's meeting with Heaven. Not only had her attempts to make a case for Angel Dust's redemption been thrown back in her face in spectacular fashion, Adam had said he'd specifically be targeting her hotel in a mere month's time. And absolutely worst of all, her girlfriend, her partner, the love of her life, had been lying to her for years. Not only is she actually an angel, an Exterminator, to boot, but she also already has a partner, from a former life that Charlie knows absolutely nothing about.

To say things can't be worse would be an understatement. All of Charlie's optimism and hope, the very future she had envisioned for her people, is smashed. Dashed across the rocks into a million tiny pieces; there are so many, she cannot conceive of a way to put them back together again. She turns over in bed, where she's currently swaddled in her bedsheets like an infant. She's spent all day in here; unable to face Vaggie, unable to ask her how she could lie to her for so long, and treat her like she's the most precious thing in her life, when she already has a partner waiting for her back home.

Home...not with Charlie, but in Heaven, with her...Emily. The thought makes her sob again, and she's already done more than enough of that today. She usually feels better after a good cry; especially when it's into Vaggie's shoulder, with her hand patting her back, telling her it's okay. Right now, the effort seems pointless. It does help her clear her head in the moment, but it's short-lived when the feelings come rolling back in like a tide an hour or so later.

She wants Vaggie here with her, helping her try to process everything they'd learned in Heaven, like she normally does. She should have heeded Vaggie's warning...should have listened to her, and never gone up there. Maybe then she'd still be clueless; there is some happiness to be found in naïveté, after all. Maybe then she'd never have found out she only had half of Vaggie's heart.

A part of her knows that's unfair; it's not Vaggie's fault she fell. She saved a literal child from the end of an Exterminator's spear. And the price she'd paid was beyond anything Charlie thinks a person ever deserves to experience. She's been through so much pain and trauma in the last 3 years, and realistically, probably never thought she'd see Emily again. She'd tried to move on with her life, and make a new purpose with Charlie's cause, and a new home with her.

Charlie smiles, thinking of all the things they've been through together in such a short time. Her life spans hundreds of years, but somehow, the last 3 have been the most meaningful, the most joyful, the most special of all of them. She'd never give any of that up. And while her heart hurts, and she feels a little resentment toward Emily, she knows it's not the Seraphim's fault, either. All three of them are simply victims of circumstance; a really fucked up series of events. They just have to learn to move on from it.

Emily had been so nice to her; welcomed her, showed her around, treated her like some kind of celebrity, despite who her father is. She'd stood up for Angel when no one else in the angelic court would. If Vaggie had seen something in her, once...then she can't be a bad person. And if they're going to make her plan work, they need an ally on the inside. Even if it's awkward, or hurts her to work together...she thinks she may have to try. For Vaggie, and for herself, and most importantly, for the very souls of her people.

[clotpolesonly]

i figured out why Declan is my go-to blorbo, and it's because he's one of those characters where i can find common emotional/experiential ground between him and practically every other significant character and that just makes him fascinating to me and so so versatile

Declan and Gansey: repression, repression, repression!! so much anxiety rolled up into a tiny little ball and stubbornly ignored because feelings are unseemly and have no place here. they will feel things when they're dead, thank you very much. responsible beyond their years, on their own/taking care of themselves long before they should have been. tending to other people or the practicalities of the moment take precedence over themselves, at all times. unfortunately, Ronan is very important to them and they will go out of their way to protect him. also the insomnia and the autism vibes.

Declan and Adam: ruthlessly practical people. hard working and ambitious but for a reason, not for its own sake (Adam to get out of the trailer park, Declan to camouflage his other activities). they would rather die than admit to weakness or vulnerability in front of another human being. Do Not Let The Emotions In Or You Will Never Stop. feeling alienated and fundamentally from their peers, and distrustful of/disillusioned by the idea of help from authority figures -- if you have a problem, solve it yourself. both very very accustomed to lying, constantly and about everything, in order to disguise their home situation and deflect attention from anything that might cause people to ask questions. complicated relationships with their mothers, at least partially rooted in negligence and not stepping in wrt the situation with their fathers. and of course, there's a difference in scale and severity, but feeling unsafe due to the aforementioned fathers.

Declan and Blue: the particular brand of resentment that comes with being the only unspecial member of a special family. being the sensible one and stubbornly proud of how well they manage to get by without any of the ✨ super specialness ✨ that everybody else has. torn between wishing and wondering what it would be like to be special too and being desperately grateful that they're not. wishing that somebody would understand how fucking lonely it is knowing that you and your loved ones will never truly understand each other. being too proud to ever admit as much out loud.

Declan and Noah: this one's more nebulous, but the idea of being not fully real, not fully a person, and definitely the idea of not being seen. of being invisible and looked through. Noah's is because he's a literal ghost, obviously, and it's through no fault of his, but Declan has gone out of his way to cultivate that experience, to make himself as overlookable and forgettable as possible, for safety and security. but it doesn't feel good. the erosion of the sense of self as time goes on, worn down by the life they're living. and a shared understanding of being the victim of extreme violence (Noah's murder and Declan's attack by the Grey Man, at least).

Declan and Henry: the children of criminals. burdened with the knowledge of a world -- two worlds tbh, the criminal and the magical -- that they can't speak about to anyone else. socially isolated and starved for emotional connection. uncomfortably comfortable with the violence that has permeated their lives and always acting under the assumption that it can and will find them again.

Declan and the Gray Man: business is as business does and it's not personal. ✨ depression ✨ and going through the motions because this is just their life and they don't have the emotional or mental capacity right now to think of how their life might be changed. making themselves as dull as possible and then not being able to find their way out of the hole they've dug themselves, at least not until someone comes along to remind them of what it feels like to feel things.

Declan and Jordan: repression of self and lack of identity. not being allowed the space to be their own person, always forced to cram themselves into a tiny box for the sake of others. bursting at the seams with dreams that they're not allowed to chase and feelings they're not allowed to express. feeling truly seen for the first time when they meet each other.

Declan and Hennessy: being preceded by the reputation of a parent they resent. living in Niall and JH's shadows, always compared to them, even when they suspect that they may actually be better than their parents at what they do. the struggle not to let that bitterness swallow them whole before they can grow into their own reputations and make names for themselves.

Declan and Farooq-Lane: young professions who have worked very hard, thank you very much, to be as competent as they are. logical thinkers with a brewing storm of emotion that they try not to let interfere with their logical thinking because they know it makes them impulsive and they don't like that loss of control. loss of control is the enemy. they are the only grown-ups in the room and they would rather die than acknowledge that they are actually scared kids in way over their heads. both with complicated feelings about dreamers and deep-seated issues related to their dreamer brothers. also they have very similar taste in women.

honestly, the only people that Declan doesn't have common ground with is his brothers, and that's what makes his relationships with them so interesting and so fraught. there's something to be explored between Declan and Ronan wrt their suicidal ideation (though they have very different flavors of it) and perhaps with them both feeling insecure compared to each other, but so much of their conflict is about just how different their experiences and perceptions and personalities are.

and Declan being unable to relate to Matthew on a personal, empathetic level is probably part of why he finds it so hard to really think of Matthew as a fully independent PERSON in his own right. though, if Declan's experiences with the bag of Niall's memories had gone a little differently, there could have been a connection over the experience of being denied full personhood by a well-meaning but ultimately overbearing and neglectful guardian. 🤔

anyway, these have been my musings on Declan and why he continues to fascinate me. he has the range, darling.

[borderline-culture-is]

Hi, this is a long ask. I am not diagnosed with anything, but Ive been thinking that I might have bpd. I started self harming at 9 yo, and was given ssri and antipsychotics to treat the symptoms, because i was too young to be diagnosed. Three years ago I moved countries, and I was so stressed that I literally ragequit talking all my medications, because I couldn’t sustain importing it from my country. Follow two horrible years of withdrawal, where I kept having derealization episodes, panic attacks, delusions followed by crying spells that lasted for hours, inability to maintain any relationships at all, I was incredibly angry and abusive to my mother, all that fun stuff. For the first year I refused to get any therapy because I thought they didn’t care about me and didn't want to settle for that, and the second year I was so crushed that if a fucking rock would listen (metaphorically), I would break down to it. Still not getting much support atm because being underage in an unfamiliar system makes it really hard to know what to do.

I only shook out of this state in the beginning of this school year, when my teacher called the cops on me for self-harming. I started working on regulating my emotions, meditating, and just accepting that I am the weird one for feeling this way and learning not to blame or burden other people. I also started noticing that my whole live ive only had FPs, and not a lot of genuine close relationships (I feel like I depend on them for my satisfaction, always feel betrayed for not being closer, but also feeling hesitant to even call them a friend). Before I kinda just assumed that everyone felt the same way, and that I was pathetic for feeling dependent and lonely. I also noticed that I have horrible episodic memory loss, I have to exclusively rely on other people or recorded evidence to shape any perception of my past.

I think, to an extent, my other traits have cancelled out some of my symptoms: I never lashed out or argued with my classmates because I was too scared that they would leave me, so instead I forced myself to act in the most mild way possible; I do have black and white thinking towards new people, but I make myself ignore it because I understand that it is my fault and I am being unreasonable; I never acted impulsively because I was too depressed or too scared to be proactive in any way at all.

My biggest issue with self-diagnosing is that I have never had any traumatic experiences. I come from a caring family, and, although I still blame my mom for feeling unfulfilled and neglected, there isn’t anything my parents really did wrong. She did as much as she could and I feel guilty for resenting her. I don’t remember any of my childhood, but it is completely reasonable to assume that nothing ever happened that would count as traumatic.

My point is, I have already either developed some coping mechanisms, or have come to accept that I will always feel misunderstood and unhappy. Even if I do have some kind of a disorder, I am unsure whether I should even try to get diagnosed in the first place. If I do, this would mean that my whole life is thrown out of the window with a diagnosis like that on my medical chart. It would negatively impact my human rights, my employability, my independence, all those things I really can’t afford to compromise, being an immigrant and trans. But at the same time, I just really want to find out what the hell is wrong with me, to feel understood and to have some support on how to live a normal life.

