Work Text:
It begins innocuously enough. Elias stands from behind his desk, thanking Jon for his time. It’s all a farce. Like they’re play-acting at normalcy, even as Jon feels something integral to himself slipping further and further away. As he pretends that he doesn’t feel the heavy weight of the Eye and Elias both fixated on his every movement. Watching him, hungry with anticipation. The wet gums of a starving mouth. The wide, black pupil of a captive audience.
Jon clings to it anyway. The normalcy. He pulls himself from his seat and pretends the weariness in his limbs is from sleep-deprivation that hasn’t yet been chased off by caffeine. He pretends the way Elias shakes his hand is entirely professional. The way Elias smiles at him, fond and amused. How Elias’ thumb strokes at his wrist, intense for all its brevity. A shock of unexpected contact. A plucked thread of something thick and tremulous between them, a connection untapped but no less extant for it. No less brimming with potential energy corded into a tight, taut line.
He jerks his hand away first, and then jerks his gaze away to avoid the softening of Elias’ eyes. Fond. Amused. Elias’ hand goes to Jon’s clothed shoulder, then, and encourages him towards the door.
“You’re coming along wonderfully, Jon,” Elias assures him, and Jon hates him. Hates the way Elias thinks his approval is anything Jon wants or needs. Hates the way a piece of his stomach twists and heats in response.
“Yes, I’m sure there’s nothing quite so wonderful as your Archivist accosting innocent strangers and- harassing them into sharing intimate details of their worst experiences,” Jon says hotly. He puts too much emphasis into it – it sounds fake even to his ears. The words taste like dust on his tongue, the same taste actual food gives him anymore.
“Some may consider your work as such,” Elias says, mild.
“I’m surprised you don’t count yourself among them. I’ve half expected you to come tell me to behave myself around our patrons again.”
It feels like another life. Another him. Another Institute, another set of his Archives. Naomi’s eyes welling with tears across the wide expanse of his desk. She was so easy for him to dismiss. Sometimes he thinks about the dark sheen of her reflection on the newly polished gloss of his newly inherited desktop, and it always resolves into her eyes, wet and shiny and repeating over and over and over beneath his hands, beneath the tape recorder, beneath the chunk of a grave she brought as evidence.
“Your restraint has been admirable,” Elias tells him, and now it sounds like a joke. A gentle reproach. A nudge to some sore spot they’re both aware of navigating around. “And, to borrow a turn of phrase, you have behaved yourself quite nicely. I’d expected a much more… volatile situation upon my return.”
Peter Lukas. That’s who Elias is referring to, however obliquely, and just the thought of the man makes Jon’s entire body tense and clench. Elias moves his hand from its position on Jon’s arm to slip between the blades of his shoulders. Jon feels acutely the drag of Elias’ fingers over his clothing. Over his skin.
“I understand that you have some lingering feelings of animosity towards Peter.” Elias’ hand pulls down his spine, fingers bracketing the straight line of bone. It crawls upward, until there’s the ice water gasp of Elias’ bare skin against the back of Jon’s neck. “You’re still so attached to your human connections, and Peter took all but the last of those away from you. I used to believe it was a detriment to your development, but-”
“Stop,” Jon demands, roughly rolling his shoulders to shuck off Elias’ touch. Elias goes willingly enough, but his fingers linger over the side of Jon’s neck as they withdrawal. “I don’t want to hear it.”
It, being Elias’ bullshit and glowing admiration. The way he talks about Martin as if he were just some expendable, disposable thing. Another component in the making of an Archivist. Another little imperfection to be carved away, sanded down and smoothed out.
They’ve reached the door now.
“It doesn’t matter whether or not you want to hear it,” Elias tells him. He goes to continue, and that’s it- the words catch in his throat, like they’ve been tangled in something, snared in a clutching twine, and Elias gives a surprised, ragged cough.
“I’ll know either way, right?” Jon sneers. Part of his thoughts are distracted away from the moment, searching for any memories of this. Of Elias being anything less than composed and inhuman. He doesn’t think he’s ever heard the man sneeze, for Christ’s sake.
“Precisely.” Elias still sounds a bit strangled, clearing his throat.
Something feels hung in the air around them. Jon studies the way Elias subtly rights himself. Elias strokes a free hand down the center of his chest, elegant fingers following the straight line of his tie. He swallows thickly, and Jon watches how his throat works with the effort. An up and down shifting of movement beneath his skin.
Elias is smiling when Jon looks up again. They’re close enough that Jon can see the small imperfections of his skin. A loose scattering of freckles pale enough to be all but invisible on his cheeks. The lines around his mouth, at the corners of his eyes, like he’s laughed more than it seems fair a man like Elias should have. There’s a stark contrast between the black of his eyelashes and the pallor of his eyes, grey and interested and watching Jon, always watching Jon. His pupils are a dark, wet hole to fall into.
