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The world doesn’t end. It seems like the world never ends, despite its best efforts to do so. Nothing new is born, wet and squalling, from the terror of seven billion skulls.
Jon is too late, of course. He’s always too late for anything that matters. He stumbles through the maze, following the map Elias gave him, its crazed and uncanny lines. The center, when he reaches it, is silent and still. The air is sharp with dissipating energy, as if he’s only just missed something momentous (too late, too late).
Fourteen passages enter the chamber, and there are two sets of footprints in the dust. Only one set goes back the way it came.
*
It is cold in the dead world. He doesn’t feel a lot of anything, but he feels the cold. He’s sure there’s a significance to that, but he can’t bring himself to puzzle through it. Can’t care enough to try.
He is not the only thing that moves, but he is entirely alone. Once that thought would have made him afraid.
He saved the world, or maybe he didn’t, but in any case he isn’t going back. It’s fine. It's fine. It really doesn’t matter.
*
Elias sits behind the desk in his office, looking as if he’s never left, and Jon despises the odd sense of comfort the sight gives him.
“What did Peter do?” Jon demands helplessly. Elias smiles, because Jon has already tried to compel him today, just once.
“Something cleverer than I thought he was capable of, frankly.” He sounds almost affectionate. “The Lukas family will be rather more dangerous now.”
Jon shakes his head in frustration; he should know better than to expect useful answers.
“What about Martin?”
“What about him?” Elias asks coolly. “Martin made his choice, with his eyes open.”
“There has to be something we can do.” Jon knows he sounds desperate, and the look Elias gives him could almost be pitying, if he were capable of that.
“There are many things we could do,” says Elias, picking up a pen. “Personally, I’m going to get back to work. I suggest you do the same.”
*
There’s nothing to do here. It’s odd: he worked so long and stubbornly towards this end, and now afterwards, there's nothing to do.
If he could still feel grief and longing, he’s sure that he would. One thing to thank Peter for, at least. The scar is already fading, painless, and the space behind it is hollow.
Sometimes he sits at the window. The world outside is gray and dull, but there's a spider that spins its webs in the frame, the only living thing he's seen that's not twisted beyond recognition. Sometimes he writes poetry, but the words fall flat and lifeless. He remembers he used to feel a lot, when he wrote. The memory is hazy, like seeing yourself in a photograph you don’t remember being taken.
Mostly, he does nothing at all. Forever is a long time. He may as well get used to it.
*
It’s quiet in the Archives, with Melanie gone. Daisy is a silent shadow of herself, and Basira is immersed in research, desperate to help her.
(She needs to hunt, Basira still insists, even as she pores over her latest avenue of investigation. Jon knows the part of him that agrees with her is the part that wants to hunt himself, so he keeps his mouth shut.)
He’s grown used to the quiet, the same way he’s grown used to the hunger, the hollow twisting beneath his rib cage that never goes away. He keeps himself busy with the statements, dry and unsatisfying as they are, the follow up research he forces himself to do. He refuses to let himself not care about the people in those statements, the victims whose fear spills out across the pages.
He’s not sure when the sound begins. It insinuates itself into his subconscious long before he’s aware of it, winding up his spinal column and into his hind brain, pulsing through his blood. When he finally notices it, it’s noticing something that’s been there all along, like the sound of your own breathing. The rhythm is slow and irregular. Quiet, but insistent, as if determined to get his attention.
“Daisy?” Jon ventures as he walks to the door, and although he knows she’s in the library: “Basira?”
The rhythm quickens for a moment, as if in response to his voice. It could be anything, Jon knows. It could be dangerous. He shouldn’t be careless.
He follows the sound.
In the musty recesses of the Archives, past the looming rows of shelves, he finds its source. It’s coming from beneath the floor. Jon crouches, and levers his fingers beneath a slightly raised floorboard. It lifts easily.
The space beneath is dusty and haunted by cobwebs. A couple of spiders scuttle out of sight as the light filters in, and Jon frowns. There is a cardboard mailer box sitting in the hollow, which is...not precisely what he expected. It looks new.
Jon lifts it out. There is a mystery here, and for the first time in a long time he is curious, eager to solve it. But something here makes him apprehensive, as well. Is this how Pandora felt with her hand on the lid?
Jon opens the box and sees what’s inside, beating a faltering rhythm. He Knows what it is, whose it is, and what it means. He takes in a sharp breath that hurts his chest. His hands are suddenly shaking, and he nearly drops the box.
“Oh,” he says, his throat tight. “God, Martin.”
The heart is cold when he takes it in his hands, and he cups it gently, feeling its frail, wounded pulse against his palms.
*
He sits in front of the mirror and presses the point of the knife against his sternum. Peter gave him the knife, told him he was ready, but he still isn’t entirely sure he won’t die. His hands are shaking.
