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It wasn’t difficult to hide, most of the time. All he had to do was not push himself too hard physically, and, well...there was a reason he stuck to academia and desk work. If he got in before everyone else, he could be settled at his desk and busy with research or note-taking by the time the others filed in, and if he forgot to eat or only realized it was the end of the day when Tim tapped him on the shoulder to break him out of whatever he was caught up in, then didn’t that just make him look better? Harder working? And if sometimes his hands shook a little as he gathered his things, or he occasionally dropped something, it was just assumed to be a case of low blood sugar.
Things changed when Elias promoted him. It had been a relief at first to have an office all to himself, even as he was terrified of trying to live up to standards he didn’t so much as have a guide for. The tremor being more pronounced in general wasn’t a problem if nobody could simply glance over to see it, and Tim and Sasha were fine. They always had been. But he hadn’t agreed to someone else. Much less someone like Martin. Tim and Sasha knew how to do their jobs, and only came to him if they actually needed something. Martin Blackwood, on the other hand, didn’t seem to understand anything and was always making tea for everyone and dropping it off on his desk at all hours and Jon hated him for it. It had taken the man a week simply to learn to announce his presence before setting a mug of hot liquid onto his desk.
Even after that, Martin always hovered just a little too long after setting down his tea. Waiting to see him drink it, Jon assumed. His suspicion was confirmed when Martin finally broke the silence one morning to ask if he was doing something wrong, because “Tim said this was how you liked your tea, but if it’s not right I can fix it?” He’d assured Martin that it was fine, perhaps a little more curtly than he should have, and spent some time wondering how and when Tim had figured out how he liked his tea. Jon had always hated being watched when he ate or drank, even on days when his hands were steady, so when had he learned? Trying to puzzle that out set him behind schedule, and maybe it wasn’t entirely fair to blame Martin for that but if the man hadn’t been doing so much fussing all the time Jon wouldn’t have gotten sidetracked.
As far as Jon knew, the first time any of his assistants actually saw his hands shake was the day Martin came into his office after two weeks of ‘sick leave’ with the...the worms. That was fair, though; even if he disguised his horror at Martin’s statement as simple disgust he could hardly be blamed for being a little bit shaken. Offering Martin his- the room he sometimes used- had been out of his mouth before he could take it back, and the poor man was rattled enough himself that Jon doubted Martin would have even noticed the way his hand was trembling as he took notes.
It got bad after Prentiss attacked in earnest. He’d been useless at trying to get the worms out of his body, between dropping the corkscrew and shaking so badly that he stabbed himself in the wrong part of the arm when he finally steeled himself to try. God knows what he would have done if it weren’t for Tim and Martin, and later the ECDC. At least Sasha had been safe. After that, there’d at least been an excuse he could point to for his unsteady hands. Something that wasn’t just an inherent flaw. If Tim’s coordination wasn’t affected nearly as much as his was, well, nobody wants to talk about the worms and what damage they’d done under all those scars. Of course, it didn’t really matter when he couldn’t trust any of them. There wasn’t exactly time for idle chatter when he could never take one moment to let his guard down.
A lot didn’t matter anymore by the time he had no hopes of hiding it anymore. Even after his burn healed he didn’t have full function in that hand anymore. Anything that required precision was a lost cause. Georgie pretended she didn’t see it, just as Jon had asked her to back in uni. She was angry with him for a lot of things, and didn’t understand that he wasn’t just being stubborn when he told her he needed the statements, but she never commented when she saw him wiping down the counter after trying to drink something on a particularly bad day.
Every so often, when he was actually in his office, Martin would still bring him tea. Once he even cleared a space on his desk that would allow him to pick it up while the man was still in the room. It was painstakingly careful, the way he slid it over to the edge of his desk before he tried to pick it up. Knowing that if he’d tried to lift and keep it held up as he moved it towards himself over the desk he would have splattered tea on at least one statement. He still shook as he brought the tea to his lips, of course, but he managed to drink and meet Martin’s eyes, if only for a moment. He’d never been the best at smiling even before the worms had burrowed into his face, and it was all the more crooked now, but he tried as he thanked Martin. The look on the other man’s face hurt so much that he didn’t try again.
He dropped the tapes several times as he went through them, the tremor getting more pronounced as he listened to what he was pretty sure would be the last statements he’d ever hear. It would only be in hindsight, as the pain gripped him, that Jon would realize that the difficulty he had lighting Gerry’s page on fire wasn’t just an effect of unsteady hands.
It really shouldn’t have come as a surprise that choosing to become something...else wouldn’t have fixed anything that came before. That even his good hand wouldn’t go back to normal, or at least back to what it had been before all of this started. Why, after all, would the Eye give up a chance to watch him suffer with the shame of being seen fumbling uselessly with delicate tasks? Why shouldn’t the Archivist provide it low-level feeding just by going about his daily life?
He never bothered to make himself tea after returning to the Archives. It just wasn’t a good idea anymore to fuss with the kettle, and even if he bothered it would just bring back waves of painful memories. Even seeing the breakroom would take the breath from his lungs some days, the ghosts of days gone by haunting his thoughts long after he’d closed himself back safely behind his office door. He’d wanted so badly for nobody to bother him and see the way he shook, and now that he had it he wanted anything else.
Thinking back on it, as he so often did on the trip to Scotland, Jon would remember that when Martin had finally taken his hand he’d felt the shaking stop, if only for a moment. They never spoke about so many things in that short reprieve. The first few days were spent constantly on edge. Struggling to learn how to sleep in the presence of another person, flinching at every sound, the crushing moment of fear when the mist slowly rolled in before they both remembered that when you aren’t surrounded by the Fears, fog was just something that happened sometimes...one night, though, as they both lay awake on pillows that never stopped smelling of dust, Jon had admitted to the man he loved that he’d always liked when Martin brought him tea, even in the early days. That it had been shame and fear of judgement that made him snippy, and that the shaky hands were never the fault of damage he’d suffered at something supernatural. Martin had looked at him so gently then, lifted Jon’s good hand to his lips before scolding him for ever thinking that something like that was something to be ashamed of. The way he leaned into Jon’s touch afterward, even though he knew perfectly well how unpleasant the feeling of his burnt palm was, was enough to actually make Jon believe him.