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On an empty street in a small village outside of London, with rain drizzling lightly like it’s a normal spring afternoon, Martin Blackwood is dying.
Jon clutches his hand tighter. Shuts as many of his eyes as he can manage, just so he doesn’t have to see it- but he does. Of course he does.
“C’mon, Jon. It’s alright. You’re fine.”
“Martin, I-”
“It’s fine , Jon.”
“I’m scared.”
“Don’t be.” Through cracked and ruined lips, the words spill out like flower petals. “I love you.”
“I love you-”
But his eyes have slipped closed. A final mercy.
Jon wishes-
He wishes no eyes could see Martin like this. No eyes to spy and defile this final moment like they have every sliver of Martin’s life before.
And he knows how that must be done.
Holding the hand of his husband, Jonathan Sims dies.
And then
And then?
He doesn’t remember anything between that moment and the present.
The “present”, in quotation marks, because time seems to have stopped meaning things.
He’s on an operating table. He’s shirtless. And there’s a hole in his chest.
He blacks out again.
He wakes up.
There’s no longer a hole in his chest.
There are, however, people standing around him.
“Martin,” He whispers. “I need to get back- to bury him-”
“Oh, no, that won’t be a problem. You’ve been dead for quite a few centuries, by my estimate.”
The whole story, when relayed to him by two apparent doctors, two women- does one of them have wings?- is this:
It’s been hundreds of years since he’d died. He had somehow not deigned to decompose in that time, which leads him to the fact that...
He’s been revived, for “fun and profit”, had his heart replaced with a mechanical replica, had an approximate bucketful of eyes removed from his general person- he’s wearily shown a large bucket and decides to not investigate whether it’s a joke- and is now on a spaceship. Now, he’s functionally ageless and immortal, though he doesn’t bother to correct the assumption he wasn’t before . The spaceship is named the Aurora and apparently houses a variable number of equally immortal vagabonds.
Jon waves for the exposition to stop.
“Why me?” He asks, voice scratchy.
“You looked like you had nothing left to lose. Also, you were quite interestingly deceased.” The one-eyed explains offhandedly, gesturing in a vague way. “Now, are you finished, or do you have any other questions?
“Kill me.” Jon croaks.
The other doctor- not actually a doctor, a scientist- the other woman, anyway, looks at the first and shrugs.
“Well, since you asked…”
And shoots him in the head.
When he wakes up again- he knew he would, but it feels different, not the same sensation as it had been after the Unknowing or the many times something had killed him in the apocalypse- there’s nobody in the room.
Jon clutches at his chest as if his heart would cause him physical pain, and yet there’s nothing there but a steady, inorganic whirr.
He feels hollowed out. Burning up. Filled with tar or nitroglycerine or just blood, pumping double time. No Beholding in his head, leaving him dizzy and unable to concentrate. No M-
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.
He stumbles off the operating table and looks around.
The “spaceship” is metal all over, with barely a slight variation between the ceiling, walls and floors. No windows, not in this room. God, he doesn’t know why he’s returning to the old scepticism routine- stranger things have happened.
Casting a glance around for his shirt, he exits the room and follows the curve of the hallway to the next door he sees.
CAFETERIA, the sign on the door proclaims. A good a place to start as any.
He opens the door to find a kitchen, strangely stocked but seemingly usable. Behind it, a dining area with a long table.
Around the table sit five people and Nikola Orsinov.
He stares.
Nikola waves. The others keep eating breakfast.
Really, it's so unfailingly tragic it almost ends up being funny. Here’s an enemy he'd feared and almost died to because he believed it would destroy the world, while he himself had actually done so. People had died in the Unknowing, but so had they at his hands.
So, so many had died because of him.
The specifics of it feel like they're behind a gauzy veil. Someone had died. But maybe as long as he dances around the thought, he might be able to keep it from hitting him.
So what had he been getting at?
Oh. Right. He isn’t in any position to care about Nikola Orsinov being on the same spaceship as him, no matter how it happened. Considering both of them were supposed to be equally dead, and instead equally weren’t.
But really, what the hell?
“So.” Begins a woman on the far side of the table, with such a thick Russian accent it can be heard even through that one single syllable. “Discounting the mannequin, I assume you are the other new crew member.”
“I- ah- I suppose so.”
She nods once, decisively.
“I am Nastya Rasputina. Engineer. This is my ship.”
“In every sense, believe me.” Someone buts in from the closer end. “But forget that. Ashes O’Reilly, quartermaster, more importantly pyro extraordinaire.” They tip their hat slightly.
The others also introduce themselves, one by one, with someone vaguely mentioning the 'mannequin' is new. He doesn’t offer any elaboration. None of them seem to know quite what to make of him, side-eyeing his gaunt frame and comparative lack of anachronistic formal wear and weird cog decals.
And it comes time for liftoff. Nobody had asked him if he wanted to stay on earth, but it may have been for the best. He doesn’t know what his answer would have been.
He's assured by Dr. Carmilla- she seems to be the leader- that Jonah's apocalypse had no effect on the universe at large, but the words don't mean much. What does he have left to care about?
So they fly away.
In the vast vacuum of space, with the cabin fever setting in and a ship full of people that can’t die, things like conventional morality seem to shrivel a little.
And, well, without a heart, without the ever-present buzz of tape recorder static that was, by the end, almost synonymous to his life, it's easy to put those things aside. Without anything to lose, without anything to love, is it any wonder he easily finds himself revelling in the rhythm of bloodshed?