(We all have to do it, Peter told him, pulling his shirt collar open to show his own pale scar. It’s symbolic, but symbolism is serious business.)
It’s easier than he expected to drive the knife home, to spread his ribs, his heart beating frantically like a bird fluttering at the bars of a cage. There is a lot of blood, but he doesn’t think he’s going to die.
He cuts away the tendons and arteries, each one severing a connection to the world, family and friends and old boyfriends and...and...
He pulls his heart from his chest, slick and beating weakly, and puts it in a box. He hides it in the hollow place he once found, full of dust and webs. It's poetic, he thinks, to leave it in the Archives, where he lost it once. He likes poetry.
(Peter told him to burn it, but something else told him not to, something subtle and shining in the back of his mind. It’s fine, though; nobody will ever know.)
*
Jon dreams of a dead world. In the dream he is in the Institute, and it is in ruins. More than ruined: scorched and blasted almost beyond recognition. Jon picks his way carefully through rubble and melted glass, out of the ruined building into the ruined London beyond.
The sky overhead is a sick, vibrant orange that hurts his eyes. The streets are wreathed in thick fog that nearly conceals the devastation, obscures the charred, desolate shapes on the ground that Jon doesn’t want to look too closely at.
Jon walks.
He isn’t alone in the dead world. Figures shuffle through the fog, nearly but not quite human, never coming near enough for him to see clearly. They don’t seem to notice Jon, or each other. As if each of them is entirely isolated.
Jon walks, and he doesn’t know where he’s walking until he does. He goes into a building and up to the second floor, and finds Martin in what looks like it used to be someone’s office, sitting at the window.
“Martin!” Jon tries to call, but of course he can’t; that isn’t how these dreams work. Martin’s expression is calm and unconcerned as he looks out at the dead world. The top couple of buttons are missing from his shirt, and Jon can just see the line of a pale pink scar running down his sternum.
Jon’s heart beats hard in his chest at the sight, at the memory of what Martin did, what he sacrificed. Martin’s hand lifts, absently, and rubs at the scar.
Jon stays there, watching him, until the dream drags him away.
*
When he sleeps, he dreams of the Archivist, of a faint, rhythmic drumming in the back of his skull. Jon’s eyes on him are dark and all-encompassing. He’s always heard that the Archivist is horrifying in dreams, but he isn’t afraid. He isn’t anything.
He can’t feel anything, now, when he thinks about Jon’s dark eyes, his soft, pained smile. Like the person who loved Jon so fiercely is a stranger that shares his name and his memories.
He can’t feel anything when he thinks of his mother, either, though. So maybe it’s better this way.
*
Jon doesn’t try to hide it from the others. It’s not some shameful secret, just something a little pathetic that he’s doing. After the awful things he’s done and hidden from them in the past, he’s fine with a little pathetic. It isn’t anything they don’t know already.
When Daisy comes into his office, Martin's heart is sitting in a nest of soft wool that Jon folded out of a scarf. His hand rests protectively over it, measuring its fragile beat with his fingertips. Daisy’s eyes settle on it, cautiously.
“What’s that, then?” she asks. Jon tells her, and she sighs, shaking her head.
“Well, not the strangest thing you’ve done.”
“I know it’s a bit...odd,” says Jon. “But I couldn’t just leave it there, not when I could hear it.”
“You still hearing it now?” Daisy asks, her eyes narrowed and penetrating.
“Yes,” says Jon. The sound is subdued, but ever present, the beat pulsing up his backbone. Daisy tilts her head.
“I can’t hear anything,” she says. “Just...be careful, eh? It’s important, I get it, but…”
She trails off and Jon nods. He understands. It’s like everything else around here, weird and unsettling and maybe dangerous. But what else can he do? Jon never took any care of Martin’s heart back when Martin might have wanted him to. Maybe it’s pointless to do so now that Martin doesn’t need it anymore, but it’s the only thing Jon can think to do.
He's not foolish enough to believe this is proof Martin's even alive, much less that he would want Jon fussing over his discarded heart like it's a baby bird that needs cosseting. Still, he isn't imagining how its pulse is less thready when he holds it in his hands. How the chill slowly leaches from it, the flesh warming against his own. Jon works with its beat beneath his palm, and as he records his notes, he could almost imagine he’s talking things through with Martin. They never did that, not really, but Jon thinks he would have liked to.
It doesn’t change anything. He’s still starving all the time, the hunger endless and biting. But it gives him something to think about, other than how desperately he wants to feed. Something to care for, foolish as that might sound. Martin wouldn’t want you to hurt anyone, he thinks, digging his fingers into his thigh when the hunger gets bad. He ignores Elias’ veiled comments about how he needs to take care of himself. Martin wouldn’t want him to hurt anyone.
