#while daisy wants nothing to do with the coffin but is chasing jon

[ashes-in-a-jar]

Listening to mag 61 I come to the realization that there is some sort of triangle in the relationship between Jon, Daisy and the coffin. Not sure if love but definitely something

[ashdumpsterpile]

ASH’S TMA HURT/COMFORT/FLUFF REC LIST 

For the gays. (And @damcrows who’s been dead for the past 24 hours. Rest in peace babe. Read some gay fic. Deny the inevitability of canon. <3)

___

the end, but the start (of all things that are left to do)  by @ajkal2

Jon wakes up.

aka. mag200 tore out my heart

(Very smol, very short, very spoiler. Def recommend for anyone who just finished the podcast.)

remind me how to smile by @tamerofdarkstars

Jon is probably fine, just hiding out somewhere while the whole murder thing blows over and that's... fine. Martin is fine with that explanation. Really. He's got plenty to distract himself - like listening through the entire What the Ghost episode library, for example. Or watching Georgie Barker's Instagram livestreams.

(Yea this was in the last rec list, but you don’t understand THE ADMIRAL GIVES CUDDLES)

Chamomile by Dribbledscribbles

Whatever the ex-tea was, if it really had ever been that last bag of chamomile Martin claimed he’d found tucked in the back of the cupboard, it was fast now.

Martin had tried catching it, chasing it, blocking its way with shoebox lids and plates and an upended footstool, but the thing was just too quick. Jon knew as well as Knew that he might have left off the attempts completely if not for the creature’s preferred game.

The game was, See How Many Times I Can Push Martin Towards Cardiac Arrest Before He Comes at Me with The Broom.

(Scottish Honeymoon Era. Adorable and weird. A vampire gets harassed.)

hey stranger by @ennuijpg

It’s a late night Tesco run, how eventful could it be? It’s not like Martin is going to run into his boss who’s wearing something absurdly different from usual and get the most acute form of whiplash possible from seeing him, right?

(Martin runs into Jon at the grocery store and has an existential crisis.)

roses roses, roses. by @judesstfrancis

Rose scented laundry detergent. Running into Jon in the breakroom. Running into Jon on his way back to his desk. Rose scented detergent. Running into Jon. Roses. Jon. Roses, roses, roses. 

(Canon enemies to friends to lovers au-ish. Martin POV. Very pining much sweet.)

go softly by doomcountry

And there is nothing else besides this. 

(More hurt/comfort than fluff. Scottish Honeymoon Era. Mild eye mutilation.)

Not Alone by @backofthebookshelf

After the coffin, Daisy and Jon are both fragile. They hold each other up. 

(Post-buried Jon&Daisy starter pack. Very hurt/comfort.)

trust my love by antlsepticeye

“you… you’re real, aren’t you?” jon whispers, the fog slowly dissipating from his mind. “it is not a trick?”

“i’m here,” martin says softly, reaching up to grab jon’s hand that was resting on his cheek, intertwining his fingers with jon’s and squeezing. he moves jon’s hand to martin’s chest, resting it over his heart. “you’re alright. i’m alright. take your time, love. let’s just take some deep breaths, okay?”

(TOUCHSTARVED JON HAS ENTERED THE CHAT.)

reaching out by Athina_Blaine

By the time things settled, when Martin had finally managed to crack through his cold shell, feel some of his old self returning to him in bits and pieces, they had found their little routine.

One that had the two of them sleeping in the same bed, making breakfast, going to the mart. Where Jon reached for his wrist while they slept, and Martin luxuriated in the gentle warmth of his fingers.  

But not one where Martin reached back. One that had Martin kissing Jon awake or taking his hand over the breakfast table, because ... Martin never had the courage to try. And then it never became a part of the routine.

And Martin desperately wanted it to be.

-

Martin and Jon have an important conversation.

(More Scottish Honeymoon Era for the soul. Hurt/comfort/fluff.)

Belabor by @janekfan​

Jon's given the position of Archivist and is falling apart at the seams. Tim and Sasha are upset and playing games. Elias is overbearing and manipulative.

And poor Martin is stuck cleaning up the mess.

(THEE first fic I ever read for tma. Season 1, hurt/comfort/fluff, and hints of Jmartin. janekfan is the absolute master of seasons 1-3 hurt/comfort. This is my favorite, but pls check out the rest of their fics.)

tea, blankets, and a damnable stubborn attitude by ivelostmyspectacles

“Are you really gonna stay here and pester Jon all evening?”

“I’m not pestering him,” Martin retorted, sounding vehement if not busy going through the cupboards. “I’m heating up soup.”

“Oh, you might as well make him another cup of tea while you’re at it.”

“Oh, good idea.”

Jon shot Tim a withering look.

(The one where Jon is ill, Martin makes tea and they watch doctor who together. Fluff 1000%.)

A Kind Hand by @voiceless-terror

Jonathan Sims was adjusting just fine, thank you very much.

In which a minor workplace spill causes Jon to realize that he might have friends.

(Ah yes, the other master of seasons 1-3 fic aka voiceless-terror being my other fav author in the fandom. This one is also season 1 hurt/comfort/fluff.)

A Weather In The Flesh by @cuttoothed

"There is a span of years where Jon doesn’t touch anyone other than the occasional hand shake. It’s not so bad. He’s never been someone who’s needed physical affection."

*

Jon has never been any good at making people want to stick around.

(More touched starved Jon! Much hurt/comfort!)

Something Old, Something New by @cirrus-grey

Months have passed, and everyone is doing better than they were. Daisy and Basira are getting married, Melanie is feeling her old self, Georgie is as much herself as she has ever been, and even Jon has stabilized on his wild fall away from humanity. Everyone is doing better.

Well. Almost everyone.

(Daisy/Barsira wedding! Melanie is a bitch and we love her! Jmartin dance! Post-canon (almost) everyone lives!)

The Weight of Love by @voiceless-terror

Jon is a restless sleeper. Martin attempts to adjust. 

(The fic where Jon is literally me and Martin attempts to sleep for 1k words.)

The Art of Conversation by @voiceless-terror

"Do you ever stop talking?"

Jon has a complicated relationship with words. Difficulties come and go.

(Jon has adhd and Martin is in love.)

Novelty by @backofthebookshelf

Jon experiences A Sexual Attraction; Martin has A Concern. They figure it out.

(Any fic that explores the ace spectrum is a 10/10. We stan all ace interpretations of jon on this blog.)

Half a Hug by Dathen

I know you weren’t going to hurt me, I trust you, he said again and again. And then a different kind of fear shone through, hollow and echoing: “Please don’t stop touching me."

-

Or: Life is hard when you're touch-starved but have trauma related to your closest friend.  Spoilers through TMA 132.

(Honestly bless every author who saw jon&daisy and was like. They’re siblings. No I will not elaborate.)

the loneliness never left me (but i can put it down in the pleasure of your company) by Athina_Blaine

It was about Martin making Jon feel safe, treasured, and loved. And it had been so, so long since anyone made him feel that way.

And, in the face of it all, Jon was starting to flounder.

(At this point I just need to make separate rec list for Scottish Honeymoon Era.)

you can watch me corrode by scarletfish

"So, how long have you been pulling this shit then?"

"I… excuse me?" Jon’s indignant, certain she can’t mean what he thinks she means.

"When was the last time you ate?"

(Georgie decides Jon and Melanie need a normal day off. Jon learns that he and Melanie have more in common than he thought.)

(Look, Melanie isn’t my favorite person in tma, but she and Jon are like THE SAME PERSON and I adore fics that elaborate on their relationship.)

Out of the Wind, In From the Cold by @ostentenacity

There are two bedrooms in the safehouse, and two beds.

For a moment, Jon considers asking to share, but decides against it with a wince. “I really loved you,” Martin had told him. Loved. Past tense. And Martin doesn’t exactly have a lot of choices right now in terms of company; it would be cruel to demand he play at feelings he no longer has just to make Jon happy.

(For a moment, Martin considers asking to share. But he dismisses the idea with a shake of his head. Jon has already done so much for him. Martin isn’t about to ask for more, especially not when it’s something he doesn’t really need. He has his right mind back, and he has Jon’s friendship. That should be enough for him. It’ll have to be.)

---

Jon thinks that Martin doesn’t love him. Martin thinks that Jon doesn’t love him. They do not, of course, discuss this. Unrequited love is already awkward enough, right? No need to dwell on it.

(THEE SCOTTISH HONEYMOON ERA FIC. IT’S ABOUT THE PINING, BEING MUTUALLY OBLIVIOUS AND FALLING IN LOVE. 10000/10.) 

I Do by @voiceless-terror

“I, um- this was supposed to be a lot more romantic, I swear.” Martin looks down at the dirty bar floor. “I had it all planned out, I-I was going to take you somewhere nice, and then we’d go for a walk in the square- I’ll still do it!” He hurries to explain, as if that’s the most pressing part of this situation. “It’ll be really nice, I’ve already hired a photographer-”

In a fit of protectiveness, Martin proposes to Jon.

(Everyone lives, Martin accidentally proposes and Jon is crying in public.) 

________

[bifrostarchivist]

tma fic recs

hi i’ve been been going through my bookmarks so here’s a list of some of my favorite tma fics! a lot of these are pretty angsty though so you should heed the trigger warnings!

jon-centric fics

Farewell Wanderlust by CombatBootsAndDreams

Jonathan Sims never had enough time. It was always slipping through his fingers like sand through an hourglass. He could see it passing but could do nothing as it took more and more things from him. So he learned to measure everything in actions instead of seconds.

Or: The many moments used to measure the life of one Jonathan Sims, The Archivist.

i love this one it hurts me real bad!

the bell tolls by softlyblue

Jon knows about death, and he knows about dying. He tries to plan around his own.

this one also really hurts me!

Touch Me, Even it Hurts by AuralQueer

People don't really touch Jonathan Sims unless they want to hurt him. That's mostly fine. Jon has never been a tactile person, and he doesn't need anyone but himself.

Except the world is falling down around him, and loneliness aches, and sometimes he'll take anything - even cruelty - just to feel human again.

*A story set between s1 and s4, looking at Jon's relationship with touch, friendship, and his own humanity.

i cried over this one a lot yesterday! it’s wonderful and so fucking sad

jonmartin fics

the garden of forking paths by bibliocratic

Whatever he had predicted might happen, Jon wasn't expecting to survive upon demolishing the Panopticon. He certainly wasn't expecting to be rescued.

Instead, he wakes up in an alternative universe where he's never been the Archivist, and Martin Blackwood doesn't exist.

Martin Blackwood wakes up somewhere else entirely.

i love this one a lot! made me really fucking emotional

The Power of Self-Respect by IceEckos12 & PitViperOfDoom

Jon's life has never been easy, but he's now in a place where he has friends, his job isn't wretched, and best of all, he's dating Martin Blackwood. Things are finally starting to turn around for him, so of course that's when he learns that he must defeat Martin's seven exes in order to stay with him.

There's something fishy about this whole thing, Jon is sure of it. But the only way to find out what is to throw down the gauntlet and fight for his love.

the scout pilgrim au i never knew i needed! i went into this expecting crack but now every time it gets updated it’s all i can think about for the rest of the day and it is very painful. it’s so good.

Desperate Measures by quantumducky

Helen offers to help, and Jon is just tired and miserable enough to accept. Turns out her idea of "helping" is to turn his brain into confused mush and then make that Martin's problem. Somehow, it all works out.

this one! fuck! i love it. made me so sad. but also. a happy ending! i miss helen.

See the Line, where the Sky meets to Sea by The_Floating_World

When Jon is a child he looks into the infinite abyss of space. The Vast looks back into him.

also has some jon/oliver! some found family! vast!jon my beloved...

jongerry fics

Til Death, Parted by Hecatetheviolet

“But, yes, if you all really must know, I married Gerard Keay in Las Vegas.” The total stillness at the table would have better suited a painting than a group of very confused archival assistants. A blob of ketchup falls from the chip frozen halfway to Melanie’s mouth.

“You… married a ghost,” says Melanie, eventually, in a stilted, leading tone.

“Mhm,” says Jon.

A ghost story is something that can be so matrimonial, actually. Too bad Jon and Gerry didn't find that out until the wedding.

I ADORE THIS FIC. U KNOW THAT ONE JONGERRY LAS VEGAS WEDDING SHITPOST? IT’S THAT BUT SO MUCH MORE. GOD IT’S SO FUCKING HEARTBREAKING BUT ALSO HAS LIKE THESE COMEDIC MOMENTS THAT ARE JUST SO FUCKING GOOD. THE WAY THE WRITER WRITES THE JONGERRY DYNAMIC IS JUST. FUCK. IT’S AMAZING.

eager eye and willing ear by graveExcitement

Gerry investigates a paranormal mirror and is pulled into another universe, one where Jon has just burned his page.

i just. love this one. 

jongerrymartin

Ghosts without Graves by Ostentenacity

“I’m already dead, after all.” Gerry smiles, a mirthless flash of teeth. “If I pop out of existence tomorrow, fine. If I stick around for a while, well—at least now I’ve got someone to talk to.” His tone of voice is still blasé, but his gaze falls heavily on Jon, as though asking, Right?