“Jon-”
“I have work to do,” Jon blurts, almost without thought.
“Of course,” Elias responds. They stand there another moment before he gestures towards the door at their side, and Jon reaches jerkily to pull it open. “I would hate to serve as any manner of a distraction for you.”
“Get yourself arrested again then,” Jon says, but it lacks any real bite. A grasping attempt at sarcasm. It only makes Elias give a low, indulgent laugh.
The sound of it sends shivers through his spine that don’t abate until he’s safely tucked away in the Archives again, surrounded by fear and distance and quiet.
And then it happens again. Much as Jon would rather avoid Elias within all reasonable limits, there are discussions that need to happen. Things to put back into place. He doesn’t know how he missed it before – the little cracks and splinters other things have made in the Archives. Other things, he thinks, when what he means is other entities.
There’s the most physical of them, the corruption and the web. Each of them have happily bored and tunneled and nested here, and they itch. Tuberous, gritty growths bulging off the surface of the Eye. Catching at its lids and scraping, scratching, irritating.
Jon assumes it will be difficult to clear their presence out – something long and involved, and no doubt somehow dangerous. Ritual circles and other cultish phrases he used to roll his eyes at hearing mentioned on terrible ghost-hunt podcasts. At this point in his life he’s not even sure he would find bloodletting or, he doesn’t know, haruspicy, out of the question as options.
Elias smiles when Jon voices this. “I’m sure it won’t be necessary to do anything so dramatic as all that.”
“Yes, I’m the one being over-dramatic,” Jon drawls. Elias left the door to Jon’s office open behind himself, but it somehow doesn’t lessen the feeling of being cornered. Not trapped – not the clutch of a closed fist but the cage of bent fingers cradling, careful.
“We’ll only need to have some contractors in to finish repairs to the Archives,” Elias tells him. He gets that annoying quirk to his lips when he adds, “And perhaps a few exterminators for any unwelcome pests we might find spinning webs find in our corners.”
Jon feels an itching to do something with his hands. He straightens the loose-leaf sheaves of a statement on his desk, his right hand longing for the familiar flick-snap of opening and closing a lighter. “I suppose that makes as much sense as anything else.”
It still feels wrong, somehow. Too easy? Too mundane? Perhaps Jon’s only thinking of the ghast Martin’s face would make at the thought.
Elias sighs. “Jon.”
“I know,” Jon says quickly. Stop dwelling and ruminating, stop longing, stop missing- “You don’t need to tell me, remember?”
“The Lonely is-” And there it is. Again. Elias’ voice interrupted in a phlegmy choke. Jon looks up from the statement in his hands to watch him. Clear his throat and then swallow, and then turn politely to the side to cough into the cupped fist of his hand.
“Elias…”
Elias straightens his clothing – Jon notes it: like a tick, Elias curls his fingers around his tie and strokes down the center of it. His thumb slides smoothly over the soft, satiny material. “Excuse me. The Lonely is more difficult to… excise, shall we say, at the best of times, and if you insist on continuing to let it feed-”
“I’m not insisting on anything,” Jon snaps. “You don’t think it would have been ‘easier to excise’ if you hadn’t let it take something from us?”
“I have no doubt that would have been the case,” Elias says, rising to Jon’s annoyance the way he always does, growing clipped and short with him. “But as you may remember, I was hardly in any position to stop that. Thanks in no small part to your own efforts, I might add, as well as Mr. Blackwood’s-”
“Don’t talk about him.”
“Try to be reasonable about this.”
“No.”
Elias takes a slow, steadying breath. It’s somewhat satisfying to imagine him having to rein himself in. Elias Bouchard silently counting to ten so he doesn’t snap back at his Archivist. “If you’re going to continue acting like a child, Jon, then I will have no option but to treat you as such.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, has this not been you treating me like a child?”
“No. It has not.” His tone is quiet, but stern.
Jon watches him come around the side of his desk, settling against the edge of it. Just shy of putting them into contact. Jon looks at the blank stretch of wood between his arm and the line of Elias’ thigh. His clothing is always so finely tailored. Well pressed and starched, sharp creases. The material of his slacks looks soft, smooth. Jon startles at the touch of Elias’ fingers to the side of his jaw, coaxing him to turn and meet his gaze.
“That’s not what I want, Jon,” Elias says once Jon reluctantly flicks his eyes up. “I’m sure it isn’t what you want, either.”
“What do you know about what I want?” Jon murmurs. The weight of Elias’ fingers against him is just barely there. No less incendiary for that, draws chills upward from the bottom of his spine when Elias strokes against his skin.
“You’re more than welcome to tell me.”
Jon snorts. He jerks his gaze away, to the side, the motion having the unintended consequence of him turning into the press of Elias’ hand. “You’ve certainly never been inclined to listen before.”
