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“Before you can kill the monster, you have to say its name.” —Terry Pratchett
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He is still, somehow, Elias, someone old and someone new. Jon would have expected him to have a crown or more eyes, an unfaithful shadow that moved distinct from the lines of his body—some acknowledgement of what he is now. But he is just the same man in a tailored suit. Smaller for it in this after of the world they knew, where Jon has seen a thousand horrors worse than Jonah Magnus, this ruined world’s would-be king.
Smaller still for the confession the Archivist has just torn from him. In the moment after Elias finally finishes talking (Tell me what you make of your kingdom, Jon had snarled. Tell me if all this was worth it.), the air rings with static and the hungry whir of a tape recorder. He wipes the trickle of blood from beneath his nose with the same hand he uses to briefly cover his mouth, as though he’s just been slapped, breaking the eye contact they’ve held for long minutes. And he smiles. Even miserable with the sharp sting of humiliation, he smiles a bitter, pleased smile, while Jon sways with exertion.
“Well,” he says, voice cracked and rough with speaking for so long, “I suppose I was overdue.”
Jon hadn’t come here for this. He had come to the Institute in search of Annabelle Cane or whatever information about Hilltop Road he could wrest from the Archives, which are so much paper now that the world has gone wrong. Instead, he gets this: an echoing, empty palace of a building, abandoned by its adherents. A brittle version of the man Jon remembers, sharp-edged and more acid than even before. The feverish light in Elias’s eyes as he holds on to what he has scraped together from the ashes. And threaded through his confession, something else lurking, some bright and reverent thing, a curious and questing warmth that Jon refused to examine but knew all the same.
“You said—in the statement—“
“I said a lot of things, Jon, but it happens that the truth isn’t always fit for inspiring terror in quite the way you’d expect.”
“The truth,” Jon spits.
“The truth,” Elias says, brutally pleasant.
The truth is that it was a hollow victory. This world is not what Elias wanted, and he has nothing left.
Nothing, that is, save his Archivist.
“I may be what I am because of you, but that does not mean I am yours,” Jon bites out, and regrets it when Elias’s eyes flare with twinned irritation and delight at the answer to a sentiment unvoiced.
Jon is drained, dizzy. Jon is flushed and exultant. Jon is wretched with truth and would rather be anywhere else. Neither of them have won this contest. Both of them have lost.
But Elias is still smiling, damn him. “You don’t really believe that, Jon.”
Jon shakes his head, but he doesn’t know what he is refusing. The entire premise, maybe? Belonging to Elias, or the pretty delusion of not belonging to him? There is an awful comfort in the idea of conceding to it, surrendering responsibility for what he’s inflicted on the world in favor of being a tool in someone else’s hands. He can hardly make this worse by admitting that he is curious what he would turn into if he gave in. But that expansive awe that takes hold of him whenever he looks up, a yearning satisfied, despite his horror at what the world has become—that is not his to have after what he’s done, so he forces himself to turn away before the temptation burrows deeper. And when the momentum carries him farther, he follows it toward the door and through.
Jon should have guessed that Elias wouldn’t just let him leave; he makes the hallway outside Elias office, but as he flees down the main stairs, the doubled sound of their footsteps thunders in Jon‘s ears. He catches up as Jon reaches the door—so close to escape, his hand yanking at the knob, a thread of daylight spilling in—and the door slams closed and Elias is at his back, caging him in with his arms.
“You want to know,” he says. It isn’t a question.
“I am through with listening to anything you have to say,” Jon hisses. He shoves back hard with his elbow in emphasis, tugs again at the handle, but Elias doesn’t budge. Indeed, he takes full advantage and winds an arm around Jon’s waist to pull him close, palm curling just below his ribcage as he turns his face into Jon’s hair.
“Let me show you, then.”
For a split second, Jon thinks Elias has either slipped his hand beneath Jon’s shirt to press directly against his skin, or else slid a knife so expertly sharp and gentle through his ribs that the shock arrives belatedly; the sensation is that intimate, that physical, except that it makes them both gasp, not just Jon, so they must both feel it.