“Yes,” says Jon. “Yes, of course.”

---

When Jon wakes up from his coma, he finds that while Gerry may still be dead, he’s not exactly gone.

i love this one so much. made me happy. made me sad. it’s just wonderful. 

jontim fics

Between Sleeping and Waking by voiceless_terror

So they curl up in his bed, an arm slung across Jon’s waist, his back to Tim’s chest. There are no spiders here, not in this bed that smells of dryer sheets and detergent and Tim. He’s almost asleep when the arm around his waist tightens suddenly.

“My brother always said the pressure helped. When he had bad dreams.”

Jon has nightmares and Tim attempts to chase them away. In the process, they learn a few things about each other.

the comfort. the understanding. it’s just so nice.

enemy of my enemy by beeclaws

Jon comes back from his time with the Circus a little worse for wear. Tim has some feelings about that.

it hurts so bad. but. fuck. the tim & jon somewhat fixing their relationship fic that i just really needed.

Tear Out All Your Tenderness by With_the_Wolves

"He’s been doing such a good job of ignoring it, up until now, pretending he didn’t know how he survived the Unknowing. Pretending he didn’t hear the constant rhythm of hunt hunt kill kill rushing through his veins in time with his blood. He didn’t used to be able to smell fear.

In the aftermath of the Coffin, Tim decides that he's going to be there for Jon. But Jon's fear is intoxicating.

THIS FIC! THIS FIC! JESUS CHRIST IT’S SO FUCKING PAINFUL. JUST. HOLY SHIT.

jonmartim fics

beautiful and annihilating by advantagetexas

But reality was a lot harsher than dreams. He admitted that to himself now, as he gently moved a piece of hair from Jon’s unblinking eye. Daisy Tonner was dead. Sasha James was dead. Daniel Stoker was still dead, or disappeared, or whatever woe begotten fate had befallen him at the hands of that wretched circus.

And here was Tim. Alive. And forced to deal with the fallout.

this fic <3 i love it very much. it’s updates are the highlight of my day. really fucks with my emotions. it’s just great.

[shiftytracts]

Stop Wanting More, part 1 of 2 (T/M/A fic)

In which season-four Jon tries to quiet his hunger for live statements by gorging himself on paper ones, and Daisy tells him what she used to do when she got shaky between hunts. Part two here.

…For almost ten thousand words (~5.1k in this half, ~4.3 in the other), beeeecause of course I did.

Content warnings:

Disordered eating (mainly of the statement variety, but mentions also the literal kind)

Nausea, and brief descriptions of prior vomiting

Brief but not-ungraphic description of Jon’s (canon) Boneturning incident—so, injury, very mild body horror

Vague discussion of Daisy’s passive suicidality (in part two)

Animal cruelty and death: Daisy talks about hunting rats for sport (in part two)

—

Jon paused the tape recorder, closed his eyes, and tried to breathe. A statement’s second-to-last page was the hardest to get down. The dull ache that had begun under his ribs twenty minutes before now stretched down far enough to converge with the one in his stiff hips. His pulse throbbed in his stomach; he could feel it swell and recede beneath his hand with every beat. Nausea boomeranged up from somewhere under his navel. He reminded himself he could stop for now, finish this later—and, as always, that thought made him feel even colder than the sludge of other people’s fear pooling in his stomach. With his free hand Jon pressed Record again, and turned to 0101702’s final page. Oh, god, there was barely anything on it. Just the rest of this paragraph and then one more. He kept his eyes on the page, didn’t stop speaking its words, but fumbled blindly for another statement with his fingers.

“Knock knock,” Daisy said as she entered. “Christ—you’re still recording?”

In a flash Jon folded his hands on the table, sat up a little straighter, tried to suck in his gut. “Er—”

“Thought you said you were gonna do one more.”

“I’m almost done.”

“You’ve got another one right there.”

“I…” he considered I’m sorry, but then she’d say For what. “I don’t know what to tell you. It is my office.”

“Yeah, and your home,” Daisy scoffed—“and mine. Sort of.”

“D—did you want…? You’re welcome, to. Sit down, or….”

She did, on the arm of his couch. “I know, Jon. That’s not what I meant.”

“Okay.” To show he’d meant his welcome, Jon pushed his chair back from his desk and turned in it to face Daisy. Hopefully she’d remember he couldn’t ask What did you mean.

“I mean, don’t pretend this is work. How many statements have you had today? You don’t think that one can wait til tomorrow?”

Seven? Or would this one be eight. Jon forced himself to exhale out the portion of gut he’d been holding back since she arrived; it hurt too much to keep sucking in anyway. “A lot. I’m just.”

“Hungry, yeah.”

“Even when I’m stuffed I’m hungry.” He snarled a laugh, and set a rueful hand over his stomach like a fig leaf.

At first he’d tried sating the hunger with garden-variety food. That didn’t help much. Way back when he’d first transferred to the Archives Jon had fallen back into the old habit of forgetting to eat—which, yeah, not great, but, it did mean he remembered well how amazing it used to feel to cram down even a stale biscuit after too many hours’ inanition. All the hidden notes he’d found in yogurt and dry toast. He even remembered tearing up once at the taste of a banana, early in 2016. Before that he’d been sure he didn’t like bananas; afterward, for a short while he’d eaten one nearly every day, hoping vainly to recapture the ecstasy of banana after 14-hour fast. No luck, of course. After a few weeks he’d concluded he still didn’t much like banana as final course of healthy lunch. He’d especially disliked peeling them: how sometimes the stems bent without breaking, and the more times you tried the warmer, softer, more flexible they got. How little strings of peel still clung to the banana after you peeled off its main body, like static when you pull off a jumper. Or like the lint it leaves behind on your shirt. And the way bananas bruise, like people do. All these vestiges of its previous life—reminders it had lived to feed itself rather than him.

Since the coma, all people food—er. That was, all food intended for human consumption—tasted like that chase after a faded spark. Cloying and mushy and… organic, reminding him too much of the garden it came from. And the way it landed in his stomach was far worse. The original banana, the one Martin had pressed on him in the Archives in April 2016, had gone down like nectar, ambrosia, manna from heaven, &c.; the ones afterward, like an unwanted dessert always does. (Cloying. Mushy. A biology lesson mildly tapping its watch.) These days, though, eating regular dinner on a stomach empty of other people’s trauma felt like trying to fill up on cake. Not like cake after fourteen hours of nothing; Jon was pretty sure his 2016 stomach would have welcomed that. But like cake at dinner time. When you’re expecting, you know. Dinner. It gave him the brief, fake-seeming energy of a sugar high, and made him sick before it made him full.

Especially when he was otherwise ailing, for some reason? After Hopworth he’d treated himself to a lie down and a sandwich. The rest had helped, but he’d squandered most of the energy it gave him on the effort to keep the sandwich down. At that moment nothing, not even the coffin, had scared him so much as the thought of what it would feel like to throw up when you had only ten ribs on one side. He hadn’t expected losing them to hurt, at least not for long—had expected the rib to flow out of his skin into Jared Hopworth’s hand like an ice cube through water, which in retrospect was stupid given the testimony of Mr. Pryor in statement 0081103, but he hadn’t had time to reread that one beforehand and at the time Jon remembered only that Hopworth didn’t break his victims’ skin when he pulled out their bones. Turned out that wasn’t much comfort: he’d still had to break the ligaments attaching Jon’s ribs to his spine and chest. It had felt like a bad dislocation (four of them, technically), only instead of the feeling of bone pressing on things it shouldn’t there was an equally violating sense of tissue wallowing in holes that shouldn’t be there. He’d had this horror that if he were sick the flesh would crumple and pop where his ribs used to be, like when you try to suck the remaining water out of a near-empty bottle.

A few months after that he’d caught cold. (A point in the still-human column, Daisy had called it.) You know the first day or two of a cold, before the encroaching mucus takes out your ability to smell or taste properly, how innocuous olfactory phenomena like cheddar and laundry soap suddenly become Bad Smells, on par with the olive bar at a posh supermarket? Well, in a similar way, this one seemed to sharpen the dichotomy in his body’s opinions of people food and monster food. His lack-of-ribs had mostly healed by then though, so either vomiting with only ten ribs on one side did not cause the anomaly he’d feared, or, if it did, it hadn’t hurt enough for him to notice it in the cacophony (pucophony?) of other sensations.

(Daisy liked to play on words, so he’d been doing it more lately. This project the Eye seemed happy to help with, though in this case the suggestion arrived in his mind at the exact same moment as a reminder that, technically, the word cacophony can apply to sensations other than sound only by synecdoche.)

And then, a few weeks ago, when the whole Archives went down with norovirus… well, it wasn’t a fun time. He’d at first mistook the lethargy, weakness, trouble concentrating for signs of hunger—the new kind of hunger. Ms. Mullen-Jones’ statement about the Divine Chains cult hadn’t seemed all that bad, when he’d first recorded it. Scarier than if he’d read its events in a novel, of course; that was just how statements worked. He experienced them more vividly than stories, though less so than the events of his own life. (Because the people they happened to thought they were real! he’d told himself when he first took this job. It’s empathy, that’s all. Nope, sorry—evil magic.) When he read a paper statement these days, though, the knowledge it wouldn’t give him nightmares never quite left him. And he’d thought he was growing desensitized to the kinds of horror most people came to the Institute to report. Coming back up, though—maybe it was the fever, but god, the visions he got on that statement’s way out, of Agape and the soft, sticky hivecorpse of Claude Vilakazi’s followers—the way it made the donut he’d shoved down that morning (in a show of team spirit, god help him) come back up tasting like rotten rice wine—it was worse than the dreams. Worse, he could have sworn, than even the first time he ever dreamt Naomi Herne’s empty graveyard.

While hanging over the bowl of the Archives’ toilet waiting to see if he’d got it all up or if there was still more to come, Jon remembered thinking again of the banana Martin had given him. A few days earlier Daisy had made him watch the video of the I don’t understand this meme and at this point I’m too afraid to ask man vore-ing a banana; Jon had confessed to her, in a conspiratorial whisper-laugh, that for him vore itself had been one such meme until that very second, when the Eye had seen fit to inform him. But when applied to a banana, the term apparently just meant eating it peel and all. In 2016 Martin had broken the banana’s stem and pulled back a section of peel before handing it to Jon, so as to brook no argument. Was it really the banana itself he’d cried over? Not the gesture of friendship, when Jon deserved it so little? The thought of someone caring for him enough that when he got hangry at them they handed him a snack. Martin had been living in the Archives then, like Jon did now. Sleeping in Document Storage—a guest in a room owned by pieces of paper. Those bananas may have been the only thing that felt like his.

A Guest for Mr. Spider was about vore, technically. Not an uncommon topic in children’s literature. Some surmised that was where the fetish came from, though others maintained kinks like that were inborn, and the stories merely alerted their hosts to them for the first time. Red riding hood, three little pigs, little old lady who swallowed a fly. The Leitner touch was only the part where he drew you to his real-life lair and real-life ate you.

Looking back, that was probably the first thing he’d ever admired about Martin—how easy he’d made it look to skin a fruit. Not at the time admired, of course, but in those weeks afterward, when every banana Jon ate made him claw at the peel til his finger joints throbbed.

That stomach bug had struck the Archives with serendipitous timing, though. If he’d not found out how thin abstinence from the Hunt had made Daisy on the same day he’d barfed up a statement, Jon might not have pieced together what their combined evidence meant. Until then he’d put down his own post-coma weight loss to the fact he rarely ate more people food than a donut in twenty-four hours. Lots of avatars were scrawny, after all. Jane Prentiss, Mike Crew, Justin Gough, Annabelle Cane, John Amherst, Simon Fairchild. Jude Perry and Jared Hopworth could mold their respective fleshes however they wanted, so he didn’t count them as exceptions. True, Trevor Herbert’s bulk had struck him as odd; surely a homeless man wouldn’t waste cash on food his body no longer wanted. And what about Breekon and Hope? Did butterflies and a quartermaster’s pen and tongue sustain them? But maybe, Jon had told himself, it was like with alcohol. Maybe the avatars with more flesh on their bones had worked to develop a tolerance for (air quotes, heavy sarcasm) people food, for the sake of their physiques, or. So they could, he didn't know, eat socially? Without feeling sick, like Jon did whenever one of the others brought donuts.

Preposterously stupid, this theory seemed in retrospect. The truth was much simpler. It was like Jude Perry’d told him. She was strong and he was weak, because she fed her god with her actions, while Jon’s had had to resort to eating his flesh.

He wasn’t going back to live statements! That wasn’t an option; he knew that. He couldn’t feed his god with his actions. But he could have more paper ones. Maybe they were like the candles poor Eugene Vanderstock used to bring Agnes—the ones she’d sat over for hours. Hours and hours, inhaling the suffering that made them. They’d kept her strong enough, right? At least in body. All those people in charge of her care, all so much in her thrall—if she’d looked hungry one of them would’ve mentioned it in a statement.