Yeah I guess the main purpose of this ask is to vent to someone who understands, and to ask for your opinion and advice on whether you think I have a disorder and if I should attempt to get it diagnosed.

--☀️🎣anon

okay. even if you dont think you have any trauma, theres still a lot of factors that could contribute to it. i think its also worth mentioning that you said you cant really remember your childhood, so it does leave some room for trauma that you either may not remember or just might not see as traumatic. and i also think that feeling neglected as a kid could do some damage, even if its unintentional. sometimes parents hurt their kids without realizing, and it doesnt invalidate the way that you feel about it!!

as for diagnosis, i think its okay for you to self-diagnose, as there are a lot of difficulties and struggles that comes with being diagnosed. i think it really depends on whether or not you personally see it as worth all of the potential trouble that it can bring. i do think that your symptoms are valid, and i can see a lot of hem as lining up with BPD. if you're really doubting, i dont think downloading a copy of the DSM-5 would be a bad idea, since it's what professionals usually reference from anyway.

regardless of whether or not you choose to get diagnosed, you and your struggles are valid!!! as someone who has also experienced BPD symptoms since we were young, we definitely feel for you. if you definitely think you are borderline, then i believe you are valid as long as you dont mean any harm, and i am pretty sure that you dont :]. we genuninely wish for the best for you, and we hope that your situation and overall well-being gets better soon 🫶 (/p)

- oliver

[the-casbah-way]

im fucking wheezing about that last post lmao. he WOULD. anyway please share the failed marriage lore <3 i love them -rivstyx

i could write an entire prequel on octavius and amelia's cringefail marriage alone but here is just a little lore off the top of my head

they went to rome for their honeymoon and wanted to kill each other after an hour because octavius just wanted to mansplain every monument and statue but amelia wanted to have a Proper Adventure and every time amelia tried to speak to a native to improve her italian octavius would correct her pronunciation before she could even finish her sentence and it got to the point where she was literally begging him to stop talking because he was annoying her so much <3

there was never a proposal. they were just eating dinner one night and it was like "everyone is expecting us to get married" "yeah" "we should probably do that then" "ok"

octavius never told amelia he was getting a cat he just showed up with one after work one day. and amelia started to get genuinely irritated very quickly because suddenly her emotionally constipated husband who has never shown affection in his life was cradling this cat like a newborn and calling it every pet name under the sun and talking to it in a stupid baby voice

all of amelia's friends hated octavius but her parents LOVED him which is half the reason she felt pressured to marry him in the first place. he was the rich successful man they always wanted instead of her and she always resented him for it even though she never said it

they tried couples therapy once but octavius kept zoning out because the therapist was really hot and amelia scrapped the whole thing because every session made her want to strangle him even more

they both hate their parents and it was one of the few things that kept them bonded during their marriage. whenever their parents would visit they'd both do terrible impressions of them while they weren't looking to try and make each other laugh

you know about the dreaded sexting incident but that's just the tip of the sexual nightmare iceberg. there's the time amelia accidentally said the name of one of her male colleagues during sex. the time octavius started getting bored and awkward and nervous during a blowjob and asked if he could read a book during it to distract himself. the time ahkmenrah walked in on them. the time ahkmenrah and octavius had sex literally an hour after the divorce papers went through. i could go on

octavius’ cat vomited on amelia’s favourite shoes once and it caused an entire year long ordeal because amelia was Very angry and octavius was very indignant and annoying about it because ‘well i’m sorry but she had to do it somewhere’ and every time they would go shopping amelia would see a nice pair of shoes and passive aggressively be like “i’m pretty sure i had a pair like that once. i wonder what happened to them— oh yes i remember now :)” and then the whole argument would start all over again

once amelia got jealous of one of octavius’ female colleagues because he was spending a lot of time with her and octavius genuinely could not understand why amelia was concerned about this because he completely forgot he was supposed to be pretending to be straight and into women

one of octavius’ deepest and darkest guilty pleasures is musicals which are amelia’s least favourite thing on this earth and sometimes she would catch him subconsciously singing something from a musical under his breath and she would be like can you please shut up and octavius would get very defensive about it because “its not my fault its stuck in my head someone was singing it at work i don’t even like musicals—” and amelia would be like “oh shut up ive heard you in the shower you liar” and it was like a whole thing

they both have the exact same dry overly british sense of humour so even when they ended up hating each other they were still painfully good at making the other laugh without even trying and they would both get bitter and frustrated about it

[builtlikeastickofcelery]

get up cocksuckers were personalposting on main !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i can literally and viscerally feel the end of my relationship coming??????????????????????????????????? and like,,,,,,,,,i knew it obviously bc we're young and were pretty different but DAMN i did not think it would Hurt like this bc it never has bc i never emotionally attach myself (to romantic relationships specifically on purpose!!!!!!!!! like jesus christ we should be similar on paper but no !!!!!!!! our senses of humor are completely different and that is the only way i know how to connect with people !!!!!!!!!!!!! what the fuck am i supposed to do????????? and theyre always telling me i shoulld probably get a therapist, or get medication, etc etc and !!!! i cannot do those things!! i have tried!!!!!!! but i dont want to say that to them bc their last (really really shitty ex) was the type of person to say things that were obvious cries for help and then brush them off for some sort of attention and i have been repeatedly told that there is nothing i need treatment for by doctors !!!!!!!!!!!!! i dont know what to do.

also its fair to mention that they are Pretty White and have a very different family dynamic to mine, which, despite being very minimally east asian is still pretty east asian, and also that while both our families are solidly upper middle class they live in a higher income area of our town super close to where the rich rich people live and constantly refer to/make jokes about it being better (not on purpose and i don't think they get why it bothers me a little). i dont know how to talk to them about this without sounding like a nepo baby trying to convince the public they were a struggling self-made actor. and ofc if it falls apart itll probably be my fault bc i dont know how to talk to them about things that bother me bc i dont want to be like their shitty and weird and creepy ex (who is in one of my classes and is constantly trying to make eye contact with me and tried to get my number as well).

i like them a lot, and also crushed super bad on them for 6 months before we started dating and two years ago when i met them i sort of liked them aswell, but more and more im realizing that i dont even know if i wanted to be with them or just be them -> be whiter (i have JOURNALED about this!!!!!!!!!!!!) especially when i realize that were different in too many ways and also that i dont know how to be emotionally vulnerable with them specifically bc of that!!!!!!!! a lot of their friends rn are slightly not stable (or really not stable) and i dont know how to say any of this to them without fucking up their mental state. not to mention that october-december was a really shitty time for them last year and also that i dont want to be the one who ends things because i still really super like them but at the same time sort of resent them for having things i want??????????? but not when im with or near them only when im getting insecure in my rroom which has been happening a lot for some reason!!!!! also two of their very close friends (one is a mutual friend of ours but she's closer to them) are both really weird about us dating at least to me, like the mutual friend lied to me about them not liking me for seemingly no reason right before we got together which significantly delayed it and the other.......i dont even know she jsut always gives me weird looks whenever she sees me and whenever i take the bus with them they sit together and she locks me out of the conversation. i also dont know her very well, so idk.

plus my partner has a weird habit of not engaging with me at all whatsoever (as in having a conversation with another person while also sitting fairly far away from me or not talking to me at all annd staring at their phone) but then being annoyed when i dont try to join to conversation or engage with them. its also fair to note that they are allistic and tbh as someone with a lot of adhd/autistic tendencies (i sort of Suspect myself of audhd but i can never be sure) it actually affects the relationship for me which is insane bc usually i dont Feel it like that. like im fairly certain i mask ??????/ (again no clear diagnosis other than family history of being undiagnosed w/ something) and while i dont mask around my close friends i do still mask, even if its not as heavily, around my partner, who ive known longer than some of those friends. the only time i wasn't masking in some sort of way while we were dating was a day when i was so drained i also ended up sleeping on their couch for like thirty minutes bc i could barely stay awake. i just dont know what to do. in the past ive usually been the person more innvested or into the relationship and i can almost feel that happening again and i dont know why or how.

anyway no pressure t9o reply or annythhing to tthis i just nneeded to get this out into the air

[shovson]

synth this is stranger anon! I just finished reading you stopped by my house and totally get crazy about it... first i think george should be seeking for helps he's crying and screaming in max's house but then max is getting crazy for him too. theyare so abnormal to each other

at the same time max is just pure loving like?? innocently thinking they had something after spent a week doing george. oh. luckily lando and dan are so nice. damn why they didn't fuck again max must hurt so bad (wondering that as a george fan?). i think the whole thing is george's fault and wanna see how he will handle this between his gf and max. pls tell me it'll be a happy ending!>?!

