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Sasha is drifting, serene with exhaustion, when she hears a noise that isn’t slow, soft snoring. Her eyes flick open so fast they hurt.
It takes a moment for her to orient herself; curled around a pillow hallway down a bed she doesn’t recognise. But of course she doesn’t, they’ve all ended up in Tim’s flat, since he’s almost the closest and had complained about wanting to be in his own bed.
None of them had questioned that they were all going together, not even Jon. They hadn’t even discussed it.
Tim and Martin are currently sprawled across the bed, Martin flat on his back with Tim curled into his side, head cushioned on his shoulder. Martin is snoring quietly, and Tim has an adorable scrunch to his nose. She’s about to dig her phone out her pocket and take a picture when she realises what’s missing.
Jon had been perched at the other corner of the bed, fiddling with his phone. He’d claimed he was too keyed up to sleep just yet, but had promised Martin he wouldn’t vanish, that he’d be there in the morning. Only he’s not here now.
Sasha slides carefully off the bed, taking a moment to snap that picture. She’s not scared – with everything that’s happened today, she’s pretty sure scared isn’t going to be an emotion she feels for at least a week. Just a little wary.
Call her paranoid, but she wants Jon where she can see him.
He’s not too hard to find. Tim’s flat has a little balcony, mostly filled with laundry and an old, probably broken bike. There’s enough space for Jon to lean on the railing, smoking and looking out to the distant, glimmering lights of the City. Sasha just stands there for a moment, watching him. Thinking how, even with the haggard stoop to his shoulders, and his quick-tapping fingers on the rail, he looks oddly beautiful, in that way he does in quiet moments. A dark silhouette in front of a sea of yellow stars.
Jon jumps when she opens the balcony door, spinning round. The cigarette end slices through the air, and her tired, glasses-less eyes trace its path in a gleaming line of light. “Oh,” he breathes when he registers it’s her, “hi, Sasha. Are you- Did I wake you up?”
The night air nips at her bare arms as she steps out, but it’s not unpleasant. It makes her feel real, grounded in her body, as she slips into the space at the railing beside him. “Yeah, but I don’t mind.” She stares at his cigarette, considering – on the one hand, she’s been trying to stop smoking, mostly successfully, since she transferred out of Artefact Storage. On the other, she almost died at least four times today.
“Can I have one?” she asks.
He blinks at her for a second; obviously, wherever Jon’s mind is right now, it’s not fully present here. Then he shakes himself and digs out the packet, fishing one out for her and passing it over. “I thought you were quitting?”
She raises an eyebrow at him. “I thought you’d quit.” He smiles, a sharp little twist of his mouth.
When he offers his lighter, probably intending her to take it from him, she leans in instead. After a second he raises his lighter to her lips, carefully cupping the flame for her. The first drag is as gross and as comforting as she remembers, and she sighs on the exhale. The wind catches the smoke and makes it twist and spiral, and she has to force her eyes away from it, uncomfortably fascinated.
Jon turns back to stare out at the city, and Sasha joins him. The bright firefly glow marking civilisation, the millions of people she shares this city with, normally comforts her, makes her feel like a part of something greater than herself. Not right now, though. She feels so distant from them, so alone.
Well, she thinks, looking over at Jon’s tapping fingers, almost alone. If she has to be stuck in this nightmare, at least she’s got someone here with her.
“What happened, Sasha?” he asks, finally. She exhales smoke and toxins into the breeze.
She’s been expecting that question, is honestly surprised he didn’t ask earlier. She knows Jon well enough by now to know he wanted to. But Tim had point-blank refused to give a statement until he’d slept, and Jon had finally caved to the various pressures of his assistants, his boss and the paramedics and CDC people fluttering around them like moths to a group of injured and exhausted light-bulbs. Sasha doesn’t doubt they’ll all be corralled into one tomorrow, but she supposes from Jon’s perspective, while he’s got her here…
She holds up a hand, passes him her cigarette for safekeeping, then slips inside. Her favourite fluffy coat is draped over the back of a chair, and she fishes the tape recorder out from an inside pocket, bringing coat and tape back out onto the balcony. When she’s reclaimed her cigarette from Jon, she passes him the recorder, and looks away as he presses the play button.
She tunes out the voices – her and Elias, then just her, narrating her first steps into Artefact Storage. How much she hates the place.
The static starts up as soon as she starts talking about the table, soft buzzing in the background. It gets louder and louder, and she can hardly hear her gasp from the moment she turned to see Michael behind her.
Jon’s head snaps up when it speaks, and she tries to smile at him, but she’s too tired to do it properly. “That’s Michael,” she tells him.
