Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I don’t get it,” Daisy says, tracking from the corridor into the break room, eyes fixed on her phone screen - the missing persons, a few texts to officers who owe favours, even a begrudgingly polite message to her cousin in social services, “What the hell could we be missing? It isn’t like we aren’t hunting but there are just no bloody wax-”

“Shutup,” someone hisses urgently at her. Melanie. Melanie doesn’t usually sound that frantic - okay, she does, but it usually isn’t aimed at Daisy. “Shush.” 

“What?” Daisy looks up, sliding her phone into her pocket, finding Basira across the room mostly by instinct at this point and cocking her head. Basira, for once, doesn’t look stressed or - or, or out of it, her face smoothed in that sweet smile that always makes people assume Daisy is the one they need to be scared of, and when she catches Daisy’s eye she smiles and points. Melanie, beside her, is filming something on her phone, eyes fixed threateningly on Daisy, wordlessly warning her not to make another sound. 

Daisy follows the line of Basira’s finger to the ratty old couch beside the kettle, a relic of the days before the archives of the Magnus Institute were a form of torture, back when they were just - well. A place to work. There’s a kettle and a toaster and a sink in that corner of the room, and a sofa for people to, in theory, sit on while they chat to their co-workers, although these days mostly it’s used for people to bleed out on. Red sofas don’t stain. 

Lying on the couch is their so-recently returned archivist, still with a patch of bloody scabbing on his temple from some unknown encounter in America, his hair all but completely loose from the bun he likes to wear it in. His glasses are askew on his nose, and his mouth is a little open, doing that snuffly sort of breath that isn’t a snore but isn’t complete silence, either - judging by the dark, deep bruises under his eyes, Daisy would put good money on the fact that Jon hasn’t slept since the last time he was in the archives. Is it the statements, or is it the safety he needs? Could he sleep in an unfamiliar flat? Probably not. His shoes are still on, although his jumper is half-unbuttoned down the front. But crucially, and probably the reason for Melanie’s hushing and flapping, is the round little lump on Jon’s chest, breathing rhythmically to the rise and fall of the archivist’s breath. 

“Why is there a baby on Jon,” Daisy says flatly. 

Basira just shakes her head and puts her finger to her lips. 

The baby is - small. Daisy is not a baby person, and hell, she can’t even tell what gender they are, since the thing is wrapped in a white blanket patterned with ducks and not a handy pink-or-blue option. They have a little white cap on their head, the shape of a chocolate kiss, and they’re young enough that they still basically look like Winston Churchill. Their little hands are curled into fists and tucked beside their chin, under the mouth, where a small pink tongue pokes past small, bowed lips. Jon’s hands are folded securely over the baby, arms crooked in such a way that even if the baby were to wake up and topple over, they would be caught. They are breathing in sync. 

And then Daisy’s eyes travel up across the room, to beside the radiator, where Martin is trying to cram his entire fist in his mouth, his cheeks bright pink, making a slow, high-pitched noise that sounds suspiciously like the start of a scream. 

“It is a baby, not a cat. Vetoed.”

“Mister Mistoffelees isn’t a bad name for a baby. I bet there are hundreds of kids called-”

“It isn’t our baby, and no there aren’t. End of story.”

Melanie and Basira have been squabbling about what to call the thing for almost half an hour, when it became obvious to everyone that Jon - and the baby - were in no state to wake up to every sudden noise. Tim emerged about ten minutes ago, looking fucking terrible, and joined Daisy in scouring missing persons and the public inquiries website, trying to find the currently-absent owners of said baby.

“He’s next to dead,” Tim says matter-of-factly, catching Daisy in another furtive look at Jon. “He used to do this back when - well. Back when, too. Used to work all day and stalk us all night, driving himself mad with panic, and then after a week or two he would just - stop. Sit down and fall asleep. Once he fainted in Artefact Storage and Sasha and me had to drag him out before he got eaten by that godawful wardrobe - the dark one, you know the one. Sucky one. He does this. Did this.”

“The baby is new,” Daisy says. 

“Yeah, okay, I’ll give you that. The baby is new.” 

Martin volunteered himself to go out and buy baby milk, which was a suggestion from Melanie, and dummies, which was a suggestion from Basira, and nappies, which was Daisy’s contribution to the whole thing. When asked about his opinion on what a baby might be likely to need in the next few hours, Tim had shrugged and said parents? and then laughed in that odd way he’s started doing, the unkind, cynical laugh that doesn’t suit the roundness of his voice. It makes Daisy’s skin crawl with wrongness. 

“So… we walk in here and we find Sims with a baby on him,” Daisy says a little louder, scooping the other two women into the conversation. “And we don’t know how and nobody wakes him up to ask.”

“I don’t want screaming baby to be my soundtrack to work for the next few days, even if you do,” Melanie shoots back. “And I hate waking Jon up. He always. Y’know. Looks at you.”

Daisy does know. She’s woken Jon up a few times, hand stretched out, touching that bone of a shoulder, and in the few seconds between sleep and true wakefulness he is his most inhuman, his eyes open before he’s regained consciousness, staring right into her head and pulling the pertinent information out - and then he will slump, always, and go ragged, and say oh christ i’m sorry i didn’t mean to fall asleep and he’ll be back to that odd collection of arms and legs and miscellany that calls itself Jonathan Sims. 

But the Eye is always watching. Always looking. 

“So we don’t know why he’s got a baby on him, is my point,” Daisy presses. “Not even Martin?”

“You saw him,” Melanie says, flapping her hand. “Martin’s brain stopped at Jon and baby and he hasn’t caught up to the rest of us yet. Elias probably knows.”

“We aren’t asking Elias,” Tim says. Snarls, really. He reminds Daisy of herself in a funny sort of way, as she watches him out of the corner of her eye; on edge, curled up, a weapon only just caught in the tension of unrelease, but with a great well of dangerous potentiality just waiting to be pointed at something and fired. In Tim is the desperate, painful need for somebody else to hurt. 

“I didn’t say we should,” Melanie says. “I said he knows. Capital K knows. Should we move to the tunnels?”

“No,” Basira says. “No facilities, no natural light, creepy shit. The only advantage is maybe not having Elias watch us, but he’ll know there’s a fucking baby in the place anyway if he sees us going in and out with - y’know. Uh. Baby stuff.”

“Has anyone here handled a baby before,” Daisy says, too flat to be a question. 

Tim is a youngest child, so - no. Basira and Daisy - only children. Melanie has a brother, but only a year lies between them, so Melanie was only toddling when her brother was baby-shaped, and also has no idea what to do with them. None of them are exactly nurturing. 

“Fucking Sims better know what he’s doing,” Daisy mutters. 