“That’s not true,” Elias tells him. The touch has shifted, from fingers against his skin to Elias’ cool palm cupped against his cheek. To Elias’ thumb running across the line of his cheekbone.
It feels… strange. People don’t touch him anymore. Not like this. He has the terrible impulse to allow it to continue. Jon recoils harshly away from it instead.
He clears his throat. “Right. Going to tell me about the importance of my choices again?”
Elias folds his hands neatly against his lap, looking utterly unaffected. Or rather, looking fond of him again, as if Jon’s done anything particularly pleasing. “Our choices are often the only thing that matters, in the end.”
The conversation drifts back to the mundane. The technicalities of shoring up their defenses. Jon is only mildly concerned to learn that yes, there are contractors who are more familiar with cleaning up the aftermath of a supernatural disaster. Really, he probably should have guessed that after the first incident with Prentiss.
Elias doesn’t touch him again. He leaves Jon’s office and closes the door behind himself. Jon brushes his fingers over the ghostly prickling of the skin on his cheek.
Elias, it turns out, is actually impossible to avoid. Somehow. They run into each other, in the Archives or the canteen, in the hallways of the Institute and the great, ornate entrance of the lobby. The last sticks in Jon’s mind sometimes, the sight of Elias framed by the glass double-doors of the Institute, light streaming in around him, his silhouette dark like the pupil of an eye.
It’s irritating. That- thing snaps taut between them each and every time. Like the shock of catching his own gaze in an unexpected mirror. It hollows out something beneath his ribs. It makes sitting down to a dry, long-since written statement even less appealing than usual.
And whatever bloody issue Elias is having with his throat continues. Strangling him at strange moments, so consistent that Jon starts trying to find a pattern to what might be precipitating the events.
He thinks, at first, perhaps it’s just a side effect of Elias’ extended leave from his seat of power. Jon had never ended up being able to see Elias while he was imprisoned – still something of a sore spot. Basira had never mentioned much about how Elias had seemed, exactly, aside from smug or gloating, or completely, utterly without use. And Jon isn’t in any position to ask her now. Sometimes it seems like she barely tolerates him, and the developing habit he and Elias have of falling into conversation has done nothing to help the situation.
But time passes and Elias keeps choking on his words, long since Jon feels recovered himself, which seems like an indication that it isn’t some… side effect of Beholding withdrawal. With all of the meddling Elias managed to do while behind bars, Jon is almost convinced he didn’t even get the chance to miss his work.
So. Probably not supernatural. Or, rather, more than likely supernatural in some manner but not specific to their shared patron. Thing. Jon moves on to noticing the topics Elias tends to be interrupted while discussing.
It’s… unenlightening.
“No, Jon, not all of our donors are-” Elias is lecturing him one day, before he’s forced to turn and wetly cough into the kerchief he’s taken to stashing in a side pocket.
Elias clears his throat after reminding Jon that he and his team need to be entering timesheets, even if they are still insisting on staying in the Archives. They’re not going to be paid for every hour they’re on location.
Elias brushes Jon’s hair to the side, apparently unbothered by the way sweat has made the strands damp and soft. Unbothered by how Jon is shivering miserably, how he’s curled in on himself, how he’s gripping his own pants-legs white-knuckle-tight in an effort to keep himself still. Elias hands him a statement – Jon can already tell it’s newer, fresher, even as his stomach sinks with disappointment – but when Elias opens his mouth the words don’t come out, a quiet gurgle behind the shift of his lips. Oh, Archivist.
No common threads there, really. Except himself, perhaps, but seeing as he doesn’t have Elias’ particular skillset there’s not much he can do to remove that variable from the equation. Jon attempts to regardless, pausing and hovering outside of Elias’ office when he hears the murmur of low conversation beyond his half-opened door.
He shifts his body to one side of the doorway. Leaning closer without revealing himself, hopefully. It’s difficult to make out the topic of the conversation, but he hears the back and forth rock of it and- there, Elias coughing. It’s a wracking set that stirs something almost like worry to hear. Not because Jon is worried for Elias. It’s the kind of instinctive concern he would feel for anyone who sounds like they’re trying to hack up a chunk of their own lung.
“Did you need something, Jon?” Elias calls out after he recovers, and Jon flinches bodily enough to knock his head into the wall behind him. He hurries away without responding.
Location has already proven not to be a factor – unless Jon considers the Institute as a whole, which feels so ridiculous he doesn’t bother to entertain the notion for more than a few moments of speculation. Time of day, no, but then Jon’s hardly been given the opportunity to see Elias outside of the workday.
Coughs are usually worse in the mornings, Jon thinks. But Elias is equally composed on his arrival at the Institute as when he departs in the evening. Jon wonders if he wakes up with his throat sticking and clogged. Elias probably has an ostentatious bedroom. Tucked in amongst sheets with thread counts in the upper hundreds of thousands. Does his room let in sunlight in the morning? Does a man like Elias deserve to wake in streamers of orange-gold sunrise?