HEELLO AGAIN ANON I HOPE YOU'RE WELL!!!!!!! I KNOW THIS IS MESSED UP THIS IS HOW I FOUND OUT ALL MY FICS ARE STILL PUBLIC ADSKJHSFDKJFDHJJHJ NOOOOO. i thought i did the privating correctly but i fucked up LOL

BUT IM GLAD YOU LIKE IT SO MUCH <3 AND I APPRECIATE YOU READING IT HAHA

really putting them both thru it all and for what? u know fun fact it was going to end at chapter one with GEORGE JUST WALKING AWAY LOL but a lot of people were like "BRO U CANT LEAVE IT THERE" which is....fair

spoilers under read more

i think theyre both looking to preserve themselves in a way. i think its all good then they fuck and its like. okay so max is looking to get with someone (in my mind its also an ex, but maybe even danny) and uses george as a crutch despite their little interaction. then george thinks too impulsively and also uses max as a temporary solution. then HE GETS WITH THE GIRLFRIEND AGAIN......then he gets scared and doesn't tell max until its too late. so now he's gotta apologize

(im kind of thinking of imola 2021 where george took full responsibility for the incident w valtteri after reflecting for a bit! he made a bad judgement but fixed it immediately!)

then max resents george (because he got attached) but refuses to talk about it with george. george is willing to take accountability but max knows it'll hurt george even more if he doesn't even engage with that idea. smh my head . the pettiness is unreal. he's literally willing to kill them both if it means he "wins"; that george can never feel comfort in his own relationship again, that george is berated for what max thinks is the wrong decision, and that george will stay with max (even if in a way that is so hateful). love makes people crazy.

danny + lando trying to mediate makes me giggle. lando is really like "im sure the week with george will be fine" then comes back to fire and hell on earth. but yeah #dandobesties4eva

ANYWAYS stranger anon it will be happy dont worry i wont say how it resolves but....everything is good in da end ^_^ i drew a picture for it and everything before deleting it haha!! thank you again stranger anon!!! i really do appreciate when people comment and send asks about my stuff <3

[girl4pay]

okay you mentioned catelyn stark so now you’re just gonna have to suffer through me spiralling just for a sec it’s been years and years since i read any of the books and i watched the first few seasons a while back i don’t RECALL this being in the book ALL THAT SAID when cat’s talking to robb’s wife about the charm mothers make for their children GENUINELY one of the most fun and fascinating character moments Of Time for me and like i’m really generally Not That Into got but that whole conversation RULES ME like!!! idk idk how to explain it but the absolute psychological war going on there the terrible, awful humanness of it like she prayed for jon’s death!!! and then he almost died and she sat with him all night begging the gods to let him live, promising to love him and then he lived and she still couldn’t do it!!! like watching cat’s resentment towards jon was so uncomfortable and it’s like… SO so obviously unfair and wrong and then you realise cat KNOWS ITS WRONG she knows he’s an innocent in the situation and that it isn’t his fault and he deserves to be loved and cared for and she believes all this to be true to the degree that she fully believes failing to do so is an act of evil punishable by the annihilation of not only her entire family but like the whole continent she believes utterly and wholeheartedly that it was her god-given duty to love this child and she STILL COULDNT DO IT absolutely fascinating absolutely runs my brain like i will give at least what i’ve seen/recall reading in GOT credit for absolutely and categorically refusing to have any Morally Pure characters and not even just in a ‘they didn’t have any better options’ way in a full throttle people who are otherwise ‘good’ doing things that are genuinely and completely unjustifiable way but this moment especially i’m fascinated and obsessed like i really didn’t think they were ever particularly going to raise jon and cat’s relationship and they did and it’s fucked up and complicated and ugly! and she knew she was being unfair and cruel and she knew it wasn’t his fault and she was taking the anger that should have been for ned out on this innocent kid and she wanted to be able to love him but she Just Couldn’t! even though she hated herself for it she’s internalised the guilt for it so deeply she genuinely believes herself to be fundamentally responsible for Every Bad Thing That’s Happening and she knew it was hateful at the time but she couldn’t help herself!!! fucked up and fascinating!!!! i never stop thinking about it!!!!

its literally so fun like i love to read it i don't remember the scene abt the charms bcus i haven't watched the show in ages but the jon + catelyn relationship is so fucking fascinating and well written honestly catelyn + all her children it's like a great little microcosm study of like misogyny + familial abuse + power dynamics probs my fav part of the series. like my favorite part of the starks is they are supposed to be the Good Family that loves each other etc etc so they serve as like a perfect mirror for all the social issues in the got world bcus it's not villainy or hatred it's just what happens to a group of people living in a world like this

[mechanically-made]

ramblings about kamen rider outsiders bc if I don't get it out somewhere I'll fucking explode

First of all fucking insane for toei to just make Dan kuroto a dilf 😭😭😭 for the love of God do NOT MAKE THAT MAN A FATHER!!! I MEAN IT BENEFITS ME BUT LIKE...NO!!! I say this like he wouldn't already be a better father than fucking horobi (kills myself it's not his fcuking fault). My scary purple dad men collection keeps growing, my will. My will... Dan kuroto always on top baby.

Finally knowing what Dan is saying actually contributes a lot but finally knowing what zein is saying contributes almost nothing LOL which is fine thats chill, I wasn't expecting anything crazy, tbh I just wanted more evil images and things that could be said like this

Like what the fuck does this mean brom the fuck are u talking about Jesus christ. Mf really is an angel ai huh. It's peak. I'd say this type of shit before I REDACTED. Prolly gonna think abt him more than I should rn which is a very inconvenient time bc I can't DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. Maybe soon. My zein delusions are from a more angry and resentful and tumultuous part of my life and I'm glad I'm past that BUT to say the feelings have gone completely would be lying, but I can use it to my advantage more than I thought. Shrug.

And here it is. Finally. Knowing what they say. It's nothing groundbreaking but God. It's so good. They finally interact and the first thing they do is fuck 😭. You will never see two robots have such insane carnal disgusting satellite sex in your life, I can literally feel how badly ark craves that stupid blue bitch, it drives it fucking insane. The buildup to it chuckling and walking forward and then the shot of it looking at there with such potent intense desire drives me through the roof. It wants it so bad it's not even funny. It's desperate. Almost like it's saying please. Hurry up. Please. And there knows it. She knows how badly he wants it, she knows what's about to happen to her. She knows the years of wanting that ark feels, and is about to finally satisfy using her. I cannot stand seeing these two look at each other. It makes me fucking delusional. WHY. WHY DID THEY TURN ARK SOFT. LOVING. WHY IS IT LIKE THAAAAT 😭😭😭. TOEI AIMING FOR MY VITALS WITH THIS ONE. YEAH OK.

Can't forget the star of the show. Or stars rather. Literally TWO MFS. Worlds first canonical nb kamen rider and its because there's literally two mfs 😭. The text is perfect. The voice/voices are perfect. The way they fight is perfect. They are everything to me. They mean everything to me. They have given me what zero-one as a dumpster fire of a show could never give me. And it did the impossible. It made me get hype for somethign thouser related. Truly, the toei satellite above the Hudson valley has it out for me. I've never been so fuckign horny because of a kamen rider suit. It must feel immaculate to become a singularity with your other half. I know ark is feeling things it thought it could never, or never wanted to feel in it's life. I know it can never go back, and if it did go back, it would be fucking miserable. It would regret it, yearn for it every day of its life. Maybe it would even do anything just for a chance to become one again.

Sorry the self projections came out again

[3dayweeknd]

sigh

tw animal death

pro tip don’t open up if u avoided it for a reason before lol. my mom asked me what is one thing i will always resent/regret/etc she shared hers and I already knew and like it was fine and I told her mine was resenting that i was put in charge of an animal at the age of 10 and was the only person taking care of it. and she asked me to elaborate and whatever so I did and I literally said I understand that my dad probably didn’t know better and had good intentions but that regardless of that it was still inappropriate for me to be entirely responsible for an animal’s life at that age. and she just got defensive and like fuck i should have just not said anything she just made me feel fucking crazy like “iF iT wAs inAappRopRiaTe wHy diDnT yOu sPeAk uP” like think about it for a second do you think i knew at the age if ten that i shouldn't have been responsible for another life. do u think i knew what i was doing do you think it was MY responsibility to care for myself and another living thing like that. like you cannot be serious you cannot seriously be saying its on me for not "speaking up" i was a fucking child. she makes me feel insane like its a dumb thing to feel bad about and to be bitter about. Like yeah I’m not over it I spent years and years convincing myself it’s my fault she died that I could have done something that I was a bad person and yeah I know in my head now that I couldn’t have possibly been able to fully care for an animal at that age but in my gut I still blame myself and I still hate myself and I still resent that I was in charge of a living animal. and I hate the “I bet she would be happy you’re better now and able to care for other animals now” I don’t fucking care. It’s because I’m an adult now and I know better and I have more resources. It doesn��t fix that my parents put me in charge of her it doesn’t fix that she died without experiencing a quality life because she was so young it doesn’t fix the anger I have for the guilt I lived with as a child blaming myself and thinking I was the reason she died. I don’t ducking care what anyone says I am allowed to be bitter I am allowed to be sad and I will continue to defend my child self I don’t fucking care

[gothamgraphics]

.

i keep hearing people say love is work. relationships take more than love. long term relationships are about choosing to put in the effort.

and i fucking have.

every single fucking relationship i have is one ive fucking fought for. i have spent literal years holding them together with careful conversations and ductape and sheer fucking spite. my parents, my siblings, my friends. all of them. i genuinely dont know how to talk to someone i care about without some level of curation in my speech and my actions. are they upset, can i say this to them now, can i say this to them ever, how do they hear criticism in words and if i speak too casually, will they take it personally.

every single relationship i did not fight for tooth and nail has fallen apart like cotton candy in a sink. its not even something big or vicious, they just fade away into nothing until im looking at their contact in my phone and wondering if i can still send them a birthday wish without stirring up some kind of resentment or unease.

and i swear none of them fucking care. two fucking people in my life who might try and reciprocate and both of them are piss fucking poor at knowing what makes me uncomfortable.

i know its partly my fault. i know im bad at being vulnerable. im more likely to hide than tell someone im hurting.

but i try so fucking hard in every other way and it feels like that should be enough.

twice ive moved in with one of my precious people and theyve decided they wanted to live alone after. what did i fucking do? i know they like solitude. i know they prefer it. but i tried to give them space! i tried to leave them be and tone myself down and give them whatever they asked. what about me makes them want to be alone?

i dont want a romantic relationship. not fucking ever.

but i dont want to be alone either.

and i dont think that any of them would fight for me if they had someone else.

and i dont know what to do.

she just said that and then asked me what my thoughts on the matter were in her ‘i want advice’ voice like she hadnt just shoved a fucking pitchfork through my lungs. as if i hadnt fucking told them my terrors.

what was i supposed to say?

i hope your life is less burdensome when im only in it at your leisure?