Tim snorts. “Fat chance.”

In his dreams he visits a young woman, her face drawn in fear and worry, who sits on a bridge above a set of cruel, narrow train tracks. She is somewhere in the Midlands, that stretch of England that is just there because something needs to sit between the bottom of Scotland and the top of Wales. For weeks now, she has been seeing bugs under her skin that aren’t there when she picks it open, and she’s been driven to breaking. Just as she - 

Just as he’s about to jump - 

“I can’t believe he isn’t waking up.”

“He’s doing his Eye thing. He’s probably, like, body-hopping.” 

Something soft and clean-smelling and small is slapping him repeatedly on the chin. It feels like being bonked with a pillow, or a small stuffed toy. Someone is laughing. “I can’t believe he isn’t waking up.” 

“Martin, are you seeing this?”

At the last, Jon wrenches his eyes open, fighting through the fluff of something unwatched to its conclusion, and finds the entire archival staff - and additions, thank you Daisy - arrayed in front of him, looking anywhere from shocked to amused to annoyed. Melanie has her phone aimed at him. Tim, for the first time in - months, definitely - is smiling. 

“What…?”

“You have a baby on you, Jon,” Basira says, with less amusement than Tim. “Where did you get the baby?”

Her tone isn’t necessarily accusatory, but it sends Jon into a flapping, defensive panic anyway, half-awake as he is. “I got - I didn’t get the baby! I found the baby! I’m not a - not a - the baby - it was-”

“Nobody thinks you kidnapped the baby,” says Martin, and Jon’s eyes fly to him with a speed he wishes he could regret. Martin is at the edge of the little semicircle, clutching his elbows, smiling in a way Jon just can’t interpret. It looks fond. Jon never realised Martin was particularly attached to babies. 

“I didn’t kidnap the baby,” Jon says anyway. The baby, for their part, slaps him softly on the chin again and gurgles, looking perfectly happy to be sitting on a monster in a gross, mouldy break room in a horrible, evil Institute looked over by a creepy all-knowing madman. 

Ignorance is bliss. 

“Where did you get the baby,” Basira repeats. She looks less like she wants to kill him, though, which is an improvement. So far, Jon’s interactions with people have deteriorated from his uni days, where he used to actively want people to like him, to just if they don’t kill me in the next five minutes we’re cool. It’s a surprisingly stressful way to live. 

Jon wriggles around, struggling to sit up with the baby patting tiny, tiny, tiny fingers over his stubbly chin. Eventually he manages it and the baby ends up sitting, still cool and calm and cooing, in his lap like some sort of - bizarre - pet. He pats it gingerly on the head. “In the - in the tunnels. I was looking for…  looking for - I had read a statement in China, a - something old, about Smirke, and I thought - well. I’m not, not - uh, not. Um.” He swallows. His stammer, never far away, has returned in the last few months with a vengeance and it hurts to have all his words eloquently lined up only to realise most of them have gone marching off. “I’m not ready, that’s it, to investigate the Unknowing. I don’t. Know. Enough, so I thought maybe Smirke had, had hidden some secrets in the. In the tunnels. And I was walking, and, and I walked a long time - I think, and then I heard - heard the baby crying. So I, I found the baby. And I think I, maybe I was tired. So I fell asleep.”

“The baby was in the tunnels,” Daisy says, doubt dripping off her every word. “Just sitting there? In a little ducky blanket and hat?”

“I hardly went and bought them myself, did I?” Jon says defensively. The baby, as though they know what’s being said, reaches up and snags his thumb, their whole fist around it, meaning Jon has to straighten it up at the knuckle. 

Martin makes a choked noise, and his cheeks, already pink, fire red. He coughs. 

“Let it all out, mate,” Tim says unsympathetically, banging his back with his fist. His eyes travel back to Jon, and harden, but Jon pretends not to notice. “Right - baby. Jon, do you know how babies work?”

Jon does not know how babies work. 

Baby is a girl, Martin and Jon discover when she fills her nappy about ten minutes after she wakes up. It takes a long time, and a lot of arguing, and a supplementary trip to the local Tesco Express for some soft wet-wipes, but eventually she’s clean and gurgling happily again, bouncing in Martin’s arms. Melanie films the nappy fiasco, but proves to be quite good at telling them what to do - I watch a lot of Supernanny. Uh. Watched - while they wait for Basira and Tim to come back from the tunnels. Daisy stayed behind. 

(In case you snap, says the Jon inside his head that exists only to watch him. She’s staying in case you hurt the baby. She’s your - haha - she’s your babysitter.) 

(Shut up.) 

“Only you could go looking for something spooky and find a baby,” Martin says, with that same weird note Jon can’t interpret in his voice. Baby makes a squalling noise, a sort of prelude to a tantrum, and Martin responds with the sort of hushy baby nonsense Jon hears young mums do in the supermarket. A plea, of sorts. 

“I didn’t want to find either of those things,” Jon says. Hands empty of Baby, he’s making tea, and he’s realised with an unpleasant drop in his stomach that he doesn’t know how Martin takes it. He’s never made tea for Martin before. He doesn’t want to ask. He doesn’t want Martin to know. 

Frantically, he looks up and around the break room as though the answer will be written on the walls. He doesn’t find words, but he does meet Daisy’s eye, from where she leans against the wall, next to the fading corkboard. She grins, and it isn’t nice, but she flashes two fingers and then mimes a generous pour. 

Martin, burbling away to the baby, doesn’t see it, and Jon is embarrassingly overwhelmingly grateful for that. Two sugars and a lot of milk. Daisy takes hers black with three sugars, and Jon drinks it like it was brewed in a builder’s boot. Strong and bitter, and hot, and the sort of thing that makes him think of long winters in his teenage years, of distantly wondering - in an experimental way - how long he can go before he feels hungry. 

“Ducky-duck,” Martin coos, and the baby grasps a lock of his curly blonde hair and pulls. “Ooh, ducky has something to say? Don’t pull, don’t pull. What does ducky want?” 

“Food, probably,” Daisy says in that casual, sensible voice. “How long ago did you find her, Jon?”

“I don’t know how long I was asleep,” Jon says. He bobs teabags up and down in their mugs. Up and down they go, and where they stop - “Probably three, four hours ago? But who knows how long she was down there before I found her. The tunnels - time, uh. Works different down there. Y’know?” 

“I do know,” Daisy says. “Martin, did you buy-”

“In my bag,” Martin waves a free hand, his hair now loose from the baby’s grasp. “But I don’t know if any of it is much use. I went to Tesco and then I went to Boots and pretended to be a stressed new dad, but I’m not sure how convincing it was.”

