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It’s early afternoon on a Wednesday, and Jon is sat on the floor of his office.
This isn’t, exactly, a rare occurrence. Even before he became the Archivist, and all the dramatic nonsense that entails, he was prone to abandoning his desk in favour of the floor. Shocker, the institute researching the paranormal has a high percentage of autistic staff – he could get away with a lot of ‘eccentricities’. He felt comfortable enough to try.
So, yes, there’s two kinds of sitting on the floor. When he sits, cross-legged, eyes closed, in the centre of the Archives. And when he sits, knees close to his chest, in the small space between the wall of his office and his desk, staring at nothing in particular.
It’s the latter, when Daisy walks in.
She doesn’t knock – no one ever knocks anymore. She just opens the door, then stands in it, crosses her arms and says, “Ah. You’re moping.”
Jon continues to stare in the vague direction of the floor. “That’s very comforting, thank you.”
“What, you want a heart to heart?”
Jon barks a laugh at that, bitter, surprising himself (or surprising Daisy, maybe) with the force of it. Daisy makes a ‘yeah, fair’ face, then hovers in the door for a moment longer before coming over and sitting down next to Jon.
He doesn’t know if it’s for his benefit or for hers (It was for her benefit at first until after a couple of weeks she noticed he’s just as touch-starved as her– Anyway), but ever since the coffin, she’s been… tactile. Presses their arms together, squeezes his shoulder, lets their fingers brush.
Now, she leans her shoulder against his, and the warmth of it is. Good. Grounding.
They sit in silence a while, until Jon breaks it by saying, “Maybe I should get a therapist.”
It’s halfway to a joke, in that if Daisy laughs he’ll make some dry comment about making Elias pay all their therapy bills. But Daisy doesn’t laugh.
Daisy makes a thoughtful noise. “We all need a therapist, but I don’t think there’s a Section 31 for psychiatry.”
“You never know. Gertrude apparently had a list of counsellors she sent statement givers to.”
“We are not,” Daisy says, immediately and firmly, “taking Gertrude Robinson’s advice on mental health.”
He never did do any follow-up into Lucia Wright. If she’s still alive.
“...No, that’s probably for the best,” he says, and they lapse back into silence. Daisy is good for silence – understands the comfort there can be in it, doesn’t feel the inexplicable urge to fill every empty space with words. Melanie thinks it’s hilarious, that Jon still despises small talk when ‘hoarding gossip’ should be ‘his whole thing’, but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not important.
And he can– There’s a shape to Daisy, in his awareness. He can’t hear what she’s thinking, not precisely, but he doesn’t need her to speak to know she’s at least some degree of content in this moment.
Some degree of content, with a layer of… nagging. Her internal Basira, bemoaning her people skills. Or lack thereof.
Nagging she concedes to, eventually, and begrudgingly says, “I guess, if you do want to talk–”
“I really, really don’t.”
“Okay,” Daisy says, less begrudging and more determined, because he put up a fight, and that was the exact wrong thing to do in this instance, “I’ll try that again. Seeing as the other day you basically admitted to being at least passively suicidal, you are going to talk to someone. It doesn’t have to be me, but it has to be someone.”
Jon huffs another bitter laugh. “Well, it’s going to have to be you, isn’t it, because–”
He cuts himself off, and is glad he did when Daisy makes what she thinks of as The Martin Face.
For a brief moment he thinks (hopes) that’s going to be the end of the entire conversation, but Daisy’s determination will best all obstacles, apparently. She says, only slightly haltingly, “I’ve some… experience with messy breakups, y’know, if you ever wanna talk about it.”
What.
“Wait. Wait. What?”
“You and Martin–”
There’s a distant ringing in Jon’s ears. “We– No. No. We– weren’t.”
But Daisy’s eyes widen, like this is, is new information, is unexpected. “At all?”
“I really don’t–”
She’s shifted back to determination again, her worldview realigned, some things clicking finally into place. He isn’t getting out of this conversation without stabbing himself. “No, we are done avoiding our problems,” she says, in something similar to her no-nonsense dealing-with-hysterical-victims voice. “We talk about things now. You’re– You do know you’re in love with him, yeah?”
“It was–” Jon starts, and then has no idea how to finish. God, even Georgie didn’t try to make him talk about his feelings about Martin. “I– There…” He lets out a breath, closes his eyes and drops his head back against the wall. Daisy presses closer, her knee against his knee, and he focuses on that for a minute, letting his thoughts organise themselves.