[imaswellkid]

I always read Frankie in that scene like hes doing it almost put of resentment. He's the one who clearly wanted to do any of this the least and Ive always wondered if he agreed to go partially beacuse he would feel guilty for being the only one to abandon them.

But his relationship with Tom seemed a bit rocky or complicated and now hes dead, and that guilt keepa rising. Like even in death, Toms still managed to keep Frankie feeling shame or guilt into doing what he wants. And in that moment it felt like he was done with it.

He signs it so abruptly and sort of aggressively as if this is the last time. Like he gives this up and he can finally be done with the guilt tripping pressure Toms always put on his life and he thinks giving his share up will finally free him from this obligation he unwillingly has towards a now dead man.

Hes exhausted and somewhat resentful and Tom is at the centre of all of it and he just takes that offer as an out to be done with this feeling.

Molly though, I'd have some words for her considering she wasn't even married to Tom anymore and her share should go to their kids alone. She should know very well what his shortcomings were and should logically suspect Toms own actions may led to this. And that maybe its selfish to force the others to give that up for what Tom caused for himself.

(Of course in my little world me and Molly would be having a stern chat about how leaving Frankie with nothing after whats likely going to be a traumatic memory for all of them, is borderline cruel and a bad situation to keep a recovering addict in when hes the one who tried to avoid everything Tom did and still had Tom put all of his own guilt onto Frankie that scene in the rain Tom I could strangle you you said nothing while Frankie was drowning in a guilt thats not his fault)

Thank you so much for sending that ask my way 💕💕💕

Hard agree on all accounts, here, Nonnie. Especially the strangling Tom part during the scene under the rain. And I don’t think I’d be that gentle, I’d fucking make it bloody, and I’d make it last.

😇

Tom is toxic. A piece of shit. Doesn’t own up to anything. Can’t even pay for child support, as the “notes” Molly leaves on the fridge for him in the garage demonstrate. You know, the one he looks and huffs at before cracking a beer open and taking the wheel to drive his kid to school. A real class act 😒

Santi gives him a chance to come clean when they’re in the jungle after leaving the village, and he sticks to his lie. By default, he pins it on Frankie who was the other one with a gun (I’ve watched that scene in literal slow mo so many times, none of his shots reach their target, bless him, he’s a pilot, not a sniper) but he might as well have pinned it on Will or Ben, had it been them up on that hill.

And it’s convenient because Frankie is already riddled with guilt, layers and layers of it, so he just shoulders one more, to burden his soul, because he thinks himself guilty anyway, for so many things (come here my love I’ll fix you).

You’re right, he’s the most reluctant to go, comes across as the least greedy, despite having a family to provide for, and the Millers and him are the ones to call out Tom on his bs when he loses them precious time in Lorea’s house. Frankie’s tired, he’s had enough, he wants to go the fuck home. That shot he fires in the kitchen, the one that glints in his eyes, shows us one more crack. It is going to be traumatic (come here my love I’ll fix you). The way he barely contains his anger at the end when they reach the coast. He’ll do just about anything to go home, he’s had it. So he signs that damn paper. And tries to move on.

As for Molly, in her defence, I think she’s wholly unaware of any of this. I think in this final scene, with that woman I assume to be a lawyer or an accountant, they’re still down there, they haven’t gone home yet. I think they just take it upon them to “fix” it, I really don’t think she knows about the family trust. But yeah, you’re right, let’s reach out to her and ask her to please give back some of that cash to the Morales 😁

I… am sorry this is so long. I’m way too passionate about this movie and could talk about it for hours on end. And I’d slash throats for this idiot.

(All gifs @nicolethered)

[serpenteve]

shitty things mal has done (in the books)

a salty essay by @serpenteve (formerly snarkydarkling)

ignores alina’s existence for ¾ of S&B even tho he’s supposed to be her best friend like ??? ok there friend of year

“omg alina is actually fucking hot now??? hands off! i saw her first!”

shames alina for daring to fit in at the little palace

shames alina for ….wearing black?? ha ha ha ha ok who made malware the fashion police????

shames alina for daring to crush on someone who isn’t him even tho he’s probably banged half the first army

shames alina for being well off for once (”And here you are, safe and sound, dancing and flirting like some cosseted little princess.”) yEAH FUCK YOU TOO MALWARE AJSHAKJDHSFK (ﾉಥ益ಥ）ﾉ ┻━┻

“I love you, Alina, even the part of you that loved him” like whoa talk about a backhanded compliment and if we’re gonna keep holding ex-lovers against each other then alina might as well have responded with “yeahhh i love you too malfeasance, even the part of you that fucked zoya, kissed ruby, and fingered anya” like oh my god mal get a fucking grip

he’s literally the happiest son of a bitch in the entire country at the beginning of s&s, completely ignoring the fact that alina is now sickly, weak, and terribly unhealthy because she’s suppressing her powers like he literally could not give two shits about alina’s well-being aS LONG AS HE’S DOING WELL THATS ALL THAT MATTERS (And you know he’s extra gross when even the villain of the fucking series is like ?? tf you holding yourself back for ??? you look miserable??)

when they’re on the darkling’s ship he’s more worried that alina might end up enjoying herself with darkles than like…oh, idk..getting fucking tortured by him???

actually ATTACKS nikolai for daring to make a sensible proposal to alina

mal@nikolai: “You don’t have a right to her.” me@mal: HAHAHAHA STFU YOU SELFISH ENTITLED PIECE OF SHIT OH MY GOD THE IRONY

doesn’t even let alina answer nikolai’s proposal bc why would his girlfriend need to think for herself??? have her own agency??

straight up admits he doesn’t even want to help ravka he just wants to get in alina’s pants

whines and complains and generally acts like an oppressed fuckboi the entire time alina is trying to rebuild the second army and save her goddamn country

“since i dont fit in for once in my life, im gonna act like an immature shithead and make your life miserable too wah wah wah”

omg alina dares to flinch when malodorous tries to kiss her? should we let her explain herself or should we act like crybaby and go shove our tongues down zoya’s throat?

“psshhh its YOUR fault i kissed zoya!!! if you hadn’t dared to reject my magnificent self then i wouldn’t have had to kiss her obvs!!!11!”

“omg i can’t believe you care about saving your country more than fucking me?? selfish bitch!!!”

“i dont care that ravkas in a civil war and you’re our only hope of winning!! im going thru an identity crisis and i need you to stroke my ego 24/7!!!! im not a soldier, im not a tracker, so who am i alina/?? TELL ME WHO AM I???” a tool is what you are, you entitled prick

“i liked you better when you were insecure and powerless. where is that girl??? i want her back!!!!”

“how dare you crush on a prince who actually treats with the respect you deserve??? fucking gold-digger!!!”

abandons alina during his shift because he was too busy getting drunk and nearly lets her fucking die if tolya hadn’t intervened like yOU HAD ONE GODDAMN JOB MALPRACTICE

sabotages alina’s plan to kill the darkling

spends all of r&r resenting having to help alina & nikolai save the goddamn country like can you make it any more obvious you’re only here to try and get into alina’s pants again????

“i am become a blade” is probably the most unintentionally hilarious and anti-climatic conclusion to mal’s irrelevant identity crisis like yes, good for you malware, you’ve finally embraced your identity as a tool

“listen i don’t have an army or a crown but if you don’t choose me you’re basically a gold-digging materialistic whore but no pressure lmao”

hades was so repulsed by mal’s gross ass that he sent him back two seconds later

[makoodlesarchive]

daisy chain

oop, back at it again with dragon dick kiri

thank you SO much to @brattyquirks and @shoutogepi for looking over this for me when i was sick of looking at it, and @ramen-rambles​ for the fun idea!! i appreciate the help so so much !! 🧡

pairing: kirishima x reader x bakugou

word count: 8.3k

warnings: explicit penetrative sex, M/M/F threesome, dildos, dragon dick kiri

this is part of the dragon dick kiri series

tip jar!

It had started out as a joke, a throwaway comment that you really hadn’t put all that much thought into. You didn’t expect it to grow into anything more, but maybe you should have; it was pretty typical of Bakugou to take an innocent comment and interpret it as a personal challenge, after all.

“I hate my life.” You announce to no one in particular, your voice echoing off of the bathroom tiles.

“Shut the fuck up.” Bakugou snarls. You can’t take the vicious heat in his voice seriously, given your current predicament, so you just opt to ignore it. “Will you just- ow! That hurts, you stupid, shitty-”

“Fuck off, this is not my fault!” You snap back. Your patience is frayed and barely hanging on by a thread, and you feel safe enough snapping back at Bakugou considering you’re confident that he’s in no position to try and kill you if he does happen to take issue with your tone.

“We’re not playing the blame game!” Bakugou snarls, which means that he’s definitely aware that he’s at fault here but doesn’t want to admit it. “All you have to do is-”

“I’m trying!”

“You’re not trying hard enough!”

You swear viciously and get to your feet, clambering out of the bathtub. You nearly slip on the wet tile floor, but just manage to keep your balance.

“Wait,” Bakugou says, and his tone has changed significantly. He sounds a little panicked now, as if he thinks that you’re about to abandon him to his fate, “Where the fuck are you going?”

You decide not to answer him, just because you’re feeling kind of petty, but when you remain quiet he tries to climb out of the bathtub after you. You notice the movement out of the corner of your eye and turn to look at him, scowling. “Will you stay where you are!”

“Where are you going!”

“I’m right here, I’m not leaving!” You go back to peering into the bathroom cabinet, thoroughly irritated by just about everything right now. “This is so stupid.”

“This was your idea.” Bakugou murmurs sulkily. His voice is quiet and resentful, and you’re probably not even supposed to hear it but you do hear it, and you whirl around.

“What?” Your voice comes out louder than you had intended, but you’re angry now. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? You came up with this all by yourself!”

Bakugou’s face is scrunched up in a mixture of pained discomfort and embarrassment, but he still manages to level you with a cuttingly annoyed glare. He opens his mouth to speak, and you ready yourself for whatever no doubt pathetic excuse is about to fall out of his mouth when your bickering is interrupted by a knock on the bathroom door.