“Powder, yeah, this stuff we can use,” there’s rustling as Daisy fights through the flimsy plastic shopping bags, “Bottles - the nib looks too small, but it’ll have to do - dummies, but Christ she’s been quiet so far - Sims, put the kettle on again, but take it off before it gets to the boil. Let’s. Uh. Let’s feed this baby.”

Jon lets his mouth twist into a wry smile, fiddling with the kettle, and thinks that Daisy is all good and great when she’s saying let’s get the bastard, but her grand commands sound very misplaced when the room is full of Martin Blackwood making goo-goo noises at a baby and calling her ducky. He fills the room with him and baby - 

But then she starts to scream. Daisy’s grip on the plastic bottles becomes white-tight, and Martin abruptly stops talking. 

Jon sighs. “I think - um. I - ah, can I work on a hunch?”

Martin deposits the baby in Jon’s arms without a second thought, and as Jon somehow knew she would, the baby stops crying and looks up at him with a wet giggle. 

“So, here’s what we know.”

Tim and Jon are sitting beside each other, Martin can’t help but notice, and he doesn’t know who looks most uncomfortable. Tim still has dust in his hair from the tunnels, and is sitting with his legs spread, his arms across the back of the sofa Jon had been napping on, a display of forced-casual dominance that Martin knows doesn’t come naturally to the man. Jon is sitting with his legs tucked under him, forming a little nest in the cross of his legs where the baby sits. She’s playing with a thin elastic hair-tie, the sort that Jon wears on his wrist, and with a warm jolt Martin realises Jon’s hair is down around his shoulders, out of the bun he had so carefully retied earlier. Jon’s arms are tucked inward, around the baby as though she’s in imminent danger of falling, and the whole scene is - 

Telling. 

Melanie is sitting on the edge of the table, chewing on her lip. Daisy has pulled over a kitchen chair, straddling it so her chin rests on the back. Basira has dragged an office chair in from the main bullpen the archival assistants used to work in back when they did work, and Martin is sitting on the other armchair, the soggy yellow one with all the cigarette burns on the left arm. 

“Here’s what we know,” Melanie repeats, when nobody responds to her the first time. “Jon found a - Jon found the baby in the tunnels around two-fifteen, give or take.”

“Bearing - ah, bearing in mind that, that I had been down there for quite a while, and - time. Tunnels,” Jon says. The baby slips her fat little wrist through his hair-tie, and giggles, and Jon’s face turns from hard and defensive to privately warm, and ever so soft. Martin feels like he shouldn’t be watching. 

“Two-fifteen, give or take Institute fuckery,” Melanie says crisply. “Okay. Two, the baby cannot be identified on police or informal missing persons lists.”

Basira nods; Daisy shrugs. 

“Three, the baby is a normal baby until you give it-”

“Her-”

“Her, give her to Jon, and then she becomes an angel baby.”

Tim says something then, something Martin can’t make out, but in the tone of voice where that doesn’t really matter. Jon’s shoulders narrow even further, and Basira looks momentarily uneasy. 

“Four, the baby doesn’t seem. Um. Weird, in any way, apart from the Jon thing.” Melanie looks discomfited, and Martin knows why. None of them have ever seen a child, a proper child interact with any of the fourteen, and so who’s to say the baby is all that normal? After all, she is so easily soothed by Jon that it must be the workings of something out of the ordinary, but she’s so bonny in every other way that it’s hard to see where this oddness could manifest. 

And none of them are too keen on experimenting with a baby. 

“Those all seem about right,” Martin says, because looking at Jon is starting to do unpleasant things to his insides. “And… working theories?”

“Trap baby,” Daisy says. “We’re all thinking it, and this is exactly like something the rat bastard would do.” 

Jon’s hands tighten on the baby’s arms. Not tight, but a change significant enough for Martin to notice. “Not a trap baby. I would - I would know.”

“Would you?” 

“Yes,” Jon says simply, and nobody questions him further. 

“Okay, theory two,” Basira says. She leans back, eyes on the ceiling. “Some unrelated tunnel shit, because they’re - like, a, a beacon for the spooky. Smirke. Jonah Magfish. You know the stuff I’m on about.”

Tim huffs a humourless laugh, but nobody else reacts - Melanie nods, adding it to her mental list. 

Jon pats Baby on the head, like she’s a little kitten, her soft downy infant-hair trickling over his thin fingers like water. Martin can’t look away. “Theory three,” Jon says roughly, “Baby has been placed here by an - by, by an al- a friendly power. For reasons we don’t - for reasons they won’t tell us, or that don’t matter. My money’s on Mic- on Helen. She - h- it, has fingers in a lot more pies than we do, and she wouldn’t - well. She wouldn’t feel the need to tell us. None of them would.”

“This isn’t some cult baby,” Tim says. He sounds scathing. “This is some fucking-”

“Don’t swear,” Jon snaps at the same time as Martin, and they both look at each other and then Martin coughs and looks away. 

(His eyes fall on Daisy, who looks. Less than amused, but more than annoyed. Fond, maybe, on anyone else’s face.) 

“This isn’t some - some season-break special,” Tim says, after a seething pause. “This isn’t where the gang bond over an infant. This is - this is a fucking baby, and shut up about the swearing, this is a child who presumably has parents she isn’t with right this second. What, so we can all clap ourselves on the back ‘cos she doesn’t have nappy rash and our resident creep-in-chief has something to keep him busy that isn’t spying on people or killing people or-”

Jon isn’t shrinking away from him. Jon is many things but he isn’t a shrinker. He’s just leaning very very far to the left, almost dangling over the arm of the sofa, as though Tim’s words won’t mean anything if he’s out of his reach. 

“He’s not human just because this fucking place spat him out a baby to chirp at,” Tim says. He stands. “I’m going - I’m going to - I’m going.” 

He leaves a horrible, sucking absence when he goes, and when Martin risks looking at Jon and the baby, he hates the miserable resignation the picture paints - Jon, folded up, the baby blissfully unaware with his hair-tie dangling around her wrist, a pretty painting with something very, very wrong with it. 

Melanie wishes she did not sleep in the archives, but she does. Sometimes she leaves and drinks during the day with Georgie, beautiful, normal Georgie, and they buy sweet cider in the pub nearest Georgie’s flat and they don’t talk about what’s going on. They talk about uni and ghosts and people Melanie used to know in the industry - people Georgie still knows - a loop of gossip that Melanie had all but fallen out of, until Georgie hauled her back in. 

