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Jon couldn’t tell you exactly when it started, though he has a pretty damn good idea.
Sometimes he can still feel the cobwebs running over his skin, brushes of light, sticky silk that pull him forward. Knock on the door. Knock on the door. Knock on the door.
If his grandmother noticed, she was too busy crocheting or complaining about him to the neighbors to particularly care. Like a seed wedged in his lungs, it all grew and grew until it was in everything, part of everything. The thoughts and actions follow close behind through uni and to his job at the Magnus Institute.
It all comes to crushing apex when he is appointed Head Archivist, despite not knowing what a Head Archivist does or how to effectively be one.
Tim’s probably the one who started the joke that Jon lived in the Archives. He’s the one that leans into it the most, though Sasha has made a few quips to him about how the cot in the spare room couldn’t be comfortable. While the idea that Jon lives in their workplace is incredibly juvenile, like how a child thinks their school teacher sleeps under her desk, he can’t exactly refute the bit about the cot. He has slept on it several times and it does leave a particular ache in the center of his back.
(Martin always sends him worried glances when he notices Jon wearing the same clothes as the day before. It’s irritating, as if he’s trying to be more of a nuisance.)
It’s not that he stays overnight often, though it probably seems that way. He has to get to his office early every morning, leaving time to check the locks on his front door several times and be certain they’re closed. When he gets to the Institute, the light in his office flicks on and off nine times.
Never eight times, mind you. He doesn’t exactly know what would happen if he flipped the switch eight times, but he’s certain it can’t be good.
It’s...well, comforting isn’t really the correct word. In fact, it feels pretty goddamn terrible. But each finished motion fills him with a sense of relief and for a moment whatever’s had him wrapped around the throat since he was eight loosens for just a moment and he can gasp in some air.
Whatever part of his brain still clings to rationality rolls it’s metaphorical eyes, informing him that hitting a lightswitch isn’t going to stop anyone from knowing how scared he really is, should it come down to it.
But the other part of his brain is louder, so much louder, so he just...does it.
But he also knows it’s not normal, so there is no way anyone at the Institute can ever catch him doing any of this inane bullshit. His appointment as Head Archivist has already been (understandably) questioned by some of his coworkers and he really can’t afford to have them see the things he does. He realizes early on that it has to stay secret. At all costs.
Jon quickly regrets letting Martin stay in the Archives after the Prentiss incident. He’s always been a smothering type and will almost certainly tell him off if he finds out the hour his boss actually arrives at the Institute. Still, the lightswitch seems more important than ever now (Jon’s mind decides that now, the light will protect his Assistants), so he just takes to opening his office door quietly.
It seems to work, because they all get out of the Prentiss attack alive, though Tim and Jon are covered in pockmark scars and Sasha starts acting particularly odd. Jon has half a mind to make Tim’s jokes a reality and take up residence in the spare room once Martin finally leaves, but he’s started checking his windows now, despite his flat being on the sixth floor.
One can never be too careful with a murderer on the loose.
Basira gives him tapes and Jon watches them until his eyes hurt and then watches them again, just in case. The click of the old VCR he’d dragged into his office becomes as comforting a noise as the click of a tape recorder. He has to figure out who was behind Gertrude’s murder, who it is in the Archives that still wants him dead.
The mental images come without warning, pushing past whatever thoughts are already in his head. Now it’s him slumped over in a forgotten room down in the tunnels, blood spreading slowly from the gaping wound inside his chest. He closes his eyes tight but it does nothing to block out the pictures, blood and gore and all.
Jon’s imaginary killer is a rotating cast of literally everyone at the Institute, though more often than not it’s one of his Assistants, standing over him with a bloody knife or smoking gun. It’s even been Elias, that bored look on his face that seems to be permanently embedded into his features staring down at Jon’s dead body, as though he’s just another completed bit of paperwork.
Things go just a bit sideways when Martin walks in on Jon looking at some photos he’s collected (“Is that’s Tim’s house?”). There’s an intervention, and then Tim is angry and Martin is walking on eggshells. Jon goes into the tunnels after the thing that isn’t Sasha and things go even more sideways. So sideways, in fact, that he ends up on his college ex girlfriend’s doorstep.
“Please, Georgie, I just need some place to lay low for a while.”
“...Shoes off on the carpet.”
The handwashing starts after Leitner, this Jon knows for sure. Sometimes he swears he can feel the slime of worms on his skin or sees blood under his fingernails and has to rush to the bathroom, locking the door and scrubbing until his fingers are red. Typically it only takes a few moments, but he once stood there for nearly fifteen minutes, trying to scratch the feeling away.
The skin on the backs of his hands start to crack, tiny beads of blood popping up on the surface. The cuts burn under the water, turning the basin red, but it’s a deserved pain, he’s sure. It’s weirdly comforting, given it’s the only thing his scarred right hand can feel anymore.
Georgie has a tiny bottle of scented lotion in her bathroom, an expensive gift from a friend of hers that smells like cherry blossoms. He uses it until he gets trapped surrounded by mannequins and then he never wants to smell cherry blossom again.
Jon ends up in Beijing and then in America, and finally gets drawn back to the Institute like a moth to flame. Tim somehow became angrier in his absence and so has Melanie. Martin brings him tea and he thanks him automatically but doesn’t drink it.
The night before they leave for Great Yarmouth, he flicks the light in his office eighteen times and knows it won’t mean a damn thing.