Caught between struggling to get free and needing to know—because he is nothing if not true to what Elias made him—Jon shoves back again and something less than physical gives way. He hears Elias’s soft yes as he is forced to blink away fragments of a double vision: his own, familiar, tense, and trapped. And Elias’s.
And Jon sees him. All of him.
In rapid succession, he sees a man’s face screwed up and radiant with laughter—his own fingers knotting someone else’s elegant cravat—gloved hands cupped around a butterfly with half its wing torn away—rain on window panes, the polished floor of a library—books, countless books, and paper and frenetic scribbling—a heavy-handed sketch in the margins of a notebook that is nothing but eyes and the suggestion of brows, the bridge of a nose—blueprints and shadowed tunnels—heavy, grey-green twilight settled over the stone scrollwork of a tomb’s entrance—another man, his face contorted in rage and shouting—the same man, looking wan and pale and miserable, on his knees weeping, with supplicant hands outstretched—
Gertrude Robinson rolling her eyes.
The familiar face is shock enough for Jon to surface briefly from the undertow of Elias’s consciousness, before the flood of memory becomes too much and all he can see is himself: that shy unfolding of his eternally crossed arms at Elias’s patient questions about his latest Leitner research. Demurely bowing his head to hide his flush at an offhand compliment, only for Elias to be abruptly reminded of his own heartbeat even as he files the reaction away for later. Jon’s hands, barely trembling as they offered Elias the first cassette tape. The look on his face as he forgot himself in Albrecht’s letter that first time, My Dearest Jonah. The mulish set of his jaw when he steeled himself to offer his hand for Jude Perry to shake.
Jon, dirt-streaked and incandescent before the coffin. His righteous fury over the faceless remains of Breekon and Hope. Dark-eyed and rapt before a woman crying in a coffee shop. Jon, only and always, even begging for his life, even cowering and fierce and dead.
Jon doesn’t recognize the ragged sound that tears its way out of him, but he understands, now, why the prospect of being near him in the throes of his becoming had been so dangerous. Two centuries of choosing to watch from a distance while others drive themselves to ruin, carefully extricating himself from any trap as fragile as human connection, and the lack of control disgusts him. Love is an intolerable weakness, a strategic failing, a character flaw. What love he has he saves for himself, where it cannot hurt him.
And yet Elias has given himself to it all the same. He savors the cut of the whip across his own back each time Jon chafes and snaps and fights him instead of gentling under his touch. The butterfly flicker of heat and interest is ruthlessly confined to rare moments of indulgence. Nurtured even still into something consuming, ravenous.
It paralyzes Jon, who could do any number of things to get away right now, use compulsion or kick or claw. But his body is full of static, electric and gauzy, and if he tries any of those things he may well come apart entirely, Elias’s hands left to hold nothing but light. Some animal instinct in him resists that and he clings instead, nails digging into the skin beneath his hand, desperate to anchor himself. Distantly, he realizes he is crying.
“I was waiting for you,” Elias is saying. “So many years I spent searching for an answer, and you were the key.”
“You could have been waiting for anyone,” Jon chokes out. “Just my rotten luck, remember?”
“I did say that, didn’t I?” Again, Jon hears the smile in his voice. “A bit of equivocation. I’m afraid it was more than that, after all.” And Jon wishes he didn’t know what he means: that he is bright and stubborn and compassionate, untrusting and abrasive and yet easily led. Most of all, that through line of curiosity sunk like a fish hook in him, his damning need to know.
“I may have chosen you out of anyone, Jon, but I chose well.”
A strange and particular betrayal, to be seen so completely through another person’s eyes that Jon resents how beautiful he is unencumbered by self-loathing and doubt and shame, how fully Elias accepts everything that he is and still sacrificed him on the altar of his own ambitions rather than—but he cannot entertain any notions of partnership that might have been without some monstrous, eager piece of Jon actually mourning the loss.
“I don’t believe you,” Jon says tightly.
“We both know I’m telling the truth, Archivist. Not that you were meant to know it. To be honest, I never intended to let you this close.”