The pub is called the Hart and Desire, which Melanie privately thinks is a very stupid name for a pub. It’s one of the gentrified London ones, brickwork peeking through unpeeled plaster and antlers mounted on the wall above the bar, and all the staff wearing terrible burgundy waistcoats and bow-ties like they’re pulling pints for bloody Queen and country, instead of a lot of depressed white-collar types drinking on their lunch break to avoid having to think about the work ahead. Melanie gets a light, sparkly pear cider, and claims a sticky table to wait for Georgie. She doesn’t have to wait long. Pictures of the baby are both carrot and stick to someone like her. 

Melanie is angry. She is angry. She is angry at Tim for taking her opportunity to rant away from her, and she is angry at Jon for looking so sad all the time, and she is angry at everyone else for not sharing in her fury. Daisy is violent and touchy but not angry, and Basira is quiet and thoughtful. Martin is - 

And Jon is a monster, and all of the rest of them aren’t doing anything about it. 

Georgie, predictably, is so taken with Melanie’s pictures of the baby that she snatches her phone away, holding it in the air so the shorter Melanie can’t even reach it, her thumb flicking through blurry snapshot after blurry snapshot of the baby in Jon’s lap, in Martin’s arms, lying on the sideboard of the breakroom as Daisy wrestles a fresh nappy out of the plastic wrap, of Tim making faces at the baby, of Basira staring at her like it might explode. “Precious,” Georgie coos, like some bastardised gollum, “Oh, precious, darling, oh my god-”

“We’re not keeping it,” Melanie says. 

“Her!”

“We’re not keeping it,” she repeats, that ugly anger under her skin, flowing to the places where her insides become her outsides. Eyeballs. Fingernails. The places where straight lines become angles. “Jon - it isn’t safe.”

“Jon wouldn’t hurt a baby,” Georgie says. Slowly, her arm lowers, and Melanie feels momentarily guilty about sucking the good mood out of her - out of the whole room. “Jon wouldn’t. He. He - Mel, he might be, might be weird, but he wouldn’t hurt a baby.”

Melanie is almost shaking for want of a fight. “You don’t know that.”

But Georgie just looks at her like she’s mental. “I went to fucking classes with him when we were nineteen. I watched him kiss Frannie Daye behind the bins of this godawful club in Manchester one night and then vomit. He cries - used to cry - in that bit of Wallace and Gromit where Gromit has to leave home and put on a yellow coat. I dated him for a year. I lived with him, like, a month ago. I - yes, Mel, I do know that. Categorically I know that. Jon won’t hurt a - a child.”

But the thing inside Melanie that wants to be angry isn’t satisfied. She isn’t the ally you want, it cries. Drink up and pretend to forget it. 

“We aren’t keeping the baby, though,” she says, halfway through her pint. 

Georgie gives her a look, beautiful as the sun. “Of course you aren’t.”

The baby is heavy in Jon’s arms. He touches her soft hair again, and thinks of Martin calling her ducky, and wishes he could go somewhere warm and quiet where he could sit and think for a while. The baby is heavy in his arms. 

“I can take her for a second if you like,” says someone behind him, and although the accent is unmistakably Welsh Jon still jumps when he sees it’s Daisy. 

She smiles. It looks - odd, but not unpleasant, on her hard-angled face. “If you want to go do something. I can take her,” she says again, and holds out musclebound arms, open, palms-up. “Have you eaten?”

Jon looks at her. He has not. 

“Give me, and go eat,” Daisy says, and with hands that Jon has never seen gentle she lifts Baby from him, pressing her hand to Baby’s back so the little thing falls into her shoulder, head resting in the crook of her neck, fitting there like a puzzle piece sliding together. Baby makes a little noise, a sort of inquisitive startle, but whatever she thinks about Daisy must be good, because she moves no further. “Eat, Jon,” Daisy repeats, when he doesn’t try and move. “Or I’ll - I’ll call Martin on you.” 

“I’m going, I’m eating,” Jon grumbles. Free of the child all his individual worries are flooding back, the aches and pains, the place in his side where Julia hit him, that patch on his scalp where Trevor caught his hair and tugged until it was painful, that place on his fingertips where Gerry’s page sizzled down into ash and bit him one last time. 

He’s going. He’s eating. 

Outside the break room, baby room, the archives are still and quiet. Jon hasn’t seen Tim since he stormed away earlier, and Melanie always leaves for a few hours during the day - he thinks to see Georgie, but he isn’t sure. Martin left about half an hour ago citing lunch, and Basira had vanished some time ago, a book folded under her arm, her dark eyes unfocused, thinking about something beyond all of them. She reminds him of Sasha, sometimes. Passionate about the work the way nobody else is. And then Jon feels bad for thinking about the Sasha that shouldn’t have been, and he keeps walking until he thinks he won’t be found, and then he stops. Stops and leans against the wall, forehead to the damp plaster. 

He isn’t hungry, but he has to eat. Jon is never hungry. He wasn’t usually hungry anyway, and then Georgie made him quit smoking because she used to be there to check, and then he would eat when he was given something, and then he found his first real body and he had a cigarette and now he’s had so many things in his body, out of his body, and done to his body that he figures not-eating isn’t really high up on the list of - 

Well. Things he needs to worry about. These days he mostly survives on tea, cigarettes, and the sort of crispy mint chocolate that costs far too much in the corner shop and can’t be found anywhere else. He sucks on it, a square at a time, and lets it fill his stomach and doesn’t think about things. Most things. 

“Stop wallowing.”

Basira’s cool, quiet voice is such a shock that Jon lifts his head too quick and bashes it against the wall. “Fucking ow.” 

“Serves you right,” she says. She’s standing in the middle of the hall, a new book in her hands - Beedle’s Pictsie Glossary - and dust settled all over her hijab and her shoulders, the sort of settled dust that only accumulates in the very corners of the library. “Quit wallowing. Where’s the baby?”

“Daisy has her,” Jon says hoarsely. His head is pounding. 

“So what are you doing?”

“Staring at the wall. What are you doing?” 

“Looking at you,” she says, and raises an eyebrow. “Are you having a crisis? I don’t want to have to deal with that.”

Jon feels nettled by the accusation. “I wasn’t doing anything so dramatic. I was just… looking at the wall.”

“Sure.”

They stand for a few beats, looking at each other. Jon sees the brittle tension in her, the way she refuses to bend, nevermind snap; the way her shoulders stand, boxing in the rest of her. He wonders what she sees when she looks at him, and then he wonders if he even wants to know. “Basira-”

“I’m getting lunch,” she says, and thrusts the Pictsie Glossary into his hands. “You’re coming with me. Ask Daisy to look at your head.”

“My he-”

“And your ribs. And your shoulder. And your hand. You probably should have gone to hospital.”