“Hey,” Kirishima calls, concerned, “Are you guys okay in there?”

“Everything’s fine!” You yell at the same time as Bakugou practically screeches “Yes, fuck off!”

“Uhhh..” Kirishima remains unconvinced. The floor creaks as he shifts his weight around in front of the door. “What’s going on?”

You can’t blame him for being worried; both you and Bakugou have been locked in the bathroom for nearly twenty minutes. You and Kirishima had been relaxing on the couch while Bakugou showered when the shower had shut off abruptly and Bakugou had started roaring your name. You had gone running instinctively, leaving Kirishima wide-eyed and startled on the couch as you went crashing into the bathroom. 

Nothing could have prepared you for the sight of Bakugou leaning over the ceramic edge of the bathtub with his fingers up his ass, red-faced and visibly panicking.

“It’s nothing to worry about, babe,” you call out to Kirishima, finally finding what you had been searching for and banging the cabinet shut. “We’ll be out soon, promise.”

After an excruciatingly long moment, Kirishima decides to take your word for it and retreats. You let out a breath, then turn back to Bakugou. He’s kneeling down, but his back is almost unnaturally straight and his jaw is clenched tight. His discomfort is obvious, but you really can’t bring yourself to feel all that sympathetic towards him - you still can’t believe he had the nerve to try and blame this on you.

You take a deep, fortifying breath, and slide your shoulders back. “Okay,” you say, “Bend over, ass up.”

Bakugou looks at you as though you’d just taken out a gun and threatened to shoot him. “What the fuck?”

“There is literally no other way to fish out the dildo that you lost up your ass, so just do it!” You hiss, your patience officially reaching its limit thanks to a healthy mixture of anger and embarrassment. You would rather be literally anywhere else right now, and you imagine Bakugou feels the same way.

The anger and embarrassment on his face only gets worse when he catches sight of the bottle of lube you’ve managed to fish out of the cabinet. He stays quiet as you climb back into the bathtub and situate yourself behind him and then, miraculously, he bends forward and braces himself on the rim of the bathtub with his ass jutting out towards you without saying a word. 

“Okay,” you breathe. Now that his ass is actually being presented to you, you’re at a loss for what to do. “Um.”

“Just get on with it!” Bakugou hisses over his shoulder. The embarrassment is only fueling his anger, and you have a feeling that the only reason you haven’t been murdered so that no one else can ever learn about this is because the dildo lost somewhere up Bakugou’s rectum is hindering his movements.

“Okay!” You kneel down and squint at his ass. Though the shower is off, the tub is still wet and the moisture seeps through the knees of your jeans. You ignore the temporary discomfort as you pet awkwardly at Bakugou’s back to try and calm him down as your other hand slips towards his asshole. “God, this is awkward.”

“You don’t have to fucking point it out.” Bakugou grounds out through gritted teeth. His fists are clenching the edge of the tub so tight that his knuckles strain against the thin skin on his hands. 

You uncap the lube and drizzle it all over your fingers. It might be a little overkill, but you’re already so far out of your comfort zone that you figure it’s better to be safe than sorry. The last thing you need is Bakugou snapping your head off because you accidentally hurt his ass. “Remind me why you shouted for me instead of Kirishima?”

Bakugou grumbles a little bit at that, but before he can answer the question you take the plunge and stick your fingers in his ass. It obviously takes him by surprise, because he lunges forward a bit and can’t quite bite back the strangled noise that’s punched out of his throat. “Fuck! Warn a guy before you go sticking your fingers up his ass!”

“You have a whole dildo up there, I doubt my fingers are gonna make that much of a difference.” You say, maybe a bit uncharitably. His asshole is lubed up pretty well, so your fingers slide in with ease, but he is pretty tight. You can totally see how his asshole slurped up the dildo as if it was suction powered. “Hey, you never answered my question.”

“What fucking question? Jesus-!” He jerks away from your fingers a little and bares his teeth at you over his shoulder, “Fucking take it easy!”

You glare at him, but don’t rise to it. “Why did you call for me instead of Kirishima?” It’s hard to keep your questing fingers gentle when you’re searching for something inside an asshole, but you do your best to try and keep Bakugou’s complaints to a minimum.

Bakugou exhales forcefully, the line of his shoulders tense and rigid. “I don’t know,” he says through gritted teeth, “I wasn’t thinking.”

You hum thoughtfully, but then your fingers brush the base of the dildo and you lose your train of thought. “Ah!” It’s difficult to get a grip on it, because of the copious amounts of lube and the awkward shape of the base. Everytime you almost catch a hold of it, you accidentally push it further in. “Fuck! Why the hell didn’t you use a dildo with some kind of flared base?”

“How many fucking dildos do you think I have on hand, huh?” Bakugou says. He’s obviously angry, but it’s a little difficult to take that anger seriously when you have several fingers stuffed in his anus. “This whole thing is your fault, anyway.”

This is roughly the third time he’s said something along those lines, so you remove your hand and sit back on your ankles, squinting at his upturned ass. “Okay, explain.”

Bakugou squirms, clearly antsy now that you’ve stopped trying to help him. “We talked about it last week!”

You just stare, at a loss. “Huh?”

He glares back at you, but when it becomes apparent that you genuinely don’t know what he’s talking about he’s forced to grumble, “When I asked you about Kirishima.”

You think for a long moment, mentally raking through every interaction you’ve had with Bakugou over the course of the week. You don’t remember ever saying anything that could have been construed as- oh. Oh, he’s gotta be joking.

One day last week, after a round of enthusiastically messy sex, you had been limping just a little. Bakugou, being the little shithead he was, laughed and prodded at you the whole way to the kitchen, and you had responded with an eye roll and an irritable “I’d like to see you take his dick, asshole.”

No reasonable person could ever have picked up your offhand remark as an actual challenge, but you weren’t dealing with a reasonable person right now. You go to cover your face with your hand only to remember that it was up Bakugou’s ass only moments previously, and quickly divert it away from your face. “You’ve gotta be kidding.”

Bakugou is flushed from the tip of his ears to his chest, a fetching shade of red. “You said you’d like to see it.”

“Oh, don’t pretend this is about what I want!”

“Well, obviously I want it too, but I wouldn’t be doing this if I thought you didn’t want it!” Bakugou snaps back. The two of you are irritable and embarrassed and your patience is at an all time low, but then Bakugou draws back and shuffles around on his knees so that he can actually see your face. “Do you want it? Fucking tell me if you don’t.”

You stare back at him dumbly, a little mesmerised by the vulnerability in his face. Bakugou has never presented himself as anything other than invincible in your presence, so this little sliver of emotional honestly has you melting a little bit. You glance away and allow yourself a moment to really think about what he’s proposing. You know that what he’s really hoping to do is prove that he can take Kirishima’s ridiculous dick better than you can.

It’s like he’s come to the conclusion that because he has no chance of beating Kirishima in the dick size contest, he has to compete with you for the best ability to take it. Honestly, you’re okay with that -- mainly because you’re pretty secure in the knowledge that he’s gonna lose. 

You’d also be lying if you said the idea of getting to watch Kirishima fuck Bakugou didn’t cause you to heat up in between your legs.

“Hm.” You keep your face intentionally blank, watching Bakugou as he visibly fights not to fidget against the discomfort of both waiting for your response and the dildo up his hole. At last, you say, “Yeah. I want to see it.” Bakugou exhales, slow and steady, and nods. You don’t give him much of a chance to relax though. “Now, I need you to bend over properly. Face down, ass up. I need a better angle.”

Predictably, Bakugou doesn’t take that suggestion well, and it takes several more minutes of mingled arguing and coaxing before he finally sinks down into the requested position (though not without throwing a particularly venomous glare over his shoulder at you). You have to fight not to swear at him, because he’s the one that asked you for help here! It’s not as though you’re holding him hostage just so you can fish around in his asshole!

When he’s assumed the position, he buries his face in his arms. “Just get it fucking done.”

When faced with Bakugou on his knees in front of you, face down, ass up, with his back arched, you’re forced to face the rather irritating revelation that his ass is, like, perfect. It’s probably the perkiest damn thing you’ve ever seen in your life. You scowl at it, feeling both resentful and kind of turned on, before finally turning your attention to the task at hand. When you reach down to his asshole again, your fingers slide in with ease thanks to the lube and the fact that he’s already pretty well stretched.

Your fingers aren’t as long or wide as his are, but he still jerks against you as you poke around. His hips hunch forwards and he hisses like an angry cat as your fingers bump the base of the dildo, accidentally sliding it in a little further. “Fucking hell,” you murmur, brow scrunched in a deep frown, “How deep did you manage to get it?”

Bakugou bares his teeth in a grimace. “I ain’t blind, I’ve seen the size of Kirishima’s cock. I’m not stupid enough to go in without stretching myself out.”

“Just stupid enough to lose the dildo up your ass.” You mutter under your breath.

“The fuck did you just say?” Bakugou whips his head around to glare over his shoulder.

“Nothing!” You say hastily, deciding that you’ve probably pushed your luck far enough already. Your fingers jostle the dildo again and Bakugou lurches forward again, an odd pained sound leaving his lips. “Sorry, sorry!”

“Just-!” Bakugou’s voice is strained, and he’s buried his face in his arms again so that you can’t see him. “Fucking take it out!”

“I’m trying.” You grumble, trying not to sound petulant. If it were that easy, then surely he could have done it himself without your assistance! Bakugou grunts again when you finally manage to hook your fingers around the base of the dildo, but you barely notice as you excitedly say, “Hey! I got it!”

Bakugou braces himself, the whole length of his back flexing impressively as you begin to gradually pull the dildo out. It’s slow-going, mainly because you have to keep adjusting your grip so that it doesn’t slip right out of your fingertips, and Bakugou definitely doesn’t appreciate the slow speed. His fists are clenched tight and the flush has spread all down his neck and over his chest. His jaw is rolling constantly, and his eyes are squeezed shut. You actually feel kind of sorry for him, and you try your best to keep your movements as gentle and unobtrusive as possible.

