Work Text:
Day One: Barnabas Bennett - Ghost AU
He was cold, so very cold.
It didn’t hurt, nothing did anymore, and yet he could not escape the feeling that crawled down to his very bones.
Did he still have bones? A body? He couldn’t quite tell. It had been so long, or had felt it at least since Lukas has stolen him away.
Taken from his friends, from his work, from his beloved Jonah.
Barnabas came into awareness suddenly. One moment he was drifting in the numbing cold, the next he realised he could hear a voice, a faint pressure against where he imagined his forehead would be. The world filled in around him, the cadence of the voice familiar, even if the accent was not. He was in an office, a man he didn’t recognise sitting at the desk.
Wait.
The desk.
That was Jonah’s desk.
The deep dark wood was familiar, Barnabas having spent many hours around it (and on top of it on occasion). He would recognise it anywhere.
“Oh, my Darling. It won’t be long now, my new Archivist is coming along nicely, took The Corruption’s scars well and his dealings with Miss King and Detective Tonner lead me to believe that The Hunt and The Slaughter will not be far behind.”
The man behind the desk was sitting with his arms on the desk in front of him, his words muffled by the skull he held in his hands, lips gently pressed to the bone. Barnabus, despite his position next to the wooden desk, could almost feel the wisp of the man’s breath against his skin. He looked around, confused. Who was this man who sat at Jonah’s desk whispering at skulls about Archivists and Hunts and Detectives?
It was hard to read, his vision still desaturated with the freezing fog that had descended on him that terrible day in Moorland house, yet he peered at the brass plate on Jonah’s desk.
Elias Bouchard, Head of the Magnus Institute
Huh.
This wasn’t the Institute Barnabas remembered, the small house in Edinburgh that had books and papers and letters crammed into every inch of storage. This single room was large and clean and empty. A few bookshelves that would have collapsed if they had held even a quarter of Jonah’s haphazard collection of books. But the Owl symbol on the header of the paperwork that littered the desk was familiar. He had many fond memories of Jonah sketching it out on comfortable winter nights in front of the fire in his home. Had Jonah retired? He honestly had never seemed the type. He wondered how long it had been since this Elias had taken over from dear Jonah.
Mr Bouchard started talking again. Why could Barnabus feel the man’s breath on his own skin when he whispered against the aged bone?
“I wish you could see it, Barnabas,” Wait, what? “It will all be so beautiful. And I shall sit above it as it’s King, I only wish you could sit by my side. What is the point of this world, of the endless tide of life without you? Maybe I will be able to bring you back when it is all over? When The End bows to me, surely you could join me, my love.”
Barnabas had a sudden terrible feeling as the man at the desk looked up from the skull. Inside of Elias Bouchard’s skull sat the painfully familiar pair of green eyes that Barnabas had spent endless hours gazing into.
“Jonah?” His voice barely raised above a whisper. The man at the desk certainly didn’t appear to hear him. His verdant gaze trained in the distance as his lips remained pressed to the skull. No, not just any skull, Barnabas couldn’t ignore the truth anymore.
It was his skull.
The realisation that it had certainly been more than a few months since he was taken (since he died), more than a few years even, chilled Barnabas even further. He reached forward towards his lover, a new body and a new name hadn’t perturbed Barnabas the first time Jonah had done it when they were teenagers, it wasn’t enough for Bennett to turn away from him now. But nothing happened, no arm reached out before him. He looked down, to see nothing, as if he wasn’t there at all.
“I miss you so Barnabas, but don’t worry we will be together soon enough.”