“Bas-”

“And I’m choosing where we get lunch, and you’re not complaining.” She marches ahead of him, a lesson in how to break in half, and Jon, bewildered, follows. He sees her hands shaking rather violently, trembling where they rest on her hips, before she catches him looking and glares and stuffs them in her pockets. The archives are quiet and damp, and they’re no place to keep a baby. No place to keep anyone. 

(That’s what she’s thinking, Jon knows, Jon Knows, and he wishes he didn’t.) 

(Shut up.) 

“They’re still blunt.”

Tim looks up from the knot he’s picking at on the table, startled out of his funk by Martin’s statement. “Huh? What?”

“They’re still blunt,” Martin repeats. He’s playing with a pad of sticky notes, flipping them like a little picture-book and then folding the whole pad in half one way, then another, and repeating the process. The sticky notes are shaped like apples. Sasha bought them. “His teeth, I mean.”

Tim sets his hands on the table. “Martin, what the sincere fuck are you talking about?”

“He isn’t some sharp-toothed dragon monster in a human skin suit, is what I’m talking about,” Martin says, and Tim’s stomach sinks because of course he is. Martin couldn’t pass the Bechdel test. The. The Jonathan Sims test. Not if he tried. 

“I don’t actually care. I was busy.”

“You were defacing Institute property, is what you were doing,” Martin says with a little of the snark he’s picked up off Melanie. “I could report you to Elias, and then you’d really see a monster pretending to be human. Jon is - Jon is -”

“A dick,” Tim snaps. 

“Under pressure.” 

“Yeah, so are you, but I don’t see you cracking and stalking your co-workers and accusing them of murder,” Tim raises his eyebrows, and Martin - true to his word - doesn’t cower, the way he would have a few years ago. “Listen, Martin, I appreciate whatever you’re trying to do-”

“-I’m not trying to-”

“But I don’t trust him, and I’m not the one with the rose-tinted glasses shoved up my arse. No offence.”

“Oh, I don’t see why I’d take offence to that,” Martin says, but his cheeks are pink with slowly building anger and Tim - 

(He never used to be like this. He used to enjoy being the glue, the soothing presence, the guy who was there with a wink and a joke to smooth down ruffled feathers. Oil on the hinges of life. Or something.) 

Tim wants to irritate Martin the way Martin irritates him. Give Jon a baby and a sofa and half an hour to sleep and Martin’s forgotten all his sins and the hearts are shimmering in his eyes and all is forgiven, but Tim can still remember the worms, and the way Sasha had sounded on those tapes. She had told him once she was unforgettable. 

“Rose-tinted,” he says, and speaks over Martin, “He’s just not right and you know it. He fucks off to, what, America, and comes back reeking of mud and blood and then won’t tell us what he’s learned? Says it’s unimportant? Runs into that Montauk girl, as though that means zilch, even though she’s wrapped up in the Dark somehow and is almost definitely big into all this shit, almost as big as he is, and then he comes back looking like a cat that didn’t manage to drown the whole way and everyone forgets what he is? What he does? He’s an arsehole, Martin, and he doesn’t care about us, and - I don’t give a shit about any of us, because we’re old and we can hold our own against a scrappy little archivist. But that’s a baby. She can’t even - she can’t do anything. And we’re just letting him have her?”

Martin, to his credit, lets Tim go until he’s thoroughly run out of steam. “You done?”

“Um.” Tim nods. In front of Martin’s indifference, he feels like he’s run up to take a swing at something which is suddenly not there - he wants an argument. He wants a fight. 

“I disagree, but - but that’s not what matters right now,” Martin talks right over Tim’s scoff, “There’s a baby in the archives and she hasn’t even been here a day, and you think he’s going to - what, to eat her and wear her like a glove? What the fuck do you think he’s gonna do to the baby, Tim? What the fuck do you think you’re saying? He came back to America so woozy he didn’t notice when I carried him to bed. That’s your boogeyman? That’s your idea of a big bad wolf? If you’re so damn concerned about the baby then help us look for her - for her anywhere. Don’t yell at Jon.”

“But I’ve got nothing else going for me,” Tim says, a last-ditch attempt to salvage the suave. 

Martin passes a hand over his eyes. “I - I don’t care if you never talk to each other again. Just stop - just. Just stop doing it when there’s a baby involved. You were right. That’s a baby, and you’re no saint either - you’re as bad as each other. So just. Stop.” 

He leaves the sticky notes on Tim’s desk when he leaves. 

In the top corner, in splotty blue biro, there’s a star drawn the way Sasha used to draw them, five points and a big smiling face like those inspirational-quote stars. Tim stares at it until he feels dizzy, and then goes to the bathrooms, where he vomits until he feels like he won’t turn inside-out anymore. 

There is no way Elias doesn’t know about the baby in the archives. 

“There’s no way he doesn’t know about the baby in the archives,” Jon says. He sounds more sulky than he means to, pulling at the skin of his wrist usually covered by his spare hair-ties, but the words are out there now and he can’t pull them back. 

“No,” Basira says. “Probably not.”

They had lunch in a sandwich place called the Jolly Sandwich, which is a very stupid name for an eatery of any kind. Jon has something vegan that involves falafels, and Basira has a cup of tea and a muffin, and now they’re back in the archives. They’re always back in the archives. 

“What are we going to do?”

“About Elias? Nothing,” Basira says. Her knuckles rap against the flaky plaster walls. “It isn’t like he’s more evil just because you found a baby in the tunnels. He’s still got us all. If we were in any way sensible, we’d give her to…” She fades. 

Jon nods. “There’s nobody to give her to. She’s been touched by - by something. We just have to figure out what and who, and - and hope it isn’t like that sorry little girl Jude was - um. Agnes. Children do not, historically, get on well with anyone here.” 

Basira shrugs, and at the door of the archives storage she pauses. “I’m going to do research, in that case. If you see Elias, punch him or something. That’ll distract him long enough for Tim to escape with the baby.” 

“Y- why Tim?” 

“Tim looks the most like a dependable single dad out of all of us,” Basira says, and it’s only when she turns to smile at him that Jon realises that was a joke. 

He is very tired, and his hands are trembling when he passes them over his forehead and down his cheeks, like if he presses hard enough he’ll wipe his face away and a new body will be waiting for him when he next looks in the mirror. Of course it doesn’t work, and when he looks at them he just sees what he always has. Brown, knobbly, one hand pink and wrinkled where Jude’s burn has healed funny, one hand almost whole apart from a scar across one finger from where he once dropped a knife cutting mushrooms in his kitchen at uni. He’d been trying to impress Georgie with his culinary skills, hadn’t he? But she had been late, and apologetic, and then he’d cut himself and they’d spent their third date in the waiting room of A&E with a tea towel wrapped around Jon’s finger, laughing awkwardly at each other every time they made eye contact. 