Does a man like Elias even sleep? Jon tries to picture it, Elias dressed down in a white undershirt and- Pants? Shorts? Socks that go up to his shins, no doubt, sheeny like short stockings. Elias probably even uses those sock garters, clutched around his calves, old-fashioned belts and clasps.
Jon shakes himself from the inane spiral his thoughts have taken. No closer to any solution or conclusion to the strange puzzle he’s been handed, but more much irate for the fact than previously.
“Are we going to talk about this?” Jon demands, while Elias has a short coughing fit in front of him.
It looks like Elias has to swallow something down afterwards. Jon studies the grimace on his face when he does so. “Talk about what?”
“Please, Elias. Even if I didn’t already know you’ve already invited yourself in to everyone else’s private thoughts, I’d know you know what I’m talking about it.”
“Is that so?” Elias asks, dabbing delicately at his lips with the kerchief. The fabric is particularly sodden. “I’m not sure what you imagine I must be doing with my time, but I can assure you I’m not camping out in your brain to study your every fleeting thought, Jon.”
Jon doesn’t know why that, of all things, is so particularly annoying to hear. Maybe just the blithe denial of something Elias has been proven time and time again to indulge in. “Fine. We can do this your way then. Why have you been coughing like that?”
Oh. The compulsion feels- good. In every other situation Jon has to hold himself tightly back, chew on his tongue, reframe and reshape every statement when what he really wants is to ask, and ask, and ask-
It’s almost a learned response, the way his stomach twists with nausea when he first realizes what he’s done. Guilt, maybe. He’s letting down everyone who’s tried so hard to help him stop this.
But the wave that follows is so much better, so much stronger. It’s like he’s stretching a muscle that’s been cramped and contracted for weeks, pinching and pulling at his nerves, tension suddenly released. And with Elias he has to strive for it to reach him. The little high he used to get after pushing through a sleepless night of work, the second wind sweeping in after he’s expended all his energy, making him feel more alive, more aware and present than he has in-
Elias shudders, taking in a sharp, quiet breath. His eyes are bright with interest, crinkled at their edges with how he’s pleased. His tongue darts out to wet his lips and then Jon watches him clench his jaw. Feels the pressure build between them and slowly, achingly dribble away.
“Very good,” Elias murmurs, and the words strike against that perfect rush inside him. “You’ve been getting out of practice.”
“I don’t- want to practice,” Jon forces himself to say. Wishing it were true. That he wasn’t still partially flushed with the thought of doing something interesting to Elias, something impressive- “Answer the question.”
“Maybe I have a chest cold.”
“Do you?”
“Most likely? No.”
Jon huffs out a breath of annoyance while Elias just looks pleased with himself. “You know exactly what’s happening to you.”
“Yes,” Elias answers to the accusation immediately. “I do.”
“But you aren’t going to tell me.”
“Frankly, Jon, it doesn’t concern you,” Elias states. “I realize it’s not an answer you’re inclined to hear-”
“It would be easier if you would just tell me,” Jon stresses, because they both know this isn’t something that Jon’s going to just put away.
Elias leans closer, a glint of teeth between his lips. “Isn’t it always?”
“You’re insufferable,” Jon snaps.
“So I’ve been told,” Elias says.
They’ve been having it out in the middle of Jon’s office, and now that Jon is come face to face with the bulwark of Elias’ commitment to never being helpful, ever, he’s rather thankful for the small privacy it’s afforded their conversation. There’s a tape recorder whirring in the background, though Jon struggles to discern what their ever-watchful voyeur could find so enlightening about their little spat.
Jon flinches when Elias reaches out to loop fingers around the span of one of Jon’s wrists. His thumb rests on the inside stretch of his arm, and drags, back and forth, over the smooth, sensitive surface.
“It isn’t anything you need to be worried about,” Elias says.
“I’m not worried.”
“It will pass,” Elias assures him. Jon’s fingers twitch at the next downward sweep of Elias’ thumb, as if he wants to reach out himself. He does not. “And I’ll be none the worse for wear of it.”
“You’ve done this before,” Jon says.
“Many times.”
Said as a statement of fact and nothing more. Jon should be reassured by this. Should be able to let the dizzily restless whir of his thoughts quiet. But he imagines Elias bent halfway over, choking on himself. He looks to the cloth as yet held tight in Elias’ free hand and sees a flash of red between the soft, muted-color folds of the kerchief and just feels slightly miserable instead.
Elias sighs, and releases him. “What you do on your own time is, as ever, your own. But please do try to keep your curiosity contained to your off-hours.”
“Yes, as you know, I stop being the Archivist right on time every evening.”
Elias gives a short laugh in response. “Well. I’ll let you get back to it, then.”