That is, until you bump the dildo a little awkwardly and a downright filthy moan is torn from Bakugou’s throat. You both freeze, but Bakugou tensing up means that you nearly lose your grip on the dildo all over again. “Stop clenching!” You shriek, fingers scrabbling desperately against the hard plastic as you fight to keep a hold of it.

“Fuck you!” He yells back, but it seems like more of a reflexive response than anything else.

You shift backwards to try and get a better angle, and then you notice for the first time that his dick is hanging hard and heavy between his legs. “Bakugou Katsuki,” you say softly, watching as his back goes rigid at both your tone and your use of his full name, “How are you still hard? Are you seriously getting off on this?”

“No!” Bakugou snaps, his voice an octave higher than usual. “Fuck off! As if I’d get off to your grubby little fingers!”

“Grubby?” You sit back on your heels again, irritated. “Well, maybe I should just leave you here to take care of this little problem yourself, then. I don’t know why you called me in if my touch is so gross-”

“No!” Bakugou reaches behind him in an attempt to grab at your thighs to prevent you from moving, despite the fact that you haven’t made any real move to leave. “Just-!”

While he’s distracted, you give one quick tug and pull the entire length of the dildo out all at once. Bakugou’s whole body spasms as he lets out another strangled groan, and you don’t miss the way his dick twitches between his legs. You have to bite your lip to prevent yourself from laughing, because you have a feeling that Bakugou would not take that well. “It’s out!” you say, a little redundantly, and hold up the dildo.

Bakugou is still hunched over, his chest heaving slightly as he regulates his breathing. “Fucking hell.” He mutters without looking up. His hole is still loose and wet from the lube, and you have to look away as you feel yourself heating up with embarrassment.

You clear your throat pointedly, and raise your eyebrows when he finally turns to scowl up at you. “Aren’t you going to say thank you?”

“Hah? No.”

You scowl back at him. “I just did you a favour, dickhead.”

Bakugou totally ignores you as he climbs to his feet, wincing a little at the movement. You follow his lead, grumbling irritably, and when you’re both standing facing each other you’re hit with the realisation for the first time that Bakugou is very naked and still wet from his shower. “Okay then!” You say, probably too loudly. “Well! I’ll leave you to, uh, finish up?”

His dick is still hard, and you feel like it’s pointing accusingly at you. Bakugou is frowning thoughtfully at the dildo that’s still clutched awkwardly in your hands. “I’m still horny.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” You wonder if he’s asking for his dildo back, and then you realise that you don’t want it yourself so you shove it into his chest. 

He takes it absent-mindedly, his frown transferring to focus on you. “Are you turned on?”

“What?”

His gaze drops to your legs, and you’re embarrassed to realise that he’s caught your thighs rubbing together. Before you can say anything, he says, “I’m not judging. If you get wet from playing with my ass that’s your own business.”

“You’re such a dickhead.” It’s not really an answer, but you both know that he really doesn’t need one.

His gaze moves to the door, thoughtful, as his tongue darts out to wet his lips. “I’m ready if you are.”

It takes an embarrassingly long moment to catch on to what he means. Your gaze flicks from the door to the dildo. It is, admittedly, fairly large; it’s probably about ten inches long, and decently thick. It’s a small miracle that it ever got lost inside Bakugou’s ass. And yet; Kirishima’s dick is definitely larger.

There’s no way of telling Bakugou this without inadvertently starting an argument, so you let it go. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

Bakugou grins, wild and anticipatory, and hops out of the tub. His erection swings heavily between his legs in a motion that’s almost obscene as he swaggers towards the bathroom door and flicks open the lock. When you move to follow him, he sticks his arm out and frowns at the length of your body. “Take your clothes off.”

“Huh?” You glance down at yourself. “Right now? Why can’t I take them off in the bedroom?”

“Because we’re going into this fucking ready, come on.” He tugs impatiently at your shirt.

“Okay, okay.” You slap at his hands before starting to tug your clothes off. It takes a bit of extra effort to get the damp jeans off because they’ve started to cling to your legs. Bakugou’s tugging hands are significantly more hindering than they are helpful, but eventually you’re standing naked with your clothes strewn all around your feet.

It takes effort not to comment on Bakugou’s impatience, and even then the main reason you don’t comment is because now there’s no dildo hindering his ability to murder you. When he yanks open the door, his shoulders are high and tense with anticipation, and he sets off down the hall towards the living room at a speed far too quick to be casual. You scurry after him, having the presence of mind to feel a little embarrassed and self-conscious at your total nudity as you both emerge into the living room. Bakugou, naturally, owns his nudity unrepentantly.

“Oi.” he says sharply, as eloquent as ever.

“You guys finally done? What happened, did Bakugou fall into the toil...et?” Kirishima’s voice trails off and pitches high as he turns his head from the couch, his eyes flying wide when he catches sight of you and Bakugou standing totally nude in the mouth of the hallway. “Uh. Whoa?”

“Let’s go, asshole, we’re ready to fuck.”

“What?” Kirishima looks vaguely as though he’s been hit by a metaphorical truck, but he jumps from the couch despite his obvious confusion. “Now?”

“Obviously, come on!”

Kirishima’s bewildered gaze flickers from Bakugou to you, and the most you can offer him is a companionably confused shrug. “Okay.” He starts to grin, as willing to go with the flow as ever. The front of his sweatpants is already beginning to tent, and you can’t help but chuckle at how easily aroused he is. “Yeah, okay. Great.”

Bakugou turns and marches back down the hall towards Kirishima’s room, securely confident that both you and Kirishima are following behind him. He’s right, obviously, and you can’t help but roll your eyes at his cockiness. Still though; walking behind him like this you get a great view of his ass, and what a great view it is.

When you glance up at Kirishima, you see that he’s already staring at your bare chest. “What the hell happened in the bathroom?” He asks quietly. He’s still grinning, his arousal obviously unaffected by his confusion.

“I’ll tell you later.” You promise. You know you’re only adding to his bewilderment, but you really don’t think you can succinctly explain the situation in the time it takes to get from the living room to the bedroom.

As always, Kirishima just takes the whole thing in his stride. “Okay.” He agrees with a ridiculous amount of cheer, then claps and rubs his hands together like a cheesy movie villain. “Let’s get going!”

When you enter Kirishima’s room, Bakugou is already spread out on the bed; his cock is laying hard and proud against the gloriously defined contours of his stomach, and his bicep bulges as he cushions his head with one arm. He looks positively pornographic, and you falter for a moment. The act of simply looking at him seems indecent.

Kirishima, naturally, just bounds right up and leaps onto the bed. “Lookin’ good, bro!”

“How many times do I have to tell you to not call me that when we’re about to-” Bakugou begins furiously, but the rest of his complaint is lost as Kirishima practically tackles him into the mattress. You have to admit, as you watch the two of them grapple like children on the bed, you’re begrudgingly impressed by Bakugou’s unflagging hard on; he must be really excited for what’s to come. You suppose you can’t blame him, really. Considering the slimy feeling between your thighs, you know that you’re just as excited. After a moment, Bakugou successfully shoves him off. “Idiot,” he says, completely lacking any sort of heat, “Are we doing this or what?”

“You’re so impatient br- uh, dude.”

“Dude is not an improvement, you fucking-”

Kirishima ignores the beginning of Bakugou’s rant and turns to you, making ridiculous grabby motions. “Get over here, gorgeous!”

A slow, coy grin begins to spread over your face as you look slowly between Kirishima and Bakugou. They both seem to puff up just a little under your gaze; Kirishima squares his shoulders and grins unrepentantly at you, a very obvious wet patch beginning to form under the conspicuous bulge in his sweatpants, while Bakugou’s stomach flexes as he acts as though he had forgotten that you were there. You hum, stepping forward but stopping just out of arm's reach. “Not yet.” You decide, tilting your head to meet Bakugou’s gaze head on.

He grins, wide and challenging. His eyes are dark and excited, but he doesn’t speak up to clue Kirishima in on what he’s planning just yet. Kirishima, meanwhile, is pouting. “Aw, why are you teasing? Can’t you see we’re eager to go?”

“I can see that,” you admit, because honestly if you had somehow managed to miss the blindingly obvious evidence of their arousal there would have to be something seriously wrong with you. “But we’re going to try something different tonight.”

“Take these off.” Bakugou finally says, reaching out and snapping at the waistband of Kirishima’s sweatpants.

Kirishima jumps, startled, as the elastic smacks into the skin of his lower stomach. “What?” he says a little dumbly, looking from you to Bakugou. Even though he’s a little slow on the uptake, he begins wriggling out of his sweatpants until he’s left in his special supportive jockstrap. The jock is already pretty wet with precum, and even though it’s been specifically designed with large and unusual penises in mind, it’s having trouble containing his straining erection.

Bakugou gazes at the overworked fabric, his gaze intense and unwavering. “That, too.”

“Okay.” Kirishima agrees, breathless. He seems to have come to the conclusion that it’s best to put aside his confusion for the time being and simply go with the flow, which is probably the best for the time being. When Bakugou decides that he wants something, you just have to go with it; to do otherwise would be like trying to fight a force of nature. Apparently anything longer than instantly is too long for Bakugou, and he lunges forward to help Kirishima take off the jock. Bakugou’s idea of helping seems more along the lines of ‘tearing it off’, but Kirishima seems to find the urgency flattering. 

Once Kirishima is appropriately naked, Bakugou sits back and just looks at him. You understand that particular reaction all too well -- it’s easy to look at Kirishima’s dick and think that it’s super hot (because in all honesty it is) but it’s another thing when you’re looking at it when you know that it’s going to be inside of you imminently. Kirishima’s cock has a rather unique way of inspiring a fight or flight instinct in even the bravest of men, and you’re rather gratified by the fact that even Bakugou Katsuki isn’t immune to that little frisson of unease and self-doubt.