He is very tired. He knows - and Knows - too much. He knows Tim is at his desk, where he’s been ever since Martin yelled at him, although he doesn’t want to know why they fell out. He knows Daisy is asleep beside Basira, who is holding her hand, and he knows that they have never both been asleep in the same room at the same time, because that leaves nobody to keep watch. He knows Melanie is on the phone to Georgie. He knows Martin is in the break room with the baby. He doesn’t know where Elias is, but then, he never does. 

He is very tired, and his very tired feet are carrying him towards the break room. He lets them; they obviously have a better idea of what’s going on at the moment than he does. 

“Jon?” 

Martin is on the sofa, half-lying on the horrid red thing, the baby lying on his chest so she can drool on his checkered shirt. He looks mortified to have been caught, although in the dull light of an uncovered bulb, with the background noise of those ever-present tape recorders nestled in hidden places, he just looks - peaceful. His curly blonde hair shines in the bulblight and it puts Jon in mind of those terrible paintings of angels with allegorical hair colours. “I - do you-”

“I thought you might be here,” Jon says, and tries not to be obvious in the way he grips the back of a chair for support. “I mean - I knew. Sorry about that.” His fingers cling on too tight for Martin to see them shaking. He hopes. 

“You look tired,” Martin says. Baby burbles something, and presses her nose into his shirt. “Jon - c’mere, just for a second. I think she wants - um. Yeah?”

Jon considers refusing, but he honestly hasn’t got the energy to do so. “Okay,” he says, and so he goes there. 

Daisy is on her phone again. Her cousin in social services, after expressing cautiously polite surprise to her text, said there’d been no babies matching her description reported missing in the London area, and that he would check the South England register instead and get back to her. The police lists are unhelpful. Right now she’s playing a point-and-tap game Georgie showed her, but she’ll never tell the others that. “I’ve narrowed down the options, but we’re still basically at square one,” she says, not looking up from her screen. “I think that-”

“Shhh!” 

Deja-vu tickles fingers down her spine, and Daisy looks up to see a scene very similar to the one that played out a few days before. Melanie is taking pictures. Tim looks begrudgingly endeared. Basira, book open in her lap, is hiding a smile behind curled fingers. 

On the long sofa, Martin lies stretched out, head tipped back on the armrest and pillowed on his jacket. Lying mostly on him is Jon, actual real Jon, who’s tucked under Martin’s arms like he’s perfectly comfortable there - like he fits. He’s wearing yesterday’s jumper and his hair is down, snaking around his shoulders and onto Martin’s bare skin, making the whole thing a thousand times more - more what? More intimate? 

And on top of Jon is the baby, in her little footie blanket, holding Jon’s navy-blue scarf to her like a comfort. 

“For Christ’s sake,” Daisy says. 

Everyone else seems, thankfully, to agree. 

Chapter Text

Jon isn’t around, and honestly, Martin is glad. Tim is - for once - out of the tunnels, making a cup of coffee in the mug Sasha bought him when he moved. He looks tired, but not too angry, and Martin just wants (for once) everyone in the damn place to get a few hours sleep. “Hey, Martin. Where’s-”

“He’s at Georgie’s,” Martin says, because he doesn’t like hearing Tim say Jon’s name anymore. “Is there much water in the kettle?”

“If you squeeze.” Tim looks from his mug to the baby in Martin’s arms. “For you or for it?”

“She’s hungry,” Martin says. In absence of a proper name Martin and Daisy and Jon have started calling her Ducky, just to stop calling her the baby every time they’re trying to get something done. They’ve also made a little headway into finding out where she came from; a few days ago Jon went into the tunnels and knocked on every door he could see until Helen emerged, whereupon he interrogated her about why she’d left a child in the tunnels. She had laughed and winked and told Jon, apparently, you aren’t the only one looking for a safe place to keep things. 

And then had vanished. Thanks, Helen. 

“Oh, she’s hungry,” Tim drawls. “Pardon me, miss madam.”

“And her name is-”

“You can’t name a baby after a blanket.”

“Well, we did. Suck it up and hold her so I can do this,” and Martin, before Tim can run away or say something unforgivable, hands Ducky to him all wrapped up in the cotton blanket that gave her a name. “Come on, Tim. Pull your weight.”

Lined up beside the sink in the break room are two empty plastic bottles, two caps with plastic nibs wobbling on them, and a box mostly full of baby-milk powder. The last week has been a - 

Learning curve. Yeah. 

“Martin, I can’t hold a baby!” 

“Oh, sorry, my apologies, you aren’t holding a baby right now and the world has exploded,” Martin says in monotone. The kettle has cooled enough now that he can probably mix the milk and let it sit for a bit without burning himself, Ducky, or the bottles. 

“Martin!” 

Martin turns around and leans against the counter, smiling despite himself - it’s been a very long week, and Jon hasn’t been the easiest to hang around with, driving himself crazy with the twin panic of the apocalypse coming up soon on the calendar and an anonymous baby to hold until Helen decides she wants her back. Sometimes it’s fun to leave the world of death and dying and - and, and the end of the world, and just hand your friend a baby to see what he does with her. 

Tim, so far, is doing well in that he hasn’t dropped her. Ducky is a peaceful thing, and doesn’t really cry apart from when she realises Jon isn’t in the room, which is why Jon’s been sneaking away during naps to do things like get his clothes from Georgie’s and, like, see the sun sometimes. She doesn’t mind playing pass-the-parcel with a lot of fascinated co-workers, and so now she’s just resting her round head on Tim’s shoulder, her fat fist occasionally bouncing off his arm, giggling to herself. Tim, on the other hand, looks like he’s just been handed a live bomb. He’s holding her rather like how people hold cats, an arm up her back and one supporting her legs, and she seems perfectly comfortable, but his face is drawn and panicky. “Martin! Take her back-”

“No, I don’t think I shall,” Martin says happily, fiddling with the cap on the bottle. “And you can feed her, since you look so happy.”

“Martin-”

Daisy, quite to the surprise of everyone (including Basira) takes to the baby like - well, like a duck to water. She doesn’t act on it, really, but she’s an open book when she wants to be, and when she’s lying on the sofa making goo-goo eyes at the baby in Jon’s arms, it isn’t difficult to see what she wants. 

“I need the loo, Daisy, can you hold her a second?” Jon is not, after all, completely oblivious to - things. He deposits Ducky and practically legs it out of the room, to the amusement of Basira, sitting at her desk with a pile of statement files she was planning to spend the afternoon at. 

“He was in a rush,” Basira says. 

Daisy, holding Ducky by the arms, is smiling in that way people do when they don’t make the face often. “I got the baby.”