Why not? The question echoes in his mind, why why why, what were you afraid of? Pure, plaintive instinct before Jon can smother it, but they are only separate in body right now, so Elias answers anyway.
“You, Jon,” he says, voice breaking with the needling force of compulsion that drags the words out past his teeth. “I gave you the power to disrupt everything I had worked for, everything I had built. I’d come too far to let that happen.”
Of course it comes down to fear. The answer soothes Jon despite himself, the note of real reluctance in it going down sweet as honey so that he eases a little, temporarily sated. Typical, that Elias can use even his own humiliation as a weapon. That when he finally offers the entire truth, it is a knife to cut them both.
Even still, Jon leans into him, no stranger to such fastidious masochism. He reaches back to find Elias’s cheek, his ear, his neck. It must be Beholding, because some part of him wants to, even if the rest doesn’t want to grip uselessly at the doorknob without pulling. Doesn’t want to be aware of the wild thud of his heart in his chest in counterpoint to Elias’s or the implacable gentleness of the hands coaxing him to turn around.
He squeezes his eyes shut childishly, as though he could keep it from happening if he can’t see. Only he can see, through Elias’s eyes instead of his own. He sees himself, face wet with tears, sharp shadows under his eyes and in the hollows of his cheeks, worm scars pitted across his jaw and inhuman glow to his irises bleeding out through his lashes. Archivist and Archive, lynchpin-king of this world in a way Elias never meant for him to be.
“I’ve a request, before you go,” Elias says, managing somehow to sound utterly casual, as though he were asking a favor of a friend over tea. He has shifted one hand to cup Jon’s elbow, and his thumb smooths over the tender, pocked skin there.
Jon sneers. “What could you possibly want from me that you haven’t already taken?”
“A simple enough thing, I assure you, but I’d rather it were offered freely.”
He can only laugh at that, hard and incredulous, but he says, “Tell me,” and this time watches the jump of Elias’s pupils dilate as the compulsion hits.
“I want to hear you say my name. I haven’t had the pleasure in person.”
“Why,” he grits out again, and Elias sways close with the force of it, so Jon has to put a hand to his chest to keep some distance between them.
This time, Elias tries to hold back his answer. He sets his jaw and lets his eyes flutter briefly closed. Jon feels the tremor run through him and watches his throat work soundlessly before he says, raw with the strain, “You first.”
He doesn’t make it a request, but the hunger on his face betrays him. And Jon knows abruptly that he is starved for acknowledgement of his true name, that he’s forgotten the first face he ever beheld in a mirror and only recognizes that man now in paintings. And, like with a painting, he would leave his signature on his greatest work. Jon could withhold this from him, a prophet denying a blessing to an acolyte. If the revulsion had anywhere to go, he would.
Instead, Jon swallows and wets his lips. Elias’s gaze dips to the movement.
“Jonah.” He gives it the cadence of monster. Of coward. But it makes Elias’s eyes go dark and intent, and he leans in so the line of his body presses Jon back tight against the door. Jon feels his breath skate along his jaw, then the brush of his lips on his neck, the heat of his mouth.
“Again.” His voice all air, soft and nearly beseeching. Jon’s hand clenches in his shirtfront, to warn him off or hold him close he couldn’t say.
“Jonah,” Jon says again, and hates how it comes out as a breathless whisper, like it’s more than just a name. Elias strokes his thumb over the scarred curve of Jon’s arm. And he mouths words against his pulse, the answer to Jon’s compelling question, the shape of them against his skin causing Jon to flinch.
“Don’t,” he snaps, and uses the little leverage he has to turn his head and stop him from speaking.
When their lips meet, Elias makes a small, emphatic sound low in his throat and surges into the kiss, the satisfied huff of his laughter vanishing into the press of their mouths. Of course this would be what he wanted, after everything.
