Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The act of object reacquisition was a subtle and refined technique. As much of an art as it was a science, it was more than simply the act of finding lost things. It was a study in human behavior: where did they go the most? What habits, small acts of routine, slipped through the human mind with little recognition or cognizance? What objects were precious enough that humans would do anything to get them back?

It was not only finding precious items, such as engagement rings or keys to safes or notarized wills. Objects of great sentimental value were frequently targets for acquisition. Humanity had a tendency to ascribe worth towards something worthless, meaning into something meaningless. 

Jon thought about the philosophical implications of his chosen career as he stood in front of a very familiar door. It was located underneath a rather dull industrial bridge, unassuming and uneventful in every aspect except for the fact that it was cracked, rather solidly, down the middle. It once lead over the Thames, connecting London with the rest of the world. It now lead nowhere. Likely for the best. Jon did rather dislike leaving London. He didn’t think anybody should do it. 

The door was odd in every angle, and hurt his head. Uncommon, incorrect, and strangely offensive, there were five fingerprints pressed into the steel, as if a child had pressed their hand in. Jon found his hand reaching up, unconsciously aching to press his own hand into the divots that seemed made for him.

A sharp tugging at his sleeve distracted his attention, and Jon looked down. Large, yellow teeth glistening with saliva were locked on his tan trenchcoat sleeve, and at his side the wolf was growing deep in her throat. 

“Ah, right. Thank you.” Jon carefully separated his jacket from her jaws and patted her on the head. “Good dog.” She eyed him balefully. “Yes, I’m sorry to condescend.”

Then he took a deep breath, balled his hand, and knocked on the steel door with three hard raps. The sound echoed strangely, as if it was bouncing down a large corridor. Which was strange: there was nothing behind the door. You could walk around it in a tight, two meter circle. 

But the door opened in short enough order, and an inhumanly tall woman stood at the threshold. She wore loud print clothing, or maybe the clothing wore her, and her afro frizzed out like an explosion. Her hands scraped the ground from where they dangled at her side. Her smile was ceramic, and her eyes were spiralling ouroborus eating themselves, but something in her expression seemed to light up when she saw Jon and the wolf. 

“Archivist!” Helen trilled, clapping her hands together. As best as she could. “And company! What a treat to see you.” She looked down at the wolf, whose tail lashed in a lazy rhythm. “Still chasing rabbits, detective?”

“Don’t antagonize Daisy, she gets tetchy.”

“Of course. My apologies to your sister, Archivist.” Helen clasped her hands together, claws scraping against each other. “Now, is it business or pleasure?”

“Business, I’m afraid.” Jon withdrew a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolding it and holding it above his head to meet her eyes. She reached out and speared it with a finger, looking at it curiously. “I’m looking for this item. I’ve been lead to believe that you have it.”

Helen hummed, poking several more holes through the paper. Apparently just for fun. “I know the taste of this item, yes. What will you give me for it?”

Business was business. Thankfully, Jon and Helen were very frequent business partners, and he liked to think that they were friends too. He unzipped his bookbag and withdrew a fidget cube from it. Helen’s spiralling eyes spun a little faster when she saw it, and Jon held it tantalizingly in front of her. 

“My client’s fidget cube. He’s had it for five years, and he is severely ADHD. What do you say?”

“An acceptable trade!” Helen rubbed her fingers together, Daisy whining softly at the harsh sound of two knives sharpening together. “Let me see if I can find it...that old thing was so long ago…”

Helen disappeared for a second, like a glitch in the world, and Jon waited patiently in front of the door. Daisy growled something cautionary. 

“Yes, it is curious how our client hasn’t been eaten yet. I didn’t think long term stalking was really Helen’s style .” Jon rubbed his chin, frowning as he brushed a thumb over the short bristles. Time to shave again. He already looked old enough without a beard, a beard just made him look middle aged. “It’s possible that the item that the Spiral stole is an anchor that slowly draws our client back within her grasp...and that by swapping items, all I’m doing is swapping the anchor. I should likely warn him that he may be at high risk of being eaten by the Spiral.”

Daisy barked, in a very recriminating way.

“Well, I hardly think it’s any of my business whether or not he lives or dies. I’m an object finder, not a bodyguard.”

Before they could devolve into their old argument, Helen reappeared at the door. A single item was draped over her arm - a skipping rope, as if for a child. She tossed it to Daisy lightly, who immediately began playing with it. “Here you are, Archivist.” Jon lightly tossed the fidget cube to her, and she let it disappear into the swirling vortex of her corridors. “Always nice doing business with you.”

“Likewise,” Jon said politely. But something made him hesitate - Daisy’s scolding, maybe, or his own curiosity. It would really be the death of him one day. “May I ask, Helen - why have you not consumed Marcus Mackenzie yet?”

“Oh, is that who owns this?” Helen hummed, tapping her finger with one knife-sharp finger. “I think I already did. I just spat him out. A lot of people escaped my hallways when the world ended, you know.”

“Are you planning on taking him back?” Jon asked, from sheer curiosity. Daisy stood still, ears flicking. “I’ve already received my payment from him. His Statement made it seem as if you’ve been chasing him and his father for a long time.”

Helen trilled another laugh, but there was another edge to it. A little more frantic, a little more unsure. “I’m hardly the type to go stealing off another monster’s plate!” She winked at Jon - the glowing purple light in one of her eyes extinguishing and re-igniting - before stepping backwards into the void. “See you during pub night. And, my dear Archivist, do try to stay out of trouble.”

“You know me,” Jon joked weakly, “always keeping out of trouble.”

With a brandish of her hand the door slammed shut, and disappeared from reality completely. All Jon was left with was his pet wolf/best friend, a limp skipping rope, and the forlorn remnants of London Bridge. 

Jon shrugged, whistling sharply. “Come on, Daisy. Let’s go home.”

They picked their way through the rubble of the world together, the jump rope limply trailing through the dirt like a trail, and Jon and Daisy made their way home. 

Of course, it took twice as long as it should have, because the stupid subway had fallen into the infernal hell pits again and it would take four more hours for the indentured servants of the Metro to dig it back out.

He took the bus instead, sitting in the handicapped section so Daisy could have room to stretch out. The bus driver shot him anxious looks, likely wanting to tell him that giant wolves were not allowed on busses, but Jon simply raised an eyebrow and let his eyes flash green. He left him alone after that. Most did. 

The trip back to his flat/office was long, and Jon amused himself by staring out the window as he scratched Daisy’s head with one hand. London as usual: humans hurriedly walking the streets, heads down and parcels clutched tightly to their chests, and monsters slowly shambling the streets making ear-grating noises. Inhuman, strange things lurked in the alleyways and the dark crevasses, and oftentimes your familiar crosswalk on your commute to work could turn randomly and spontaneously into something that was debatably alive, probably oozing, but definitely not a crosswalk. Nothing was safe, nothing was sane, and London was one of the last urban centers still standing in any semblance of functionality. 

What could he say? The English were adaptable. Everybody made memes about the situation and graffitied them on decrepit buildings. What once was unimaginable and terrifying had long since flinched, and settled into the unremarkable present. People got up every day and went to work, because groceries still had to be bought and Amazon still had to be run - and if Debrah was a giant spider today and she wasn’t yesterday - well, you might have to change her catering preferences, but she had always been vegetarian anyway. It was one of the things Jon loved most about humanity, although he himself could not boast a membership of it: their resilience and adaptability. And how scared they could get. They practically scared themselves. Jon and his ilk didn’t even have to do anything!

 The only thing notable about the day was how clear the bright green skies were. You could even see the Giant Eye That Watches Over Us All clearly. Jon turned his face to it, feeling a strange parasocial connection to it. He found the constant surveillance and prying gaze into every corner of his life comforting, although he was aware that most didn’t. But that was really no surprise, was it?

Jon should interact more with humans. Outside of a business, ‘in exchange for finding your shit I’ll eat your trauma’ type transaction. Maybe they were fun! They definitely seemed fun. Daisy was always telling Jon he needed more friends besides her. 

He turned behind him to the couple minding their own business on the bus seat behind him. It was two young women, one of whom was reading a book and the other was staring out the window as he was. Jon frantically tried to remember what you said to humans, or how you interacted with them. 

He had never exactly been one, so he wouldn’t really know. 

Still, he could do his best. Jon smiled broadly at them, struggling to remember the right angle for a Genuine Human Smile. Was it like a half-circle? Or a quarter-circle? What did humans talk about? Last time Jon had a discussion with one, it was regarding the events that had made all of his teeth grow out of his head and start running around. He had seemed pretty obsessed with the whole teeth thing.

“Good morning!” Jon said, proud of himself for remembering the pleasantry. “Do you two like your teeth?”

One of the girls whimpered. The other one made the sign of the cross at him and began chanting under her breath - which, that was both rude and ineffective. Jon turned around in his seat, sinking down lower. Daisy stared at him judgmentally. 

“Shut up,” Jon hissed. 

Needless to say, by the time he got home he was tired. Working with Helen always put his teeth on edge, and Daisy was antsy. She ran around his feet as he stumbled up the stairs, prancing lightly as he pushed open the door to his office. 