Not the most graceful of exits Elias has ever manufactured for himself. Jon doesn’t move from where he feels almost anchored to the floorboards. Elias’ fingers fumble briefly with the kerchief as he stuffs it into his pocket, opening the door in the same motion and letting himself out without a glance behind.
Which means that he misses how something red and heavy falls out of the crumple of his kerchief before he leaves. Jon stares at it, heart leapt into his throat because his only thought is that it must be a piece of Elias’ tissue, the skin and meat of him sheared away. The absolute certainty that something is actually capable of killing him.
Jon grabs a pen off his desk and comes warily closer to the door. To the small, wet clump Elias left on its threshold. He crouches down on the balls of his feet to study it. It’s hard to say what, exactly, it is. Some of the interior lining of Elias’ trachea, his bronchioles? Some soft, limp fold of his lung itself.
He pokes at it with his pen. The material is thin, and when he gets close enough he can see the impression of small, filament-like veins running below its surface. It doesn’t seem to be actively weeping blood, but it’s possible it’s already clotted. There’s a thin, shiny layer of phlegm across it.
With a bit of finagling Jon is able to slip the end of his pen beneath one of the flaps of it, to lift it away and unfold it. And- He’s stalled. It looks like… a flower petal? Did Elias cough it out? But that makes no sense. Was it already in his pocket? But, no, it’s covered with his- spit, certainly battered like it’s been put through a ringer or two.
He gets it draped over the shaft of his pen and carries it to his desk, where he peers at it beneath the lamp. It’s… a flower petal. He sits down and keeps turning it, looking at it from different angles, as if this way or that way would tell him more about its how and why. He almost wishes it were a person, somehow, that he could question and force to answer.
It doesn’t take him long to find a statement. His meditations have already shortened from when he first began his efforts, and having some idea to focus on, to refine his search, makes it even easier. Jon follows what he used to believe was his intuition out of his office and into the greater Archives, between the rows and columns and towering tributes to the Eye until he comes to an aisle as equally remarkable – unremarkable – as all the rest.
He finds Rosario Boyce’s statement about halfway down the row. The manila folder it’s contained in is identical to the ones surrounding it, but he pulls it free and Knows it’s the one he’s been looking for. He doesn’t bother to open it until he’s back in his office, the door closed and himself returned to his seat. He doesn’t bother to find a tape recorder or a cassette, and hears one click on as splays the file’s contents across his desk. Haruspicy, of a different sort, he can’t help but to consider ruefully.
“Statement of Rosario Boyce,” Jon says. He’s not sure when he knew her name, if it was before he pulled her file open or after. “Regarding her love for Joseph Craft, and subsequent illness. Original statement given February 18, 2006. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.
“Statement begins.”
He takes a breath. Clears his throat, which feels abruptly thick and sliding, like he has to cough through wet, liquid mud to speak.
“I almost think it’s funny sometimes, you know? I mean, it’s not funny – not really – but it’s just so… I don’t know? Cliché? There’s even a poem, or something- there’s this poem. I think about it sometimes.
“It goes like, ‘love and a cough, cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.’”
Jon has to stop and cough, because Rosario had had to stop and cough, even as she wrote it out. It feels like something begins to clog his lungs, filling them more and more. Hard, unforgiving growths, shoving into all the small branching tubules of his respiratory tract. Sinking into his soft tissues, stealing away his breath.
And through Rosario he Knows. A small love, nurtured gently and carefully over a period of months. Of years. Through encounters – chance meetings and incidentally shared happenings. Blossoming, as she and Joseph began to know each other. As Joseph lavished her in his intense interest, his heavily cloying attention almost addictive. The sweet, unbearable pain of the imbalance of their feelings.
A small cough. An ache, in the base of her lungs, first one and then the other. It creeps itself upward. It twines in response to Joseph’s presence, to Joseph’s absence. To his quiet smile and kind eyes. The gentle reproach of his refusal, again and again.
She tries, she really does. To move on. Her silliness fondness clings to her. She can’t stop imagining how their life might be together, in the world she makes for herself where he loves her back. It feels like something is caught in her throat. Tickling the back of it, making her choke and cough and gag.
She coughs out a flower. Bursts of petals like confetti spilling out of her mouth. Long, twisted stems, sprig green and sharp with freshly budding growths, pulled and pulled and pulled out of her throat. She’s going to choke on them. She’s going to drown in them. She’s going to be strangled by their roots, tangled as they are with her own, as deep inside her as the love that even now can’t stop growing.
Statement ends.
Maybe he’s wrong. Made a mistake somehow. Somewhere.
Maybe the Eye made a mistake. Maybe Elias has tuberculosis. It’s more likely that than- than imagining Elias wasting away out of love. Or something like it.
Jon paces in his office. It isn’t even something he would have thought Elias capable of, previous to this. Love. Not for anything except the Eye, of course, and that relationship seems to be as mutual as the hungry gaze of a coagulated fear can manage.