During Jon’s school days, back when he was still trying to learn how to be a girl, this brief window had opened up right around age thirteen where the girls around him had enough self-consciousness to start developing eating disorders? But not enough to keep them secret. Thirteen had been this phase of, like, I’m a teenager now, see? I’ve got the teen angst now—SEE?! Where after they’d finished the day’s maths assignment, or while setting up microscope slides, one could overhear girls swapping self-harm anecdotes and tips for how best not to eat. Anne, whom he’d been almost friends with, went through two packs of chewing gum a day for a while. She would shove three or four sticks at a time in her mouth, then spit them back out into their wrappers as soon as they lost their flavor. Eventually they made her sick, and she switched to chain-sucking butterscotch discs. (Most artificial sweeteners, as the Eye now informed him, had mild laxative properties—including those used in gum.) Other acquaintances had brought comically large thermoses of coffee to school every day, and scurried to the toilet between classes. But it was another polyurious crowd that Jon kept thinking of, these days—the kids who would chug water every time they felt hungry. Trying to fill up on paper statements felt just like that.

He’d never understood that urge until now. Hunger was already a bad sensation; why would it help to add the further bad sensations of nausea and stomachache and cold? But now it made sense: feeling better was not the point. The point was to stop wanting more. He couldn’t get rid of the hunger, exactly—not in a way that mattered. Not the shards of glass in his belly, not the itch in his esophagus like a finger tapping behind his gag reflex, not the way simple motions like soaping his hands made his whole body ache. Not the sharpening of his senses to such a fine point that he jumped whenever Thérèse in the office above him shut her desk’s sticky drawer. (He hadn’t known that was what made the squeaky noise until a few weeks ago when the Eye decided he might like some office gossip. Even now he didn’t know which of the faces he sometimes passed up there belonged to Thérèse. She had no statements to make.) Nor the fog in his mind, though he tried sometimes to blame that on the Lonely. He couldn’t sate his hunger with paper statements—couldn’t make himself full, in the rosy way we usually connote that word. All warm and carefree and pleasantly sleepy. But he could cram the hole inside him with enough stale horrors that the temptation to chase down a fresh one momentarily left him.

And that was the new plan—to stuff himself with paper statements.

Tomorrow would mark two weeks since the day he’d first tried it. Brian from Artefact Storage had a statement to give him, Jon could feel—either Stranger or Spiral, it was hard to tell quite which. Something that caused paranoia. Not a great fit for that department. Good fit for a temple of the Eye, Jon supposed, remembering Tim and Michael Shelley. But Artefact Storage? God help him. He wondered if Elias had done it on purpose, hiring a paranoid man to work in a room full of objects that wanted him hurt. If so it must’ve been this one—this purpose. And on Wednesday mornings Brian manned the place all alone. Poor soul was already clinging to this job by a thread, though (so, Web…? That could cause paranoia too, as Jon well knew). Surely if Jon made him relive his trauma that would break it. Though perhaps that’d be a mercy. And but besides, two weeks ago Melanie had still lived here, and sat all morning between Jon’s office and Artefact Storage. Until she went to lunch. But by that time the woman whose laugh Jon could sometimes hear through the walls (Pooja, the Eye had since told him her name was) would have joined Brian. And it’d just be too weird, too risky, to go in and ask him about it with a third person in the room. Even if it wasn’t also evil.

So he’d read 0132210—the statement of Sierra Talbot, regarding a swimming pool whose depth changed every time she entered it—in hopes that’d make him quit thinking about the paranoid man down the hall. It didn’t, not really; paper statements didn’t take up as much of his attention as they used to. But he couldn’t get up and walk to Artefact Storage in the middle of one. When he finished and still couldn’t think of anything but Brian, he dug out another statement (this one from 1938, regarding a bad penny). Just to keep himself chained to his desk til lunch. And then a third (Liza Ho, attack of the killer seagulls). And by the end of that one he felt too heavy and cold inside to want to go anywhere but the couch. It made his stomach swell until it hurt to sit up straight, and the thought of shoving anything more inside made him feel sick—exactly like chugging water every time he felt hungry.

Basira had said maybe the Web just wanted to keep them so afraid of their own impulses they sat and did nothing so they couldn’t be puppeted. Maybe she was right. He’d never felt more like a spider, with his weak, skinny limbs and bloated stomach. Lying on the couch massaging other people’s horrors into more comfortable shapes inside him. Thank god he’d already given up tucking in his shirts, when he came back after the coma. Jon had worn the same trousers for three days in a row, now—shucked them off at the end of the day, hoping if he left them on the floor that’d convince him they were too dirty to wear again, and then slipped them back on over clean boxers in the morning. They were the only trousers he had that stayed up with the button left unfastened.

(Technically, the noun bloat refers to the feeling of weight or tightness in the abdomen. To describe a belly which has expanded beyond its typical size, one should use the word distended. Though these phenomena can occur separately, most people conflate them under the single word bloated. This trivia had seemed worthless when Beholding told him of it. But now he knew better. Every morning he woke up feeling like he’d had his whole torso replaced with the aching void of space, empty but for silver glints of pain that were the stars. And then he’d look down and find his belly still distended.)

Melanie and Basira didn’t know—at least not officially. They both seemed to have noticed how much more often lately they’d walked in on him recording, but Jon was pretty sure they suspected him less of bingeing on statements, more of pretending to record so as to avoid talking to them. He welcomed this misapprehension.

It was also possible they knew but declined to comment, since. Well, it was kind of a pathetic habit? Physically, a bit pathetic. Morally, though, such a big improvement over compelling statements by force that maybe they figured they ought to let him have it. If so he should be grateful, he reminded himself. Their pity, after all, was humiliating only in principle; Daisy’s teasing and concerned questions embarrassed him in practice.

“Enough navelgazing,” Daisy scoffed, but when Jon looked over at her he could see a smile creeping its way onto her face. “Look—finish the one you’re on, then come over here and I’ll. Tell you a story.”

“I—what?”

“Don’t know if it’ll count as a ‘statement,’” she said, with air quotes; “not much fear in it, more just.” She looked at the floor, then shrugged. “But it seems worth a try, yeah? Might make you feel better.”

“I-I, er. I really shouldn’t?” He meant in case it had a taste of human blood effect, but set his hand on his stomach again in hopes she’d think he meant he was too full.

“Yeah, you should. I want you to hear it.” Daisy shrugged again. “Think it might do you good to know.”

Jon turned back to his desk, unpaused the recording and wrapped up the statement. He’d quit bothering to record end notes on most of these—told himself he could add them in later, like he used to when he’d first taken this job. How proud 2016 Jon would have been to see how many statements the 2018 Archivist got through in a week.

He paused for a moment before standing up, to take as deep a breath as he could manage when stuffed full of paper. The end of that statement had gone down easier, since he’d had that few minutes’ break talking to Daisy, but he still didn’t love the idea of standing and walking. Especially since he knew once he got to the couch he’d be glued there by fatigue. If he didn’t pee now, he’d spend most of the night far enough into sleep to be paralyzed, but not far enough to numb his bladder. He excused himself to Daisy, promising to come right back. Then hauled himself up, with help from his cane and one arm of his chair.

Six limbs it took to maneuver this body now. Two more and he’d’ve gone full spider.

Three quarters of the way to the bathroom—that’s how long it took before the ache in his legs outpaced that in his stomach. He arrived on the toilet seat shaky and out of breath, as always. Months ago he’d given up standing to pee. When you sat you could rock back and forth, and cross your arms tight over waves of quease.

Not much came out, as was also usual lately. As far as Jon could tell, his body now required only enough water to keep his mouth from drying out while recording. Dehydration no longer made his head hurt, so, why bother. Good thing, too, he supposed—the last two weeks he hadn’t needed much non-metaphorical water inside for his body to parse that as needing to pee.

He let his trousers stay pooled around his ankles until after he’d washed and dried his hands. Then pulled up his shirt, to judge from his reflection whether they’d stay up with the fly undone. If he kept his hands in his pockets, yeah. Could you tell the difference, visually, once he put his shirt tails back down? Not for such a short distance. They wouldn’t have time to get disarranged.

It didn’t matter; Basira didn’t even glance at him on his way back, and all Institute staff who didn’t live here had gone home.

Jon opened the door to his office, said hello to Daisy but didn’t manage to look at her, and sat himself down on the other side of the couch. From the corner of his eye (or someone’s anyway) he saw her rise to her feet. “I’m gonna pee too,” she told him, picking her way toward the door; “get yourself comfortable, like you’re going to bed.”

“Where will you sit.”

“I’ll squeeze in.”

“I don’t mind leaving room for—?” Finally he made himself look up at her, in time to see her shake her head. Daisy hadn’t been strong on her feet either, since the Buried; she held herself up now with a hand on the doorjamb, elbow bent so her shoulder leant against that wrist. He regretted quibbling. “Never mind; I’ll just.”

“Really? You’re comfortable like that? You look like a sheep in clover.”

The knowledge came to him before he could ask her what that meant—complete with a nasty visual of what happens in cases acute enough to require rumenotomy. Jon swore he could feel himself swelling to accommodate this tidbit. His eye twitched in discomfort.

“Think I prefer ‘windbag,’ if it’s all the same to you.”

She made a face like that was grosser than what she had said. “You ruined my joke. I was gonna say I won’t let you have any more leaves til you look less like you might explode.”

“Sheep in clover suffocate,” Jon frowned; “they don’t explode. You must be thinking of how they cure them when—”

“Leaves. In. A. Book, Jon. That joke.”

“Oh. Yes, I see.” He made himself chuckle.

Daisy sighed and shifted on her feet. “I’ll be right back. Just lie down, alright? Like you’re going to bed.”

Jon agreed to lie down, but couldn’t decide whether to face the wall (as he would to sleep), leaving her to slide in between him and the back of the couch the way she had a few times before when she’d walked in on him catnapping, or whether he should lie on his back, where he could see her as soon as she opened the door. It was important to make sure she knew he appreciated her offer to give him a statement. Or, no—to tell him her story, he meant.

Ultimately he picked the latter course.

“You sleep like that?”

“Sometimes."

“I’ve never seen you sleep like that. You always face the wall.” Daisy crossed her arms, blew hair out of her face. “That for the tummy ache, or for me?”

“Uh….”

“Would it hurt you to face the wall.”

“No, I just.”

“Turn around, then. I’ll squeeze in,” she said again.

“I-if you’re sure.”

He rolled onto his side, gritting his teeth as the cramps in his stomach swirled in new directions. What made it slosh like that, he wondered. While he fought to regain his breath Jon watched Daisy climb up onto the back of the couch on shaking elbows and knees, then avalanche down hands- and feet-first so she fit between him and its cushions. He’d never watched her do this before—always either startled out of a doze at the sound of her thumping down next to him, or simply woken up to find her there.

“You’re just like the Admiral,” he informed her.

“True words spoken in jest,” muttered Daisy. Too quietly for him to hear what she said over the couch’s tortured creaks, but half a second after she finished speaking the words appeared before his mind, in white, all-capital letters with a black background like closed captions on the news. “That’s Georgie’s cat, right?” she said aloud.

“Yes.”

Her knee jostled the cap of his; when it made him gasp she snarled under her breath. “Sorry. Can you move your leg?”

“Yes, it’s fine, just—”

“I mean would you move your leg.”

“Oh.” He did so.

“Thanks. Ugh—you’re cold,” Daisy accused him; “where’s that blanket.” He pointed behind her to the arm of the couch where it lay folded. She shook it out, and draped it over both of them. Reached around behind him to make sure it covered his whole back. Jon tried to ignore the way his stomach lurched every time Daisy’s weight shifted against the cushions. Finally she settled next to him to catch her breath. Their foreheads touched; her stomach pressed into his, though not as tightly as the last time they’d lain like this. “Can you breathe or am I crushing you?”

“Not at all, you’re fine—in fact, if the couch cushions are chafing you too much you can—”

Daisy huffed, and scooted herself in closer to him. “That better?” She set her warm hand down right where his belly diverged from pelvis. Jon tried to keep both voice and tremor out of his exhale. Since the coffin, Daisy’s hands and feet suffered at night and after any exertion from the same excess of heat his sometimes did. So the cold inside him probably felt nice on her hand, if not to the rest of her.

(Like snuggling up to a hotel mattress, she’d described it, after the first time she joined him for a nap when he’d just had a statement. Cold, hard, covered in lumps and dents, and creaks when you roll over on it. “I’d prefer you didn’t,” he’d replied, while praying her elbow wouldn’t come any closer to the crevasse where his ribs used to be.)

“Christ you’re stuffed,” commented Daisy. For emphasis she lifted her fingers, then set them back down on his gut.

“I don’t know what you expected.”

“You won’t pop if I tell you a story?”

“Not literally,” Jon said, blinking.

“Of course not literally,” she scoffed; “you know what I mean.”

“Do I?”

“Will it make you sick. Don’t want you throwing up on me; this is Melanie’s shirt. If you ruin it she’ll hit us with her cane, and I don’t trust you to hit as hard back with yours.”

“Mine’s shorter and thicker,” he mused. “I don’t have to hit as hard.”

“Stop. Avoiding. The question.”

Jon sighed to show her he capitulated. Then thought about it. He felt cold and sick, but the idea of saying no to a statement made those feelings worse, not better. And the sharp clusters of pain in his belly were harder to sleep through than quease.