Jon slept where he worked: sometimes literally, when he fell asleep on his desk, but most of the time he was capable of stumbling through the locked door in his office into his living quarters behind the office. It was only three rooms, really: the lobby, his office, and the library. The library used to be Daisy’s office, before - well. It was nice to have his own library. It was where he kept all the books he had stolen from that weird Victorian building.

He was fully intending on not even making it to his flat and just passing out on his visitor’s couch, when he opened the door. However, his lighthearted daydreams of restful sleep were rudely shattered when he already found someone primly sitting on his visitor’s couch. 

Upon retrospect, he should have noticed it the minute he walked in: Daisy had begun growling the second he opened the door.

Annabelle Cane stood up from her seat when she saw him. She was dressed, as always, in her immaculate pastel-goth gothic lolita style, complete with a prim parasol patterned after a spider’s web. She smiled beatifically at Jon. Her long white braids, carefully connected to each other through gossamer thin webbing, did nothing to hide the small caved in portion of her skull artfully covered with spider web. 

Jon was abruptly aware of the way that his dress shirt, slacks, scuffed trainers, and tan trenchcoat were covered with dust and grime, and that he didn’t look very impressive in front of the Daughter of the Mother of Spiders. But nobody really did, next to Annabelle. 

But, as always, Annabelle seemed nothing other than kindly enthusiastic to see him. “Come into my parlor, Jon!” Annabelle laughed, a delicate and wispy sound. “Hah. That’s a little spider humor for you.”

“Technically it’s my parlor,” Jon pointed out, and gently put a hand on Daisy’s head and eased her. “Down, girl, it’s just Annabelle.”

He closed the door behind him, and stepped forward so Annabelle could embrace him and kiss him on the cheek. Jon stiffly hugged her back, mindful of the way Daisy was still growling. It wasn’t as if he didn’t understand - Annabelle was likely one of, if not the most, dangerous people alive, and she didn’t regularly show up to his house in person unless far more was going on underneath the surface than she liked to pretend. But she was a friend, and more importantly had always been his steadfast ally. She had gotten him his office space and flat, had set him up, had welcomed him when he was lost and confused. You couldn’t put a price on that. Even if Daisy had never warmed up to her.

“I’ve had such an exhausting few days,” Annabelle moaned theatrically, walking back over to his desk so she could perch on the top. Daisy strode to her corner, leaping up into her tattered easy chair and biting furiously into one of her stashed femurs while keeping her golden eyes fixed on Annabelle. Jon, sensing a long conversation, moved to make tea instead. He made hers exactly how she liked it - sweet, with the good creamer and a generous dollop of blood - and tossed Daisy another fleshy rib from the freezer to appease her. It still had meat hanging off it, and she eagerly attacked it. “Rigging the Prime Minister’s election - I think Johnson is going to be a wonderful puppet, by the way, you must meet him, he’s such a doll - took so much out of me. Then there was shopping for Helen’s birthday present - I mean, what do you get the endless spiralling horror nightmare twister who has everything? And then there’s my most recent disaster. This, darling, is where you come in.”

Jon served her the tea, not bothering to take any himself. He never could make it right by himself. He sat down on his hard backed desk chair, carefully moving his tape recorders and Statements out of the way of Annabelle’s fluffy dress. “So this is a business call.”

“Business and pleasure should be mixed, in my experience,” Annabelle said primly. “All work and no play makes the Archivist a dull boy.” Her eyes glinted strangely, pure black in the dim fluorescent yellow light. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

“My payment rates are standard,” Jon said. He leaned backwards in his seat, steepling his fingers. “You know my methods. They’re no secret. You ask me to locate something for you, I use my...particular talents in order to divine its location, and I fetch it in return for your statement. I hardly work for more than an honest day’s meal. What else are you offering?”

Annabelle leaned forward, and this time her eyes were truly black and glittering. It didn’t frighten Jon, as not much really did. Daisy growled lowly, a deep bassy thrum, but somehow Annabelle’s gaze ensnared Jon, trapping him, and he knew that his own eyes were beginning to shine and spin like a pinwheel. 

“A memory. I’ve recently... acquired a memory from your childhood. The childhood - and life - that you’ve forgotten so long ago.” Annabelle smiled daintily at him, weaving her web tighter. “I could pass it on. If you find my item for me.”

It was as if Jon had been punched in the gut. To finally remember something before that strange little Scottish cottage...the answer to the one question he’d never known the answer for... 

To know who that strange man with the wide eyes and the tear streaked face was…

But he knew. If Annabelle had one memory, she had more. And she would drip feed them to him, leaving him on her hook, for however long she wanted him there. Jon didn’t mind doing favors for her, but he would much rather not be beholden. No pun intended.

It was more difficult than anything, but Jon kept his face impassive. “That seems like rather a useless bit of trivia. I was wondering if you had something more...direct.”

“Such as?”

Jon let his gaze skitter to Daisy, who was contentedly gnawing a bone in the corner. “A cure.”

Annabelle smiled, strangely small and gentle. “I know a guy who knows a guy. Agreed, then? One item for my best assistance in finding a cure for your long since trapped friend?”

“No agreements until you’ve told me what, exactly, you want,” Jon said warily. 

But he was already hooked. He knew it, and she knew it too. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for Daisy. 

“Excellent, then. You always come through for me, Jon. I’m so glad we’re friends.” Annabelle crossed her legs at the knee, idly twirling her umbrella. “I’ll get right to the chase, then.”

“Too late for that.”

She gently smacked him on the head with her umbrella. “Hush. I have a person I need you to track down.”

“A person? A human?” Jon leaned forward, frowning at Annabelle. “I don’t find people. That’s most definitely not in my job description. I have a sign .” He pointed dramatically at the handwritten sign taped up on the wall - WILL NOT TRACK DOWN MISSING PERSONS, HOPES, OR SANITIES. “Far too many inquiries for Jimmy Hoffa. That’s a big ask.”

“I’m giving you a big reward.” Annabelle let her gaze slide to Daisy, who had stopped growling and was now watching the conversation with gently flicking ears. “Well?”

He was going to regret this. He could tell it already. Tracking down people, especially humans - just far too much trouble. For one thing, it required human interaction. No thank you. Much more trouble than they were worth.

But...for Daisy…

Besides, if he said no, Annabelle would just find a way to get him to do it anyway, and her bait wouldn’t be nearly as nice. Jon sighed. “Fine. Give me the name and a picture.”

“No picture,” Annabelle said. “But I do have a name and a description.” She leaned in, and her flesh rippled to reveal three more sets of glistening black eyes. They blinked and scuttered around the room, but ultimately locked in on him, trapping to his seat, wrapping him into his chair for an evening snack. All of her attention, all of her anticipation, was on Jon. What was she waiting for? “Sasha Eva James. Ex- Archival Assistant in the Magnus Institute in London. Woman, two meters tall, preferred to wear heels that brought her even taller. Cuban, curly hair reaching down to her back, in the habit of wearing small glasses with a vicious smile. Good with computers, not very brave or empathetic, but possessing a natural bent towards heroism. That's enough?”

Only one sentence in that description really stood out to Jon, even as Daisy started up a cacophony of barking again. “Magnus Institute? What’s that? Is Jonah involved in it?” He eyed Annabelle balefully. “If you’re trying to get me to act against Jonah, that won’t go over well.”

Daisy barked furiously, tail thumping against the seat, and Jon frantically tried to shush her as Annabelle hummed, kicking her heels against his desk again. “Don’t worry. Jonah doesn’t care much about the ex-employees of his ruined pet project.” She eyed him with her eight glittering eyes strangely. “The name honestly doesn’t ring a bell?”

“Honestly, Annabelle, you know perfectly well I don’t keep in regular contact with Jonah.” Jon rolled his eyes, settling back in his chair. “He’s pretentious, rude, and smug. He stays in his ivory tower in the center of all destruction, and I prefer my boots on the ground. Whatever little diversions he amused himself with Before, it’s hardly of importance After. But very well, I’ll find her for you.” 

“That’s all I ask,” Annabelle said sweetly. 

Butter couldn’t melt in her mouth. Jon took a breath in, and gently exhaled. He closed his eye, savoring the blackness and nothing, and when he opened his eyes again he knew that they were glowing a bright, neon green - a similar shade to their usual color, but vibrant and alive and wrong. He felt holes opening up on his arms, on his neck, on his cheeks, on his torso, on his legs, on the soles of his feet, on the palms of his hands, on his forehead. Eyes, dozens of eyes, glowing just as brightly green as his two main ones. Finally, almost ritualistically, Jon opened his final Sense, his Sight, and his Perception. It was invisible on his body, but he felt it connect with his patron, and Jon Saw and Knew. 

Jon Knew. 

“She’s dead,” Jon regurgitated. “Torn into shreds by the Not!Them, identity assumed. She died in agony, screaming. She was not kind but she was good, and her favorite food was warm chocolate chip biscuits. She’s gone, as only those consumed by the Stranger could be. The creature that stole her skin still walks. Nothing is left of her but bones, and the fragments of memory.”

