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Afternoon, as it had so many times before, found Daisy wandering the streets. She had nowhere to go in particular, but she needed to be outside for a while. It was hard to get...perspective, these days. Especially in the Institute.
And at least she could be sure that she wasn’t hunting while out and about. Well, pretty sure. She paused for a moment, just to make sure she couldn’t hear the blood. Nothing. Good. Shoving her hands in her pockets with a shudder, she resumed her walk and train of thought.
They had all agreed to Jon’s proposal, but that didn’t mean she liked it. The others, she knew, had spend months barely able to leave the Institute, so perhaps it was more acceptable to them. And it would work—as a stopgap measure. It wasn’t a solution. Daisy knew it, Basira knew it, Melanie knew it.
Jon knew it, though he hadn’t asked the rest of them to find another way to help him. Wouldn’t expect them to. He would just keep thinking about it, alone, until he figured something out, or it destroyed him.
But whether or not Jon expected or asked for it, whether or not it was her responsibility, Daisy wanted to help him. Not save him, no: she knew better than anyone that he had to do that himself. If it was even possible. She’d had a hard enough time of it, even with the intervention of the—
Regardless. She wanted to help. Not least because that’s what Jon would do for her. Had done for her, climbing into the bloody Buried and—
And afterward, when she couldn’t be alone, he had been there. Sympathetic and understanding, even as he was drowning in loneliness himself.
It hurt to know that he hadn’t told her the truth, then. And it was an awful, hideous truth, just as bad as her own. Neither of them could take back what they had done.
But she was better, now. And Jon...Jon could do better, could be better than this. She knew that just as surely as he knew whatever truths that his spooky patron deigned to impart into his mind. She wouldn’t give up on him.
If only there was a way to make him understand that. To show him that he wasn’t past the point of no return. To give him reason to keep trying...
Jon sat in his office, morosely drumming his fingers on the desk. The Beholding was more than happy to bombard him with useless trivia any other time, but when he was bored out of his skull and could actually use a distraction? Nothing.
Part of him wanted to ascribe it to a malicious attempt to foil his plans, but that was absurd. The Eye didn’t have a human consciousness, and probably couldn’t even act with such focused intent. Nevertheless, he mentally told it to piss off. Just in case.
With a heavy sigh, he leaned back in his chair. He could go out and fetch another statement to read, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to deal with the look of alarm that would inevitably flit across the others’ faces before he clarified a normal one for the dozenth time. He didn’t blame them: it was a lot to ask, to keep him from leaving the archives. Nor could he say that they had no cause to fear.
He didn’t wish to compel the rest of their stories out of them. He didn’t think he would, no matter how…ravenous he felt. He would do his damnedest not to.
But he wouldn’t expect them to trust in the few good intentions he still possessed. How could they, when he himself did not?
So, although it was technically the archives to which he was confined, he remained in his office as much as possible—if not for the others’ safety, at least for their comfort. There was nothing else for it, at this point: he still didn’t know how to make himself to want to stop taking statements, so he would stay where he couldn’t harm anyone else.
It was harder than he had expected. At least before, he’d had people to talk to. Something in particular to research, to occupy his mind. Once upon a time, he’d had both.
Now, he didn’t know what to do. He was tempted to lay his head on the desk and sleep, just to make the time pass. But they weren't really sure what his sleeping in the middle of the day would...do. The best-case scenario was that he only haunted the dreams of any statement-givers unlucky enough to choose the same time for a nap, and even that seemed rather contrary to the goal of not being evil. So he only sat, staring into space, and...existed.
With time, perhaps he would come up with a better plan. Or perhaps he would slowly turn more and more monstrous, until he became a shambling horror like the one that Gertrude had destroyed in Alexandria. He supposed that either would be better than what he was now. Neither a good person nor a good monster. It was pathetic, really.
When the door flew open, he nearly jumped out of his skin.
“All right, Jon,” said Daisy, striding into the office and dumping a haphazard jumble of stuff on the floor, “You’re going to do something for me.”
“I...what?” he replied, watching her rummage around in the pile.
“You,” she continued, depositing a small bundle on his desk with utter disregard for the papers that already sat there, “Are going to promise this kitten that you won’t take any more statements.”
Jon blinked down at the bundle. Sure enough, staring up from where it was nested inside a small blanket, was a tiny grey kitten. A month old at most. Jon uttered a soft Oh despite himself.
“Daisy...” he cleared his throat, “I can’t...I can’t keep a cat in my office.”
“Sure you can,” Daisy said matter-of-factly, “It’s not like you’re going to get fired. I already bought everything that it needs—we’re not doing anything else with our salaries—and the shelter gave me loads of pamphlets on care and feeding. For me and Basira, I suppose. You’ve had cats before.”