“I’ll be fine,” he decided. “It’ll help.”

“Alright. When you’re ready, ask me what I used to do when I got shaky between hunts.”

--

Read part two here.

[that-one-girl-behind-you]

Illicio 9/?

Part 8

"What's up with that?" She asks after so long has gone by that Jon is starting to think he's safe. He lets out an exhalation that hopefully doesn't sound as exhausted as he is with this whole matter.

Jon is, regardless of what Tim -or Georgie, or even Gerry himself- used to say, not completely hopeless at reading people. Only mostly. He's not entirely blind as to how the mood has shifted in his interactions with the man in question.

"Nothing." Jon says, then adds sullenly. "I don't know."

Daisy squeezes his hand. "Martin?"

"I don't know." Jon turns his head away to avoid Daisy's gaze. "I- Daisy, I think there's bigger things to worry about."

"It's good to- I'm trying to think of the little things too." Daisy shrugs. "It feels like having a purpose."

IX

On the days after the Buried, Daisy gets to know the world again. Or more accurately, the Institute, and the people in it. The difference is mind-blowing, now that the Hunt is only a background presence in her mind instead of the driving force behind her thoughts.

"You look... better," she tells Melanie one evening. It's not really a visible change, but she remembers Melanie from before the Unknowing, always bristling with a rage so barely restrained it used to set Daisy on edge too. Back then her thoughts had been mostly focused on how to take Melanie down if it came to a fight, and she has the feeling the same can be said of Melanie. Just two rabid dogs sizing the other up and waiting for the tension to crack.

"I guess I am," Melanie frowns down at the computer screen, and when Daisy leans over she can see she's taking a quiz of some sort. Probably not the approved use of Institute equipment, but she doesn't seem to care. "Did Jon tell you about the bullet?"

"He mentioned it," Daisy shrugs. A lot of things were said in the depths of the coffin, trying to bring the other some measure of comfort.

"Gerry says they got it off me just in time. Apparently I was a bad accident away from becoming a full avatar." Melanie gives her a careful look out the corner of her eye. "I'm guessing that's why you look..."

"Like shit?" Daisy asks with a dry smile, and after a moment Melanie smiles back.

"I was trying to look for a better term."

"Sugar-coating doesn't suit you."

"Can't say I have much practice." Melanie goes back to her quiz, and Daisy goes back to thinking.

Her condition is hardly surprising, considering everything; the Hunt has been pulling at her from the moment she climbed out the coffin after Jon, but she's done her best to ignore the call of the blood. Daisy's very aware that this is abstinence without recovery, and that her reticence to join in with the Hunt's other hounds is her choosing a slow but certain death.

But she's herself again, and finding out who that is feels like a goal worth dying for.

"Why are you an onion?" Daisy frowns at the computer screen showing the results of Melanie's quiz.

"I was always going to be an onion," Melanie shrugs, "I just wanted to know what kind."

Daisy's thinking about the right way to answer to that statement, when Melanie's phone pings in her pocket. She watches her pull it out, and her face softens at whatever it is she just received.

"I have to go. You should- I think he's recording, but you can probably go in if you're quiet." Melanie points at Jon's door. Even the way she refers to him is different, vaguely distasteful apathy instead of the tense hostility Daisy remembers from before the Unknowing, which is a relief.

The irony of the situation doesn't escape Daisy, how she walked into the coffin with half a mind to kill Jonathan Sims, and walked out ready to kill for Jonathan Sims.

"I can be alone for a while. It's alright." The call of the blood is easier to ignore when she's in someone else's company, but Daisy's not- she's noticed how Basira looks at her, the tired tension of her lips when Daisy follows her around the Institute and she has to pretend it doesn't bother her. Daisy's broken, but she will not be a burden. Not to anyone, but most of all not to Basira.

"Okay, then. Want anything from outside?" Melanie asks as she shoves an arm through her jacket's sleeve.

"I- some chips, if you could get them. Or any food that doesn't come packaged, really."

Melanie briefly nods an acknowledgment as she leaves, and she closes the door behind her before Daisy can ask her to leave it open.

It's okay. It's just a room, just a door. There's plenty of space to breathe and to move. If she focuses, she can feel Jon's presence in his office; he's okay too. They're- they made it out.

Daisy opens her eyes, unsure when she closed them, and finds that the walls have started closing in. She tries to ignore them by clicking back on Melanie's onion quiz, surely that will distract her right? The room is unchanged, she's- it's safe out here, safer than outside for sure, where she'd no doubt find a trail and be compelled to chase it, to run until her legs hurt and she can smell the panicked exhaustion her victim's perspiration, until they cannot keep from her any longer and she's forced to claim the prize and move on to the next-

"You alright there?" When the man's voice pulls her away from her mind, Daisy realizes she's closed her eyes again. Her fists are clenched tightly on the desk, and when she forces them open she finds a matching set of angry red crescent moons on her palms. "You're growling."

She looks up; the man is standing before the desk, looking warily down at her and he smells of lavender and Jon, which helps her push away the last traces of the blood.

"I'm okay." She mumbles, taking a deep breath and forcing herself to release her hunch over the desk, leaning back against her chair. She's heard a lot about this man lately; Basira calls him by his surname, like the ones she doesn't trust, but Melanie calls him Gerry with a sort of relaxed companionship, and when Jon does the same there's an undeniable undercurrent of fondness in the tone he gives the name. She has yet to meet him herself, but this seems as good a time as any, now that the room has stopped trying to suffocate her. "You're Gerry Keay?"

The man holds his silent contemplation for another minute, before he shrugs and grabs the chair across the desk. "That would be me. I've never seen an avatar of the Hunt look so famished," he observes. "Your kind doesn't usually deprive themselves."

"Well, I do," Daisy grumbles.

"Yeah. I can see that."

Silence. It's not exactly comfortable, but it's not uncomfortable either, and the company keeps both the Buried and the Hunt at bay.

"Are you here for Jon?" Daisy asks, and Gerry nods.

"Always. But right now I have to see Martin first."

That's... unexpected, to say the least. "Why do you have to see Martin?"

The man gives her an amused, resigned smile and a shrug. "Jon," he says like it's all the reason he needs, and Daisy decides on the spot that she likes Gerry Keay.

"I guess that tracks," she nods. "Why don't you go then?"

"You looked like you needed someone to talk to for a bit."

"That helps." Daisy nods. While she would've sneered at it before, she's now terribly aware that kindness is a virtue sorely lacking in the world they move in. "I'm alright now."

"You sure?" Gerry's eyeing her strangely, and only then does Daisy remember he's aligned with the Beholding as well.

"Yes. I'm- I'll just keep myself busy." Daisy looks at the computer. "I can... figure out what kind of onion I am."

The man blinks rapidly a couple times, probably trying to process what she just said, and Daisy wonders if Melanie felt the same perverse satisfaction when she said it.

"Sounds- yeah. I'll go now," Gerry says, climbing to his feet again. He turns at the door, and gives Daisy another evaluating look. "You're… very strong. Thank you. For helping him back." And he's gone before Daisy can ask what that even means.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"You should be careful with that. Could be dangerous." Peter half-turns before he leaves, a hand on the edge of the ajar door and ice-cold eyes heavy on Martin's nape.

"Not any more dangerous than anything else in my life, really." Martin shrugs, eyes fixed on the bright computer screen. Interacting with Peter is only tolerable because it feels only marginally like talking to another human being, but even that is enough to upset his stomach.

"Well, if you look at it like that. But I think you'll find that doing something dangerous out of your own free will is always better than being controlled to do it, even if that will is motivated by your frankly worrying infatuation with a man that does not care about you."

"Hm," is all Martin says. Out the corner of his eye he sees Peter's lips curl into a satisfied smile, but he can't bring himself to care. It's not like he's telling any lies either way.

"Okay! Now I really am running late, so if you don't mind?" Peter says in that cheerful, jovial tone Martin is quickly growing tired of, before he closes the office door behind him.

Martin sighs. This is- it's been harder, lately.

He still remembers why he's doing this, and he still cares, he really does. And everything is going according to plan, Peter really does think Martin believed his 'only you can save the world' spiel, Jon is out of the coffin, Daisy's alive, the Institute is -mostly- safe... but he just got the first actually feasible proof that the Extinction might be a real thing, and all he can think is that he's glad Peter left quickly.

The door flies open, and Martin jumps to his feet so abruptly that the chair he was sitting on tumbles to the floor.

"What- Gerard? What are you doing here?" Martin asks angrily, his heart beating madly in his throat. "Peter could've seen you!"

"I waited until he left, Martin, I'm not an idiot." The man rolls his eyes as he closes and locks the door behind him. Martin isn't sure it would be enough to stop Peter from coming in through the Lonely, but it's something.

"So what, were you eavesdropping?" Now that the shock is starting to pass, Martin is steadily moving towards annoyance in the spectrum of emotion. He told Gerard he didn't want him messing with his business, and yet here he is, just-

"You still look a bit gray," Gerard comments, coming to sit across Martin's desk like they had a freaking appointment. "You know what he said was bullshit, don't you?"

"He said a lot of things," Martin mumbles as he picks his chair back up and sits under Gerard's heavy gaze.

"There we go again." Gerard rolls his eyes, crossing his arms over his chest. His eyes are a beautiful color, Martin notices -if he still felt anything when writing his poetry, he'd be inclined to find a suitable comparison- and they couldn't be more different from Peter's. Gerard is actually looking at him, instead of through him, like Peter does. "Are you always this stubborn?"

"Excuse me? I'm not- you're the one who broke in here!" Martin sputters indignantly. "After I told you very clearly that I didn't want your help. If anyone is stubborn, that's-"

"The door was unlocked. Next time you want to be alone, check that first." Gerard shrugs, leaning backwards on his chair until the front legs lift off the floor.

Martin rolls his eyes. "Would it have stopped you?"

"For about five minutes." The man gives him a smug smile that fits his face like a glove, a handsome, mischievous troublemaker that takes far too much pride on the admission. "You look better now."

Martin grumbles, shoving the tape towards him across the desk's polished surface. "Here. Dekker's statement."

"What did you make of it?" The chair's legs land heavily against the floor, and Gerard reaches to take the tape and shove it in his jacket's pocket.

"It's... very odd. It feels like the Spiral, the Lonely and the End all rolled into one, with a side of the Stranger to boot." Martin worries at his bottom lip, frowning. His thoughts as he puts them into words are slow like dripping treacle, like waking up on a cold morning, but he can feel with no room for uncertainty that they're his thoughts, not the Lonely's. "I'm- I don't know if it is a new power, but I- the fears don't usually interact like that, do they?"

"Not really. They're more likely to fight over territory than to share it." Gerard's face is thoughtful when Martin lifts his gaze to look for answers there. "Sometimes they get along if their domains overlap. I've seen the Forsaken mix with the Vast and the Buried, but never at the same time because those two are opposites. The more entities that try to get in the mix, the more likely it is to fail."

"Hm. So? New kid in town?"

"I'll have to listen to it. I'm not exactly thrilled by the idea, though." Gerard sighs, rubbing at the back of his neck in a slow, deliberate movement that belies his exhaustion. "But it's not out of the question."

"H-how's Jon?" Martin blurts out. Gerard's mouth twitches, and Martin clears his throat, looking pointedly away.

"He's... better. I don't think anyone's left the coffin before, so it's not like we have much to compare his progress to. Got a nice new mark out of it, of course. We're this close to completing the card."

"The what?"

"It's just something I- " Gerard blinks, a confused frown coming to rest at his face all of a sudden. "...Something I thought of."

"...Yes?" Martin arches an eyebrow, but Gerard's frown only grows more pronounced when he shuts his eyes tight, as if trying to focus on a though- "Oh. Oh, you're bleeding again!"

Martin goes rustling frantically around in his desk, until he finds a box of paper tissues. The black ink dripping down steadily from Gerard's nose still hasn't slowed down by the time he looks back up, offering the box.

"Her- grab one. Jesus, what happened?"

"I-" Gerard opens his eyes again, and one of them has popped a blood vessel, it seems, the black startling against the white and blue as he reaches to pull a tissue free. "The Eye didn't like that too much."

"It didn't like what specifically?"

Gerard gives him a dubious look. "I don't-"

"Oh, no. You have to tell me now." Martin scowls as fiercely as he can, ignoring the heat on his face when Gerard raises an eyebrow.

"Excuse me? I have to?"

"Of course you do! You can't just barge in here and- and expect me to give you all I know and then not tell me anything!"

"You continue to not be what I expected, Martin," Gerard says in a flat, annoyed tone. Good. "It's got something to do with the marks. He's- he has twelve of them already."

"That's- wow. That's a lot of them." Martin blinks. He's aware -oh, he is so aware- of Jon's brushes with the entities, but it never occurred to him to actually sit down and figure which he hasn't encountered yet. It never felt important, for some reason. Peter's voice echoes in his mind. You should be careful with that. Could be dangerous.

"And he's getting them in the weirdest ways too, like-"

"Is there a normal way to be marked by a fear god?" Martin interrupts, only to be pinned down by Gerard's unimpressed stare. He snorts. "Sorry, sorry. You were saying?"