“Yes, I can see that. You got the baby.” Basira sets her elbows on the table and cups her chin in her palms, resting it there so she can take a long look at Daisy. Work in the archives is more an abstract concept than something anyone does professionally, apart from Jon, and Basira could look at Daisy’s smile from the hours of nine to five very easily for no pay at all. “What are you going to do with the baby now you have her?”

“Hello, baby,” Daisy bounces Ducky up and down, dangling her feet on Daisy’s stomach. “Hello, baby…”

Basira muffles her laugh behind her fingers, not that Daisy would notice. She’s in almost her own world. “What about when Jon comes back? The loo isn’t very far away, you know.”

“He’ll just have to cope,” Daisy says. Ducky, giggling happily, sits on her chest, flapping around. The sleeves of her baby-gro are slightly too long because Georgie’s shop in the Primark sale had been quite a generic one, but it seems to be a constant source of entertainment for her. “Oh, who’s a good baby?”

“She’s not a dog, Daisy.”

“No, she’s a duck,” Daisy laughs. It’s the lightest sound Basira’s heard her make in months. “Oh, Basira, don’t you want a go?”

Basira recoils. “No. I’d drop her, or - or, or. Or something. You keep her.”

“Wish I could,” Daisy wriggles on the sofa until she’s sitting, with Ducky happily planted on her lap. “I wonder when Helen’s gonna come back and get her?”

“Maybe never,” says Jon from the door, and Basira tries to hide how she startled at his voice. He’s become more quiet recently, padding from shadow to shadow, tucked into the corners, seeing but not being seen in turn. 

“She’ll want her back when we’ve all got good and attached,” Basira says. She doesn’t want to, but someone has to be the voice of reason, and with Jon and Daisy making eyes and cooing at the thing someone has to be the one to keep their head. 

Daisy frowns. “Basira…”

“Don’t let’s think about it,” Jon murmurs, and his scarred hand touches Daisy’s shoulder briefly before moving to rest on the back of the sofa. “For the time being, anyway.”

Daisy seems to manage that all right, so Basira has to do the thinking about it for both of them. 

Georgie meets Ducky four days into her arrival in the archives, and her response is exactly as Jon and Melanie had predicted; she squeals and winks and giggles and holds her arms out for Martin, who’s on Ducky-duty, to hand her over. 

(And Melanie can’t help but catch how Martin looks to Jon before he does, and how Jon gives a barely-there nod. It angers her.) 

(Many things do, these days.) 

But where does Jon get off on deciding whether or not Georgie is trustworthy? Jon? Jon, who’s covered now in more scars than not - Jon, who regularly goes off the rails and has to be fed decades-old conspiracy theories until he stops shaking? It rubs Melanie the wrong way and she tries to say so with a hard glare, but unfortunately Jon’s attention is wholly on the fucking baby. Dippy or Doppy or whatever they’ve called it. 

“She’s just precious,” Georgie says, cradling Ducky with the experience of a well-versed aunt. She’s the youngest of four, and her two oldest sisters are already well on the way to creating little Barker clans of their own; out of the whole of them in the archives, Georgie is the only one who’s actually interacted with anyone under the age of four before. “Oh, does baby like her home? Does baby do filing? Is baby really into staples?”

Melanie rolls her eyes. “It can’t understand you.” 

“Mel, you’re so boring. Babies respond to tone of voice. You better not have been talking to her like that the whole week.”

“‘Course not,” Melanie says uncomfortably, but Georgie is cooing and clucking and lost in her own world and doesn’t seem to notice.

“Hold her, please,” Jon says, Ducky balanced on one arm as he rubs at his eyes under his glasses with the other. 

Basira looks over her shoulder, as if expecting him to have been talking to anyone else. “Who, me?” 

“No, the filing cabinet,” Jon says. “Of course you. I can’t - I need to - listen, I’m pretty sure there’s someone in my office who knows Agnes, or who is actively in the Lightless Flame, and I don’t really want. Um. Babies? I don’t want. If Helen’s keeping quiet, I want to, too, and I don’t think the Desolation finding out about - about - is a good idea. So. Yes, you, if you wouldn’t mind, and I can go take this statement and, and hopefully not set the whole place on fire.”

“Uh.” Basira can’t very well refuse that, though, not with Jon giving her that look he so often does of bedraggled responsibility. “Uh, okay. Give here, then.”

He looks relieved, as though there was ever a world where she would have said no, and hands Ducky to her with the sort of gentleness that should be foreign to him, but isn’t. Jon is careful with everything and everyone but himself. “Thank you. I’ll be - I’ll be right back.”

So now Basira is standing in the main office, surrounded by dead, black monitors and old stacked statements, rocking a baby gently in her arms. Ducky finds the end of her hijab and waves it around for a bit, before getting bored and shoving it in her mouth. She gurgles a little bit. 

“Same,” Basira says. Pats her on the back. That’s what you do to babies, isn’t it?

She wishes someone would come back, but Martin is with Elias upstairs, and Daisy is out on one of her mysterious missions taken on behalf of the aforementioned, and Melanie and Georgie have gone out for their sacred lunchtime drinks. And Jon is in his office, dealing with yet another spooky character that wants to hurt them, and she has no doubt he’ll come out with another - something on him. Everyone they meet has to make their mark. Basira had wondered one night, after jolting awake from a dream where she couldn’t escape the watchful eyes in the moon, whether Jon trades the privilege of seeing for the suffering of experience. Once you feel what we can do, then you can watch us. 

And he still can’t curl the fingers of his right hand properly, and on quiet nights she can hear him shouting in his sleep. 

Ducky is a quiet child, at least, apart from when she realises Jon isn’t within arm’s reach, and so she’s perfectly happy to sit against Basira, chewing on the parts of her clothes she can reach. 

And Basira does have some work of her own to chase up. She walks very gently over to her desk, to the open statement folder there, the three typewritten pages askew and covered in her own notes in red ink. It’s from a man who lives just outside Aberystwyth, or possibly lived, and his struggle with the plughole of his bathtub, which had been growing until it could fit a regularly-sized man inside. It’s interesting even without the extra pressure of the looming apocalypse. “Do you want to help,” she murmurs to the baby on her, bouncing her a little on her arm, “Do you know anything about the Dark? Anything about the Vast?”

Ducky giggles. 

“That’s very helpful,” Basira says seriously, and makes a little mark against the sheet. “Thank you very much.”

Jon watches from the door, his left hand wrapped around the doorknob, watching but escaping being watched. He could interrupt, but he doesn’t much want to. 

And all the while, Basira recites the statement, looking as peaceful and content as she ever has done these past few weeks. 