It doesn't matter, after all. None of it matters.
Their erratic flight plan takes them all over the universe. Jon throws himself into the distraction with as much energy as he can muster, plundering the depths of all the world has to offer, somehow ending up knowing how to use a gun- it helps that there’s no chance of killing himself through user error- and play the harmonica- ditto.
They somehow manage to lose Nikola on Earth. Not that he complains, definitely not. Then they go some other places, nothing notable, they return for a bit before a series of events that culminates in the moon exploding.
Then, by the time he's done being a fine gory mist and started being a person again, they've got two new crew members. One's a guy called Tim, which sounds familiar, but even if he managed to remember where it sounded familiar from, the new Tim looks and sounds nothing like the theoretical past Tim.
The Tim that's barely half a memory, stuck to his mind like an extremely stubborn barnacle.
Hm. He'll think about that later.
The other's a Toy Soldier that looks familiar-unfamiliar-wrong, but at that point he's tired of familiarity and ignores the phantom scent of Extra Hydrating Aloe Vera Cucumber Moisturiser without a thought.
So when the introductions are all done, he goes off to find some quiet, empty spot in the Aurora to think.
Tim. Who had he been?
He'd been
Anyway, statement of Timothy Stoker, archival assistant at the Magnus Institute, regarding the infestation by the entity formerly known as Jane Prentiss.
So why don’t you ‘Archivist’ me, then? Just pull it straight out.
I’m going to destroy the Circus that took my brother, and I can’t trust them to help.
You can’t even save him!
But I can hurt you.
And then Tim had.
Sasha had.
Martin had die-
He doesn't want to think about it. HE DOESN'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT IT.
He's crying.
There are footsteps behind him, and he whirls around, reaching for the gun that had become a fixture of his outfit. The bullet goes through a display on the wall, but fails to hit whoever is scurrying away. Nastya, probably. She was always fucking doing something in the bowels of the ship.
The interruption ended, he slumps back down. Memory comes like rain falling onto dry ground. He doesn't want to remember, not the smell of tea on his desk every day, not the awkward smiles and seeing him in the Archives after hours because of the worms and Jon had decided to stay in late and not Scotland, and cow-spotting and grocery shopping together and just sitting on the grass and
He doesn’t want to think about it.
So he just doesn’t.
What use does he have for love anymore? For these stories of loss and fear and eyes staring from every direction? His heart no longer feels it- not pain nor love.
So it doesn’t matter if he remembers. No good story can be made of it.
Time passes. In which direction, who can tell? Crew members pop in and out from time to time, chasing their own stories. Ashes starts calling him Jonny at some point and it manages to stick.
Oh, and at some point their “creator” falls out of an airlock. Not particularly notable, but fun for everyone involved. Which Jonny certainly wasn't, no matter what one might have heard.
It’s a strange kind of cycle in and of itself. Space is so unceasingly large, and so filled to the brim with human suffering. They travel around, make a few songs of it, make a few bloodbaths…
But it’s always a supporting role. They watch. They wait.
Which brings him to a moment that seems to stretch on forever, staring down their ship’s newest crew member.
She’s an Archivist. An Archivist and an Archive, one and the same. He stares at the woman in front of them, feeling somewhat like a deer in headlights- though she certainly isn’t the headlights in the metaphor. She’s talking, excited, and he...
“Actually, I just decided, I don’t care.” He turns around and walks away. And shoots a single bullet behind him- without looking- just to punctuate the action. It ricochets, presumably off the woman’s Mechanism, and catches Tim somewhere fleshy. He turns a corner and walks away to the sound of profanity and confused yelling.
The next time they land somewhere, it’s Earth. The sky shifts and distorts above and beside them as they enter the atmosphere, proper celestial bodies replaced by giant non-euclidean staring eyes.
“Looks like even more of a shithole than last time.” He remarks to the Drumbot, who shrugs.
“The moon’s back, though.”
They land outside what may have been a village, once, before various disasters, tragedies, and/or horrors befell it.
It’s something undefinable that leads him down empty roads towards the town centre. And then further down, not knowing what he’s looking for until he sees it. Gunpowder Tim follows close behind, stopping to his left as Jonny does the same.
There’s a man. And a dead body.
Huh. Was that all? He’d been expecting something more.... interesting. He turns to break into the nearest house, just in case there’s some indication of what befell the residents inside, but Tim just squints closer at the two figures.
“Hey, Jonny.”
“Mm?”
“Is that you over there?”
“What? No. How could it be?”
“Why not? We don't go through time linearl-"
“No, I meant he’s got scars all over him. And he’s wearing a sweater vest .”
“Oh. Right, fair point.”
Still, he looks closer at the man.
A burnt hand, but he’d first lost his… when was it again? Not long after he’d been, heh, disheartened. Puncture marks running across his face, but faces really didn’t last long staring down a rocket launcher, and all the other scars… well, he’d been just a head for a while, that time with the moon, hadn’t he?
“Fuck, I think that actually might be me.”
“What, really? Huh.”
His past-present-past self screams into the sky, an agonised sound like the shattering of glass and the tearing of tendons. Eyes stream out from his own instead of tears, fluttering around like moths drawn to tragedy instead of light.
The two Mechanisms watch for just another moment.
“Looks like a real wanker.”
“I know, right?”