He blinks, and pauses the recording to ask, “Michael, from your statement? With the, the hands, that Michael?”
“Do we know a creepier Michael?”
“True,” he sighs, shaking his head. “What the hell was it doing down there?”
A breeze blows past them, and the short ends of the curls Michael sliced off her head get in her eyes. “Saving my life, apparently,” she says, and indicates for him to play the tape again.
Jon listens avidly, face bent towards the tape, eyes fixed on her. He visibly flinches when he hears her whisper about something else being there, and makes an abortive little motion, like he wants to reach out to her.
When she hears the slapping impact Michael made when it cannoned into the other monster, she reaches over and presses pause on the recorder. “Trust me,” she tells him, “you don’t want to hear the sounds they make after that.”
He looks like he wants to argue, but when Sasha takes the recorder from his hands, he doesn’t resist. To make up for it, she lets him dig out the spare tape he has in his pocket for some reason and tells him what happened instead.
It’s hard. There’s so much she doesn’t know how to describe, especially not with Jon’s bright, intense eyes on her. Still, she manages, between drags of her cigarette, keeping her eyes on the lights. It’s strange though, like the first statement she gave Jon in that little details she didn’t mean to mention just slip right out.
She hadn’t meant to talk about the way Michael cupped her face, the feeling of its strange too-soft skin, the heaviness of its hands and all the sharp points that she couldn’t see, but could feel clear as anything. She definitely hadn’t intended to tell him that she’d watched the monster steal her hair and made a damn friendship bracelet out of it without saying a word. But Jon watches her through all of it, no expression on his face, no judgement. Just listening. You wouldn’t expect a guy like Jon to be a good listener, but he really is.
When she finishes, her cigarette is burned down to the filter. She grinds it out on the railing, considers taking it inside and binning it, but flicks it off the balcony instead. Jon raises an eyebrow and she knocks him with her shoulder. Whatever. Four near death experiences, one monster dead by mostly her hand – the universe owes her a bit of littering.
Besides, when his burns down, he flicks it off the balcony as well.
They’re quiet for a long time after she finishes talking. Jon doesn’t light another cigarette or offer her another, and she doesn’t ask. They just stand there, breathing side by side. From this close, she can feel the faint warmth of his body – Jon runs cold, almost worryingly so, but there’s enough heat to make her want to be closer to him.
Yeah, that’s definitely the only reason she wants to be closer to him.
Jon clears his throat, eyes fixed deliberately on the view. “I’m glad you survived, Sasha.” Then he pauses, and fumbles on; “I mean, obviously, obviously I’m glad. That’s, well, not entirely what I meant, I-“
She stops him with a hand on his. “It’s okay, Jon, I get what you mean. And I’m glad you survived too.”
Jon stares at their hands on the railings for a moment, as if lost in thought. Then he carefully turns his hand over and curls his fingers around hers. It’s a loose grip, but there’s something wonderful about the contact; Jon has lovely hands, large broad palms and long, oddly graceful fingers.
Abruptly, Sasha wants to hug him, to cradle his head against her shoulder and rest her head on top of his, to hold and be held by another human, by her friend. But Jon’s not one for hugs, really; Sasha never considered herself much of a hugging type, but Jon and her have been working together for a year now, probably friends for about six months, and this is the first time they’ve touched. She gets the feeling that actually initiating something like this is a big deal for him, and she’s not going to push it.
So she holds Jon’s hand in the darkness and the quiet, so tired she can’t feel anything but peaceful. Even if the city lights still seem far too distant for her liking.
Eventually Sasha starts shivering, even through her coat, and as soon as Jon notices he lets go of her hand and chivvies her back inside, making exasperated noises that don’t take much away from how close he’s standing to her. They pick their way through the dark in silence, slipping into Tim’s bedroom to find him and Martin wrapped even further around each other. One of Tim’s legs has made its way over Martin’s, and Martin is hugging Tim like a teddy bear. Sasha wants to take a picture, tries to, but Jon smacks her phone down and hisses something about privacy which she assumes means he’s embarrassed.
They end up collapsing width-ways at the bottom of the bed. Tim had piled up his spare blankets before they went to sleep – and Sasha can see now why he has so many, she’s taken he coat off and the flat is cold. When they lie down, Jon slides one carefully out from behind Tim and draws it over them both, and Sasha grabs the pillow she was hugging before.
It should be awkward really, lying curled up with her boss under the same thick blanket, legs brushing together and faces so close on the single pillow. It’s not. From this close, she can see every detail of Jon’s face, even in the dim light – the bandages and stubble, the bags under his eyes, the flutter of his eyelashes – Jon has the most ridiculous eyelashes, she realises. She’s never noticed them before. It doesn’t even feel weird to study him this closely, because he’s looking right back at her, studying her the same way. Sasha thinks she can feel his gaze on her, like a feather brushing over her forehead, her cheeks, her nose and lips. Cataloguing her whole face, every hair, every micro-expression, just like she’s cataloguing his.