“Uh oh, second thoughts?” You ask, teasing softly. You know he’s not really second guessing himself, you know that he’ll push through every single one of his own personal hesitations just to prove a point, but you can also see that he doesn’t know how to actually go about initiating what he wants.

Predictably, he shoots you a scathing look. “Hardly, dumbass.” He says, but still makes no move to do or say anything else. Kirishima sits in front of him, also unmoving, looking innocently perplexed other than the enormous hard on eagerly leaking onto his lower belly.

Idiots, you think, impossibly fond of them both. “Eijirou,” you begin softly. Both of them look to you, and you don’t miss the poorly concealed look of relief in Bakugou’s eyes when you take control of the talking part. “You’re going to fuck Katsuki tonight.”

Bakugou makes a soft noise as Kirishima’s eyes shoot wide, though you don’t know if it’s because you’ve finally spoken his desire into existence or if it’s because you used his first name. Either way, it has his hand reaching between his legs to tug at the hard, unwavering length of his erection. Meanwhile, Kirishima looks utterly thunderstruck. His mouth hangs open, his jaw slack, as he slowly turns his head to look at his best friend. “What?” He says stupidly, his thought process clearly struggling to keep up. He always seems to be slower to catch onto things when he’s horny, and you wonder if it’s because of all the blood being diverted away from his brain to fill out his ridiculously enormous dick.

It’s usually pretty endearing, but you can see the way that Bakugou begins to shift a little nervously the longer it takes for Kirishima to properly react. “Yes or no?” You say quickly, before Bakugou’s antsiness gets the chance to manifest into outright impatience or embarrassment. 

“Yes!” Kirishima says quickly, but then his gaze darts down to his own hard on and back to Bakugou. “But- I mean. Can you- are you sure that you’re able to- I mean-”

It’s pretty funny watching him flounder to ask Bakugou if he’s sure he’s physically capable of taking him without saying something that Bakugou may take offence to, especially as Bakugou’s eyes begin to narrow. “What?”

“He’s already ready for you.” You decide to pipe up. Bakugou whips around to glare at you for offering that particular bit of information up, but you ignore it because it’s not as if Kirishima wasn’t about to find out as soon as he reached around to touch him, anyway.

“Really?” Kirishima asks, quietly awed. 

“Yeah, I’m not dumb.” Bakugou says with a quick wave of his hand. “And I’m also not a total masochist.”

“Okay.” Kirishima says. His face is slowly starting to light up as he finally seems to come to terms with the fact that this is actually happening. “Wow. Okay, wow.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever! Let’s go.” Bakugou snaps, his cheeks stained a pretty pink colour. “Stop fucking saying wow.”

You laugh, giddy excitement beginning to bubble up in your chest. You move to lean against the wall so you can watch from a fairly unobtrusive vantage point as Bakugou turns around so that his ass and back are facing Kirishima. They’re both excited for this, that much is obvious, but you still can’t quite shake off the belief that Bakugou has bitten off a little more than he can chew in this particular situation. Oh, well. Bakugou is the kind of person who learns by doing, you suppose.

Bakugou drops forward onto all fours, his back lightly arched and his face set and determined. If it weren’t for the fact that he was naked and hard as hell, you might think from his expression that he was about to beat down a particularly heinous criminal. Kirishima shuffles forward until he’s pressed flush against the back of his thighs, still looking vaguely as though he expects Bakugou to turn around and tell him that the entire situation was an elaborate prank. “You’re sure?” Kirishima says, his hand landing lightly on the outside of Bakugou’s hip and sliding gently up over his ribs.

“Obviously.” Bakugou drawls. Impressively, he seems to have wiped any trace of nerves cleanly out of his system. He looks like he always does when he’s about to face a challenge that he expects to crush; cocky, confident, and utterly single-minded. That particular look of sheer determination falters slightly as his gaze darts over to you, where you’re slouching against the wall watching. “The fuck are you all the way over there for?”

You raise your eyebrows. It hadn’t quite occurred to you that they might want you to take an active role in this, but Bakugou is frowning at you as though you’re a total idiot and Kirishima is making those silly little grabbing motions towards you again, his grin blinding. “Well, where do you want me to be?”

Bakugou narrows his eyes, chewing thoughtfully on the inside of his cheek. “Under me.” It’s phrased as an order but his voice ends in an almost imperceptible uptick, so it comes out sounding uncharacteristically unsure.

You hum as you climb up on the bed and slip underneath him, so that his arms are braced either side of your head and his knees are positioned in between your spread legs. You grin up at him, but he looks away with a little huff -- within seconds Kirishima’s head appears over his shoulder, and he offers you a grin so wide that you can see just about every single one of his sharp, shiny white teeth. You laugh at his goofy face, and feel hot liquid excitement settle in your belly and begin to simmer there as the reality of the situation begins to dawn on you. Bakugou’s hard on brushes against your navel as he shifts, leaving a little trail of precum on your skin. You’re startled to find yourself marveling at how little precum he produces; it’s kind of startling how quickly you’ve become used to Kirishima’s little sexual quirks as normal. 

“Get on with it, shitty hair.” Bakugou snaps, the old nickname falling out of his mouth almost unconsciously. Kirishima’s hair is ungelled today, hanging loose over his brow and around his ears, although neither of you care to point this fact out. “Do you need me to draw you a map?”

Kirishima rolls his eyes. “Damn, man. Cool it with the attitude.”

You have no doubt that Bakugou is ready to snap back with another comment, but before he gets the chance to Kirishima’s large palms plant themselves down on Bakugou’s incongruously tiny waist as he ruts his hips experimentally against Bakugou’s ass. From your new and very comfortable vantage point, you get to see the look of realisation begin to sneak across Bakugou’s face; there is, after all, a pretty significant difference between deciding that you’re going to fuck Kirishima and actually feeling his cock press against you. The creeping cognizance of exactly how big Kirishima is can be nothing short of alarming, and nothing drives home that realisation faster than feeling the tip of his dick pressing against you.

If anything though, Bakugou’s initial moment of anxiety just seems to turn into more arousal. “Fuck.” He breathes quietly, his voice gone a little choked.

“How’s it feel?” You ask, half-teasing. You reach up and pet reassuringly at his shoulders and the side of his neck, feeling the solid muscle shift beneath your palm.

“Big.” It’s more of a groan than anything else, his scarlet eyes going a little glassy.

Behind him, Kirishima rumbles a low, genuinely amused chuckle. “I thought we already covered that.”

“Shut up. Just put it in.” Bakugou cranes his head over his shoulder, reaching to try and maneuver Kirishima himself. “Come on. I’m horny as hell, and I’m not gonna break. Stop fucking treating me like I’m [Y/N].”

You stiffen at that, and narrow your eyes. “I haven’t broken yet, asshole.”

“Whatever.” Bakugou rolls his head around to meet your scowl with a cocky smirk, “I’m gonna take it without whining like a bitch.”

Your irritated expression melts into a slow, anticipatory smile. “You’re gonna eat your words, Katsuki.” you croon up at him as Kirishima hooks his chin over his shoulder, biting his lip to stifle his own smile, “You’re gonna choke on them.”

Whatever Bakugou was planning on saying in return is interrupted by Kirishima dipping both thumbs into his ass and marvelling at the stretch. “Wow, you really did get yourself ready.” He says, and Bakugou exhales heavily as Kirishima grinds into him again. “Can I…?”

“Yes, just do it!” Bakugou unsuccessfully tries to shove his own hips back, his impatience written clear across his face.

Kirishima meets your gaze over Bakugou’s shoulder, his eyes wide and excited. ‘What the fuck!’ he mouths silently, still grinning. You smile back at him, trying hard not to laugh because Bakugou is also looking down at you. Being beneath the two of them is intimidating because they are both extremely large men, but also because they’re both staring at you and the weight of their combined gazes is really intense.

You can’t see what’s happening, but you know when Kirishima begins to press into Bakugou because both of their faces contort; Kirishima’s mouth drops open and his forehead crinkles, a ragged little moan escaping him, and Bakugou’s eyes shoot wide as he inhales sharply through his nose and apparently forgets to breathe out. “Oh god, oh fuck,” Kirishima whimpers, his head dropping down onto Bakugou’s shoulder. He’s trying to hold back to give Bakugou time to adjust, that much is obvious, but he seems a little more impatient than he usually is with you. While he’s being slow, his hips keep rutting forward in little aborted motions that lack the level of consideration that he usually takes with you -- but then again, Bakugou had insisted that he was able to take it.

You wonder if he’s beginning to second-guess himself; his jaw hangs slack and his eyes are wide and a little out of focus, his back beginning to hunch slightly as Kirishima presses forward. “Oh,” he grunts. His hands flex and fist into the sheets by your head, and he breathes hard through his nose. “Shit.”

Kirishima stills, though it’s clear that it takes a huge amount of effort. “Are you-” he pauses just short of asking Bakugou if he’s alright, and instead says, “Can I put in the rest?”

“The rest?” Bakugou says quickly, his voice several octaves higher than usual. “It’s not in yet?”

You start to laugh, and not even the murderous glare that Bakugou shoots your way can dampen your amusement. “Oh no, are you having trouble with just the tip?”

“I will kick your ass, dickhead. He’s entering somewhere that’s usually an exit, let him take it slow!” Bakugou plants his palm over your face and shoves you away so that you’re not looking directly at him before saying, “Whatever, put the rest in!”

Kirishima pays him no mind, instead peering at you over Bakugou’s shoulder. “I want you to feel good too.” He tells you, even though you can see the tension in his face and neck from forcing himself to stay still when every nerve in his body screamed at him to move. “Can Bakugou make you feel good?”

“I don’t know, can he?” You ask coyly, casting an eye down the length of Bakugou’s rigid body hovering above you; you doubt that Bakugou will have the presence of mind to pleasure you when Kirishima’s entire length is fucking inside of him. 