Jon closed his eyes, and Knew no more.

When he opened his eyes again he had only the two eyes, and they no longer glowed with their radioactive shine. He scowled at Annabelle, who looked impressed. “Sorry. Can’t help you. She’s long dead. Do I still get my payment?”

“Oh, I’m well aware of that!” Annabelle said, making Jon choke. “Still, I need you to find her anyway. You should know as well as I do, Jon, that dead doesn’t always mean gone . I never said it was an easy task, but you’re the only one I can trust to do it.”

“You want me to track down a dead woman, whose identity was eaten , whose body no longer exists?” Jon complained. “What do you want me to do, peer into the Not!Them’s stomach?”

“That’ll do for a start!” Annabelle hopped off his desk, ignoring the way Daisy had jumped off her chair and was wielding her femur like she wanted to beat Annabelle over the head with it. “I’ll get you the payment after you complete the job. For a woman of my resources, and a man of your power, we should have no problem fixing your...temperamental friend.” She winked at Jon and Daisy, flashing a cutsey V-for-victory sign. “Remember we’re a team! I’ll be watching you always, Archivist!” 

“I believe you totally and completely,” Jon panned sarcastically. He reached out and scratched Daisy on the head, urging her to stand down. “Do you know what Archivist means, Annabelle?”

For the first time since she stepped into his office she looked a little off-balance, her mouth tightening ever-so-slightly. “I’m aware it’s a bit of a misnomer. You’re hardly a librarian.”

But Jon just shook his head. “It means to put something in its proper place. To organize and notarize the world.” He fixed Annabelle in his infinite and penetrating gaze, and he knew - as he knew most things - that even Annabelle was afraid of him. “I deal in order. A place for everything and everything in its place. Yet I am the man who broke the world and plunged into the worst chaos it has ever seen. Why do you think that is?”

Annabelle stared at him, caught wrong-footed. “I thought you didn’t remember anything from before you ended the world.”

“Maybe it wasn’t worth remembering.” Jon tilted his head as Annabelle’s eight eyes blinked slowly. “Goodbye, Annabelle.”

“...goodbye, Jon.”

She closed the door behind her, swinging it shut with the wisp of a thread, and Jon didn’t realize how long he had been standing in one spot staring at the shut door until Daisy prodded his hand with her wet nose, panting slightly, and Jon found his body enough to sit down where he stood and dig his face into her thick fur. He breathed heavily, digging his hands and face into her fur, letting her ground him, remembering how it felt to die. 

The fact of the matter was this: the apocalypse was all Jon had ever known.

He had never used that magical device that others frequently referred to as ‘the Internet’ (Annabelle called it the ‘Web’, and insisted that she was the one who had invented it - Jon believed her, but nobody else seemed to). He had never seen the blue sky painted in storybooks, and scrutinized with an alien eye the way humans spoke nostalgically of ‘safety’ and ‘boredom’. He had read books on it, of course: the towering civilizations that were now long dead ruins, the empty shells of cities once known as ‘Manchester’ and ‘Leeds’. Even long past history: great wars of humanity, astounding triumphs and inventions. He had even spent an exciting night devouring documentaries like Alien and Predator before Daisy had amusedly informed him that they were fictional.

It was a treasured memory: Daisy, lying on top of him as they both relaxed on the couch one late night, blasting the telly and making their portable generator groan loudly to drown out the sounds of screaming from outside. He remembered the way her wispy blonde hair tickled his nose, her large crystal blue eyes, the way she favored wearing his overlarge jumpers over her own clothing. She remembered the old world far better than Jon did, but her memories were scattered and hazy. It only grew worse as she grew sicker, and it grew more and more difficult for her to turn back into human. They used to have long fights over which movies were fictional and which ones were real - they both agreed Blair Witch Project had to be real, but the argument over The Quiet Place had lasted for hours. Easy, simpler days. 

The apocalypse was all he had ever known, and the only person he had ever had was Daisy. It was her who found him, half-dead, staggering through the Scottish countryside. It was her who protected him as they searched for a safe haven, some sanctuary inside Walls of Jericho that hadn’t fallen yet. But all they found was London. They had made London their home together, and as Daisy grew sicker and sicker and Jon realized the depth of his connection to the Beholding it became him who protected her. 

He remembered the last day she spent as a human. She had known even if he hadn’t, and had understood in some deep part of her that she couldn’t restrain it any longer. She had spent the day curled up in bed, sick and coughing, fur sprouting out of her arms and retreating just as quickly. Bones cracked, broke, and reformed in the space of seconds. It had seemed unbelievably painful, but she hadn’t complained. 

Jon had spent the entire day by her bedside, wiping her brow with a wet cloth and desperately twisting the heads off mice in front of her in hopes that they could feed her somehow. But if they did it was scraps, and since she refused to eat real food then there was nothing he could do -

“It would just make it worse,” Daisy had said hoarsely. “Don’t you get it, Jon? If I had submitted to the Hunt, then I wouldn’t even have held onto my form this long. It was inevitable.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Jon had said severely. “I’ll fix this. I’ll - I’ll find Jonah, I’ll make a deal -”

“No!” The exclamation had been almost ripped out of her, and Daisy broke into another coughing fit as Jon frantically guided her to drink some water. If it wasn’t for Annabelle having found them a place to stay a month back, they’d be even more sunk then they were now. “Don’t find Jonah. He can’t help us. All he’ll do is ruin you. Find...find…”

“Find who?” Jon had asked. “Find what? Whatever you need, I’ll find it for you.”

But she had just smiled for him, eyes glazed and unfocused, hair sticking to her face from the sweat. “I really do love you, Jon. You’re my brother. You know that, right?”

“I know everything,” Jon said, instead of don’t go .

When he woke up the next day, passed out from where he was leaning against her bedside, she was slumbering in peace as a wolf, and she couldn’t turn back. 

Her human mind was still there, he was pretty sure. He could understand her as well as he understood any animal, which was perfectly. Her memory of life pre-apocalypse, what loose scraps of it she had held onto when Jon had nothing, was distant and foreign to her. In that way, at least, they were finally on the same foot. Or paw. Whatever. 

He had held onto her last wish, even if now neither of them really understood why it had been so important. He hadn’t contacted Jonah. Jon didn’t much wish to speak to him, anyway. They had only met once, but sometimes in the dead of night their minds brushed up against each other, their tight and powerful link thrumming with energy, and Jon felt - exposed. Too exposed. 

Yes. Best keep away from him. 

Daisy had been his old connection to a past he couldn’t remember. He sometimes felt, or maybe just Knew, that they used to know each other. Occasionally, when he was feeling particularly fanciful, he thought that they were siblings, or cousins, or childhood friends. Who could say differently? They had a connection that predated that destroyed and shattered safehouse, beginning long before she rescued him from the hellish tides of Scotland. In the world that Jon lived in, family was what you made it. If he and Daisy made a misshapen, inhuman, mostly amnesiac family, then it was their truth. It was as simple as that. 

Now, his connection to the past was books. Books, stories, traumas, Statements. Jon consumed memories of anyone and everyone, stuffing them into his empty space, as if they could fill the cavernous void within him. Jon learned about the world of yesterday through fiction and fact, melding into each other so seamlessly they were almost interchangeable, and if there was a distinguishable or meaningful difference he did not know it.

Jon spent the rest of the day frantically eating to try to make up for the huge expenditure of energy it took to peek into the reality of the Stranger. He ended up going to the park, Daisy trotting loyally at his heels, and walking the trails until he ran into a human with a good enough story. It really wasn’t very hard: the richest stories were those with traumatic supernatural encounters, and nobody was short on those. Daisy tended to act a little huffy with him when he ate more than he strictly needed, and she had the tendency to nose him away from populations like children, but it wasn’t as if she wouldn’t peel off to go hunt down a shambling zombie and bite its head off. With the way that she played with her food sometimes, Jon enjoyed teasing her and calling her a cat. Jon felt as if he had owned a cat, once. 

After eating lunch he went home, cleaned his flat, and collapsed in bed to crack open a new book. Daisy lay over his legs, tail happily thumping on the bed, as Jon scanned the book and tried to lose himself in the thrilling tale of high school romance. High school truly seemed like a sadistic place. Jon was frightened and fascinated by it in equal measures. 

But even as his eyes ate up the drama and theatre, his mind drifted. It seemed almost like a logic puzzle, some kind of trick: how do you track down a dead woman, one who left no body behind? More importantly, why would Annabelle be interested in a dead woman?

There were many ways to die without dying. Zombies, for example, or brain death as your body was puppeted around by malevolent forces. Having your skin stolen and stuffed with sawdust, living in a delusional world as your body carried out horrible acts, being stuffed in a coffin, being put in suspended animation between the pages of a book...the list truly went on. One thing was for certain, especially when taking into account the most interesting thing about Sasha James: her death, and life, and whatever after-life she may be living, was supernatural. 

What else could it be, if she had been a marionette on Jonah Magnus’ strings?

“There’s plenty worse things than death,” Jon mused out loud, flipping through his book without truly reading it. “I suppose you and I would know that quite well, Daisy.”