"Well, yes. I was there when he Knew about the bullet in Melanie's leg. It was a tidbit from the Eye. And then- why did that Stranger bloke bring the coffin here?" Gerard frowns, and ink starts running down from his other nostril as well. "Ah, fuck."

"Yes, maybe- we should stop for now." Martin gives the box of tissues another push. "I really don't want to go looking for Jon because you bled out in my office."

"Would be hard to explain, huh?" Gerard tears a handful of tissues out, before climbing to his feet. "We'll listen to the tape. I'll-"

"Wait- we?"

"I'm not going to lie to him," Gerard shrugs. "Besides, it will make him... not happy, but at least he'll have news of you."

"Very considerate," Martin says dryly. It's an abrupt reminder that they might be doing this out of love for the same man, but they're not friends. Still, Jon deserves nice things, even if Martin can't be the one to give them to him. "What?" He asks, when he zones back in and finds Gerard still looking at him thoughtfully.

"He really does care. Lukas knows how to come at you; don't let him." Gerard opens the door, halfway out already before he pokes his head back in. "Don't call the Lonely back in yet, give yourself a break, will you?"

He's gone before Martin can answer, and he sighs. This is getting so much more difficult than he thought it would be.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"-statement ends." Jon clicks the recorder off and places it on his improvised desk, before turning to look at Daisy. "The Flesh continues to be... puzzling, to say the least."

"Nasty," Daisy agrees without looking away from her phone. The tape recorder slides a little on his stomach when she shifts to make her head more comfortable on Jon's thigh. "Are vampires from the Flesh?"

Jon leans back, resting his head against the wall as the Knowledge starts pressing against his mind. "Yes. Bit of the Hunt too. And a little Stranger. They're quite a mess." He shifts too, the hardwood floor of his office punishing on his tailbone.

"Want to switch?" Daisy asks, already halfway through sitting up.

"I'm alright." Jon slides down instead. "It's almost time to leave anyways, Gerry will be here soon."

"I met him the other day. He seems nice." Daisy lays back next to him. Jon slides his hand under her forearm, just to have an additional point of contact, and she tangles their fingers together.

"He is," Jon says quietly. Daisy, who is not aligned with the Beholding but whose stare can still make you squirm, looks at him out the corner of her eye.

"What's up with that?" She asks after so long has gone by that Jon is starting to think he's safe. He lets out an exhalation that hopefully doesn't sound as exhausted as he is with this whole matter.

Jon is, regardless of what Tim -or Georgie, or even Gerry himself- used to say, not completely hopeless at reading people. Only mostly. He's not entirely blind as to how the mood has shifted in his interactions with the man in question.

Gerry has ways been generous with his touch, a heavy hand on Jon's shoulder, around his wrist, on top of his head, but recently there's been the slightest moment of hesitation just before making contact, and Jon finds himself dreading it every time, without really knowing what outcome he fears more.

It definitely doesn't help that Jon is far too aware that no matter what Gerry may or may not feel, he did not choose to be here willingly, that even if he for some reason enjoys Jon's company, he's as much a prisoner to him as Jon himself is to the Eye.

"Nothing." Jon says, then adds sullenly. "I don't know."

Daisy squeezes his hand. "Martin?"

"I don't know." Jon turns his head away to avoid Daisy's gaze. "I- Daisy, I think there's bigger things to worry about."

"It's good to- I'm trying to think of the little things too." Daisy shrugs. "It feels like having a purpose."

Jon purses his lips. Sure, having a purpose is good and all until said purposes are self-sacrificing to a fear entity to keep you safe or behaving in an entirely too confusing manner.

"How's Basira?" He hasn't spoken much to her since that day after the statement. Jon gets the feeling she doesn't want to give him another chance to voice those thoughts she doesn't pride herself on.

Daisy sighs. "She's- it's okay. We're together, so it's fine. I just-" her voice falters a little, and Jon turns back to face her, squeezes her hand in reassurance. "I know I'm not what she needed."

Jon doesn't do her the disservice of trying to offer advice; the nuances of their relationship are something he doesn't want to intrude on. Instead, he tugs softly on her hand.

"I think we have time for an episode or two, if you're up for it."

Daisy's chapped lips twitch with humor. "I thought you didn't like it."

Jon snorts; no need for an Eye membership to see that, then. "It's- charmingly simple, I suppose."

"You don't get to back out," she says, lifting Jon's hand in hers to tap at her phone.

"Fine. But I will comment on it." Jon mock-scowls as the opening notes of The Archers' intro start playing.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Want some coffee?" Gerry asks as he locks the door to the flat behind him.

"That sounds nice," Jon mutters. His voice is distracted and somewhat annoyed, and Gerry turns to see him struggling with the very last button of his coat. The burned hand must be aching more than usual, because he's not even trying to use it. "Uh- could you-"

"On it," Gerry nudges Jon's hand away gently, before easily sliding the button through the hole. "You're... good." Jon's large, dark eyes are glued to him when he looks up, awfully closer than he expected.

"Yes, I- thank you." After a moment's hesitation Jon's hands slide under his again to grab at the coat's lapels, and he steps away as he shrugs it off.

Gerry sighs, taking his own jacket off. This tension is ridiculous, he thinks as he watches Jon make a beeline for his bedroom. It's not- Gerry's far too aware of the situation with Martin. The tape he's carried around in his jacket for the past two days can attest to that, so no, he's not planning on making a move on Jon without at least a conversation. But he can't- it's not like he can just pretend he doesn't want Jon. Not after the Buried, not after thinking he lost him, and all the revelations that stemmed from that.

And speaking of the tape...

He hasn't brought himself around to listening to it, the hard corners digging at his ribs where his heart should be. Gerry's not so blind as to not realize this is selfishness on his part, a futile attempt to keep up this false normalcy they have found for themselves.

It's not fair for Jon, after Gerry made him promise to not keep secrets, but most of all it's not fair to Martin, who Gerry has very much decided he misjudged.

"We should- there's something I have for us. That we should listen to," he says once he goes back to the living room. He hands Jon -who has already changed into night clothes and is balled up at one end of the sofa- the two steaming mugs. "Here. I'll be right back."

Jon's eyes narrow in suspicion when Gerry comes back with the tape recorder. "What is that?" Gerry sits next to him on the sofa, stalling for time. "Gerry..."

With the kind of relationship he has with Jon, there's probably not a good way or time of saying 'I really like the way you say my name', but considering the news he's about to give, Gerry's willing to bet this would be one of the worst.

"I spoke to Martin." He says hurriedly, instead.

"You what?" Jon's eyes go wide, and Gerry lifts a hand in an appeasing motion.

"Yes, when- I went to look for him when you went into the Buried."

"I- why would you do that?!" Jon asks, his voice strained.

"Let me see, because I found out you'd fatally misunderstood the concept of anchors, and I thought he might have a better chance at getting you back than a rib." Gerry finds himself growing more agitated as he speaks, the light compulsion bringing forth more than just words. "A rib. Jon what were you think-"

"You said you'd stop bringing that up," Jon cuts him sullenly, his brow furrowed as he straightens up to shove a finger into Gerry's chest. "You said a man used quiche as his anchor!"

"It was not about the quiche, I thought you'd understood that!" Gerry clamps a hand down on Jon's to yank it away from his torso as he leans forward. "How was I supposed to know- a rib!"

"Well-" Jon snaps angrily, inches from Gerry's face. "Next time-"

"Next- there is not going to be a next time, Jon! You're not going into any more entities without me," Gerry blurts out. Jon's face goes carefully blank, and they stay there for a moment, breathing heavily in agitation. "Jon-"

"What- the tape." Jon sits back, bringing his knees up to his chest and wrapping an arm around them. "What's in it?"

Gerry groans, sitting back as well. Stupid.

"It's... let's just listen to it," he says before pressing the play button.

"Right. Martin Blackwood, archi- assistant to Peter Lukas, head of the Magnus Institute."

Jon grows more and more stiff with each passing second, and Gerry purses his lips in thought. This is probably the most Jon has heard of Martin in months, and the content could hardly be worse.

"Hey, I..." Gerry sighs. Jon doesn't look at him, and Gerry notices with a start that his eyes are starting to glow a faint green. More information to the Archive, then, whether Jon wants the knowledge or not.

He reaches over to lay a comforting arm across Jon's shoulders, pulling him lightly towards him, and Jon -surprisingly, terrifyingly- comes. It doesn't make Martin's words any less dreadful, but it does make it easier to listen to, knowing they're not alone.

"What- what happened after?" Jon asks after the tape clicks to an end. Gerry didn't miss how his posture against him grew stiff again at the subtle abuse Lukas flung to Martin after the statement. He'd known that was a possibility, but he'd also known Jon wouldn't let him stop the tape before it was over.

"I waited until Lukas left, locked us into his office and pissed him off until he was more human." Gerry shrugs. "Then we talked."

"Please don't antagonize Martin," Jon mutters softly, running his pointer finger over the edge of the tape in a gesture that seems almost intimate, and that Gerry very much doubts is meant for the device.

"All interaction helps, when he's like this. Especially if it turns out he wants to engage back, and trust me, he wanted to argue with me."

"That's because you are irritating," Jon huffs, and Gerry snorts a little.

"Beholding hasn't told you where it hid the return receipt?"

Jon's hand slaps softly against Gerry's chest. "What else?"

"Not much. After- I reminded him that you care about him. When he was more himself," Gerry adds, giving Jon's shoulders a light squeeze. "He even listened, I think." Jon frowns, quiet and contemplative for a moment that stretches for entirely too long. "Does it help? To know he's doing this for a reason?" Gerry asks

'Does it help to know you're loved?' he doesn't add.

Jon sighs.

"Somewhat. I just- leaving my personal- what are we going to do about this?" Jon asks. "This new- we have our hands full with the regular ones already, but a new one?"

"Is the Eye telling you something about it?" Gerry watches his face carefully, but his eyes are already back to their usual, comforting dark hue, and Jon shakes his head.

"Suspiciously quiet, if you ask me." Jon looks up at him, his brow furrowed in concentration. "Does it ever tell you anything?"

Gerry thinks of the marks all over Jon's soul, and the screeching static that came from trying to Know about them.

"Sometimes. I try to pay more attention to what it doesn't want to tell me."

"And what is that?"

"There's something about your marks," Gerry says slowly, trying to pinpoint the exact piece of information that the Watcher doesn't want him to focus on. "I think there's a reason you're getting- oh, there we go."

"Wh- Gerry!" Jon springs from the sofa, leaving Gerry's side uncomfortably empty as he darts into the bathroom. He closes his eyes and tilts his head back to keep the ink flowing from his nose from making a bigger mess. Done with Eye business for the night, it seems.

"It doesn't hurt," Gerry shrugs after Jon comes back with a handful of bunched up toilet paper. "You're a cheapskate, Martin had tissues."

"You're ridiculous," Jon huffs, pressing the paper carefully against Gerry's face. "Should I- I'll get something to read, that'll fix it. Hold this."

"Nah." Gerry makes no move to take over holding the toilet paper under his nose, cracking an eye open instead to find Jon hovering over him with concern clear on his face. "Just talk to me. I like it better."

"I-" Jon's cheeks go a few shades darker, and Gerry feels his mouth twitch into a smile. "Uh- alright. What- Gerry, I'm really bad at small talk."

"Then don't do small talk," Gerry shrugs. "Tell me... oh, tell me about when you broke into Getrude's flat."

"W- how did you know about that?!" Jon gapes, his face red with embarrassment. He could get used to this, Gerry thinks.

"Had a lot to listen to when you went to pick up Daisy. Supplemental Jon sounds like a fun fella," Gerry adds with a wink, and Jon sputters like an angry kettle.

He could definitely get used to this.

[bubonickitten]

TMA fic: Reciprocity

Summary: Sometimes, listening to the quiet just doesn't work. Jon and Daisy drown out the noise with tea, board games, and some heart-to-heart conversation.

Notes: Writing this one put me in the mood for more Jon & Daisy friendship, so I decided to write a fic to expand on this silly headcanon I had.

Cross-posted to AO3 here.

CW: brief descriptions of claustrophobia; panic attacks; discussions of canon-typical trauma; brief psychological self-harm (i.e. punishing oneself by purposely exposing oneself to a triggering situation). Spoilers up to & including MAG 146.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The storage room is claustrophobic: cramped, cluttered, and dark. Pitch dark, actually – there is no gap between the door and the floor, nothing to let the light from the hallway filter through.

 Shelving units line the walls, sagging under the weight of boxes and papers. Daisy has managed to squeeze herself into a tight space between the shelving and a wall, knees hugged tight to her chest, wrapped tightly in a heavy blanket from the cot in the corner. A precarious column of boxes sits in front of her, crowding her and half hiding her from view should anyone come in. She’s become rather gaunt lately – a combination of eight months in the Buried and her failing appetite – and even through the blanket, she can feel her vertebrae pressing up against the cinderblock. She anticipates bruises.

 All of this is fine.

 Until the door creaks open and a thin streak of light shoots across the floor. Daisy hisses and presses the heels of her palms into her eyes, leaning into the pressure.