He lets out another breath, and says, “I don’t usually. Do this. I don’t feel this, I don’t like it, I’m not good at it. Martin was – I liked him, and I didn’t want to,” he laughs, wry, “So I tried to push him away. Which worked just fine– Well, which worked well enough, until Prentiss. And then he was in the Archives all the time, and then after he kept. Making me get lunch, and telling me off for not sleeping, and having terrible taste in poetry, and…”
He trails off again, thinking about. About. Martin’s hopeful smile as he stuck his head round the door, cup of tea in hand, how Jon always knew he’d stayed too late when he finished a cup and Martin didn’t appear with a new one.
He shakes himself. “It was a lot harder to pretend, and I didn’t even want to, really, but I was having something of a paranoid breakdown so it wasn’t exactly an ideal time to start a– a relationship. And then I was wanted for murder, and then I got kidnapped, and then I had to, then I was away, and when I got back there were. Moments, sometimes, but something would always interrupt–” He pauses briefly, something clicking into place. “Thinking about it, that something was often Elias… Anyway, then I listened to Melanie and Basira gossiping, and I was– God, I wanted to, but I.” Another bitter laugh. It all seems so futile now. “I thought it was better if I didn’t, before the Unknowing, so if I didn’t come back he’d be fine.”
He has to take another moment, then, thinking about Martin thinking he was dead. Martin, who stayed behind, who got Elias out and then had to pick up all the pieces himself, Martin all alone, when Jon should have been there. When it was Jon’s fault.
“And then I didn’t come back,” he says, voice rising, splintering, “And he wasn’t fine, thanks to Peter goddamn Lukas, and now, now I can’t tell if he has moved on or not because he won’t talk to me and I miss him so much even though he’s right there and I, God, I still kind of think it’d be better if he had moved on, because God knows being involved with me doesn’t have any benefits–”
He cuts himself off again, when his voice cracks. He’s shaking slightly, and his eyes feel hot, there’s a lump in his throat, he wants to punch something. He needs a cigarette. Fuck, he needs a drink.
“...Okay,” Daisy says, carefully. “So there’s a lot to unpack there.”
“Let’s not,” Jon says, voice caught somewhere between faux cheerful and acidic. “There’s a bottle of vodka around here somewhere. Let’s get shitfaced instead.”
“Jon.”
“I know, I know,” he waves a hand, “I’m overly self-critical. I think I have a good excuse, though.”
He can – Daisy is sorting through her thoughts, trying to decide what part of his outburst is most pressing. The problem, of course, is he does actually need a therapist, and there’s no way for her to enact violence on his trauma and deep-rooted personal issues. If she even wants to use violence as a solution to problems anymore.
Eventually, she sighs, deep and deeply exhausted, and asks, “You realise a good part of the reason he’s isolating himself is he has no idea you feel the same, yeah?”
“If you want to try and have a frank conversation about feelings with him, by all means, be my guest.”
Jon expects her to laugh, and move the conversation on, but instead she gets a thoughtful look on her face that is not reassuring in the least.
“Daisy,” he says, with the tiniest amount of panic. “Daisy, that wasn’t a challenge.”
She puts the thoughtfulness to one side, but not away – she knows better than to plot with her side pressed close to Jon’s side. She also, annoyingly, knows better than to listen to Jon about what’s best for him. Maybe he likes avoiding all his interpersonal problems so long they solve themselves by ceasing to be relevant when the other person no longer cares, dammit.
Daisy says, standing up, “Enough heart to hearting for one day, I think. Wanna go see what Melanie’s up to?”
I want a cigarette, he doesn’t say. If he keeps using cigarettes as an ad-hoc stand in for any real emotional processing, he’s going to die of lung cancer before any murderous eldritch fear entity gets the chance.
“Texting Helen and mocking the fake statements, I imagine,” he does say, and lets Daisy pull him to his feet. An unexpected side effect of his new… resilience is his legs no longer fall asleep, no matter how long he spends sat on the hardwood Archives floor. It may, possibly, be a contributing factor in the amount of time he’s spent sat on the Archives floor lately.
As well as, of course, his ever-growing collection of trauma and the way his life and the lives of everyone he cares about are all falling apart rather dramatically and violently.
But he’s not sat on the floor anymore, he’s walking over to Melanie’s desk where Melanie is, in fact, texting Helen to mock the latest fake statements (Jon can spot them a mile off at this point, but Melanie insists on reading them anyway. Keeps talking about making a drinking game of them.) And it’s not… Things aren’t any better than they were half an hour ago, but he feels better anyway, and he’s not in any position to question that improvement.
Later, Daisy’s going to concoct some kind of scheme, and he’ll have to deal with that, but that’s later. Right now, he’s going to read this statement that would have been better off submitted to some amateur short story competition in his Archivist voice, because it makes Melanie howl with laughter.