At night he lies on his cot in the storage room with the heart held carefully against his chest, listening to its quiet rhythm in the darkness. Its pulse matches to his own, stronger each day. It feels warm and alive against him, and Jon can almost imagine Martin feels it too, wherever he might be.
*
There is a sensation in his chest, where the scar bisects his sternum. Something wrong. His hand presses hard to his rib cage as he tries to identify the feeling.
It’s warmth, he realizes. He’s been cold for so long that he’d forgotten it. It’s the feeling of walking indoors after you’ve been out in the snow, pins and needles crawling down your limbs, making you hiss and stamp your feet. It’s the feeling of the thaw, of blood flowing and nerves sparking to life.
He folds to the ground while the hollow place behind his ribs warms and bleeds, and it hurts like dying.
*
There is someone in Elias’ office.
Jon doesn’t know why he Knows this, but he does, so he goes upstairs. He pushes the door open without knocking. The man standing over Elias’ desk, hands braced on the wood, turns to look at him. He is gray haired, with startling blue eyes, and from the cold blankness of him Jon knows this is Peter Lukas.
“Well,” Peter says, “This is a surprise. You might have warned me we were expecting company, Elias.”
“I suppose I might have,” says Elias. He looks unperturbed, pen still in hand. Peter Lukas stands to his full height, scrutinizing Jon coolly.
“So, what can I do for you, Archivist?”
“Where. Is. Martin.” Jon snarls the words, letting the hunger he’s been holding behind his teeth for weeks flow out of him like venom. He’s never loathed anyone as much as he does the man standing in front of him. Jon wants to hurt Peter Lukas.
Lukas gasps as the compulsion hits him, recoils as if he’s been hit. Then he growls from between clenched teeth:
“He's in the Extinction.”
“How do I get him back?”
“You can’t,” Lukas spits. “He severed every bond to this world so he could pull the Extinction’s emergence into the Lonely. He can’t leave, and even I can’t reach him. He’s cut off.”
The dead world, Jon thinks. A dead world that now will never be born. Absorbed into The One Alone, its power and its fear co-opted by the Lonely. Jon understands what Elias meant, about the Lukas family being more dangerous now, but he doesn't care about that.
“Now, Jon,” Elias tuts, “Is that any way to treat a guest?” He sounds rather more amused than annoyed. Jon turns on him.
“You knew,” he accuses. Elias inclines his head.
“As I’ve told you many times, Jon, no easy answers. You have to learn these things on your own.”
Peter Lukas leans heavily against Elias’ desk, breathing hard. His expression is one of cold anger.
“I think that's us done for today, Elias,” he says. “You’ll be hearing from us.”
He fades from view so rapidly you could doubt that he was ever there. Elias sighs.
“I do wish you wouldn’t antagonize our donors, Jon.”
Jon swallows the tart response that comes to his lips, and says instead:
“You didn’t tell him.”
“I didn’t, did I?” Elias muses, tapping his pen against his chin. “And why would I? Peter does seem very impressed with his own cleverness these days. I’m sure he doesn’t need me to tell him these things.”
“Is it enough?” Jon knows better than to ask, really he does, but he can’t help hoping. Elias looks at him, and his expression gives nothing away.
“I’m sure I couldn’t say,” he says. “Frankly, Jon, what you do with Martin Blackwood’s heart is entirely up to you.”
*
The warmth keeps spreading, coiling painfully out from his rib cage and down his limbs. If he dies here, nobody will know. Except maybe Peter, and he hardly counts.
Jon won’t know, won’t know anything past the final tape he left behind. It was so important, he remembers, to leave those tapes. He knows why, of course, but when he tries to think about it, the ache grows so sharp he can’t breathe.
He is alone, and if he dies of this, nobody will know. He thinks he might be afraid.
*
Jon dreams of the dead world. Walks through the razed and decaying remains of the city to find Martin. There are spider webs in the windows and lines of poetry scrawled on the walls in charcoal. Martin’s brow is furrowed, his mouth curled down at the corners. The scar on his chest is livid and red.
(He holds Martin’s heart against his own, feels its beat sure and steady through his rib cage. It is so warm in his hands; warm as blood, as tears, as Martin’s smile in his memory.)
Jon dreams of the dead world. Finds Martin slumped on the floor, sobbing, his hand clasped against his chest. The scar on his sternum is open, raw and bloody. Jon’s heart aches at the sight of him, and a fresh gout of blood pours from Martin's wound.
(He draws Martin’s heart to press warm against his cheek. Its rhythm is fierce and determined in his ear, curling up his backbone, twisting through his veins. It is not the sound of surrender.)
Jon goes down into the tunnels, with the map Elias gave him and Martin’s heart tucked beneath his shirt, so near to his own. Spider threads wind around his fingertips as he goes and he lets them, allows them to tug him gently onward. He’s already going where they want to take him.