Slowly, so carefully, he reaches out and curls his hand around hers again, drawing it into the space between them. Sasha weaves their fingers together and holds on to him, her friend.
Eventually, her eyes must close. She knows they weren’t watching each other in that quiet, intimate way the whole night. But when she does slip into sleep, she doesn’t notice it. Too busy watching him.
~~~~~
In the morning, the four of them cluster round the sofa like hungover students, munching quietly on Tim’s cereal because nobody can be fucked to even make toast. Martin’s made them tea, but that’s practically an autonomic function for him.
Even though Tim and Martin must have gotten a solid twelve hours, they both still look exhausted. Tim can’t even bring himself to sit on the sofa; he’s plonked on the floor, back leaning against Martin and Sasha’s legs, his head occasionally thunking onto one of their thighs when he can’t be bothered to hold it up anymore. Martin isn’t doing much better, slumped back into the sofa with his head tilted to the side, curls falling into his eyes that he’s given up on brushing away.
Jon is perched on the arm of the sofa, eating his cereal dry because of course he does. He’s bouncing his leg slowly, eating in quick, mechanical motions. He hasn’t said a word to anyone since they woke up, but Sasha’s not too worried. He’ll start talking again soon, if only to badger Tim and Martin about giving a statement. Martin especially – she could tell last night how much hearing about the body that’s probably Gertrude Robinson’s rattled him.
Sasha draws up her legs and curls them under her, picking her way through the bowl. She still feels…off, somehow, like something’s shifted out of place in her head. It reminds her a little of the first few days in Artefact Storage, when the reality of the things she was surrounded with was still sinking in.
The thing is, the part she’d never told anyone, not even Jon’s tape – it wasn’t what she knew that had chased her out of Artefact Storage. It was what she didn’t. So much that was obviously paranormal, obviously wrong and still she doesn’t understand any of it; nor do any of her colleagues, not really, even the ones who act like they do. To work so closely with such awful things and not even understand them…she hadn’t been able to bear it.
Working in the Archives, running round researching statements, putting the pieces together – she likes that. It helps. She feels like she’s gathering knowledge, learning more, even if most of what she’s learning is the various things in your house that can make you hallucinate ghosts and how many ways you can access people’s private information without properly breaking the law. At least, she had felt like that, up until yesterday.
Michael…she doesn’t know the first thing about Michael. What it is, what it wants – it’s saved her life twice now, and put her in serious danger once. She still has the scar from where its fingers cut into her to get that worm out; still wakes up sometimes, remembering clear as day how it had felt to have it reach into her flesh. She suspects more of those dreams are in her future. It terrifies her. And it wants to be her friend. Or something.
And then there’s Jane Prentiss, or what was left of her, and whatever the thing she’d killed had been. That terrible, elongated monster, even more monstrous for how it seemed to have been made along a human body plan – someone’s disgusting fever dream of what a human should look like. Even trying to picture it turns her stomach, and she has to set the rest of her cereal down on Tim’s coffee table.
Martin gives her a worried look, and so she tugs on his arm until he raises it and she can duck underneath. Since the time her cramps left her shaking over the loo at work, she’s known Martin gives great hugs, and even one-armed and eating cereal he doesn’t disappoint. Tim leans his head back against her knees, a quiet but obvious gesture that warms her through.
When she turns to look at him, Jon is watching her. The light pressure of his eyes on her is as nice as it was last night, and somehow just as comforting as Martin’s hug.
Tomorrow, Sasha decides, she can worry about the monsters, and the worms, and all the inexplicable horror she works with and doesn’t understand. Today is officially a day off.
Apparently they’ve all come to the same conclusion, because when Tim scoops up the remote and puts Saturday Kitchen on, even Jon doesn’t make a fuss. He does heckle the celebrity, but to be fair, the guy they’ve got on is incredibly boring. By the time they cut to Rick Stein somewhere in Asia, he and Martin have gotten into a good-natured argument about the best way to do a turkey, even though it was clear from the start that neither of them know the first thing about it.
Tim makes eye contact with her from where his head is resting on her calf, wicked grin on his face, and then says “What about deep-frying it? Hear that’s nice.”
As Jon and Martin unite in spluttering outrage, Sasha presses her face into Martin’s shoulder and laughs and laughs, shaky and almost desperate, that wrong feeling still pressing on her. She feels so alive she could cry.