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Jon is sitting in Elias’ high-backed chair as Elias leans against the dark wood of the desk, and the tape he’s pulling from between Jon’s lips pools on the floor between them. When it catches on Jon’s teeth, Elias extracts it with gentle precision, one cool hand lingering on his cheek.
It’s like vomiting, except without the messiness; the visceral sensation of something emerging from Jon’s body, scraping against the inside of his throat. His voice resonates in the air — statement of Jonathan Sims, regarding his becoming the Archivist . When he coughs, the sound rattles in his throat like plastic tumbling against plastic; fingers fumbling against the pause button and bringing everything to an ungraceful stop.
Elias goes still, the tape falling from his fingers.
Pressing his hand to his throat, Jon tries and fails to speak. There’s a series of dull clicks as his jaw opens and closes, but no trace of anything resembling a human voice. Below his skin, something is unspooling — or trying to, at any rate, but the tape refuses to be dislodged.
Elias shakes his head with a sigh. He looks— disappointed? As though Jon is a schoolboy who’s made yet another mistake in a long line, and Elias is resigned to the task of teaching.
“Don’t damage yourself, Jon.”
His fingers are unyielding where they cover Jon’s. They guide his grip tighter and tighter, until something shifts, and the whirring of the tape resumes — Jon’s voice resumes, calm and measured and bitter. Elias hums in satisfaction. He doesn’t remove his hand from Jon’s neck.
Jon can’t reply to that condescension. All he can do is listen to his own voice proclaim his loathing and love of what Elias has shaped him into — what he has shaped himself into. It hurts like he imagines a pulled tooth to hurt. A relief in the extraction, something of a catharsis, but not enough to extinguish the pain of it all.
He wonders, idly, if Elias ever felt this kind of conflict. It seems impossible now, as he stands in front of Jon and pulls his secrets out of him with such tenderness; but then, it seems impossible to imagine him as a younger man, and he can’t have been born into the world as a bureaucrat.
Elias laughs. Jon can’t summon the heat to glare at him. Pointless, really, to get annoyed about a little mind-reading when Elias is gently coaxing out every fragment of his self-denial.
Jon sinks into the strangeness of it all. His own voice, carrying on without him; his secrets laid bare for Elias’ assessment; the hard plastic that shifts and creaks in the places where there should be muscle and bones.
The tape scrapes across his tongue with a stinging pain that terrifies him in its utter correctness: the truth should hurt, that’s just the way of things. It heals quickly, but the tape just keeps coming and coming, digging in deeper and deeper until Jon is sure it’s going to scar. The blood tastes wrong; it isn’t iron and memories of childhood injuries. Instead, it’s acrid, bringing to mind deep blue spreading on bone-white paper, hand-writing that curves and flourishes.
Jon knows to his bones that it’s the taste of ink.
He only comes back to reality when Elias pauses, and the voice in the air cuts out, more abruptly than any normal speech. A clean break, lacking the messiness of humanity.
“I wonder,” Elias murmurs, seemingly to himself, as he reaches into the snarls of tape in front of him. Jon shivers as Elias unearths a section of tape, turning it this way and that in his hands. Something is different, but Jon can’t tell what.
Carefully, with all the caution of someone unused to taking reckless action, Elias runs his thumb along the coils tangled between his fingers. Jon’s voice repeats— and repeats— and repeats.
If Elias is trying to make a point, Jon is too off-kilter to decode it.
With each caress of the tape, it feels as though Elias is running his fingers across Jon’s thoughts, his very soul laid bare and tender. Jon feels himself flush at the intimacy of it all — the casual possessiveness with which Elias brushes across Jon’s being.
He wants to lean towards it, like a flower to the sun — like Icarus, doomed by his own flaws.
He wants to run away, so no one else can ever know him so profoundly.
Elias catches his gaze, and he sees himself reflected in that silver stare. His eyes are dark and hungry, eating every shred of light that hits them. He can barely see his sclera around the black hole of his irises, pupils wide and avaricious.
“It suits you, Jon. I hope you understand how much all of this suits you.”
With that, Elias begins coaxing the tape from his mouth once more. It falls easily into his waiting hands, and Jon’s voice continues exactly where it left off.
Elias smiles, and the look in his eyes is— it’s worship. An awe stronger than anything Jon saw in half-remembered childhood services at the local church. He never clicked with religion — still doesn’t, despite the circumstances — but the look in Elias’ eyes is nothing short of devout.