He finds the chamber, footprints undisturbed in the dust, the air thick with expectation. Jon Knows what he’s going to do, like a premonition, like an instinct he never knew he had. This place is a cynosure of fear, a lens through which those strange and terrible places are brought into focus, and Beholding is the hideous wavelength of their illumination.
Smirke intended it to trap the fears. Through Martin, Peter Lukas used it to fold two fears together.
Jon will use its gaze to tear open fear itself. He will rend it apart, reach into the cold, dead heart of the Lonely, and he will have Martin back.
All around the walls, stone cartouches slide open, revealing their organic interiors, wet and rolling. In an instant, the chamber is All Eyes. Jon stands in juncture of their infinite, horrifying gaze, sees and is seen, over and again.
He lifts Martin’s heart, and through a multitude of eyes he sees the net of thin, shining threads that twine around it, sees how they stretch out towards his own chest, a delicate and inexorable tether. It’s never an accident, he remembers.
Jon presses his lips to Martin’s heart, and its rhythm explodes in a joyful staccato, like a bird taking flight. Jon smiles, and thinks about nothing else but Martin, Martin, Martin.
“I love you,” he whispers. “Please come home.”
*
The scar has become a wound that does not heal. It bleeds and bleeds and doesn’t stop, and he thinks this might be the end. He is afraid, and so lonely.
He saved the world, or maybe he didn’t, but in any case he isn’t going home. It’s fine. He doesn’t have his heart, but still he can feel it, beating grief and sorrow and desperate longing. At least he’ll die with his own feelings in his chest, bright and fluttering as bird wings.
He closes his eyes.
“I love you,” he hears, and the heart he no longer has beats fiercely behind his ribs. “Please come home.”
He opens his eyes, and sees a thousand staring back at him, dark and all-encompassing, so familiar he could cry.
Martin feels a tugging in his chest, behind his sternum, warm and aching and insistent.
“I love you,” he replies, and follows his heart.
*
“..on. Jon!”
He opens his eyes and is momentarily bewildered at the fact that he is only looking through two of them. He blinks, and Martin’s face comes into focus, pale and worried.
“Martin…” Jon breathes. His hands grope for Martin’s shoulders, and there they are under his palms, solid and real and here. Jon gives a choked laugh that’s more than half a sob, and Martin makes a very similar sound, and then he’s falling forward into Jon’s arms. They sprawl on the floor, laughing and crying in each other’s arms, holding each other so tightly it’s a wonder either of them can breathe.
“You’re here,” Jon says, and: “You’re here,” again, because he still can’t quite believe it. Martin is cold in his arms, chilled to the bone, and, Jon realizes, his shirt is soaked with blood. Jon pushes away from him and sits up, his hands going to the front of Martin’s shirt.
“You’re bleeding,” he says urgently, and Martin scrambles up in alarm. Pulls his collar down anxiously to show a pale, silver scar bisecting his sternum. He pats disbelievingly at his chest, his hands trembling.
“I was - I thought I was going to die,” he says. “I don’t - ”
Jon suddenly becomes aware of a sound he cannot hear, a rhythm no longer winding up his spinal column and pulsing through his blood. He glances around the chamber frantically, but it is empty other than the two of them. He looks at Martin, wondering.
“Just a second,” he says, “Let me just - ” before he gives up on explanation and ducks to press his cheek against Martin’s chest.
“What - ” Martin starts to say, but Jon ignores him, because there it is, that strong, beloved rhythm, echoing through Martin’s rib cage.
"Oh," Martin says, and his hand cups around the back of Jon's skull, strokes carefully over his hair. Jon pushes closer against him for a moment, closing his eyes, basking in the feeling of Martin, here with him.
For an instant, when he pulls away, he fancies he sees those threads still, thin and shining like steel, stretching between Martin’s heart and his own. It’s never an accident, and he doesn’t know what this is, or why, but he isn't not going to question it just now.
The chamber is still and silent again, the cartouches closed around their baleful secrets, the air hissing with fading power. Martin is shivering, and Jon thinks distantly that it’s a good thing. A human thing. He gets to his feet, helping Martin up with him. Hauls Martin’s arm around his shoulder, not sure if he’s trying to support him or offer warmth. In either case Martin draws him closer, pulling Jon back in against his chest, and Jon likes the way that feels.
“Let's get out of here,” he suggests.
“We, uh, we probably need to talk about a lot,” Martin says, hesitantly.
“We probably do,” says Jon, and they do. They need to talk about Jon making himself a monster, and Martin making himself a sacrifice, and what each of them said and heard, across that gulf of fear and longing. But all of that is for later.
For now, they’re together, and both their hearts are beating, and that’s more than enough.