She leaned forward and licked his face empathetically, making him laugh. 

“Yes, I’m aware I’m being melodramatic. My life is quite good, I admit.” He scratched her behind the ears, staring up at the ceiling. His hair brushed annoyingly against his nose again - it was time to cut it. Daisy used to before - well. “I have you. I have friends. I have a place to sleep, eat, and live in safety. I’m too powerful to genuinely be damaged by almost anything. That’s more than...well, almost anybody can say.” He wasn’t naive. He was aware of how humanity was losing the fight for survival, not that it was much easier to be a monster. It was dog eat dog out there, if you pardon the stereotyping. “So...why am I sad? Why do I feel so empty?”

Daisy barked at him. 

“But my memories can’t be that important, can they? I mean, I can hardly miss what I’ve never had. Yes, sometimes I...wonder, or dream, but I’m content with things as they are now. There’s a reason I turned down Annabelle’s offer, beyond the obvious.” Jon put the book down, staring at the ceiling, absent-mindedly scratching Daisy as he became lost in thought. “So what’s getting in the way of my own happiness? Is it just me?”

Daisy barked an affirmative. 

“We’ll cure you,” Jon whispered. “Then everything’ll be perfect.”

But even that he wasn’t too sure about, and Jon lightly dozed off into sleep listening to the heavy heartbeat of his best friend and the low thrum of the fan. Persistently, eternally, a sick-shock image lingered behind his eyelids, chasing him in the corridors between wakefulness and sleep, between daydream and nightmare: a man, blood running down his temple standing out in harsh contrast to his open and gentle face, standing in the doorway of a ruined home, looking at Jon with horror and fear. 

Jon dreamed of that man, and then he dreamed of all the others. 

The next day, Jon got to work. 

He welcomed the woman who walked into his office searching for the briefcase of money that her great-grandfather stored in her house because he didn’t trust banks, told her it was underneath the boiler, and accepted his payment of her run-in with the Corruption. He filed, brushed Daisy’s fur, and pulled on his trench coat before stepping out into the cool London air. 

Daisy stood next to him, sniffing the air. He looked down at her, sighing and shoving his hands into his pockets. “Well, I suppose we better begin looking. The old-fashioned way.”

She barked sharply at him.

“I’m well aware of how spoiled I am. Look, you can’t accuse me of being meant for fieldwork.” He gestured to his, as usual, fancy outfit that was covered in dirt, holes, and tears. “Does this look like the clothing of a man who’s always searching for trouble? This suit is dry clean only!”

She growled skeptically at him before trotting off, tail and nose held high in the air, and he sighed and followed after her. 

“Guess we’re going to the circus,” Jon muttered. Joy. 

If he had been a fan of circuses as a boy, he wasn’t now. He was dimly aware of circuses as they used to be, bright big carnivals of fun and splendor, filled to the brim with...joyful clowns...animal abuse...alright, Jon was an adult of indeterminable age and didn’t understand the appeal of circuses whatsoever. Then or now. He knew better than to voice the opinion aloud - it was seen as someone of a challenge, in some circles - but he supposed it was one of those things you simply had to be a child to understand. Maybe Jon would have an easier time understanding if Daisy ever let him eat children - or their nightmares - but no, it was ‘unethical’ -

The Circus of the Other spanned what was once known as Thorpe Park. Daisy had mentioned that it used to be a theme park, which was backed up by the various promotional and tourism pamphlets Jon had read on the matter. Taking up several blocks on the outside, and probably a pocket dimension on the inside, it lured Londoners inside with sickly sweet temptations and feasted on their joy and terror. Not to say that any Londoner was stupid enough to voluntarily walk into a circus, as anybody that stupid hadn’t survived this long, but some minds were more easily influenced than others. There was usually a slow trickle into the circus. The trickle out was even slower. 

Yes, the Stranger did well for itself. They all did. Jon, personally, found its adherents a little annoying and obscure. If there was one thing Jon hated it was obfuscation and crypticness. He was a straightforward, blunt person, and he appreciated it when others were the same. Willingly or not. 

It was a short subway ride to the park, and Jon appreciated the bright wind tousling the strands of his hair that had fallen loose from its bun. As usual, the few pedestrians he encountered averted their eyes from him and huddled in their coats, but every so often they had the pleasure of running across a child who would reach out to pet Daisy before their terrified adult could stop them. Daisy never said as much, but judging from the way she patiently sat still and wagged her tail whenever a toddler ran sticky fingers through her fur, she liked the attention. Jon wondered if she had ever wanted kids, but that wasn’t the kind of thing that they tended to talk about. Their lives Before...it didn’t seem so important. 

He heard the calliope music before he saw the circus, and when he turned the corner of the street he was unsurprised to see its bright, multicolored, tented and neon glory. There was a big archway set up at the street entrance, with two ticket booths manned by shadowy figures. No line. There was no traffic going down this street, and no other pedestrians besides Jon and Daisy. A place that stank of evil, seductive and alluring, but poisonous. There was nothing friendly or welcoming about the bright advertisements and giant balloons. 

Jon walked to the ticket booth, sticking one hand firmly in his coat pocket and keeping his other one buried in Daisy’s scruff. The ticketmaster came into sharper focus as he grew closer. It wore the skin of a woman, but it sagged strangely in odd places. Skin was bunched up the elbows, and it hung a little loosely at the mouth, revealing glistening plastic behind it. 

The ticketmaster’s eyebrows raised when they saw Jon, and further when they saw a stoic Daisy. Jon knew that she hated this place. She refused to tell him exactly why, or maybe she didn’t know. 

“Archivist,” the ticketmaster trilled. “So good to see you again. Welcome to our lovely circus. How may I help you?”

As always, the royal treatment. Well, he supposed most customer service people were forced to be polite. “I was hoping to speak with one of your employees,” Jon said smoothly. Or as smoothly as he could. Which wasn’t very, as Daisy liked to remind him. “I’m conducting an investigation.”

The ticketmaster’s skin sagged a little further in stress. “Oh, really? Well! I’m afraid that won’t be possible. We’re closed today!”

Jon looked up, pointedly, at the glowing neon sign reading ‘WE’RE OPEN!’ in cheery bright letters. Underneath it was the ticket pricing - kids got in free, adults had to pay with a finger of their choosing. “Are you?”

He stared at the ticketmaster. The ticketmaster stared back, painted-on eyes glancing left and right anxiously. 

“You know,” they said finally, “I’m sure we can make an exception for such an important guest. Right this way, Archivist.” They stepped out from the booth, and unhooked the velvet rope that opened the way to the rest of the circus. “You have fun, now! Leave quickly!”

“Do I get a guide?” Jon asked. “It’s easy to get lost in there.”

The ticketmaster giggled, an electric and static sound. “We thought the Archivist was never without direction.”

“You’d be surprised,” Jon muttered, but he supposed that he was better off without anyway. He had the sense that the Stranger wasn’t his greatest fan. He didn’t trust a guide to let him back out again. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

“Welcome to the greatest show in Hell!” The ticketmaster trilled, and Jon nodded at them before walking through the entrance. 

It was a dangerous thing, what he was doing. Most who came in never came out. But Jon was not most people, or even really a person at all, and he knew full well how often senses were deceived. 

The Circus of the Other, one could say, existed in two parts: the ‘front stage’ and the ‘backstage’. The front stage was grounded in reality, so much as real was ever really real. Jon walked down a paved walkway, Daisy slinking at his feet, eyes skimming over booths set up along the walkway and food stalls hawking fresh meat and funnel cakes. What exactly those cakes funneled you into, nobody knew. He passed several attractions, slumped haunted houses and curiosity rooms with a wooden facade, gift shops with glass jewelry in store windows and employee-only access areas. It was eye-wateringly bright, the band music replacing the sound of Jon’s own heartbeat, and with every step he took further into the heart of this great carcass he felt more and more as if he was merely walking in spirals. 

He wasn’t going to get anywhere like this. There were no employees around save those safely ensconced behind flimsy wood, yelling in rhythmic pitter-patters for attention. Occasionally he could make out the trumpets of animals, the sawdust smokey smell, and the dim roar of a crowd as he approached the Big Top. Jon knew that if he kept walking for long enough he’d end up in there, and it would be difficult even for him to escape. Besides, the Stranger rarely appreciated it when you interrupted its show, and Jon preferred to make his enemies more strategically than this.

 Backstage, then. That was the only way. Jon took a deep breath, relaxing in the soothing yet unnecessary motion, and dug deep inside his trenchcoat pocket for his blindfold. Daisy barked when she saw it, nosing his leg and moving to sit in front of him. Jon tied it around his neck, and dug deeper in his pocket for the guide harness. It was rarely used, as neither of them appreciated the indignity for both of them, so it took a second to find, but eventually Jon was able to wrangle it up from the depths. He crouched down and securely snapped it around Daisy’s stomach, grabbing the thick metal bar. Daisy barked again. 

“No, I call it thinking ahead. It’s a good plan.” Jon wiped his suddenly sweaty palm on his slacks, gripping the bar firmly. “If you get in any trouble, just tell me, alright? Rely on your nose.” 