There’s a part of Jon, very deep down, that envies that zealotry.
Without any warning, Elias surges forward and kisses him. There’s the taste of blood; the tape has cut Elias’ lip where it falls from Jon’s mouth. When Elias pulls away, ruffled and breathless, there’s a thin line of crimson running down his chin. Jon can’t seem to drag his gaze away, entranced by that sliver of scarlet humanity.
Elias runs his thumb across the line of Jon’s cheekbone. Jon’s eyes flutter shut in hateful relaxation, his skin tingling below Elias’ touch.
The tape runs out eventually. They can’t have been sitting here for any longer than an hour by the time the last inch of plastic ribbon frees itself from his throat and falls to the ground.
Elias hums in quiet satisfaction, leaning back to take the measure of him.
Jon’s mouth works silently. He can feel the plastic and metal below his skin, desperately trying to shift into something with a voice. It’s empty, he realises. Elias has unwound all of Jon’s words, leaving them piled on the floor, and Jon has nothing left that he can say.
He’s seized by the intrusive urge to pull the tape to his mouth, to painstakingly re-wind it into his being. Reclaim all those words, then record over.
Jon doesn’t, of course. He wouldn’t, it’s— it’s insane.
(The worst part is, he only resists because he knows he would relish the coils of plastic buckling between his teeth, and after that? He wouldn’t be able to pretend that his thoughts work in human ways. He wants to keep that pretense for a little while longer.)
There’s a tape recorder on Elias’ desk. It hasn’t been recording their encounter, but now Elias flicks it on with a quiet sigh. Sitting there, Elias caressing his cheeks in open wonder, Jon doesn’t dare to try and find his voice. The silence is important, even if he doesn’t know why.
He’s aware of the recording in a way he doesn’t think he would have been before. It’s like he can hear through that microphone, pick up on the dead air that it’s recording for him.
After half an hour of silence, the recorder stops, and Jon finally feels like he can breathe.
“Better?” Elias’ mouth curves in a smile that’s as gentle as it is insufferable.
“I—” Jon coughs, and his voice is still there when he exhales. “Yes, actually, I— what was that?”
Elias falls quiet. His expression turns troubled, though Jon isn’t fool enough to believe it’s any kind of concern for the state of his precious Archivist. More likely he’s just deciding what he wants Jon to know — how to phrase things so as to be revealing yet completely unhelpful.
“A gift,” Elias says at last. “Even if it doesn’t seem like one just yet.”
If Jon were a better person, he thinks he would have a biting reply to that. As it is, he just sighs, listening to how it sounds like dead air falling from his mouth. The whirring under his skin is quieter, but still there. He can taste ink drying on his tongue.
Without prompting, Elias hands him a tissue. The blood Jon spits out is red and ordinary.
“Is this going to happen again?” Jon asks, wincing as the movement of his tongue pulls at the scar left by the tape. His voice sounds different than before; the subtle distance between the movement of the vocal folds and the mimicry of them.
“Hard to say.” Elias wipes at his own lip, the blood smearing as he cleans it away with characteristic precision. “But for what it’s worth, I doubt it.”
“Good,” Jon mutters, and pretends that the rush of cool emotion in his thoughts is relief.
“At the very least, we won’t be dealing with this particular mess.” Elias nudges the coiled tape with his foot. “We’ve facilitated the exposure of these secrets, so the Eye finds them uninteresting. Do you have any others you feel a particular urge to share right now?”
“No,” Jon says, even though every instinct is telling him to lay himself bare before Elias’ gaze.
“Pity,” Elias replies, a fond smile on his lips. “You know where I am if that changes.”
Another alien impulse forces itself through Jon as he pushes himself out of the chair. In the moment before he shakes himself out of it, he finds his hand reaching down to the tape, ready to pick it up and— what, take it with him?
He glances back at Elias, but the affection has smoothed into a mask of quiet indifference.
Jon tells himself, quite firmly, that he’s being ridiculous. There’s no reason to feel as though the tape on the floor is a part of him, no reason to feel quite so off-balance at the idea of leaving it exposed to Elias’ ruthless tenderness. There’s no reason at all that it feels like leaving his still-beating heart on the floor for anyone to steal away.
Jon can feel Elias’ eyes on his back until he leaves the Institute that night.