“I…” Jon thought of protesting that he likely wouldn’t be alive long enough, let alone human long enough to take care of a cat, but Daisy had locked eyes with him and set her jaw in a way that said she knew exactly what he was thinking, and wouldn’t be having any of it.
“Promise the kitten, Jon.” She walked around the desk to stand just behind him. It was probably an attempt at intimidation, but he felt only relief at knowing that she was still willing to come so near.
“Very well,” he said, picking up the kitten with both hands. It was so warm. So soft . Already, he never wanted to put it down. So, taking a deep breath, he looked into its bright, inquisitive eyes, and promised. “I won’t take any more statements.”
The kitten squirmed and mewled in reply. Jon found himself blinking back tears.
Daisy clapped him on the shoulder.
“Good man.”
“The Duchess, really ?” Melanie said in exasperation, perched on the edge of Jon’s desk. “What is it with you and Georgie and the pretentious cat names?”
She hadn’t actually come to pick a fight about feline naming conventions, of course. She had just felt like they should talk. About anything. It had been bothering her ever since they had learned about Jon’s feeding habits and locked him away.
She and Jon had—to put it mildly—never gotten along. Even before she had joined the Institute, every conversation had turned into an argument. But...he had always let her talk. Had helped her get access to the Institute’s library when he had no reason to, and had taken her theories about war ghosts seriously when no one else did.
And still she resented him. Before the Unknowing, she wished that it would hurt him. And it did . Irreparably. Then he had come back, and had ripped the bullet out of her leg, and it hadn’t made things better, exactly, but...he had been right to do it. No matter how hard everything—every tiny damn thing—had been since.
She had barely begun to work out how she felt about Jon Sims the person when they had all learned of Jon Sims the monster .
But she wasn’t ready to give up trying. She wasn’t done with Jon, not yet, and she was going to damn well make sure that he wasn’t, either. It had to be her, because she knew better than anyone how it felt to lose the parts of yourself that weren’t just selfish . How much easier it was not to fight it.
So she could let him talk to her, at least.
“It’s not pretentious.” Jon glanced up from his desk, where he was darting his fingers toward the kitten and back again as she tried to bat at them. “It’s a perfectly respectable name. And anyway, titles are—” he snapped his mouth shut, cutting himself off. Melanie raised an eyebrow.
“Are…?”
Jon mumbled something, flushing.
“Jon. ”
“They’re cuter , all right?” he said indignantly, meeting her eyes again with a glare and flattening his palm on the desk. The kitten took this opportunity to pounce with a little squeak of triumph, and Melanie laughed in spite of herself. “...Anyway, I’m calling her the Dutchess whether you like it or not.”
“Fine, fine…” She reached down to pat the kitten’s head, but hesitated. It occurred to her that given their history, particularly such colorful bits as the time she stabbed him, Jon might not exactly be comfortable having her near the single fragile piece of happiness he had to his name.
He looked at her curiously, and then, whether because he could tell or because he Knew, pushed his hand across the desk toward her, Duchess and all.
“Go on.”
Jon was watching her, when she emerged from the tunnels to fetch the toolbox. Not in a creepy way—though he was holding the Duchess in one hand and stroking her with the other like a supervillain. But his eyes were...inquisitive. Normal, Basira thought in the instant before he looked away.
It was just Jon. It had always been just Jon.
I chose to do it. All of it.
He was right, of course. Logically speaking, the responsibility for his actions ultimately lay with him, not her. No matter that she had called him monster , like a curse. Like an invocation.
Yet now, Jon wasn’t going to ask her why she had carried a load of plywood down into the tunnels. Wasn’t going to look for the answer, either. And she knew why.
He had listened to her, when she told him to stop knowing. What else would he have stopped, if she’d only told him to? If she hadn’t shut her eyes from the beginning? If, when he reached out, she had reached back?
It wouldn’t be rational to blame herself. Not for all of it. But it was rational, it was necessary, to look back on what had brought them to this point. And now, without any excuses, without any conveniently immediate dangers to draw her gaze, what she saw was—it was just Jon.
Jon, in a hospital bed, staring stunned and stricken at the doorway through which Georgie had passed.
Jon, throwing a worried glance back at a screaming Melanie as he fled the room, blood dripping onto the floor as he went.
Jon, emerging from the coffin, in defiance of the Buried and all good sense, with Daisy leaning against his shoulder.
Jon tearing the story from the lips of an unsuspecting sailor. Jon pushing past her toward the Dark sun.
He had made his choices, but so had she. She had chosen over and over again to forget who he was. And still she had had the audacity to feel surprised by the contents of that tape. So much for being the reasonable one.