Daisy barked in recrimination. 

“Okay, fine. Sorry for telling you how to do your job.” She barked at him again. “Yes, I know that’s as stupid as you telling me how to see, I understand. I’m very sorry, I won’t do it again.” She huffed. “Am I forgiven or are you going to leave me to be eaten by skin stealing clowns?” She blinked at him. “That’s fine. My will’s written out. I’m leaving everything I own to Helen. Including the bones.”

He took a deep breath, and tied the blindfold around his eyes. He felt the air circulate through his lungs, oxygenate his blood, and course through his veins. Were his lungs like a human’s, functional like theirs? If you were to cut him open, pull out his veins and bones and blood and organs, would they be soft and supple? Or would they be like Albrecht von Closen’s - lined with softly blinking eyes?

Jon shivered with the thrill of the thought. Eyes inside of him, seeing his blood and insides. Private, dark, and hidden, thrown into sharp relief. What was never witnessed finally being laid bare for judgement. The thought was heady and exciting. It was a wonderful, thrilling idea. He wouldn’t like to do it to himself, not until he was sure it wouldn’t ruin his body. Maybe he could find a patsy marked by the Eye, choke them with its holy light, and crack them open to see what was inside. That was a way to spend a Saturday afternoon. 

Daisy bit him on the hand, hard. Jon yelped, tugging his hand free of her bite, and scowled down in her direction. “There’s nicer ways to get me to stop zoning out. Now help me out, will you? The sooner we’re out of here the better.”

Then Jon opened all of his eyes, opening the dozens of wounds that littered his skin from head to toe, and let himself See and Know. He gasped with the rush, the thrill, the spark of life that blew his empty void of a soul into warmth and light. It made him feel the furthest thing from human. It made him feel alive. 

Jon Saw with more than his eyes, and slipped backstage. 

As the documentary The Santa Clause elegantly proclaimed - seeing isn’t believing, believing is seeing. When Jon freed himself of reliance on mortal senses, and opened himself up to the guidance of heaven and hell, he saw his reality for what it truly was. 

The Backstage.

Existing in the same space and time as the Front Stage, yet separate. Even as Jon stood on cobblestones in the Front Stage, staring at a house proclaiming its many mystical wonders hidden inside, in the Backstage he was standing on a thin and tacky lengthy strip of skin staring at a metal cage full of creatures howling in pain and anguish. They were deformed, disgusting, and misshapen. They smelled richly of trauma and pain, and they made Jon’s stomach grumble, but Daisy quickly pulled him away from them. He followed her, using his Sight and Daisy’s Smell to guide him through the labyrinth.

Colors, sights, and sounds existed in the abstract. A more human mind would have lost all sense of self and understanding, the Unknowing singing its winter hymnal, but Jon’s senses were capable of understanding and interpreting where a human’s was not. He smelled violet, tasted the odor of rotting fish, and saw sweetness. Without the limitation of his mortal eyes, Jon Understood. It made something metallic bloom in his mouth, making his body reverberate and hum in ways that flesh was meant to do, but some part of it thrilled Jon. It was so rare for him to see a brand new thing. And this, in every way, was new. 

Daisy guided him towards a destination, as Jon desperately tried to keep in his mind locked in who he was and his goal. He knew that was what he had to do, if he ever wanted to walk out of here. How did he know that? It felt as if someone had told him, one day long ago, someone with cold eyes and a cold smile but who stayed with him, through everything. That person had been intellect and warrior and trust. 

The colors began to loom. The world began to turn and shift, a lottery wheel spinning and spinning. Jon felt his own pupils begin to spin, faster and faster, anxiously searching for an answer that could never be found. Remember who you are, Jon Sims. Remember how it felt to see the tattered identification card in your wallet, to see the name Jonathan Andrew Sims and realize that it was him, it was who he was. Or, at the very least, the name of the man whose body he wore.

But how could he? Jon had three years worth of memories. He did not have a childhood home to clutch onto, no first kiss to linger over. His identity was his devotion towards an unseen and uncaring god. Where was he? Who was he? Where was who was he where was he where was -

Answer not found. Answer not found. Answer not found. Ans -

Pain, shooting up his hand. Jon revelled in it, let it thrill him and ground him back in where he was. With one of his eyes he saw Daisy biting his hand, growing softly, and Jon was finally able to exhale. 

“Thank you,” Jon said, with the mouth that was his. He cleared the throat that likely belonged to him, and craned his head into looking up-down-left-right. “I am the Archivist. I wish to speak to your manager.”

Instantly, a manager had always been there. They were wearing a sparkling, loud, brilliant suit that covered up the stitches and staples that lived underneath their twinkling coat. Their mind was impenetrable, but Jon could taste their anxiety. 

“Archivist!” the circusman echoed. “I’m afraid you are not allowed in this section of the Circus. Please, let me guide you -”

“I am here on an investigation,” Jon intoned, and the circusman shut up. They had a job, some job, but it was unimportant. It was just a finger of a beast. “Give me the Not!Them.”

“They’re quite busy -”

“I want to see the Not!Them,” Jon said. Every single one of his eyes were staring at the circusman, and it was beginning to melt a little bit. “Now.”

“Anything for the Archivist,” the circusman crooned, all sugar syrup and smiles. “Let me take you to its dressing room.”

And, in a twist, they were there. Jon was even able to recognize it as a dressing room, somewhat - it had a dresser, a bureau, a couch. Even if the dresser existed in ten dimensions and the bureau bled Orange Julius. Daisy began licking the dresser, and Jon had to pull her away before she could get high off it or something. Extradimensional sugar was not good for dogs. 

“I’ll leave you to it!” the circusman sang, leaving the Not!Them to their fate. 

The Not!Them itself was sitting in front of the bureau, brushing its long hair. It was long and straight, and it appeared to be stubbornly clinging to the face it had stolen. Sasha James, perhaps? No. If it was Sasha James, then Helen was Helen Richardson and Jon was Jonathan Sims. Not quite. Even further. It was a parasite, a squirming and unclean thing. Jon felt his lip curl. 

The Not!Sasha sat on its plush seat in front of the bureau, dressed in a dressing gown as if she was preparing for her big show. She brushed and brushed her hair, not bothering to turn around, but she watched Jon and Daisy in the mirror from where they stood behind her. 

“Is it true?” Not!Sasha asked, running her brush through her hair with long, elegant strokes. Her voice was human sounding, even and calm. “What they’re saying? That the One Who Knows All has lost all memory of his past?”

Out of all of the questions she could have asked him, that one froze Jon where he stood. He felt off-balance, lost. Daisy growled softly next to him. He felt himself slip deeper into the endmost everything -

No. No, he was Jonathan Sims - although he wasn’t, really, he was a monster who had eaten Jonathan Sims’ identity and walked around in his body -

He was Daisy’s brother. Helen and Annabelle’s friend. Even those terrible children relied on him, in their own way. He was a private detective. These things, at least, were his. They would always be his. 

“Is it of any concern to you?” 

Not!Sasha laughed slightly, like the tinkling of plastic bells. “Oh, the things I could tell you, Archivist. The secrets I could share.” She grinned, razor sharp with a knife’s edge. “I suspect I know more about you than you do.”

Daisy growled something, and Jon privately agreed with her. She was doing this on purpose, trying to make Jon unsteady. Trying to make him forget who he was. She was threatened by him. She was trying to protect herself. Jon really had just come to talk, and get a little bit of information. Why was she so defensive? 

“Would you tell me if I asked nicely?” Jon wondered. 

Not!Sasha smiled, with movie star white teeth. There were just a few too many crammed in her mouth. “I would hate to disrupt anyone’s plans. I don’t think I will.”

“I could ask less nicely.”

“In this place of my power?” Not!Sasha turned around for the first time, meeting Jon’s blindfolded two main eyes. “You’re in the Stranger’s stomach. The Unknowing was a time of great vulnerability. Don’t think that you can pull a repeat of Nikola.”

Who was Nikola? Whatever. If it was important he would know. Enough games. “Sasha James,” Jon said, the words fitting strangely in his mouth. They felt well-worn, well-used. “You ate her and stole her life. Do you deny this?”

“How can I?” Not!Sasha flipped her hair over her shoulder proudly. “I digested her slowly. She never stopped screaming. A wonderful performance. My finest yet, I think.”

“Is there anything left of her?” Jon pushed. “Any possibility she could still be alive? Any possible remnants of her that could still be around?”

“None,” Not!Sasha said. “There’s no possibility of her still being alive. I was quite thorough. If you’d like to make this a proper Statement, I’m sure I could oblige -”

But Jon didn’t want that. Since when did he not want that? “I’ve been sent to find her,” Jon said. “I wouldn’t have been asked to take this case if it was impossible. There has to be something left of Sasha James, something that I can just find . The Stranger’s influence obscures my vision - your influence. Think. Tell me. Is there anything left of Sasha James ?”

“Not that I know of,” Not!Sasha spat, the compulsion dragging the words from her. “But the Eye’s influence is pervasive and complete. In this world, marked by eyes and seeing, controlled by two megalomaniac men with god complexes - in your world - maybe anything is possible. Especially for a woman who obeyed the Ceaseless Watcher so well, and who carried out her tasks as Archival Assistant so perfectly.”