 “Daisy?”

 Jon’s voice, soft and tentative. It reminds Daisy of the tone one might use when approaching a wounded animal, or perhaps to avoid provoking a bear after unwittingly stumbling into its path. 

 Prey or predator. She isn’t sure which she hates more. 

 “Did you Know I was here, Jon?” She grits her teeth against the snarl climbing up her throat, but doesn’t bother to keep the edge out of her voice.

 “I… yes,” he admits, after an uneasy pause. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to – to Know, it just… it came to me.”

 “It’s fine,” she says, voice clipped and teeth clenched so tightly her jaw aches under the tension.

 “Are you –” Jon stops himself short of asking a question. “I would like to know how you’re feeling,” he says instead, reframing the sentence. He speaks each word carefully, deliberately; he’s trying to keep the compulsion from creeping into his voice, Daisy knows. 

 “Fine,” she repeats, unable to stop the hint of a growl underlying her tone this time. “And stop talking to me like I’m a frightened rabbit, or – or a rabid dog.”

 Jon is quiet for a few moments. When he speaks again, he does take on a more conversational tone: still calm, but without that timid tinge to it.

 “Daisy, I’m going to turn on the light,” he warns. “You should close your eyes if you don’t want to get blinded.”

 Daisy hears the flip of the light switch, followed by Jon’s footsteps crossing the room. She pulls her hands away from her face but keeps her eyes closed, letting them adjust to the sudden influx of light. She doesn’t open them until she hears Jon stop, followed by the rustle of clothing as he lowers himself to the floor. Squinting against the light, she sees that he’s sat a few feet away on a diagonal from her, placing himself within her line of sight while still giving her space.

 He settles back on his haunches, leans back against the shelving unit, and draws his knees to his chest, an unconscious mirroring of Daisy’s posture. When he looks in her direction, he doesn’t actually meet her eye, instead staring at the wall just over her head. He’s been self-conscious lately about eye contact, she knows, ever since he listened to the tape of his victim: He’s all eyes. He’s all eyes.  

 Even so, Daisy still feels exposed. Vulnerable. Known. Seen –

 “What?” she snaps. She’s far too tense right now to care how harsh she sounds.

 It’s fine; they both have a tendency to lash out when they feel cornered. They’re working on it, but in the meantime, they’ve reassured each other that when it does happen, it’s not personal. They’ve been through this song and dance many, many times – which is probably why, when Jon replies, he sounds utterly unfazed.

 “You already know what I want to ask.”

 “Did you rummage around in my mind, then?” It comes off as caustic and accusing, and this time she feels herself wince – yes, there’s the guilt. That was a low blow, and she knows it.

 After a moment of uncomfortable silence, she chances a glance at him. There is the slightest trace of hurt in his eyes, but otherwise, he keeps his expression neutral.

 “No,” he says simply. She can tell he’s trying to keep the conversation from becoming about him, from turning into Daisy comforting him rather than the other way around. Which means she's not getting out of this easily. “I just recognize self-harm when I see it.”

 “I am not –”

 “You’ve hidden yourself away alone in a cramped space, in the dark, and you’re smothering yourself with the heaviest blanket you could find,” Jon interrupts. Then, more gently: “I don’t have to read your mind to know what you’re trying to –”

 “Leave. Me. Alone.” She nearly chokes on the last word, hating herself for how weak it makes her sound. Tearful and timid, like easy prey.  

 “No,” Jon says resolutely.

 Daisy groans. On the whole, Jon tends towards doubt and indecision, but he can be stubborn when he wants to, and she recognizes this tone of his. She has one just like it, though she uses it more often than he does. It exudes an attitude of no, you move – and it’s infuriating to be on the receiving end of it.

 “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but I’m not just going to leave you here to torture yourself.”

 With that, he looks away, giving her back her privacy, and lets the silence settle between them. Fine, Daisy thinks. Jon might be stubborn, but she matches him in that regard. Moreover, she has the advantage of patience. She can sit with silence a lot longer than he can, and she determines to wait him out.

 As expected, it only takes a few minutes before he looks down and focuses his attention on his hands, flexing his burned hand, rubbing his fingers together on the other, tapping them against his knee. Daisy knows by now that Jonathan Sims can’t sit still even when his life depends on it. After he was abducted by the Circus, she saw the bruising from the ropes they bound him with. It wasn’t unexpected, but it still seemed more extensive than it should have been, as if he’d struggled against the restraints the entire month they had him. Even in the Buried, he’d never stopped squirming.

 Usually, his fidgeting doesn’t bother her. Right now, though, it’s grating on her nerves, and she can tell that Jon is in this for the long haul. She cannot handle hours of this.

 Daisy heaves the loudest, most exasperated sigh she can muster, and Jon – damn him – smirks. It’s a private little thing, probably unconscious – a nearly imperceptible upturn at the corner of his mouth, just the faintest hint of self-satisfaction that for once he’s managed to outlast her in one of these conversational stalemates – and then it’s gone.

 It still takes some time for her to compose a sentence, but when she does, the words tumble out in a rush.

 “In the coffin, I couldn’t hear the blood.”

 “I know,” Jon says softly. “But I don’t think forcing yourself to relive the Buried is going to drown it out.”

 Daisy opens her mouth – whether to agree or to make a snide remark, she isn’t entirely sure – but no sound comes out. She can hear her own heart thundering in her chest, can feel the throb of her pulse in her throat. Suddenly, she is all too aware of the blood coursing through her veins – and through Jon’s.

 She jams her fingers in her ears, but it only amplifies the sound of her pulse; she leans back as far as she can, chasing the ache of the wall against her spine, trying to ground herself in the present. That distant but ever-present roar is creeping up on her, though, building in volume, commanding her to seek, to chase, to hunt, to sink her teeth into the prey and let its fear revitalize her.

 The Archivist is right there, the blood tells her, vulnerable and exposed. For too long now, he has delayed the death that dogs his steps. She allowed him to escape, and his continued existence an unforgivable insult to the Hunt. All she needs to do is finish what she started so long ago, grant him the end he knows he deserves, and then she can be whole again –

 “I can’t – I can’t handle the quiet right now,” she blurts out, slamming her hands onto the hard floor. Her voice cuts through the silence, sharp and abrupt, reminding her all too much of the bark of a wild dog. She gives Jon a pleading look, and she doesn’t care how helpless she sounds right then; he’s already seen her like this, in the coffin and so many times since. “I – I need a distraction.”

 “Come on, then,” Jon says, standing and extending his hand. “I’ll pull out the board games. I already made tea.” 

 As he pulls her to her feet, Daisy starts to speak, but Jon heads her off. 

 “Yes, I made yours extra sweet,” he says, rolling his eyes. It’s only faux annoyance, though – there’s fondness in his little half-smile, and he gives her hand a light squeeze.

 Daisy tightens her grip in response before loosening and letting go. Jon lets her hand drop without comment.

 Over the months, they’ve both become adept at offering different varieties of reassurance and comfort, while still giving each other the space to withdraw when necessary. Jon has admitted to her before that he’s always had difficulty reading people, and it’s only gotten worse since working in the Archives. His long bout of paranoia demolished his ability to trust in his own judgments of others, and his constant hand-wringing about his own humanity doesn’t help matters. Lately, he seems to spend every interaction nearly tripping over himself trying to read people’s cues and body language and speech patterns, frantic in his attempts to avoid hurting anyone and constantly dreading the rejection he has come to expect.

 It’s hypervigilance, plain and simple. When it’s just him and Daisy, though, it’s… different. It comes more from a place of mutual understanding, of shared experience. They both know what they’re capable of; they both know that they are things to be feared. With Daisy, Jon can retreat without flinching away and tolerate disengagement without curling in on himself. With Jon, Daisy can let her guard down and trust that he will not patronize her with pity, will not judge her for her moments of weakness. They see each other for what they are. It’s a simple thing, but it makes them both feel just a little bit more human all the same.

 Jon pauses at the threshold, glancing back to make sure she’s following. With a sigh, Daisy steps out of that suffocating room and into the hallway, shutting the door behind her.

 Even she has to admit that sometimes, it’s nice to be seen.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A short time later, they’re cloistered away in Jon’s office with two mugs of tea and a stack of battered old board games. Jon had insisted that Daisy choose, so she kneels on the floor and sifts through them.

 “How about Uno?”

 “Hmm. We can, but you seem a little wound up right now, and Uno can be a little… intense.”

 “Fair,” Daisy says after a moment of consideration. “I did get competitive last time.”

 She doesn’t take offense. When they first started spending time together after the Buried, they had promised to be honest with one another. They both had trouble trusting others; reassuring one another that they would be explicit about their thoughts and feelings removed that extra roadblock of constantly questioning the other’s sincerity. Mostly, though, they were both deeply terrified of their own potential, and blunt honesty was the best way they knew to keep each other in check.

 Daisy tosses a few more boxes aside before settling on another. “What about Clue? You’re all about solving mysteries.”

 Jon visibly flinches at that.

 “Did I touch a nerve?” Daisy asks, keeping her voice as neutral as she can. Jon is always primed for rejection these days; all it takes is a hint of disapproval, and he’ll start apologizing for feeling things and setting boundaries.

 “It’s fine.” Jon waves her off, but she gives him a pointed look until he relents. "Just - something Elias said to me once. 'You never could tolerate an unsolved mystery.' He wasn't wrong, but... well..." He trails off and shrugs. 

 "Got it," Daisy says, making a mental note to avoid that particular subject. "So, Clue?"

 He bites his bottom lip, considering. “Unsure. With my luck, the weapon will end up being the lead pipe, and I don’t expect I’d handle that particularly well.”

 He chuckles, but she can detect the seriousness beneath it. She can vividly remember the crime scene. Jurgen Leitner had been bludgeoned so thoroughly that his corpse was unrecognizable, and the blood spatter had traveled so far that Jon was stumbling across overlooked droplets of blood in his office for weeks after he returned. Daisy was desensitized to that sort of thing, but that was likely the first time Jon had seen anything like it. He’s seen worse since then, no doubt, but sometimes the firsts are the ones with the most lingering impact. 

 Daisy holds up another box. “Trivial Pursuit?”  

 Jon seems to perk up at that. The bright spark in his eyes is reminiscent of a child unwrapping a present, and Daisy flashes a knowing smile. “I take that as a yes?” 

 “I… I like trivia games, alright?” he says, a little defensively. “When I was in uni, I used to go to the pub with Georgie on trivia nights –” He cuts himself off, a pained expression dawning on his face. Georgie is always a sore subject, Daisy knows. He has to take a long moment to compose himself before continuing. “She, uh, used to tease me for taking it so seriously. Apparently I can be a bit competitive with it, and – what?”

 Jon stops when he hears Daisy's snickering, and he looks so affronted that it only makes her laugh harder. “Nothing, nothing. That just sounds very… you.”

 “What’s that supposed to mean?”

 “Sims, you’re the biggest nerd I know.”

 He huffs. “We can play something else –”

 “No, I think I want to see what you look like when you get competitive,” Daisy says, already unfolding the board on the floor between them and setting up the stacks of cards. “Youngest goes first,” she says, tossing the dice to him.

 Jon still seems a bit petulant about the ribbing, but she knows it’s just a mask he puts on sometimes, whenever he feels a bit too seen. They’ve spoken a lot about the things they can tease each other about and the things they can’t. Sometimes it’s inconsistent – something can be fair game one day, and the next it’s salt in an open wound – but they try. Jon told her that it makes him feel more alienated when people walk on eggshells around him. Daisy’s light teasing makes him feel included – like she’s treating him as she would treat anyone else she’s friendly with.

 Also, Daisy has found that Jon is actually pretty transparent, once you hang around him long enough. And right now, she can tell he’s inordinately pleased. If he’s trying not to seem too enthusiastic when he rolls the dice, he’s failing magnificently.

 “Purple space. That’s… Art and Literature.”

 “Right,” Daisy says, picking up a card. “Question is… ‘How many sonnets did Shakespeare write?’”

 “One hundred and fifty-four,” Jon blurts out, not missing a beat. 

 Daisy raises an eyebrow. “Didn’t even have to think about that one, did you?”

 “I majored in English as an undergrad,” Jon mutters, sounding a bit embarrassed. “And I already told you, I explored AmDram in uni for a stretch. Did some Shakespeare.”

 “Hm. You’ll have to show me your Hamlet one of these days.” Her voice drops to a lower register as she mimics him: “‘To be, or not to be -’”

 “Absolutely not.”  

 “You’re no fun.” Daisy rolls her eyes in mock annoyance and rolls the dice. "Looks like… Sports and Leisure for me.” 

 Jon dutifully picks up a card and begins to read, modulating his voice the way he does when he’s afraid of letting the compulsion slip through. “‘What are the three positions in roller derby?’”

 “Jammer, blocker, and pivot,” Daisy recites automatically, counting off on her fingers.

 “Didn’t need to think about that one, did you?” Jon says, mimicking Daisy’s previous tone.

 “Is it really that surprising that I like women’s contact sports?”

 Jon laughs. “I suppose not. My turn.” He rolls the dice and moves his piece. “Ah… purple again.”