“I think you’re being harsh,” Georgie says, and watches Melanie’s face turn sour. 

It often does these days, no matter how sweet the cider is, and Georgie doesn’t know the reason for it. She wishes she did - she could help, she could try and fix it, and she knows Melanie would be more open to the concept than Jon ever was. But she can’t very well do anything until Melanie - 

“I’m not being harsh at all,” Melanie says, arms folded tightly across her chest. “I think they’ve all gone bonkers - and you, too. It-”

“She!”

“Has obviously been dropped by Helen for something bad. I don’t get why Jon’s paranoia stretches to, to me and Tim and you and the whole fucking world, but not to a mystery kid that has this, like, mental link to him. It’s nuts. It’s stupid.” 

“If you even talked to her-”

“She’s a baby,” says Melanie. Georgie misses when it was easy to talk to her, without every sentence being a potential for an ugly explosion. “What can I say to a baby that’ll be meaningful in any way?”

“Hold her, then.”

“Fine.”

Which is how they get to here, now, Georgie leaning against the doorframe of Jon’s office and watching the awkward little scene with a bubble of love very deep and quiet in her stomach. Jon is sitting against his desk, holding Ducky, his glasses on the very tip of his nose and his head dipped in exhaustion; Martin has been busy, recently, and Jon doesn’t actually listen to anyone else when it comes to taking care of himself. 

“...Georgie’s idea,” Melanie is saying, huffily. Although she’s shorter than Jon, she looks a lot - larger, like she takes up more room in the space. 

Jon has been diminishing recently, and there wasn’t much there to begin with. He was always slight, even in university, and the eyes are eating him up right before Georgie’s - 

Well. 

Jon looks at Georgie and he looks like he would laugh if he had the energy. “Georgie’s idea,” he echoes. “Baby therapy, hm? That’s a new one.”

Melanie looks cross. “Well there’s no need to laugh about it.”

“I wasn’t laughing.” Jon is earnest when he wants to be, and Georgie can see Melanie’s scowl, unwilling to be taken quite so seriously as that. “She’s quiet, even for Basira - she’ll, she’ll let you hold her.”

“Mel, take the baby and let Jon get some sleep,” Georgie says, and both of them turn to her like they’ve forgotten she was there. 

“I don’t-”

“I don’t-”

“Melanie,” Georgie says. 

The cruelty drops from Melanie’s face, like a shade was hovering there pretending to be her, like something has just chased away the Melanie that thought it was real. In its place she just looks tired. “I’ll hold the damn baby if you both stop looking at me like that, deal?”

Jon laughs softly. “Deal. Hold out your hands.” 

Georgie debates with herself for a ferocious few moments over whether or not to film from her pocket, but the way Melanie’s expression smooths and softens, goes surprised like she thought Ducky would vanish on contact, makes her decide against it. This is a moment for her, and for Melanie, and for Jon almost entirely dead on his feet, and for the happy baby touching her small, small fingers to Melanie’s lips. 

“Oh - I’m - I didn’t know you were in here-”

Jon, so tired that his eyes are stinging with the pain of it, drags the lids up over them to see who’s come into the break room. He knows he stinks of nicotine, and there’s a mostly-empty bag of rolling tobacco and papers beside it on the counter to verify the account. The figure standing in the doorway is just a black shadow, at odds with the light in the corridor compared to the darkness of the room. “Who - who’s there?”

“It’s Tim,” says Tim, and his voice is quieter and gentler and nicer than Jon has heard it for months. “Sorry, I - I was looking-”

“Where’s Martin,” Jon whispers hoarsely, struggling to sit up on the sofa and only half-managing it, his head slumped over the side into the air, his neck screaming at the odd angle. “Wh-”

“He’s gone to Boots, I think,” the silhouette that calls itself Tim says, moving further into the room. Still quiet, still soft. Jon wishes his eyes would focus, wishes his body would move, wishes he could stop feeling like a weed snapped in half, but he simply can’t. 

“Boots?”

“Nappies. And more Aptamil,” Tim closes the door with his foot, and slowly, slowly Jon’s vision adjusts. 

Immediately the cause for the whispering becomes clear. Cradled in Tim’s arms, with a little yellow rubber dummy in her mouth, is Ducky, sleeping as peacefully as she would anywhere else. Jon wonders when that happened. For all her passive agreement to be a sort of mascot for the archives, it takes a lot to get her to sleep on someone new, and it’s been a busy few nights of crying and wailing to get her to settle for Martin instead of for Jon. And yet there she snoozes, making little bubbly sounds with every outbreath. “Oh -”

“Yeah,” Tim says, and some of the hardness flashes in his eyes. “This okay with you, Master Eyeball?”

Jon’s throat hurts when he swallows. “I-”

“She’s sleeping,” and Tim sounds almost defensive. “You shouldn’t disturb her.”

Jon smiles. “I was going to say that you can.” And he has to stop to swallow again, to coat his dry throat. “You can sit here if you want.” His body is far, far too heavy for him, but he manages to stand with a staggering sway, lurching against the counter with a sickening heave of vertigo. 

Tim moves closer into the room. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Going to my - going to my office.”

Ducky burbles unaware. 

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

Jon, with an incredible effort, waves his hand at Tim and at the sofa. “Because that’s where Ducky sleeps and you’ve got her. And I don’t - think you would want me here.”

Tim makes a scoffing, disbelieving noise. “You’re pretty pathetic when you mope, Jon.” 

“What?” Jon stops with his hand on the door, and the room is spinning far too much for him to continue, or else he’d be making a valiant effort to fight back.

“Moping,” and Tim sounds like he’s smiling, something he hasn’t done around Jon in - oh, it must be a year. Maybe more. “Come and sit on the damn sofa with your little eyeball baby and be happy about it like anyone else.”

Little eyeball baby is the thing that shocks Jon into doing what he’s told, and he slowly, achingly makes his way back over to the sofa again. “Tim-”

“You’ll wake her up,” Tim says. He stares, intense, and Jon sees - oh, a thousand things. Ducky is, right now, the only thing sleeping between he, Tim, and an absolute raging argument, and frankly Jon hasn’t got anything left in him to have the blowup that’s been building. 

So he sits. 

They exist there, side by side, in the uncomfortable silence of strangers who were once something more. 

Until, of course, Jon falls asleep. 

When Martin comes back, his hand is right about to slap the light switch on when a voice from the dark hisses, “Don’t!”

He pauses. “Huh-”

“They’re both sleeping,” the voice, which belongs to Tim, sounds very annoyed. “I can’t feel my arm. Is this what you put up with?” 

Martin peeks through the darkness, and sees the baby in his arms, and the archivist on his shoulder, and can’t help his merry laugh.