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“In five minutes, I’d appreciate it if you called me an ambulance.”
He does.
He sits shivering in the dampcold of the archives with his right hand on a long-cooled cup of coffee and his left hand on his thigh, waiting. Watching. He cannot view places remotely like Elias can but he can know, and right now he knows that Melanie King is in the backroom of the other office, staring down the barrel of a tool. He knows how utterly terrifying it is to look at it. To see it approaching. He knows, with no small pang of shame, that she is brave where he is not, and despite the primal screaming of her heart, she is going to do it.
She doesn’t have a plan but she did google the anatomy of the eye before attempting, so she knows it’s mostly water and jelly and she knows that it feels pain. She also learned that Sigmund Freud used to be an eye doctor and apparently was introduced to cocaine by rubbing it on eyeballs to use as anaesthesia. She did not know, however, where in London to get cocaine. She wouldn’t have left the building to get it even if she did. Also, is she made of money? What, did she think an archival assistant position paid enough to buy cocaine? She’s probably going to be cashing in on disability payments from now on, though, so maybe.
Scramble them, right? Just… Pretend the awl from the book repair shop is a spatula and your eyes are some eggs, and then, just… Just-
Jon severs himself from Melanie as he feels the awl approaching. He sits motionless. He stares. He knows (not Know knows but plain knows) that any second now, the most human will become the bravest and she will cut the tethers that he is too cowardly to even attempt to touch. He is too dry inside to properly weep but he still feels his shoulders shake, ridden with rattling sobs that bang against the inside of his lips.
He is so jealous. He is so happy. He is absolutely mortified. He cries, silently, as the scream of Melanie King reaches him through the wall.
He calls her an ambulance but tells them to come to the street corner, because response teams of all flavours tend not to answer the Magnus Archives.
It is only later in the suffocating silence of post-siren reality that he realizes how deep she went. Eyeballs don’t bleed by themselves. The awl went past them. He stands in that backroom now and drinks in the lingering pain, the trauma, and he feels deeply ashamed for just how nourishing the blood on the floor looks. Something terrible happened here, and he already knows the story. He wouldn’t mind hearing it again. From her.
Still, he just finds a bucket, rag and liquid soap from the supply closet and returns to the room to clean the gore, entertaining for a moment the idea that he might taste the blood, just in case there’s something of the Flesh in him. He doesn’t actually try (he knows he is untouched by it), but enjoys the idea. Blood can be ethically sourced, after all. Trauma can’t.
And it is in those chores of pinkish water and lemon fragrance that he reaches under the chair for what he thinks might be a chunk of meat from a ruined eyesocket, only to find his hand balancing a light lump of clear, bloody, jiggly gel. It feels like holding a jellyfish. The substance starts to shape itself in his palm and he does not need to look into the dark-brown iris that is creating itself to know it. He Knows it. The sobs starts to rattle him again as he watches.
Its twin got knocked into a corner and is in clearly worse shape, and Jon doesn’t want to know (but still Knows) that Melanie got this one first, when she had more zeal and a steadier hand. It still knits itself together, though. After a couple of minutes both extracted eyes are firm as hard-boiled eggs, and they pulsate gently in his palms, leaking transparent fluid into the gaps between his fingers. There seems to be some knowledge somewhere above his head and it’s trying to get in, but whatever the horrible reality of these impossible eyes are, he doesn’t want to know.
No. You know what? Fuck the Beholding. Right now he hates it with an exhausting kind of hate and he cheers in defiance, no, roars against it, yelling into its unblinking face, telling it “Yeah, you know what? I’m glad she’s out! I’m glad this hurt you!” and his shrieks sound lonely and animalistic, like a wounded child on the playground realizing that there are no adults around.
He transfers the left eye to his left palm, and notices the pupils shifting to observe him. He Knows that Melanie is not looking out of them any more (she is free, thank God), but whatever uses them seems to like him. His right hand is still burn-scarred from Jude Perry’s handshake. The skin on it is tough and white. Maybe that toughness is what deters the unblinking eye from sinking into him; instead it slowly and carefully rolls itself to his exposed wrist.
He closes his own eyes because he can. This is one of the few choices still left to him, and he does not need to observe the Beholding strip his humanity from him further.
He feels it though. This is the knowledge he refused to take in. He knows it now as he knows his own name, that one can never truly quit, and that even severing one’s mind from the power of the Watcher, one will still be forced to serve. Everything Melanie is has left, but her skills… Her eyes will remain, and they will remain within the only constant that this godforsaken place has, and that is him. He is the Archivist. He needs his assistants. Melanie would hate this if she knew, but she doesn’t, and he hopes she never will.
It’s surprisingly painless, but extremely uncomfortable. His right wrist opens, welcomes, reshapes and closes, and it feels a little bit like having had a rock in your shoe for so long that it has embedded itself. The left eye finds no resistance in his palm but for the sake of something else (symmetry?) it also choses his wrist, and it also embeds itself. He cannot remember the last time he wept like this but it must be years, for when he finally lets his eyelids flutter up and braves a loot at himself, it feels like someone scrambled his lungs in his chest.
Two round, dark-brown, blinking eyes look up at him. He feels a grain of absurd relief as he realizes they have eyelids, too. It makes him feel better for some reason; the thought that they could, theoretically, close.
For a second he imagines a future where all his assistants choose to get out and he is left utterly alone to clean their blood and gather their eyeballs, and he imagines a string of multi-coloured irises embedded on the inside of his lower arms, like precious gemstones in a necklace. He imagines Basira’s almost-black next to Melanie’s dark brown, and Martin’s grey-blue next to Daisy’s almost-yellow, and then his mind wanders, trying to remember what colour real-Sasha’s eyes were, and Tim’s, and maybe after a while he will collect the gems from his enemies too, and the ranks of loved ones will be joined by muddy Buried and empty Vast.
And why does he feel better? The brainache of paranormal hunger has lessened. He wonders if so much of Melanie’s trauma might have been stored in these eyes, and now that they belong to him he can absorb the nutrients of it.
He gets back to cleaning the floor, through the blood has seeped into the woodgrain and he can only get so much of it. Then he pointedly lowers his shirt sleeves to cover his new acquisitions and leaves to empty the bucket.