Jon wakes up six months later as The Archivist.
Tim is dead and Daisy (probably) died and Martin is somewhere upstairs under the Lonely fog of Peter Lukas. Despite having been essentially dead himself, some days it takes all Jon has not to just put his head down on his desk and fall asleep.
Other days, he finds himself sitting in front of box after box of statements, trying to find the right way to shuffle the files that stops the pounding in his head. Every combination feels wrong, like a buzzing in the tips of his fingers that will only go away when he’s found that perfect, golden arrangement. Something in the back of his head whispers that if he gets it right, Martin will be okay.
His hands ache when he stands up, and he knows he’s touched the ground (worms dirt blood dirt infection worms –) so he heads for the sink. He doesn't bleed anymore, not really. The red crosshatches close up as soon as they appear, gone before he even makes it back to his desk.
Getting Daisy back from the Buried hurts in more ways than one. It takes weeks for the feeling of pressure building against Jon’s body to dissipate. The feeling of dust on his tongue never does. He starts imagining pushing his friends into the coffin and slamming the door. When his imagination conjures up the look on Martin’s face as he topples backwards into the dirt, he finds a dark corner of the Archives and sobs.
Melanie makes her decision. Jon calls her an ambulance and flicks the light in his office meditatively until it arrives at the Institute.
He’s somewhat unsurprised at the revelation that Elias is actually Jonah Magnus, body-hopping through the centuries. What does surprise him is when Trevor and Julia show up, flanked by the thing that stole Sasha, and he barely makes it to the tunnels with Basira and Daisy’s help.
He ignores the litany in his head of dirt tunnel pressure worms danger around every corner count the turns until he stumbles upon the Panopticon and Elias. Jonah.
Laughter fades in time with his vision, and when Jon opens his eyes he only sees an endless coastline. Lukas laughs at him too, then speaks then screams and Jon is alone.
And then he is not.
He grabs onto Martin, both physically and with whatever it is that grows inside his chest. Pulls Martin closer and closer and closer until he’s gasping “I see you, Jon.” and falling into Jon’s arms.
Daisy’s cabin is dusty and it sets off alarms in Jon’s head that he tries his best to shove away. But he forgets that Martin is observant now (well, always has been) and levels him with several concerned looks before words and numbers and fears are rushing out of his mouth before he can stop them.
“I know it’s stupid.” Jon starts, fingernails scratching at the back of his hand. The wounds seal up as soon as they are created. He’s perched on the very end of the couch, which is so covered in stains that it makes Jon’s skin crawl. Martin interrupts him, reaching over to knock his hand away and intertwine their fingers in one smooth motion.
“It’s not stupid. Brains aren’t meant to process all of,” Martin gestures vaguely around him with his other hand, “this . It’s scary.”
Jon frowns. “No, this, this I’ve been doing since I was a child.” Then he makes a noise that he thinks might have been a laugh in another time. “Well, not all of it. Some things I did pick up along the way because of...this.”
“I remember.” Martin says. “You used to come into the Archives super early when I was staying there and flick the lights a bunch of times. I figured it was, you know, something in your head. I didn’t want to ask though. Seemed rude.”
Jon doesn’t know how to answer, so he just looks away. There’s a cobweb in the corner of the room. He watches a tiny spider scurry off into the darkness.
Martin runs his thumb over his knuckles and he shivers involuntarily. Full of sudden impulse, he uses one hand as a support to lean over and kiss him, dusty couch be damned.
(And if he scrubs his palms raw ten minutes later, Martin doesn’t mention it.)
Once they clean up the cabin a bit (a lot), it’s actually quite nice to live in. The village is within walking distance and Martin goes every Thursday for groceries. Jon busies himself waiting for statements from Basira by reading the few books–classics, to his surprise–that Daisy has shoved in a box in one of the closets. It doesn’t help the growing pit in his stomach, but it’s better than nothing.
It’s not easy, though nothing in Jon’s life has ever been easy. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night, prying himself from Martin’s grasp because he has to go check the lock on the door (“I’m aware I can Know if it’s locked, Martin. That’s not the point.”).
Martin is patient, though, a quality that Jon is now realizing he has been underappreciating for years. He lets Jon sit on the kitchen counter while he cooks, reading out the recipe. He feels terrible not helping, but he can’t help the pictures that force their way into his head when he picks up one of Daisy’s unsettingly sharp cooking knives (he starts describing them to Martin on accident once, giving the specific details of blood and pain and gore, only stopping when Martin started shaking him. It wasn’t until later than he realized he wasn’t as hungry as usual. He knows he should feel guilty about it. He doesn’t).
In a few weeks, Jon will tear the world apart with his words. He will speak words that are not his, in a voice that does not belong to him, and bring forth things that he does not understand or want. He will lay passed out on the cabin floor, tape recorder in hand, for six minutes and twenty-four seconds until Martin wakes him. The curtains will fly open of their own accord and he will sob when he first catches a glimpse of the sky. Not out of sadness, but of some ugly form of joy that sits in the bottom of his stomach like a rock.
In a few weeks, everything will change. But that is not now, that is then.
Now, Jon is lying in the cabin’s one bed, reading a passage from The Iliad out loud. Martin is smiling, rubbing unscented lotion into the burns on Jon’s hand. He smiles even when Jon frowns, repeating a line six times because it won’t come out right.
They fall asleep only after Jon hits the lightswitch three times and presses a kiss to Martin’s forehead.