He has to be wrong. It’s- It’s blatantly ridiculous. Absurd. And who could Elias even be growing them for? If that’s what’s even happening here.
Unbidden, Jon feels his face flush. He thinks of the way Elias watches him. The cool touch of Elias’ palm to his cheek, the lingering brush of his fingers over his skin. How Elias quietly allows Jon his reproaches, his refusals, with bland acceptance.
That can’t be right. Elias has his… interests in Jon, that much is obvious. More to do with his position and the Eye than anything about him as a person.
But who else is Elias even close to? Jon’s startled at how little he knows, really, about any details of Elias’ personal life. He frankly has a difficult time imagining Elias outside of the Institute itself.
And then there’s that- tugging, biting thing that keeps yanking taut between them. Like a riptide coursing along beneath still waters, waiting for one of them to dip a hand into and become carried away in its pull. That Jon sometimes wants to sink into, the way he wants to let the black depths of a pupil devour him whole, scour him from root to stem and rip apart his pieces, to know each and every one of them.
Jon stops pacing. Blatantly ridiculous. He continues pacing. He thinks of Elias and the Eye and all the unsettling ways the two blend together, blurred at their edges until Jon can hardly be sure where either one begins or ends. He wonders if Elias even knows anymore.
He thinks of all the small ways the remainders of Elias’ humanity creep up without warning. The fine lines at his eyes and mouth, the unexpected (infuriating) existence of his sense of humor. How fragile he seems doubled over, choking on love.
Jon slams the door to his office shut behind him, and storms off to Elias’.
“You do realize I can’t just let you-” Jon can’t finish, because he could and very well should let just about anything happen to Elias at this point.
Elias looks up from his desk, eyebrows raised with what must be artificial surprise. “Jon. What a-”
“Shut up,” Jon snaps. He’s marched across the room quickly, before his nerves or his sense can make him think better of his actions. Draws around the side of Elias’ desk and, frustratingly, has to wait for Elias to slowly pull his chair back and turn to face him.
“Was there something-”
Christ, he cannot listen to another word out of Elias’ mouth or he won’t be able to go through with this. Jon lunges forward, fisting his hands in the crisp, professional collar of Elias’ shirt. He drags Elias up by it, though he’s willing to admit that at least half of this is simply Elias allowing it to happen.
“I said shut up,” Jon repeats, and then he crashes their mouths together.
Well, hopefully eagerness and enthusiasm count for more than any measure of finesse. Elias makes a noise against his lips and Jon presses closer to him, tugs Elias nearer by the twisting grip he has on his shirt. It only takes a moment for Elias to respond properly. A hand finds its way into Jon’s hair and encourages him down. Elias’ other grabs him by the belt, until they’ve lowered back so Elias is seated again, and Jon is leaning over him, curling over him, a knee planted on the seat between the spread of his thighs.
And they’re still- kissing. There’s the crackling weight of the Eye’s gaze and the whirring of its endless mouth and the soft movement of Elias’ lips beneath his own. The slick glance of his tongue that sends a shockwave down Jon’s spine, ripples out through all his soft tissues. There are teeth – Elias bites at him, gently, draws Jon’s lower lip between his own and sucks at it like he could soothe the stinging ache away.
Their noses bump. There’s really not enough room on this chair for both of them. Jon’s back begins to twinge in complaint. They break apart and breathe in the same space. Elias smells like crushed, wet flowers. Like the scent of new things pushed out from the earth. Elias’ hand trails from his hair to the side of his jaw, cupped there, pulling him back. Jon is almost willing to admit that at least half of this is simply him allowing it to happen.
It’s- nice, as inane as the thought is. As how utterly inapplicable such a word is to Elias. Jon doesn’t want it to end, this moment they’ve created that’s just the two of them, lips and tongues and teeth and flesh that feels like not enough, somehow, like there’s some way Jon could still have more of him. They take turns drawing one another back. Parting and returning, chasing after something Jon can only catch tastes of, flickers of something beyond their messy physicality.
It grows a bit beyond nice. Elias kisses and bites his way across Jon’s jawline and down his neck. Parts the collar of his shirt so he can clamp teeth into the meat of his shoulder, bruising into the long sloping muscle along the side of his neck. Jon doesn’t stop him. Jon tangles fingers in his hair and urges him closer, gasps and whispers his name on strangled breath, body jerking instinctively into more and into yes, and into please, and into Elias.
Through a bit of awkward arrangement Jon ends up straddling Elias’ legs. The arms of the chair pinch at his thighs and knees. Jon has his arms around Elias’ neck. Has clawed against his shoulders multiple times, while Elias runs his hands up and down the length of Jon’s spine. Sometimes pausing to cup against his ass, sometimes scratching until Jon shudders and pushes them flush. He’s managed to get beneath Jon’s shirt at some point, the cheeky bastard.