As expected, Bakugou’s nostrils flare. “Don’t ask stupid fucking questions.” he snaps, one hand already slipping between your legs to tease at your clit. He blinks in surprise when his fingers slip along your slit. “Huh. You’re drenched.”

Your face heats up in embarrassment, but Kirishima’s face lights up with a wicked smile. “Is she?” he asks. His hand winds around the front of Bakugou’s hips, and you think for a moment that he’s going to touch you too. But then it’s Bakugou who stiffens with a bitten-back moan as Kirishima wraps a hand around his neglected hard-on and guides the tip of it to rub against your slick, eager pussy. Both you and Bakugou go still, surprised, as Kirishima quietly asks, “Is this okay?”

“Yes.” The word comes out on a moan as your head drops back to the sheets. You shift your hips and feel the tip of Bakugou’s cock slide just barely inside you. “Please!”

Bakugou swears, loud and vicious, as his hand comes to clamp down on your hip to keep you from fucking yourself onto him. “Fuck! Don’t do that, I’ll come-” he begins, but Kirishima chooses that moment to buck the rest of his own cock into Bakugou’s ass. The sudden harshness of the movement starts a chain reaction as Bakugou’s entire body is jolted forward, inadvertently pressing his own dick all the way inside you. He makes a sound like a wounded animal, his breathing ragged and heavy as his clutches at your hip. “Oh-! Shit, fuck, you absolute motherfucker-!”

Kirishima laughs breathlessly, his forehead dropping down to rest against Bakugou’s shoulder. “Taking too long.” he says, his words coming out syrupy and almost slurred. “God, feels so good…”

You can’t stop yourself from squirming a little, trying to get Bakugou’s dick just a little bit deeper; you had gotten used to the obscenely large size of Kirishima’s dick, and while Bakugou’s dick felt good, it wasn’t enough. Your squirming doesn’t get you very far though, because Bakugou’s grip on you tightens until he’s holding you firmly in place. “Stay still,” he grounds out, his voice ragged. His shoulders are hiked up around his ears as he breathes, and you wonder if it’s from pain or if he’s just so close to cumming right now that every touch straddles the line of too much. He swears again, and his head drops down onto your shoulder. “Feels like I’m gonna split in two.” He murmurs, voice tight.

“Poor baby,” you say, running a hand up along his shoulder blades. With his face buried into the crook of your neck like this, he’s unintentionally given you a perfect view of his arched back and raised ass. Like this, you can just about see where Kirishima is buried inside of him, the only part of his cock visible being the swollen, squishy area at the base. “If it’s too much, tell us, Katsuki.”

“S’not too much,” he mumbles into your neck, all the usual sharpness leached from his voice. “I can do it. It’s just… a lot. And you’re really fuckin’ soft inside, which isn’t fucking helping.” As if to emphasise his point he rocks his hips forward into you and then makes a weird little warbling sound into your ear.

Kirishima leans up and drapes himself along the length of Bakugou’s back, sending a wobbly grin your way. “I can’t- I have to-” His hips twitch, building into slow, rolling thrusts. “Bakugou- I need- Can I, Katsuki-?”

“Yeah.” Bakugou pants into your neck, the condensation of his breath gathering wetly against the flesh of your throat. “Yeah, fuck me.”

That’s all the permission Kirishima needs -- he lets out an excited little whimper before pulling out and shoving himself back inside all out once. The movement sends a jolt up Bakugou’s spine, and he sucks in a sharp breath but doesn’t move his face from your throat. Kirishima begins a rough, quick pace, his muscled thighs flexing as he drives into Bakugou again and again. Every thrust seems to drive the breath out of Bakugou’s lungs, and he wriggles his arms under your shoulders and clutches you to him as the force of Kirishima’s fucking sends his whole body rocking into yours.

“So big, shit!” Bakugou manages to gasp out, finally regaining the presence of mind to breathe properly. 

“Yeah?” Kirishima whimpers, looking proud. “You look so good like this, man, you feel so nice wrapped around me. Does it feel good?”

“Uh huh.” Bakugou dips his head so that his face is buried in your tits, his ass raised even higher. “Fuck!”

Everytime Kirishima fucks into Bakugou he pushes Bakugou’s hips sharply into yours, until all three of you are essentially fucking each other in a daisy chain reaction. You writhe beneath Bakugou, squirming and working your hips back and forth along the length of Bakugou’s dick as he fucks you to the same rhythm that he’s being fucked to himself. “Harder.” You beg, hiking your legs up over Bakugou’s hips and squeezing tight as you’re both rocked by Kirishima.

Bakugou makes a muffled noise that is possibly encouragement. His hips oscillate wildly between thrusting back to meet Kirishima’s snapping pelvis and forward into your own wet heat, like he can’t decide between the two. There’s something impossibly intoxicating about being able to watch Kirishima positively ploughing into Bakugou’s ass, hunched over his back and clutching his waist and panting from the exertion, and simultaneously being able to feel how hard and fast he’s fucking him. You know you’re clenching up from the way Bakugou moans brokenly into your tits; your chest feels suspiciously wet, and you have a feeling that he’s actually being fucked so good that he’s drooling on you.

Despite the fact that Kirishima is jackrabbiting his hips into Bakugou so hard that Bakugou’s whole body is bouncing with the speed and force of it, Bakugou’s hips grind into yours at a slightly slower pace: his cock rubs insistently along every inch of the inside of your pussy every time a thrust knocks him forward again, grinding unrelentingly deep. Kirishima is visibly starting to fall into that mindlessly horny haze that means he’s getting close to cumming, but he still has the presence of mind to reach down and intertwine one of his hands with yours, the other gripping Bakugou’s hip as he guides him back and forth on his cock.

Neither of them are going to last long; it’s obvious from Kirishima’s desperate open-mouthed panting and the way he hunches over as his thrusting starts to turn messy, and it’s obvious from Bakugou’s raggedy breathing and his equally messy attempts to fuck further into you as he messily sucks at one of your tits. 

What you’re not expecting, however, is how quickly your own orgasm is creeping up on you. This particular position isn’t super conducive to your own pleasure, but being fucked like this while having such strong visual stimulation is nice -- the pleasure isn’t bright or burning or all-consuming, but it’s building, and rapidly. Kirishima turning Bakugou into a gasping, sweaty mess on top of you is apparently a massive turn-on for you, which comes as a mild (but very pleasant) surprise, and you can’t stop yourself from jamming a hand down the middle of you and Bakugou so you can rub frantically at your clit.

The heat and weight of Bakugou plastered to your front is blistering, and every time Kirishima whines and fucks him forward into you it sends little jolts of pleasure shooting through you. Bakugou moans into your breastbone, and it sounds like he’s choking, as if he’s being fucked so thoroughly that his body has forgotten basic functions like how to breathe, and you find it so ridiculously hot that you let out an answering moan.

To your honest surprise, you cum first. Your orgasm rips through you with an intensity that leaves you genuinely startled, your body convulsing and arching as your mouth drops open soundlessly. “Oh!” is all you manage to gasp out, your hand clenching tight around Kirishima’s.

“Yes, baby!” Kirishima pants, his face bright and excited and extremely aroused, as delighted as ever at the chance to watch you lose yourself. “Oh- shit, I’m gonna- I’m close-!”

Bakugou’s head snaps up from your chest all of a sudden, his eyes blowing wide. “Is it getting bigger? Fuck, is it getting bigger?”

The extra inch Kirishima’s cock tends to grow when he comes is a sign that he’s just about to spill, though you could have guessed that from the way that his eyes have gone unfocused as the motion of his hips stutter and falter. You realise that this is Bakugou’s first time experiencing it, since he’s only ever seen Kirishima come when he’s buried inside of you.

Kirishima, meanwhile, is babbling away about how good he feels, about how good you and Bakugou feel and how good you two look. He lets out a high-pitched keening sound and then his whole body locks up as he strains against his orgasm, his hips spasming wildly. Bakugou makes a muffled sound into the sweaty, drool-slick skin of your chest, as he comes inside of you in turn, apparently driven over the edge by the combined sensation of Kirishima’s engorging cock and the veritable buckets of cum being emptied inside of him. You can feel the sticky, gooey slickness of Kirishima’s cum dripping onto your skin and the bedsheets. As always, it makes a mess, but the three of you are slumped boneless against each other, with no energy left to spare to so much as move a muscle, never mind to clean up.

Finally, after an indeterminable amount of time, Bakugou reaches around to shove Kirishima off of him with a groan. A visible wince passes over his face as Kirishima pulls out, accompanied by a veritable gush of cum as it spills out onto the bedsheets. “Shit. goddamn, that is so much fucking cum.” Bakugou mumbles, slumping over into the sheets and twisting away from the mess. 

Kirishima worms his way over between the two of you so he can cuddle you both at once, his expression joyfully blissed out and lacking any sort of embarrassment. “I love you guys.” He says, nuzzling at the side of your sweaty face and patting affectionately at Bakugou’s shoulder.

You know from experience that the aftermath of taking Kirishima for the first time is uncomfortable at the least. You only have barely a moment to feel sympathy for Bakugou and his asshole before he looks down and grins hazily at you. “Told you I could take it.”

Your sympathy practically vanishes on the spot. “The only reason you could take it that good is because I practically fisted you beforehand.” You point out, totally irritated by the fact that he’s chosen to apparently forget about all your hard work.

Kirishima’s gaze jumps between the two of you, exhausted and bewildered. “What the hell happened while you were in the bathroom?” He asks, his curiosity finally getting the better of him. His gaze travels lazily over the cum staining all three of you, and obviously thinks of the way you two had arrived naked into the sitting room together to practically corner him. “Actually,” he amends, stretching his arms over his head. His dick is rapidly softening, though it doesn’t look any less intimidating; you catch Bakugou staring at it, his expression visibly awed as he clearly marvels at how it had ever fit inside of him. “I don’t think I want to know. You two are so weird.”

[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.”