“ Did Jonah have you kill her? ” Jon asked. “When he destroyed the Institute.”

“She died a long time ago, Archivist,” Not!Sasha sneered. “Now release me from this compulsion. You’re so rude .”

But Jon hesitated. 

She had information on his past. Almost definitely. He could drag it from her, rip it from her throat. She seemed to think that he couldn’t, but she thought he was weak. Jon was so much stronger than she knew. Maybe more than even he knew. 

Jon breathed in, uselessly, and exhaled slowly. He knew, beneath his blindfold, his eyes were spinning and whirling in an endless mandala. The cycle of reincarnation, of death and life. 

“ Tell me about my past ,” Jon said. 

Not!Sasha opened her mouth, eager to obey. A word sat in her mouth, the beginnings of a long and storied tale that Jon was so desperately hungry for, but instead of spinning her sweet story she seemed to choke instead. It lodged in her throat, making her throat bulge and expand rapidly, twist and deform until it was sheared in two. Blood dribbled out of her throat as her eyes bulged out of her head, gasping and choking, stock-still and frozen in her seat. There was only one way to describe it - her throat ripped itself out. 

Jon stared in dumb, mute fascination as her trachea, larynx, and voicebox tore itself out of her throat, dangling loosely down her chest. Blood gushed from her now empty husk of a throat, nothing but an empty tube lined with shining blood vessels, gushing slowly down her now soaked dressing gown and pooling on the floor. 

Hm. Could this be construed as his fault?

Before Jon could wonder too much longer if he had to go up to the ringmaster and apologize, or if he could just sneak out and pretend that he had found her this way, Daisy howled. Her howl was boneshaking, ear-drum shattering, and with no further ado she lunged. All eighty kilograms of wolf sailed through the air, salivating and howling, and landed on top of the corpse of Not!Sasha before eagerly ripping in. 

Well, best to be polite about the whole thing. Jon stepped backwards a few steps, opening the door behind him and slipping out, giving Daisy her privacy as she chowed down. He knew that it wouldn’t quite be satisfying - the chase was the meal, not the flesh - but hopefully the satisfaction of chewing off one of the Stranger’s fingers in its own house would do it for her. Jon whistled and pretended he couldn’t See everything she was doing, smiling broadly and waving as the passerby terrified employees, until she finished her meal and barked at the door to get Jon to open it. He did so, frowning down at her when she panted at him, her fur tacky and sticky with blood. 

“We’ll have to have a bath when we get home,” he said. “I do not want that staining my good carpet.” Daisy barked at him. “If you didn’t want a bath, then you shouldn’t have been a messy eater!”

There were many worrying implications of this, but Jon knew that it was a thought for later. He could think about it when they were safe in reality, pockmarked and warped as it was. He sighed and carefully rolled up his sleeves so the blood wouldn’t stain his cuffs. The dry cleaner always charged him extra when he made them scrub out bloodstains.

“Maybe if we leave very quietly they won’t notice we were ever here,” Jon said optimistically, and Daisy barked in agreement. They were a great team. 

Too bad about that Statement, though. Jon had the feeling it would have been a great one. 

“You really have no idea?”

Helen shrugged, shoulder cutting the air like glass. Her spiralling eyes, lit from within by a soft purple light, swam gently and slowly in her sockets. She took a long, deliberate sip from her drink, which was a neon green margarita with a crazy straw that spelled out ‘WELCOME TO VEGAS!’. Pushed up on top of her head was a matching pair of novelty sunglasses which read out ‘SAVE ME FROM VEGAS’. 

“Don’t recall the name. Then again, I don’t recall many things.” Helen slurped her drink. Jon watched with morbid interest as the drink disappeared into her body and came out her elbow. “She does not endlessly wander my corridors, screaming for release. I am afraid I simply do not know. I’m not you, Archivist.”

Jon sighed, kicking his heel against the brick wall. The door was halfway up a brick wall this time, down the street from his flat, and after a bit of ungainly climbing he had managed to settle onto the doorframe next to her. Their thighs brushed, which made Jon’s leg feel as if it belonged to somebody named Bill Truman in Wales, but overall it was nice. Her afro today seemed to be threaded with copper wires, sparking electricity every few seconds. 

“It’s alright. It’s not like I know as much as I would like either.” Jon sighed, leaning back and sipping from his lemonade. Alcohol made him...weird, so he tended to stick to soft drinks. “So she was an archival assistant. With would, ostensibly, insinuate that she worked in archives. Archives that, perhaps, a Head Archivist might have worked at.”

“Do you think you may have been employed at the Magnus Institute in your previous life?” Helen asked curiously. 

“What? Why would I do that? Of course not. God, what kind of idiot would work for Jonah? I’m not that stupid.” Jon drank cautiously from his soda again, inspecting it for extradimensionality. Helen had a strange sense of humor sometimes. “She probably worked for Gertrude or something. No, I’m just wondering what she must have been wrapped up in to even have the possibility of surviving the Not!Them. They’re usually quite thorough.” He eyed Helen. “And you’re sure you’ve never heard the name before.”

“I don’t even remember last week!” Helen attempted to pat him reassuringly on the shoulder, which he only barely dodged. “You may have to shop around with all of the Entities in your search. What fun. Like Christmas Carolling.”

“I...yes, that’s one way to put it.” Jon sighed. At this point, he was beginning to think that really would be what he would have to do. But he wasn’t a very smooth talker, and he couldn’t afford for every encounter to end up like the encounter with the Not!Sasha. Daisy was no better - she was even ruder than he was. “I may have to call reinforcements.”

“Oh, goody! I haven’t seen those two scamps in...oh, quite a long time. They don’t like my hallways as much as you do, you see.” Helen giggled, clapping her hands together carefully. Jon dodged again. “I’ll send them right to your door, first thing...soon.”

Jon didn’t know how he felt about this. Helen’s shortcuts were...bit of a crapshoot, to put it charitably. Besides, the ‘reinforcements’ were very hit or miss in their own way. Jon loved them, cared for them in the same way Daisy cared for him...but, well, they were occasionally worse monsters than he was. “Most people don’t have built-in maps to you, Helen. Please make an effort not to eat them, they’re the only people I hang out with who aren’t also wolves or living hallways.” Jon sighed, already regretting bringing them into it. Chaos tended to follow where those two went, but at least they were usually fun. Even if...destructive. Very, very destructive. “It’s bothering me. That Not!Sasha knew more about me than I did. I feel oddly stuck in this state of permanent grief for someone I’ve never known. I can’t stop wondering if I talk like him, if I put on my shirts like he did. That I had a family and loved ones who have to live never knowing what became of him. Or...or maybe, even worse, knowing what did . Knowing what ate him. Or knowing what he turned into.” Jon bit his lip, hard. “I feel like I’m constantly searching for that thing to fill the emptiness, but it’s nowhere to be found. What if I never find it? What if the old Jonathan Sims is dead forever?”

“Nothing’s ever truly over, Archivist. Just over there.” Helen patted him reassuringly on the shoulder, which he only barely dodged. “You’ll find Sasha James. And yourself. All lost things turn up eventually. You just have to look.” She paused contemplatively. “If I haven’t eaten them. If I’ve eaten them, they’re never coming back. But I don’t believe I ate you.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m eleventy six percent sure.”

“That’s appreciated.”

Jon took a sip of his lemonade, and promptly choked on it. He took another look at the glass and realized that Helen had replaced it with cloudy lemonade, like a fucking criminal.

“Helen! You replaced my lemonade with the American shite!”

“Aw.” Helen’s features drooped on her face- literally, her mouth started swinging downwards as if on a hinge. “I meant to replace it with Martian lemonade, not American lemonade.”

“Martian lemonade doesn’t exist, Helen!”

“You ruin everything,” Helen told the drink reproachfully. It squealed in Jon’s glass from fear. “Don’t whine. Your life was short and meaningless.”

“ Please stop anthropomorphizing my drinks, their fear tastes strange.”

“I think it improves the taste.”

“Fear isn’t meant to be lemoney .”

Helen sniffed. “Your drink is now bleach. Lemon scented.”

Jon drank it anyway, just to spite her, and they both watched the sky scream itself to sleep as night encroached its inevitable course through tepid London streets.

London survived another day, and lives on to slumber through the night. Humans nestled safely in their beds, and even monsters curled up in dark corners and rested. Life prevailed, and for one more day terror subsisted back underneath-the-underneath. 

Well. There was always tomorrow. 

Chapter Text

Helen was true to her word. Jon’s peaceful rest was interrupted the next morning by the arrival of what he had privately begun to name the ‘Terrible Twosome’. As usual, Helen didn’t see fit to drop them off in his, oh, who knows, hallway or lobby , and instead decided that they were best dropped off inside of his bedroom.

The noises of two people bickering cut through Jon’s usual voyeuristic nightmares - tonight, it had been that angry and over-familiar woman yelling at him over a sea of corpses again, which was definitely his most confusing one. He kept his eyes closed, aware of the heavy pressure of Daisy lying over his legs, and didn’t let on that he had woken up. 