Elias chuckles at him. Jon’s fingers pet through the stray hairs at the nape of his neck. Traces over his skin until he can watch Elias’ skin prickle and tighten and shiver beneath the drag of his nail and the pad of his fingertip.
Elias hasn’t coughed once since Jon came into the room and forced the topic, so to speak. He wonders if he actually needs to say any of it, or if this was enough. If this could ever be enough, with the threat of the rest of the world hanging just outside this room. Weight already settling at the edges of his peripheries.
It’s a familiar feeling, this reluctance to move, to stop. Every time Jon trips into the waiting grasp of the Eye, he wants to stay just a little longer.
“Soon, Jon,” Elias tells him, encouraging Jon closer. To fold himself against Elias, and Jon follows, awkward positioning that it is. He hides his face into the crook of Elias’ neck and breathes.
He doesn’t need to ask what’s coming. In the dark space behind his eyelids, he sees eyes and eyes and eyes, repeating. Staring. Consuming.
It’s almost comical how things return to their baseline. If not for the rings of bruising slow to fade on the sides of his neck, Jon could almost imagine nothing had even happened between himself and Elias. There’s a fluttery kick in the base of his stomach the first time or two he chances into Elias at work – Elias responds with that smile of his, the one that’s pleased and self-satisfied and utterly obnoxious – but it’s a reaction that quickly becomes manageable, and then becomes nothing at all when neither of them move towards rekindling any of the fervent need lying dormant between them.
Jon doesn’t mind. He almost prefers it. They have better things to do with their time, anyway. Elias touches him more than he used to. Jon lets him more often than is strictly professional.
In the hot, wet confines of his own ribs, something flourishes and grows, tight and constricting if he thinks about Rosario’s statement. A love to choke on, a love to soothe it away. The implications of what he’s done are daunting. He focuses instead on the satisfaction he feels. The sense that he’s actually beaten one of these curses at their own game. Carved himself the ending he wants for a change, staked a claim and then kept it.
Elias is the Eye’s. Elias is his, in some manner Jon shudders and shies away from thinking of. It’s a little bit intoxicating to admit, and to accept how it’s returned. It feels good. He’s not sure that’s something either of them deserve at this point.
Jon is passing by Elias’ office – a happenstance, because he’d had to go traipsing off to one of the upper levels of the libraries in the Institute, chasing after knowledge the way he always used to have to. A bit of an indulgence, really, when he could probably just know what he needs to, but the ache in his thighs after climbing all those stairs is human, the ache in his joints from climbing ladders and searching through books that never seem to stay properly catalogued anchoring.
Jon is passing by Elias’ office and hears from within a wet, ragged cough. He freezes in his tracks. Elias keeps coughing. Choking. All but vomiting, the kind of heaving that sounds like he’s drowning. Fighting to breathe through thick mud. Jon opens the door and locks it behind himself, and watches Elias hunched above the small waste receptable he’s dragged over near his desk.
Limp petals are plastered to the sides of the plastic liner, stark red against sheeny white. More keep coming out of Elias’ mouth. He spits them out, half chewed and dripping, or shoves his fingers into his mouth and pulls out in thick, matted clumps, and keeps coughing in between. Elias is barely able to look up to Jon when he comes in.
It’s hard to tell how long he watches. How many handfuls of flowers Elias plucks off his tongue, gnashes between his teeth. At some point Jon comes closer, sets his book half-forgotten on Elias’ desk. There’s a tumult of something twisting around in his gut, emotions snapping and biting at each other until Jon can’t separate them, can’t begin to access them properly.
He feels strangely disparate from himself. Almost like he’s watching someone else’s hand soothe across the sweat soaked strands of Elias’ hair, brushing them from where they’ve fallen around his face. Watching someone else tighten their grip and pull until Elias is forced with a weak groan from his half-huddled positioning.
“Why is this still happening?” Jon demands, a question that crackles and pops on his own tongue as it leaves his mouth.
Elias shudders, his voice thick when he answers, “You already know why, Jon.”
It fills him with a white-hot surge of annoyance. Can Elias not for one god-damned moment be anything other than cryptic and unhelpful? He pulls until Elias’ neck is craned. He almost imagines he can see the points of tender branching vines pressing against the skin of his throat.
He knows why this is still happening. Because he’s-
There’s a little trailing piece of greenery slipped out between Elias’ lips, ripped free of all its petals already.
“Who are you growing these for?” Jon compels. Watching the static of it in the kick and twitch of Elias’ muscles, how Elias tightens his jaw. How the serous fluid of flowers oozes faintly green in a thin trickle down and over his bottom lip. “I know they’re not for me.”
“Jon-” Elias tries to gasp.
Jon presses forward, digging in. Like finding a small imperfection on a smooth surface, and pressing on it until it buckles and break. He twists his hand in Elias’ hair and asks him again, like a whiplash, “Who, Elias? Who are you growing these for?”