She sighed.
“Building a cat tree.”
Jon’s gaze snapped back to her. Brow furrowed, he opened his mouth as if to blurt out a well-deserved Why , but he stopped himself. For a moment, his expression hovered somewhere between bafflement and frustration. The Duchess yawned. And then, gently,
“You don’t need to do that.”
It might not even help.
“No? Because the way I see it, we need to give her something to do. Otherwise she’ll be running along the shelves and getting into your precious statements before we know it.”
“Nevertheless, that’s my problem. She’s my cat.”
It might be too late.
“She’s not just your cat, Jon. She’s part of team archives.”
“Team— What? ” Apparently he couldn’t help himself, this time. But there was no compulsion behind the question.
It wouldn’t undo the damage that had been done.
“Team archives. And anyway, you have to let us help sometimes. It’s not like you can take her to her vet appointments.”
“I...suppose,” he relented.
But she could either accept things as they were, or change them.
“So, are you helping me build this thing or what?”
Jon stared at her like she had grown a second head. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, he deposited the Duchess on her blanket—which she immediately snuggled into for a nap—and nodded.
“Lead the way.”
So she did.
Martin sat at his solitary desk, trying and failing to review the library’s list of recent acquisitions. With eyes fixed, unseeing, on Aleister Crowley: Intrepid or Imbecilic? he wondered, for approximately the hundredth time, if he had done the right thing in giving the tape over to the others.
Because the truth was, of course, that he could have spoken to Jon himself. Nothing was stopping him, least of all any sort of commitment to Peter’s grand plan—whatever the hell it was.
He tried, again, to tell himself it didn’t matter. The others would take care of it—in a non-life-threatening way. Probably. He still wasn’t quite sure about Melanie.
Anyway, the point was, it was being handled. That was good. It didn’t matter whether he had done it this way because it was necessary and right and what was best for everyone, or because—
Because it was easy. Easier than crossing the distance. Easier than seeing for himself whether Jon was—
That didn’t matter either, he told himself crossly. Not in the scheme of things, which is what he was supposed to be focused on. He had promised himself, all those months ago, that he wouldn’t keep standing around and waiting for Jon to—anything. Wake up. Tell him it was going to be alright. Fix things.
Of course, Jon had woken up, which had complicated matters slightly, but he still knew what he had to do. More than before, maybe. He couldn’t turn off caring about Jon, so he hadn’t tried. Had just gone on saving the world—only now it was back to being a world that had Jon in it, which was...yeah. Better.
But even if Jon wasn’t there anymore, wasn’t Jon anymore, he could still do what needed to be done. He was never meant to be saving the world for himself, anyway.
...Yet somehow, he couldn’t help but feel like he had fallen at the first hurdle. And he didn’t even know what hurdle that was .
He groaned, leaning back in his chair. Elias’s clock showed that it was well past business hours—nearly eleven o’clock, in fact. God, he was turning into—
Nope. No. He was not going to start his—spiral, meltdown, whatever, again from the top. Not at this hour.
His phone buzzed on the desk, and he jumped.
Well, that was...rare.
Curiously, he leaned forward to peer at the screen. Which couldn’t be right, because it said that he had a message from Jon . That hadn’t happened since—god, since Jon had left the hospital and come back to the Institute. He had texted Martin saying he’d like to have that talk. The one they’d promised they would, if the world didn’t end.
Martin hadn’t replied.
And he hadn’t spoken to Jon in any capacity in—he didn’t really want to think about how long, at this point. Regardless, there was no reason for Jon to think that he would start now . No reason for him to be texting him in the middle of the night. Unless…
What if something had happened? Something really, really bad.
Martin’s hand hovered over his phone. He shouldn’t look. He really shouldn’t.
He did.
when you’re done being stupid, come down here and visit us, yeah? -daisy
Daisy. It was from Daisy. Martin breathed a sigh of—something, as he slumped back into his chair. He wasn’t exactly surprised: he had known that his little ruse was only really good in the moment. She had probably figured it out as soon as she was back downstairs. But she did seem to have taken the hint to stay out of Peter’s line of fire, at least. With a text, well...what Peter didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.
Scrolling down, he noticed that she had also sent a picture.
And then he nearly burst into tears.
It was a picture of Jon , asleep at his desk, and he looked just like Martin had seen him look so many times before. Only...nestled in the crook of one arm, and slightly squashed up against his face, was a fuzzy little kitten. It seemed supremely content, and not at all afraid.
For once, Martin was glad to be completely alone, as he could feel what was likely an incredibly daft-looking smile spread across his face.
He sniffed, just once, and then closed his laptop. He could resume being stupid tomorrow.
And when he was done, he would go back to where he belonged.