“ - stop yelling, you’re going to wake him up!”

“It’s fine! He sleeps like a rock.” A voice huffed. “If you don’t jump on him you’re a pussy.”

“He sleeps with a giant wolf , idiot. She’d bite my head off. You do it.”

“I’m not going to do it, she’d bite my head off!”

“Pussy.”

“Let’s both do it, simultaneously. She can’t kill both of us, right?”

“That is a good idea,” the first voice said thoughtfully, as if it was anything approaching a good idea. “Okay, on three. One...two...three!”

Three things happened in quick succession: Jon felt a smallish body collide at terminal speeds next to him on the bed, Daisy rolled off at even greater light speeds so she was spared the collision, and Jon screamed as he was left to bear the weight of all hundred and ten pounds of teenager. 

Only one teenager - his partner, as expected, was too smart to assault Jon this early in the morning, and was laughing her head off as she stood to the side. 

Jon wheezed and opened his eyes, only to see a great deal of a familiar teenage face. With dyed black hair, an unusual quantity of piercings, a ratty black cloth jacket and sagging jeans, and a graphic t-shirt that listed off some band Jon had never heard of, the face was both way too familiar and way too close to his personal space. 

“Good morning, Jon!” Gerard Keay said. “You slept too long, it’s eight o clock!”

“Yeah, Jon,” Agnes Montague said, still laughing. “You missed your daily delivery of idiot!”

Gerry sat up, scowling furiously at Agnes. “You said that you’d do it with me! Why are you always such a liar?”

“Because you always believe it,” Agnes teased, and Gerry reached forward and tugged her onto the bed too. She collapsed, laughing her head off, and the two teenagers promptly got into a juvenile punching and kicking play fight that ended when Agnes heated up her hand and made Gerry yelp. “Got you!”

“No powers against each other,” Jon scolded, feeling like a kindergarten teacher. Daisy barked, tail wagging and crouching, clearly two seconds away from joining the fight too. “No, Daisy, please don’t encourage them.” Jon slid off the bed, carefully disentangling himself from the pile of teenagers, and scowled at the pair until they seperated and sat at the foot of his bed, blinking innocently up at him. Wow. Real angels. Maybe Agnes’ guardians bought that, but Jon wasn’t an idiot who worshipped her. 

Agnes was willowy thin in the way that only teenage girls were, coltish and awkward with fiery red straight hair reaching down to her shoulders. She always dressed straight from the 70s, with a loose peasant blouse hanging off her thin shoulder and a peasant skirt draped down to her pointy heeled boots. She looked like she should be making flower crowns at Woodstock, or calling her five girlfriends on her princess line as she yelled at Gerry to stop hogging the line. Instead, she led a cult. 

So far as Jon knew. She didn’t seem that invested in it. Whatever, it was none of his business. 

“What do you need help with, boss?” Gerry asked eagerly, making Jon groan. “Are we going to rough someone up? Extract a Statement so hard that they explode ? You haven’t made anyone explode in months, let’s make someone explode.”

“We’re not exploding -”

“I can make people explode,” Agnes said, scandalized. “We don’t need Jon for it.”

“Yes, but I’ve seen your way a million times,” Gerry said, rolling his eyes. “It’s boring. All you do is set them on fire. Jon, like, squishes them. With his brain.”

Like a punch, the memory of Not!Sasha’s death struck Jon. He felt sick abruptly, in a way that he hadn’t felt even as he watched her die, and it was only Daisy pushing reassuringly against his knees that grounded him. He took a deep breath, distantly aware that the kids were bickering about whether or not Agnes’ flame powers were cool or lame. 

“Have you two had breakfast yet?” Jon asked. They both glanced at each other and shrugged. “Right. I’m making breakfast. Gerry, you set the table. Agnes, please feed Daisy. You’re having eggs and toast.”

“I like my eggs well-done,” Agnes volunteered. 

“I am wildly aware, and that is still not a way to make eggs.” Jon sighed, clapping his hands and cuing the two teenagers to scramble up and run for the place settings and fridge. “Let’s get on it.”

Twenty minutes later Jon had managed to scrape - or peel, in Agnes’ case - food onto the plates of two hungry teenagers and get two flanks of meat on Daisy’s plate. Eggs, toast, some very crispy rashers of bacon, and beans with milky and sweet tea were all he could make on such a short notice, but the two kids attacked the meal with as much fervor as Daisy. Jon sighed, sitting on the other end of the table from them and watching them eat. He ate food sometimes, and kept his fridge stocked for the visitors who preferred it and when he felt like it himself, but in general he had never quite gotten used to the sensation. Eating was a little bit like sex: disgusting and weird, but everybody else just seemed to take it for granted. 

Even Agnes, although she needed to eat about as much as he did. Or maybe she fed on the well-hidden affection for the both of them that Jon had cooked into those eggs. He did worry about them, living all by themselves. Kids usually had adults, right? That was how it was in all the books he read. Was Jon that adult? Could he swindle Daisy into being the adult for all three of them? 

“Don’t eat so fast, you’ll choke,” Jon scolded lightly, as Gerry was forced to chug his still steaming tea to chase down the rasher stuck in his throat. Agnes smirked, pointing her finger at the mug in a way that likely meant that Gerry was about to drink boiling water, but Jon glared at her until she put her hand down. “Are you two not eating enough?”

“My servants give us more than enough food,” Agnes said loftily. 

Jon highly doubted her servants knew how to feed two teenagers. “Do you know how to cook any of it?”

Incriminating silence. Gerry stuffed more toast in his mouth, somewhat guiltily. 

“Agnes, you know Gerry’s not like us. He genuinely needs actual food.”

“I feed Gerry!” Agnes protested. “Why do you think my servants bring food at all?”

“I eat enough,” Gerry volunteered. “Her weird cult dads get me anything I want. I had, like, five Monster energy drinks yesterday. It was awesome, I could taste colors.”

“That...makes me feel worse.” Jon sighed. “And you two are still living by yourselves at Hill Top Road?”

“It’s fine, Jon,” Agnes said, mouth settled into a thin line as she wiped her mouth primly with her napkin. “I’ve tamed the house. It’s not even dangerous to us anymore.”

“I don’t like you two living in a seat of the Web’s -”

“I thought we were friends with Annabelle?” Gerry asked, confused. “Aren’t we?”

Politics. Jon groaned, glancing down at Daisy. She was chewing her meal, and refusing to help him handle this. Jerk. But he couldn’t help but remember at the way that she was always growling at Annabelle. Daisy had decided a long time ago that they could never truly trust Annabelle, and Jon trusted her judgement. Despite everything, she was usually working off more information than he was. 

“I would just feel better if you two had actual adults to look after you,” Jon said carefully, neither confirming nor denying. Agnes opened her mouth. “No, Agnes, your cult members that stop by twice a week to clean and give you food don’t count.”

“We’re fifteen,” Gerry muttered, pushing around the rasher on his plate. “Practically adults. We can totally look after ourselves.” 

“We appreciate your concern, Jonathan,” Agnes said loftily, reaching out and patting Jon carefully on the hand. It tingled on his skin, turning it a bit red. “But I am doing a great job looking after Gerry. I take him for walks every day. Don’t worry, I asked Daisy for tips on how to look after boys.” Daisy barked. “She agrees with me.”

“You can’t understand her.”

“But I know she agrees with me. I’m always right.” Agnes smiled prettily at him, batting her eyes in her most perfect ‘Cult Princess’ impression. “But you’d be able to keep a better eye on us if you let us help with your case. Spill the tea, Jon.”

Well...she was right. If Jon was a better person, he’d try to get them to stay with him, but Agnes’ cult would not appreciate that and Gerry would refuse to go without her. It was a minor miracle how they had let Gerry stay with her in the first place. He was just a human. The Cult of the Lightless Flame tended to...look down upon mortal connections. Sometimes as they lowered them into the grave. 

Jon explained the situation shortly, unconsciously falling into his tendency to weave it into a story. Agnes and Gerry were on the edge of their seats: eyes widening when Jon revealed Annabelle’s promise to help cure Daisy, tension rippling up their frames when he spoke of his journey into the Circus, cheering when Not!Sasha tore itself to shreds. Daisy chewed on her bones, for all appearances barely paying attention, but her ears flicked in a way that betrayed how closely she was keeping up. Jon had tried speaking to her about how she felt about Annabelle’s promise to try and cure her, but she had been noncommittal on the matter. 

She hated it when Jon felt guilty over her predicament, always insisting that it was her own fault. Jon didn’t think so, but mostly he just hated feeling so powerless. It was a unique feeling for him. Normally Jon could do...well, just about anything. Anything, it seemed, except save the people he loved. 

“So you have to go around to each Entity and basically ask them if they’ve seen this Sasha James?” Agnes said, after he finished. Her fingers were steepled, expression drawn tight in thought. Jon was reminded that, despite her teenage girl personality and appearance, she was quite bright and a tactical thinker. Likely more of a tactical thinker than Jon. “I can already say for sure that the Desolation doesn’t have her, but I’ll ask around anyway.”