But in this, too, he is honest. Jon notes, with the part of his mind that is still ruled by the Archivist’s critical eye, that Elias’s normal smirking condescension is absent. After that first little victory, he kisses Jon seriously and slow, like the next point made in an argument he is determined to win. Where Jon freezes with indecision, Elias is unhesitating, tugging him closer, grasping at his hip, his waist, any part of him he can touch. Jon might have thought it would be more of a leap, once upon a time, from snarling across a desk to entwined against his last alley of escape—he breaks down Jon’s defenses in the same way, scrape of teeth followed by the soothing press of his tongue, so that heat rises to Jon’s face when all he can do is moan, low and needy.
It is embarrassingly like that first morning back at work after the month Jon spent at the Circus’s mercy, when his bitter, frightened vitriol was turned on its head by what he knows now to be false indignation.
I should have thought that preventing the horrific transformation of our world is not solely my concern.
A hysterical laugh bubbles up before he can stop it.
“You fucking liar,” Jon says, unable to keep from smiling helplessly against his lips. “You selfish—“
Elias kisses the words from his mouth, one hand floating up to the hinge of his jaw, the other sliding up his spine and pulling him still closer as if he could consume him just like this; the thought thrums like a plucked chord between them and sends a shivering bolt of heat to the pit of Jon’s stomach instead of the disgust he ought to feel. He kisses back anyway, with all the fevered desperation Elias drew to the surface. Clutches at Elias’s waist and chases that perfect state where he doesn’t despise what he is and what he’s done. Where he bears all the blame but bears it indifferently, as merely a side effect of the world they have made.
The urgency strips away after long moments. Elias slots one knee almost absently between Jon’s, not seeking so much as there. And Jon is flushed warm from the ebbing swell of knowing and seeing that has such devoted fondness buzzing under his skin; when Elias slides a hand into Jon’s hair, Jon sighs with the firmness of his grasp, the light scrape of nails against his scalp.
The despair and recrimination have gone silent, replaced with a hazy, warm blank. Nothing beyond this moment need exist.
But of course, it does, and that is the problem.
When Jon has to pull away, dazed, to catch his breath, Elias lingers close and Jon lets him. Allows him to press a kiss to his cheek, then the corner of his eye, his temple.
“I hate you,” Jon says softly with Elias’s shirt still clenched in his fist.
“I know,” Elias says, and his thumb sweeps gently across Jon’s cheek to wipe away the absent tears still trailing down his face. Jon can feel how the words dig into whatever vulnerable place in Elias’s chest he has hidden so well, but the pain is piercing-sweet. Nothing in his tone resembles regret.
That, in the end, is what breaks through the shield of blind contentment and gives him the strength to push Elias back so hard he stumbles.
“This is my choice,” Jon tells him, though his fingers are stiff from how tight his grip had been.
If the truth is that Jon is the only thing that can prove Elias is real anymore, the only one who can testify to what he has accomplished, Jon cannot withstand that sort of love. What he has accomplished is the nightmare Jon is trying to undo. There is some dangerous, yawning depth within Jon that doesn’t care about any of it, because being here right now is enough. Because the rush of tenderness that tightens Elias’s chest at the sight of him is true, too, Jon’s eyes always cutting right to his marrow so that the wanting spills over like a slit throat. Just as it is true that Elias himself somehow fits the aching emptiness that the Archives once filled, making all the frantic horror go quiet and easy and right. That might just be worth the end of the world.
But he is not the same kind of monster as Jonah Magnus, content to watch everything burn so long as he remains untouched. Jon wants to put this world back together again if he has to shore up the cracks with his own hands.
Elias straightens, runs his fingers absently through his hair to tidy it. Aside from the bitten red sheen of his lips, he is as pristine as he ever is, but Jon senses, too, the illogical hurt that lances through him, the instinct to move closer again that he carefully reins in. Such a wretched, human impulse that Jon wants to go to him, still.
“Don’t follow me,” Jon says. He reaches back, unsteady, and his fingers find the door handle.
Elias’s shoulders drop. He nods. The razor edge of his smile hints at the corner of his mouth, but Jon is beyond his reach, now. Martin and the others are waiting for him. Someday soon, Jon will be back to finish this.
Maybe then the aching will stop.