And it should be so obvious. Jon knows the answer in a flash, half a second before Elias gags a wretched answer, “Peter Lukas.”
Of course. Of course it is. Peter fucking Lukas. Jon can’t squirm out from his shadow, can’t turn anywhere without finding the grease of his clutching grasp smeared across every surface. As if it wasn’t enough for him to take the Institute, to take Martin, Peter is gone and still here, still taking-
Jon switches his grip. Moves from Elias’ hair to cupping against the front of his neck, digging his fingers and thumb into the hinges of his jaw. “Open your mouth, Elias.”
It’s still dripping with static and intent. He doesn’t know if Elias wants to open his mouth. If he’s honest, he doesn’t particularly care. Either way, Elias does so, and Jon braces himself, one leg between the spread of Elias’ again. Intimacy, again, with Jon leaning over Elias and Elias arching himself upwards to accept.
Jon reaches into his mouth and twists his fingers around the little twirl of green he finds inside. He gives an experimental tug and Elias voices a wordless complaint. He lets go of Elias’ throat to grab onto the back of his chair instead. Elias stays where he put him, mouth open and drooling around Jon’s hand.
He wraps the vine around his knuckles and yanks. It doesn’t sound like it feels good. Elias is back to choking, stuck with his jaw fixed open, and Jon has only gotten enough of the thing out to curl it around his palm. It gives him better leverage for the next pull, and the next.
It really is a plant. It’s green, and beautiful, so lovingly nurtured that it hurts. Budded with new limbs and unopened flowers, roots that come out of Elias’ throat tinged with red and with little blubbery-yellow nodules clinging to their tips. Where he’s ripped them free.
Jon can’t stop. Now that he’s gotten hold of it he has to see the end. The root system lodged in Elias’ lungs and heart. It’s thrilling on a primal level to rip Peter Lukas right out of Elias’ chest.
There’s a point that gets stuck just behind Elias’ throat, towards the end. Jon nearly falls backwards when he manages to pull it free, and it’s nothing but a tangle of thin, trailing roots, dripping red with Elias’ blood. And then it’s out. There’s nothing left to pull. Jon has a climbing plant wrapped around and around his fist, a chunk of roots as large as a baseball dangling from the end. Dripping red with Elias’ blood, onto the ground.
He drops it into the waste bin. Elias has sagged back into his seat, panting. There are streaks of blood and saliva down his chin. Streaks of tears down his cheeks. Jon feels faintly sick.
Elias opens his eyes, and licks his lips. “Well.”
Jon winces at the rough scratch of his voice. “Elias-”
“If you’re going to apologize, please, don’t. I think we both know you wouldn’t mean it.” Elias’ hand is shaking as he reaches to his desk. Opens up a drawer and pulls out a few tissues. “I hope you’re feeling quite satisfied with yourself.”
Shame pulses hotly through him. He is. His fingers twitch, like he wants to help, but instead he watches as Elias cleans himself a bit. “I- I shouldn’t have done that.”
Elias raises an eyebrow.
“I-” Jon begins, and then doesn’t even know where to start. “I thought-”
“Did you?”
“Earlier,” Jon presses on, determined to explain himself in some way, almost desperate to. “I mean, before. With- you, and I- and I thought-”
Elias gives a heavy sigh. “Come here, Jon.”
There’s not much closer for them to get. Jon kneels down, because Elias is still seated, and wonders at the mess that he’s made of this. Even an otherworldly connection to a distant, all-knowing god can’t keep him from utterly imploding his personal relationships.
Elias brushes his fingers through Jon’s hair. He allows Jon a moment of huddling against his lap before Jon feels his fingers hook beneath his jaw to guide him upward. Jon meets his gaze.
“Rosario Boyce,” Elias says. “What did she die of?”
“She might not be dead,” Jon says. “There was no follow-up conducted, and-”
“Jon.”
Jon snaps his jaw shut and swallows. “…She died of- of love, I suppose.”
“Unrequited love,” Elias amends, “To be precise.”
Jon feels sullen. And stupid. That he could have assumed Elias felt anything-
“Jon,” Elias says again. He leans forward in his seat, to bring them into proximity. “Does anything about this feel remotely unrequited to you?”
Jon is spared the indignity of having to form an answer by Elias pressing their lips together. He tastes like flowers. He tastes like blood.
“What about Peter?” Jon asks once they’ve parted. His lips feel sticky with sap.
“I wouldn’t worry about Peter,” Elias tells him with a shrug. “As I told you before, I’ve been through this many times, Jon.”
That isn’t actually reassuring. Jon presses his lips together in a tight line. Unhappy at the thought. Peter keeping himself all tangled up in Elias’ chest, over and over and over. “What happens if it grows back?”
Elias pets at his hair, a faint, wry twist to his lips. “If that happens, I’m sure I know where to find you.”