 “Right. ‘What is the translation of the Russian proverb “chemu”…’” Daisy frowns. “I can’t read this.”

 “Give it here,” Jon says, taking the card from her. “‘Chemu byt’, togo ne minovat’,’” he reads out. Daisy doesn’t speak Russian, so she can’t know for sure, but… she swears his diction sounds indistinguishable from a native speaker. At the very least, there’s no hesitation in his voice, no false starts, no hint of unfamiliarity with the words. 

 “That’s… a weirdly difficult question for Trivial Pursuit,” she says slowly. “How is someone supposed to guess that if they don’t know any Russian?”

 Jon just stares at the card for a few moments, brow furrowing, before placing it face-down on the floor and looking back up at Daisy. “Can I pick a different one?”

 “You can’t just pick a new card whenever you don’t know the answer.”

 “No, I… I do know the answer,” Jon murmurs, shifting uncomfortably. “I just feel like answering it would be cheating.”

 “Why? Are you fluent in Russian or something?”

 “Not… exactly.” Daisy stares at Jon insistently until he sighs. “Sometimes when I read things, the Eye sort of… translates it for me.” He flaps his hands nervously. “It’s – it’s a whole thing.”

 “Right. Different question then,” she says, cutting him off before he can start berating himself. “Let’s see… ‘In Egyptian hieroglyphs, the symbol of a decorated eye most commonly represents the eye of which god?’” Daisy frowns. “That’s a little on the nose.”

 It’s most likely just a coincidence, but she can’t help the feeling that the Eye is laughing at them. Or maybe the Web. Is it able to just magically manifest cards that didn’t come with the game, just to mess with them? Or maybe it’s Helen, having a laugh. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s played a prank that falls just on the side of cruel.

 Daisy is about to say so – mostly but not entirely as a joke – but when she looks up, she sees that Jon has that peculiar look on his face again. He reaches over to the stack of cards and picks one up.

 “What are you –”

 As he reads it, he shakes his head and tosses the card aside, reaching over to take another one. He glances at it, mutters something under his breath, and discards that one as well. Then he picks up another card. And another. And another.

 “You… you alright there, Sims?”

 Jon says nothing, just continues reading and discarding cards, increasingly agitated.

 “Jon.” Daisy reaches over and puts her hand on his wrist. He freezes in place. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

 “I Know all the answers,” he says dully, pulling his hand back.

 “Okay, so you’re good at trivia. I already know you stay up most nights bingeing Wikipedia articles –”

 “No, I – I Know all the answers.”

 “Ah.”

 “Yeah." He steadfastly avoids eye contact, plucking absently at a loose thread on his sleeve. 

 “Alright, out with it,” Daisy says.

 “What?”

 “You’re moping.”

 “I’m not moping –”

 “Yes, you are. I can practically hear your brain going through the five stages of grief over there. So, spill it.”

 “I’m supposed to be comforting you, not – not making it about me!”  He makes a frustrated little groan and buries his fingers in his hair, tugging lightly.

 “We don’t get to choose when the hurt comes.” He said much the same to her just the other day. Both of them seize every opportunity to parrot each other like that, especially when making allowances for the other while refusing to accept the same. It's almost become a game at this point. 

 “Don’t use my words against me,” Jon mutters.

 “No double standards, remember? If it applies to me, it applies to you, too." 

 Jon makes an irritated little sound, blowing a stray lock of hair out of his face. “It’s stupid, anyway.”

 Daisy stares at him, undeterred. She can wait him out all day if she has to. But she won’t have to. Their standoff in the storage room notwithstanding, Daisy usually wins these contests of will. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 Predictably enough, Jon only manages to withstand the silence for a few minutes before he crumbles and lets out a heavy sigh. He catches Daisy’s fleeting, victorious grin and shoots her an annoyed scowl, but there’s no real bite behind it.

 “I just… I feel like I can’t go ten minutes without being reminded how much I’ve changed.”

 “We’ve all changed.”

 “You know what I mean,” Jon says sullenly. “It’s just so… so invasive, having some – some thing put knowledge into my head. I’ll just suddenly Know the answer to a question I never asked. It's just there where it wasn’t before, interrupting whatever I was thinking before, like – like tripping over a piece of furniture that shouldn’t be there. And when I actively try not to Know things, it’s like opening the floodgates – it’s more likely to slip through the cracks, once the idea is there. Like a…” He gives a short laugh. “Like a compulsion, I suppose. Intrusive thoughts, but with a supernatural origin.”

 “Sounds like how the blood feels for me. Sometimes I can listen to the quiet, but other times – like earlier – there’s no drowning it out.” Daisy’s expression darkens. “I let down my guard for a second, hear the first note of it, and then it has its claws sunk into me. And it doesn't like letting go." 

 “That’s… that’s it exactly," Jon says. "Seems like you’re better at controlling it, though.”

 “I’m not, really. It keeps getting harder and harder.”

 “Well, you’re better than me, at least. I couldn’t even ask you how you take your tea without accidentally compelling you. I can recognize on sight when someone has a statement, and it’s everything I can do not to – to gravitate towards them, like a shark to blood.” He grimaces. “I can’t even look people in the eye anymore. I’ve noticed lately that if I lock eyes with someone, they can’t seem to look away, and sometimes I can’t either, and then – then I have to watch as the dread starts to dawn in their eyes. They always sense that there’s something about me that they should fear, even if they can’t put their finger on why, and I have to watch it play out on their faces. It's like the nightmares, but... bleeding over into real life, now. And I’m constantly bombarded with – with facts and figures, almost all of them completely useless, or –” 

 That familiar sense of dread creeps up on him, and with it comes the pressured speech, a stream-of-consciousness torrent of words that spill from his lips before he can even process what he’s saying. He threads his fingers through his hair again, pulling lightly, trying to ground himself in the sensation.

 “I passed someone in the lobby the other day, and suddenly I Knew the cause of death for their Year 9 maths teacher. I can’t be in crowds anymore – too much floods in at once, I can't separate myself from the noise. And – and just yesterday I was making tea, and between one thought and the next, I Knew the exact number of casualties in the Nivelle Offensive – right down to the single digit.” Jon knows he’s rambling, can hear his voice rising in volume – louder, louder, anything to drown out the sound of his own heartbeat thundering in his ears – but he can’t seem to stop himself. He tugs even harder on his hair, just to feel some semblance of control over something.  “That’s – that’s not even a thought that would occur to me naturally, I’ve never – never wondered about that, military history was never my thing, but – but there it was. I – I can’t even read a book anymore without having the ending spoiled for me before I even finish the first chapter.”

 By the time he stops, Jon is nearly panting. Daisy says nothing for a moment, leaving an opening for him to continue before she speaks. 

 “That sounds…”

 “Yes, stupid, I know,” he mutters darkly.

 “I wasn’t going to say ‘stupid.’”

 “Well, it is. So much has happened – Jane Prentiss, the Circus, the coma, the Buried, the – the existence of potentially world-ending Rituals constantly looming over all of us. Losing Tim, and – and Sasha, and… and Martin being…” Jon leans forward and puts his head in his hands, covering his eyes. “And then I read, and experience, and – and feed on – other people’s trauma, and what I finally break down over is some silly little thing like this.”

 Daisy sighs. “It’s not stupid, Jon. This place keeps finding new ways to make us all miserable. Sometimes it gets to be too much. Especially when we aren’t even allowed a good distraction from it all.”

 That’s really what it is, isn’t it? The Eye has stolen everything from him – from all of them. They have no respite from its watchful gaze, no sense of safety within these walls, and any ounce of comfort they can scrounge up is promptly wrung out of them. And Jon – Jon doesn’t even have the space to think, to process any of what’s happened to him – not when his own train of thought can be unceremoniously derailed without warning, replaced with the details of some hapless stranger’s darkest secret. Even his dreams aren’t his own.

 He keeps trying to listen to the quiet, but he can’t find it in all the noise.

 Before he went into the coffin, it was only the Eye keeping the Lonely from claiming him for itself – and yet, he was still never alone in his own mind. It was jarring, feeling isolated and watched and possessed all at the same time. He wanted companionship, yes, but he also was desperate for just a moment to himself – just one inch of himself that belonged to him and him alone. He has Daisy, now, and she keeps some of his loneliness at bay, but it doesn’t dispel that fundamental sense of ostracism he feels when interacting with any of the others, and it doesn’t change the fact that he hasn’t been his own person in a very, very long time – and probably never will be again.

 He doesn’t know how long he’s been lost in thought, but he snaps out of it when Daisy adds: “Sometimes it’s the little things that wear you down the most.”

 She isn’t wrong. Jon distinctly remembers what finals week during uni was always like for him. He’d pull back-to-back all-nighters, let that ever-present fear of failure drown him, bottle up all the stress until the pressure became too much and he would finally, inevitably break down. It was always some little thing that would finally set him off: someone playing music too loudly outside, a car alarm startling him into heart palpitations, not being able to find a particular page of notes in the constant clutter that was his desk. There’s always been some seemingly insignificant last straw that leaves him crying over spilled milk, figuratively speaking. (And, on one occasion, literally: Georgie had walked into the kitchen one time to find him sitting on the floor just staring at an upended milk carton and fighting back tears.)

 Apparently that hasn't changed much in the intervening years. 

 “Yes, well,” he says, “I don’t see you breaking down over every little thing.”

 “Hmm.” Daisy stretches her leg across the gap between them and nudges him with her foot. “Want to know why I was hiding in the storage room?”

 “Only if you want to tell me.”

 “I fell in the tunnels. I had been doing fine down there, but then out of nowhere the walls felt too close together, and when I tried to run, I tripped. Scraped my hands on the floor when I fell. When I looked at them, they were covered in dirt, and that made me think of the coffin. And there was blood – just the smallest amount, but it was enough to make me think of…" She gives a humorless chuckle. "Well, it’s a cliché, but it made me think of all the blood on my hands.”

 “And then you felt guilty,” Jon says slowly, putting the pieces together, “so you decided to punish yourself by simulating the Buried and cramming yourself into it.”

 She gives a little half-shrug. It’s as good as a confirmation.

 “We… we’re a mess, aren’t we?” Jon says with a wry smile.

 “Yeah. But at least we have that in common.” Daisy gives Jon a purposeful glance. “Better than dealing with it alone.”

 It takes a moment, but Jon nods.  

 “Well,” Daisy announces, clapping her hands on her knees. “I’m going to go out back and burn this.”

 “Wait – what?” He watches, completely bewildered, as Daisy folds up the game board and starts shoving cards haphazardly back into the box. “Daisy, you don’t have to –” His hands flutter anxiously for a few moments before he throws them up in exasperation and sighs. “Why is everyone’s first plan always arson?”

 “I get to destroy something that upset someone I care about,” she says, matter-of-fact, smashing the lid onto the box, “and no one gets hurt in the process.”

 “It’s not the game’s fault that I –”

 “Yeah, well. I can’t exactly set Elias on fire," she says, punctuating Elias' name with a low snarl. “The next best thing is a reminder of what he’s done.”

 With that, Daisy stands, tucking the box under her arm.

 “I –”

 “When I get back we can play Candy Land,” she says, overriding Jon’s protests.

 “Candy Land?” He laughs, bemused. “Really, Daisy?”

 “What, are there any statements on – on evil sugar that I should know about?”

 She means it mostly as a joke, but there’s still the hint of a genuine question there. Given everything they’ve both seen, malicious, sentient candy would just be one more impossible horror on the pile.

 Jon tries not to think too hard on which of Smirke’s Fourteen would be its domain.

 “No, uh –” Jon laughs again, not quite able to disguise the nervous uncertainty that creeps in. “No confectionary horrors so far, thank god. As far as I know, anyway.” He wrinkles his nose. “Just – just meat.”

 “Good. Now go make some more tea. I’ll meet you back here.”

 “Fine,” he sighs. “Just don’t – don’t set the dumpster on fire while you’re out there? Last thing we need is for someone to call emergency services. They would send Sectioned officers over as soon as they saw the Institute on caller ID.”

 “Right, right.” Daisy starts off down the hall. “Extra sugar in my tea, Sims,” she calls over her shoulder.

 “I know how you take your tea by now, Daisy!” he shouts after her, smiling as her laughter echoes back to him. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

End Notes:

The "you never could tolerate an unsolved mystery" line Elias is from one of my other fics.

The Russian is a transliteration Чему́ быть, того́ не минова́ть. It loosely translates to "fate cannot be avoided"/"what will be will be" (or, that's the gist, anyway). Baaaaasically I needed to manufacture some kind of conceit to have Jon translate a thing, and I figured I may as well make it something that would feel just a little too personalized for him specifically. (And also handwave how out of place that question would be in your standard Trivial Pursuit deck by saying 'the Web or Helen probably did it just to bully Jon, idk, that seems pretty on-brand for them'.) Anyway, I checked the translation and transliteration with a friend of mine who knows Russian; hopefully I got it right.

