Chapter Text
“You gonna be alright while I’m out?” Martin asks absentmindedly as he shrugs on a woolen cardigan and slings a purse over his shoulder.
Jon takes no notice of the question, staring out the window with a blanket over his shoulder and a cold mug in his hands. His eyes are wide, and Martin suspects he hasn’t been blinking, but he isn’t sure he wants to know if that’s true or not.
He sighs in a mix of defeat and sympathy and walks cautiously over to the couch, “Jon? Hey, are you-?” As he carefully brushes Jon’s arm, his head snaps from the window to meet Martin’s kind eyes. Martin starts back in shock for a moment before Jon blinks.
“Sorry, I- what is it, Martin?”
Martin swallows hard, but regains his composure. “I’m going into town, I-I was wondering if you’ll be alright while I’m gone?”
A smile flashes across Jon’s face, “Yes… I’ll be fine.” He tries to resurrect the smile, but it comes back a bit wrong, not meeting his heavy eyes.
“Right. Well, don’t go all… creepy on me.”
“Of course.”
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Jon hasn’t felt right since… Lukas. Or maybe that’s not quite true, he’s felt more capable, more focused, but that horrid hunger that claws and begs from the back of his mind hasn’t let him be. He knows he needs to learn something, experience something his patron had not before, or else… Well, he doesn’t know what would happen if he fasted too long, but he knows it would be bad.
Maybe it wouldn’t be all that bad - a little fatigue here or there, some withdrawal, but maybe it would all just go away. It's certainly possible for the Eye to be simply planting these feelings in his mind. But no, at the same time Jon knows that wouldn’t make sense. Manipulation is the Web, this suspicion that was given to him must be the horrible truth.
As he sits and stares after Martin’s hurried stride down the path, these are the thoughts that occupy what of his mind he has left to think with. He’s seen how Martin looks at him at times, fears his hunger. How could he not know? Knowing is all he seems to be good at these days.
Frustratingly, he doesn’t know hardly anything about his own condition, just that it scares Martin and killed an avatar of the Lonely. The kind of power he finds himself possessing is intoxicating and terrifying, but he yet doesn’t know what its like to have that power affect you.
As soon as this thought rises in his mind, he jolts, stares back into the cottage. His hunger rears up and bares its teeth, consuming all thoughts other than that perverse need for knowledge, which mingles with the remnants of his own fear.
Without even thinking, he begins to stand, letting the blanket slouch off his limp shoulders as the cold tea spills onto the floor. He walks in a daze to door to the bathroom before clutching the doorframe.
He grunts as he resists his hunger, trying to blink away whatever power was being held over him. A deep nausea builds in the pit of his stomach and he lurches to the sink, breathing heavily and trying his best to keep his eyes closed.
Jon stands in front of the bathroom mirror, carefully steadying his breath. He turns his face away from the tarnished silver and down to the sink, the sides of which he clutches with white knuckles. That horrible, gnawing hunger eats away at his sanity, consuming his thoughts with the want of fear.
I can’t , he shakes his head suddenly, trying to banish these intrusive thoughts.
Jon remembers what Martin had recommended whenever he had been hungry before: just breathe and focus on who you are. But this was so much worse, because he knew he could lap up the terror that was readily waiting for him in his own mind.
No, he can’t even consider that. Just breathe.
Finally, he feels somewhat himself again and looks hesitantly up into the mirror, hoping the hunger has passed. He instantly realizes his mistake as he looks into his own gaunt eyes, stained a piercing green by the Beholding’s influence. His scars only make him look worse - war-torn and… terrifying.
As Jon looks at his own eyes in the mirror, he is afraid. And that begins to make the hunger withdraw.
He cocks his head as he realizes this, and the monster in his reflection does the same. If he can feed off of his own fear… But what is there to be afraid of in the middle of cow-country in Scotland? He can’t exactly seek out anyone else or risk taking a victim or getting himself killed, but he needs to feed. Somehow.
As he focuses, contemplates his situation by staring into the ceramic basin between his hands, the air takes on a greenish cast. He furrows his brow and looks around, again meeting what he must assume are his own eyes. They’re narrowed to inhuman pinpricks, and their shining color swirls through the dust particles in the air. Again, Jon is terrified and immediately intrigued by his own terror. He realizes that he’s never seen himself as the Archivist, only the reflection of the fear in his victims. A new experience for him, a firsthand fear, could tide him over until Martin can acquire some statements.
The Archivist grins.
He feels the smile spread across his own face. His eyes widen and he can see that the outside edges of his eyes are also tinged with green. No, that’s not quite it, it’s more like-
His breath catches in his throat and his heart pounds. His own two eyes begin to fill with other sets of green irises and narrowed pupils. They encroach on the limited space of the whites and stare back at him with calculating intensity.
He grunts in pain, tries to pull his eyelids closed, but that gnawing at the back of his mind has already tasted his fear. His head aches like someone pressing their hands through Jon’s skull and groping into his own mind. He wonders if this is what others feel when he looks at them, and tears begin to spill over his pockmarked cheeks.
He begs silently for it to stop, but at the same time is fascinated by his own monstrosity. His plea must’ve been enough to elicit some reaction, as he feels the pressure on his skull lessen, and he lets out a sob of relief.
He blinks away the additional irises, and notices an odd sensation beneath his skin. Its like running your tongue along the inside of your cheek, but beneath the skin of his whole face and spreading down his neck. He looks back up to the mirror, but can’t see anything amiss aside from his creased brow. All he sees is his own tired face, green eyes still too-bright, but nothing to worry particularly about.
Then, they begin to open.
A scar on his forehead from Prentiss’s attack all those years ago splits, and Jon half expects a silver worm to crawl out, but instead a green eye breaks through the skin, staring back through the mirror at him. He doesn’t hear himself scream, but can see his mouth open and his hunger slightly satiated.
The other scars across his face each split open in turn, a new eye swiveling to face themselves in the mirror. Then comes the pink gash across his neck from Daisy’s attack, then he feels the horrible tingling spread through his whole body. He can’t tear his many eyes away from the mirror, trapped in his horrific vanity, but he knows the scar from Jude’s handshake has split into dozens of pairs of eyelids.
As each eye opens, he relives the pain and terror each scar commemorates, the events flashing through his mind on a horrible loop. The hunger, the Archivist, consumes Jon’s fear and he feels as though his entire body is filled to the brim with staring, wanting eyes. They peer from the slots of two missing ribs, through his throat, replacing his stomach. He retches, but nothing comes up.
He’s trapped in his own fears before he realizes some of his fears he felt were no longer his own. He saw himself in countless nightmares, covered in hundreds of eyes that all stared and catalogued and ate . He felt their secrets being pulled from the most vulnerable parts of their minds as his own, and listened again to every question he’d ever asked.
He sees himself in the Lonely from above, felt his heart pound as this creature of the eye tried to pull something out of his mind. The feeling of being watched intensifies to the point of suffocation and he (no, not him, not Jon ) falls to the gray sand. The Archivist looks up at him and stares, saying nothing from his place across from the mirror. The creature of the Lonely stares back with an expression of the purest fear and - worry?
Jon realizes faintly that he’s no longer looking through Lukas’s eyes and his perception snaps back to the perspective of the hundreds of eyes that pepper his body, staring at Martin.
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Martin bought plenty of groceries while in town, trying to get something nutritious doesn't need much preparation. He had to leave Jon alone so often, and he always claimed to have eaten, but Martin held his suspicions.
He sighs as he lugs the couple of full tote bags (of mostly granola bars) back up the path. What was he going to do with Jon? He hadn’t been the same since their encounter in the Lonely, but he wasn’t sure why. He probably just needed a statement, which Basira was trying her best with, but one ex-policewoman could only do so much.
In the meantime, he just has to make sure Jon stays safe.
He sets down the bags on the front stoop and fishes around his pockets for his keys. Halfway down the set of 4 heavy duty locks, he feels something off. Hand poised over the doorknob, he stops, assesses the feeling. It's the sense of… loneliness, which he’s used to being able to feel, but tinged with so much more pure terror that he nearly falls over once he focuses on it.
Something is very wrong.
Paling, he creaks the door open and steps over the threshold. He hears barely audible panting from the direction of the bathroom, and knows immediately that a.) Jon found a victim, or b.) something else had found him.
“Jon- Jon!” Martin rushes to the bathroom, and pushes through the door.
He doesn’t see Jon.
He just sees eyes.
The thing in front of him might wear Jon’s clothes and Jon’s hair might hang messily over its face, but it is certainly not Jon. It’s covered in eyes head to toe, eyes that all swivel to look at him as their bearer turns slowly to face him. Martin falls back instinctively, immediately repulsed by its appearance, but a moment later is trapped in place by its gaze.
It isn’t looking at him, exactly, but looking through his mind, exploring every crevice of his life with its searching presence. He can’t move, can’t think, can only stare back as it finds what it's looking for.
Every fear Martin had ever felt was drawn up into the forefront of his mind. They’re opened like old wounds, and his suffering is extracted from each like nectar by the thing’s eyes. When he was scratched by a neighbor’s cat when he was young, when his first goldfish died, when his father left and he was so sure his mother would follow, they all flitted through his mind one by one.
He feels tears fall to the floor and he finally has the capability to push his palms over his eyes. Begging has no effect, and he suspects for a moment this thing has no ears. Only eyes. All eyes.
The memories keep coming, even the little things being revelled in by the creature. They slowly creep closer, closer to when he was hired at the Institute. Martin feels as though his mind is being torn to pieces, when it stops.
Abruptly, without warning, the stream of dread pauses on a single memory.
He’s in the Institute on his first day. He’s preoccupied trying to decipher the academic jargon on a file he’s supposed to be delivering to the library. He runs into a much shorter man who falls against a wall. Martin apologizes, and the man glares at him. Martin swallows back his fear of being discovered and apologizes again. The man doesn’t say a word, pushing past Martin. As he walks away in this embarrassing memory, Martin snaps back to reality, where that same man stands in front of him
Jon is panting, all but doubled over as he covers his face with his good hand. His scars all look raw and newly painful, but the color is slowly returning to his sunken cheeks.
Martin’s vision fades to black.