[somuchbetterthanthat]

OKAY AS ALWAYS JUST A NOT VERY COHERENT SCREAMING POST ABOUT MY FEELINGS ON MAG 133

- Daisy and Jon being soft and friendly to each other? y e s. Y E S. Y E S. I so dearly hope Daisy is going to manage to keep her gentle side, she so clearly wants to, and I love it; both Jon and Daisy are fighting to stay soft and emotional, and i am SO HERE for this. Clearly their conversation with the coffin has been the best thing that could happen to both of them; there’s something fragile and beautiful developping here, and I just HOPE it’s going to stay alight. 

- I don’t remember who talked about the fact that Jon tended to build connection through knowledge --- but that’s exactly the feeling I got here. Jon reached out the way he knows how, by intellectually chatting, sharing ideas about the Statement at hands, and what it could potentially meant. Of course, he didn’t seem to realize poor Daisy doesn’t really WANT to be involved in the Hunt talk really, but Daisy herself doesn’t entirely shut him off either, she tries to help, and she gives good ideas and insights, and I mean, clearly? Jon sounded so GOOD here; ernergized; not quite happy but definitely not - tired or defeated or anything like that. he must have missed it so much? I doubt Melanie is up for that kind of talk still with him? so yeah. i just. 

- The concept of the hunt never being able to complete it’s ritual because the catching your prey is actually the least satisfying part of the chase is BRILLIANT. Honestly, genuinely brilliant, and I love the idea. Absolutely love Daisy’s point of view on this, and how she explains how it felt, and how it clearly relates to the statement, and the way the hunters sort of forgot about exactly what they were hunting, and just ---- kept enjoying themselves and moving anyway towards “it”. Frankly i just really really love it. 

- Were all the explorers like, caught in a bubble outside of time and space? I mean it seems to me that it was what was implied, but could it also mean, potentially, that being a hunter, or, or plainly an avatar, stops you from dying? After all, it seems to be what happened to Trevor, so? I’m just wondering if 1) it’s specifically for the Hunt 2) apparently they do keep aging in some capacity, so does the immortality would only happen if, like, you’re going to chase in the juggle? 3) if this does concern over Avatars, let’s say, some who actually became one by dying already once, COULD THIS MEAN Jon would potentially like, become sort of vaguely immortal? 4) my real question is: how old is Elias and could he be more than a hundred years old. the people need to know; and by people i mean me.

- OKAY LET US NOT PRETEND I’M NOT MAKING THIS POST JUST SO I CAN SCREAM ABOUT BASIRA AND JON

- Honestly better people than me are probably going to make much better meta about it; i’m just absolutely HERE for the drama, the way their paths are slowly but very, very obviously going parallels but different, and I love every single second of it. RATIONAL!BASIRA VS EMOTIONAL!JON THAT IS WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT THANK YOU JONNY THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

- One note, though, first, about Basira/Daisy. Because this is heartbreaking. This is utterly, utterly heartbreaking. Here is Daisy, free at last, who dreads being alone, who’s lost, who needs support more than she ever has before in her life -- and who, obviously, obviously turns to Basira, who’s always been her anchor throughout, her key to humanity. But Basira --- Basira loves Daisy, but Basira expected that she could at last have the support she so desperately wished to have and couldn’t have among the current people in her life. She doesn’t trust Jon, her bond with Melanie has been severed and, besides, Melanie was a loose element for a long time, and not in the driven way Daisy was. Martin is notably absent (where are you martin T_T). 

It’s so tragic, because it’s all about - two people who loves each other so much, but are clearly at two different points in life where they cannot help each other like the other needs to. Neither of them can support the other properly, because Daisy just lived through the most traumatic experience of her life, and Basira has felt like she had the fate of the world on her shoulders, all alone, for MONTHS, and still does. And the fate of the world, in basira’s eyes, has to come first.

- and here’s the thing; the biggest, biggest tragedy. It’s that Jon did a good, beautiful thing. He saved Daisy. It’s a victory. But it’s not; because no matter how happy Basira might be to get Daisy back, she didn’t get her rock back. Before she may have hold on to the hope that she may not have to do this alone, if she could free Daisy. But now Daisy’s back, and Basira just got her last hope for “proper support” just - disappear. And so she is going to help Daisy, but she is not going to be slow down by Daisy which might mean, which already means, really, leaving her behind. Unless, of course, Daisy loves Basira too much to let her go, and decides to give in to the hunt again, to help her, when she understands. It’s still a possibility. And it would be all the more heartbreaking, that Basira who helped her once kept her humanity, is the reason why she loses it entirely one day, by choice. To help her.

(other possibility, of course, is Daisy rejecting the hunt so violently that she “loses her purpose” and starts to fade, and Basira has to watch the woman she loves die slowly, cutting off Basira’s last thread of humanity as well) (i’m employing “humanity” on a very broad spectrum here) 

- ANYWAY. I love Jon Sims. I love him. There is absolutely nothing more beautiful than to watch his growth; to see him having learnt from his past mistakes; to sound refreshed, determined, eager to communicate, to promote communication. This is so beautiful and it makes me so emotional. I swear to god i had tears in my last on my second listen. He is so, so so good. If anything - and pardon the selfishness for an instant - saving Daisy has clearly had such a positive impact on him. More so than Melanie, perhaps? so, y’know Jon, now it MIGHT VERY WELL BE TIME TO GET CURIOUS ABOUT THE LONELY. I AM JUST SAYING

- Emotional!Jon: "You’re not happy Daisy is back.” 

Rational!Basira: “Of course I am! I would never leave Daisy behind, but right now, she’s dead weight.” 

Basira is happy Daisy is back. But it’s not what’s important to her, though it was what was important to JON. Like, he’s friend with Daisy now, and that’s good, but he didn’t get into that coffin for her. He did it for Basira. He did for Basira, and it backfired.

- BASIRA!FOLLOWING!GERTRUDE’S!STEPS!!!! 

How long before it’s not just happiness that is the priority? How long until one life can be sacrified for the good of thousand, billions? 

- Jon’s mention of Tim? Broke me. Let my boy grieve for god sake. Can’t he adress them a bit, directly?

- Jon’s “I don’t care if don’t trust me, but at the very least I proved that I was useful, so use me” . Oh. Jon. Jon. He has spent so long almost begging for her trust. But it seems like he’s got such a clearer vision now of how things are, I guess. He is reaching for the possible now. He is attacking Basira from her angle. “I am an asset, keep me”. It might even work. But by making himself an asset, he entirely loses the potential of ever being her friend.

- Because at the end, Basira says “okay” and i don’t doubt she will use Jon, for a while. But she won’t confide in him, like she did just before leaving. She stopped herself, at the end. Clearly she has many, many, many conflicting and sad feelings about Daisy’s return, but she won’t share them. She’s done sharing any emotional part of her. Because emotions are not what’s important. Emotions are dangerous, faillible. 

she knows her mind is not. 

(also, Basira: “you got kidnapped three times so uh, shut up jon” jon: “well you went away from three weeks and came back with nothing soo. anyway, doing things on your own is stupid.” basira: “you literally just fucking went on a coffin without telling anybody!!” jon: “yeah??? and i almost DIED, DO YOU WANT TO GET TO MY LEVEL BASIRA DO YOU REALLY???”) 

(that “case on point” was perfect, Jon, if you weren’t made for martin, i’d marry you.)

anyway, i have. feelings. lots, and lots, and lots, of feelings. I cannot wait for more basira&jon. I really can’t. BUT ALSO SOMEONE UPDATES US ON MARTIN OR I AM GOING TO DIE. 

[centaurianthropology]

The Magnus Archives ‘Heavy Goods’ (S04E08) Analysis

Half a return, half a delivery, and a new story.  Come on in to hear what I have to say about ‘Heavy Goods’.

Breekon and Hope’s story is somewhat what I had thought it would be, but longer and more … focused. Unlike a lot of the Stranger’s creatures, Breekon and Hope had a singular purpose that they followed without relenting.  Any time they were side-tracked they were miserable.  They have to deliver.  It’s what they are.

Or were.

They’ve been doing this for a long time.  It started out perhaps during the medieval period, but even then he described their faces as ones that could only be half-remembered.  While some monsters started out human, some clearly were always monsters.  That seems to have been the way with Breekon and Hope.

They also served on transport ships to Australia, as conductors on trains going terrible places. They moved goods, always, to places in which those people or goods would suffer.  What’s interesting is that, although they are of the Stranger (those half-remembered faces), they would clearly work for any power.  There was no obvious alignment of loyalty, but simply of existence.  Whichever monster needed something or someone transported could contract with Breekon and Hope.

And that’s interesting, as it shows at least some entities to be of a power, but not necessarily beholden to it beyond their base nature.  They can collaborate and work together.  We saw this in the collaboration between Nikola and Jude Perry, as well, and of course Elias and Peter Lukas.  When interests are similar, powers may align and work together.

But Breekon and Hope still seem different, because they weren’t collaborating with other powers toward a common goal.  They had a singular purpose, and would fulfill that purpose for anyone who might hire them.  That’s doing a job, and only collaboration on the most technical level.

And yet, in the end, coming back to the Stranger gave them more meaning than simply fulfilling a base purpose.  Coming back to the Circus made them happy in a way that delivering for the other powers didn’t.  And I suppose that says something.  The being claimed as part of a power do have that innate draw, and even if they can act independently, the desire to be where they belong and amongst those of their own kind is also still there.

Breekon and Hope were always monsters, so the pull must have been very powerful.  After all, they had no draw to pull them back to another life. They had no ties but one another, and they were uniquely melded into a singular being, so that they always had the only thing that mattered to them right by their side.

I wonder if the struggle is much more powerful for human avatars, people with connections.  It certainly seems to be.  Maybe the transition point between human and monster is simply when someone loses every connection, every reason not to fall in with their own Power for the company, if nothing else.  

And yet, even that didn’t lead to contentment for them.  Their purpose outweighed simply staying with Nikola to be with others like them.  They were meant to transport, so they eventually did again, as Breekon and Hope.  The casket ended up being their downfall.  They took the wrong delivery, and the casket claimed them in a way they couldn’t break, because there was no one further to whom they might deliver it. They had to keep hold of it, move it with them, until the being that was Breekon and Hope was shattered, and only half remained.  And that half was unrecognizable to the casket, enough so that its hold vanished.

And yet, Breekon, the remaining half, fading and losing coherency, had to finish the delivery.  Jon was the perfect final destination, as punishment for ending half of them.  So he got the coffin, and Breekon … who knows what became of it?

Jon’s powers continue to expand.  He can now extract stories from unwilling subjects.  Not only by compelling them to speak, but simply by staring at them and willing their story into his head.  For a man trying to hold back the tide of the knowledge beyond the door in his mind, Jon is really not doing a great job not embracing all the power at his disposal.  And whatever he did to Breekon (or Hope) clearly was extremely unpleasant.  Does it even still have that story?  Does it even exist without that story?

This is easily the most power we’ve seen Jon display, and as a means of self-defense or even attack, it seems fairly impressive, if roundabout.

It definitely left Basira not trusting him any more than she already has.  Her having to reason her way out of the Unknowing has left a mark on her.  Her distance is part of her focusing on only trusting herself and her own capabilities. Daisy is gone.  Tim is dead.  Jon was gone for months.  Melanie was unreliable, and Martin seemed to have turned traitor, no matter what he said (interesting that he took her to meet Peter, and she just sat in an empty office for an hour).

She was alone for six months, and as much work as the Lonely has done on the others, it’s clearly worked on her as well.  She refuses to trust the others.  She’ll follow her own leads, and doesn’t want Jon’s help, and even insists he learn not to pluck information out of the air about her.  She knows that the Buried has Daisy, and has ‘leads’ to follow.

I do wonder if those leads involve Elias.  After all, if she’s decided not to trust Jon or utilize his knowledge, there’s only one other person she could turn to with extensive knowledge about the Buried. Elias wants something from her, and would likely be happy to give her assistance in return.  

It’s good to get more of a sense of where her head’s been at for six months, as she’s the one we know the least about during that time period.  And really, it seems that isolation has been working on her just as intensely as it’s been working on Martin.  

She’s been waiting and watching, trying to reason through everything.  But now, with a lead on Daisy, I think she’s about to act.  What that action might be, I don’t know, but I fear that it’ll push her further into Elias’ gravity, or into an equally worrisome path.  Self-reliance is great, but if she refuses all help then she’s in as much danger as anyone.  

All the characters are repeating the same motif that Jon was last season: to protect the people they care about, they’re convinced they have to go it alone.  To figure things out on their own.  To refuse to trust one another, and instead to turn to far more questionable methods.  It’s ridiculous and unreasonable, and I have to think it’s the combination of the trauma of the Unknowing being chased by the opportunistic influence of the Lonely. And so, once again, I have to say what I was saying all last season: they have to talk to one another.  They have to trust one another and work with one another.  What’s changed is that Jon’s actually ready to do all of that.  He’s been free of the Lonely’s influence all this time, and can still think relatively straight.  But because all the others are influenced, he is isolated by proxy.  

They were all hurt. They’ve all lost friends.  They have so much in common that blaming and attacking one another is either a sign that they’re all as stupid as Jon (unlikely), or that the influence of the Lonely has set in fast and hard in the Institute.  Rooting that out may be the only way for them to start working together in time to prevent the next catastrophe.