Jon exhaled. He hadn’t expected anything different - the Desolation did not tend to leave scraps behind - but it was worth a shot. “Thank you. Hopefully she hasn’t been made into a...candle or something.”

“No, I’d recognize her if she had been made into a candle,” Agnes said, with a completely straight face. “Why don’t we try tracking her history? Who she was during life, things like that.”

“She was an archival assistant! ” Gerry exclaimed, waving his fork around. “Come on, Jon, it’s so obvious! The only Entity that still has its grips on her is yours . Just ask the Eye.”

Jon squirmed uncomfortably. “I did. It...didn’t tell me anything useful.”

“Why don’t you ask Jonah?” Agnes asked, before Gerry swatted her on the arm. “Ow! What was that for!”

“Shut up, you know he hates Jonah!”

“I don’t know why,” Agnes said prissily. “They’re the flame and the smoke, those two. The light and dark side of the mountain. Yin and yang. Two sides of the same coin. Denying contact or connection is like stifling a flame’s holy light.”

“You don’t get it,” Gerry said, sticking his nose in the air. “I’m affiliated with the Eye. I know how it works. The Eye is always making sure all its goons hate each other. Like, it's rule one.”

“Oh, you just made that up.”

“Did not! The Head Archivist and the Heart always hate each other. It’s the rule.”

“It’s no such rule, Gertrude was just a priss.”

Gerry’s eyes narrowed dangerously, and he poked his fork at her. “You take that back, she was cool.”

“Gertrude was a mean old power stealing bitch,” Agnes said loudly, and then Gerry tried to stab her with her fork, so then she superheated the fork, and then Gerry threw it at her, and Jon very much regretted involving these two at all. 

“If you two do not stop fighting I will tell both of you who had a crush on you in secondary school,” Jon said loudly, which made them both stop and sit primly in their seats like little fake angels. They knew he didn’t make empty threats: Agnes still wasn’t over hearing that Joey Triscott from the halfway house had been in love with her. “Gerry, it’s not mandatory that we all hate each other. We just do. Agnes, I’m not contacting Jonah and that’s final.”

“But why ?”

Unconsciously, Jon’s gaze drifted down to Daisy, who was grooming herself. The kids looked a little confused, and then they both realized something at once, and started elbowing each other again. “Jonah can’t be involved. But I am afraid that Agnes may be right. We may have to find out more about the Magnus Institute.” He shrugged listlessly. “Whatever that place really is.”

“Where is it?” Agnes asked. 

“No idea,” Jon said. “London, probably?” He paused contemplatively. “It would make sense if it was right next to that giant all seeing tower, but...what are the odds, right?”

“Can’t you just…” Agnes waved a hand in front of her eyes. 

“Then Jonah would know I’m looking. Which is to be avoided.”

“I know where it is,” Gerry said suddenly. Agnes and Jon stared at him, and he flushed a little. “Mum was friends with Gertrude. She used to take me there when she talked with her. I would...play in the stacks. The assistants would yell at me. I wonder what happened to all of them...some of them I would see once, then never again.”

“The same thing that happens to every sacrifice,” Agnes said flatly. If the prospect bothered her, she didn’t show it. She nibbled on some toast, burned flecks showering her plate. “So we check it out, then.”

“If we step inside Jonah will know too,” Gerry pointed out. 

“The most surreptitious way to do this is to inquire regarding Sasha James - and the Institute - from those who would have encounters with it.” Jon chewed at his lip, trying not to think too hard about the impossibility of hiding his actions from the omniscient avatar. His own position afforded him some degree of protection, but there was breaking into someone’s house and then there was breaking into their house and blasting an air horn in their face. Stepping foot inside the Institute would be the latter. “This is what I need you two for. Daisy and I are a bit - well -”

“Rude?” Gerry volunteered. “Violent? Terrifying?”

“Monstrous? Insanely powerful? Impulsively homicidal?” Agnes said. 

“Yes. I need two people who are a bit better in areas of...negotiation.” Jon sighed. “And someone who can set fires with their mind is never a bad ally. I must warn you, it may be dangerous -”

“We’ll do it,” Gerry said immediately. “You can count on us, Jon!”

“Gerry!” Agnes hissed. “We gotta swindle him first!”

“Oh, yeah.” Gerry turned back to Jon. “But you gotta make us food if we’re helping you.”

“ Gerry, that’s not swindling - ”

“Deal,” Jon said quickly. “No take backs.”

Daisy barked something about how unfair it was that she had to deal with three teenagers. 

But they did shake on it, even if Agnes singed the hair on his arms a little bit, and a deal was a deal. Friendships were friendships. 

Hopefully this wouldn’t backfire. 

Because nothing in Jon’s life ever backfired. 

Especially when involving two almighty teenagers with no impulse control.

Well. At least Daisy was there.

They all decided (Agnes decided, and Jon and Gerry agreed) that it was best to go in order of ‘Least violent and most friendly to most violent and least friendly’. Agnes even helpfully withdrew a pretty little notebook with butterflies on the cover and a matching glitter pink pen with a fuzzball on the tip. She carefully listed out each Entity, and Jon sorted them in terms of which of them was most likely to attack on sight. They carefully crossed out ‘The Stranger’, put ‘The Eye’ in its own category, put a question mark next to ‘The Desolation’, and argued for twenty minutes about whether or not to include The Extinction. Seeing as none of them really knew an Avatar of The Extinction, they left it off. 

After careful consideration, they realized that The End - and, by extension, Banks - was probably the least dangerous. They were all big fans of Oliver ‘Identity Theft King’ Banks, and they all knew just where to find him besides. 

It was a rare beautiful day in London. Jon shrugged on his trenchcoat and did his hair, Agnes made pleading eyes at Daisy until she relented and let Agnes put a big bow around her neck, and Gerry tried to steal one of Jon’s leather jackets out of his closet and put it on, practically swimming in it. It was at least ten minutes before Jon was able to get them out of the flat, lock up, switch his sign from ‘IN’ to ‘OUT ON CASE - BE BACK WHENEVER’, and escort them downstairs and out of the building. 

It was a short distance to their destination, so they decided to walk. Agnes and Gerry promptly launched into an argument over something inconsequential - it sounded like they were having media analysis differences over Fahrenheit 451, Agnes seemed fairly convinced that the moral of the book had been pro-book burning and Gerry was horrified - as Daisy trotted along easily beside them. The sky was a cheery green, it was the middle of the weekday, and the shambling monsters roaming the streets had mostly retreated to allow the pedestrians to complete their errands and get their exercise. 

As Jon watched the joggers, the parents with children in strollers, the errand runners, he marvelled at the tenacity of people. They were still alive, despite their dangerous surroundings. They had made a haven out of London, learning how to live and co-exist with those that preyed upon them, and although you could hardly say that they were flourishing they still clung stubbornly onto life like barnacles on a ship. Sometimes Jon truly admired humans, and wished that he could ever understand them instead of simply witness them. 

It was how he had met Gerry. The boy was one of the few humans who had been raised since birth into the supernatural, and he had handled the...changes with casualness and aplomb. He had been marked by the Eye at some point, but Jon didn’t know when. But if most humans were lightly sauteed in the pan of supernatural trauma, Gerry was marinated in it overnight and thrown on the 4th of July grill. Jon had smelled him from across the city, and had followed his nose straight into his hiding spot underneath what used to be a washateria. His Statement would have filled his stomach for a week . 

Agnes had set him on fire. Ruined his best suit. Oh well. He’d find out how those two met one day. He was patient. 

They passed by a flat complex, and a small squadron of children playing games in front of it. Like all children, they seemed to spend most of their time playing within the protected courtyards of their flat complexes or schoolyards. Jon had heard of video games but he had never seen one in real life, and although electricity functioned well enough to power tellies only old VHSs or DVDs were really accessible. Sometimes one may catch cable playing programmes, but - well, if you were foolish enough to look through cable, you likely deserved whatever happened to you. 

The children were skipping rope, playing double dutch. Two girls at each end sang out in high, clear voices a lilting, rhyming song. 

“Miss Suzy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell! Miss Suzy went to heaven, the steamboat went to- Hello operator, give me number nine! If you disconnect me I'll kick your big be-”

And on and on and on. Jon kept walking, even as Agnes slowed down. Her eyes fell on the singing little girls, something strange and foreign in her expression, and Gerry was forced to tug her along to keep pace with Jon and Daisy. For a brief second, Jon wondered if he saw envy there - but before he could think about it, it was already gone, and Agnes was asking Jon loudly if they could get a soda once they got there. 

There was, of course, the only place known Grim Reaper, Avatar of the End, mass murderer, insane man haunted by the sins of his past, serial identity theft and general crime committing king, and trans icon Oliver Banks could possibly be found: Taco Bell.

Of course, it went without saying that Hell Taco Bell was different from Normal Taco Bell - that is, identical except that ‘Diablo Sauce’ was deemed politically incorrect and renamed ‘New Jersey Sauce’. Like every other fast food restaurant in their Brave New World, it looked a little bit straight out of the 90s. Likely how fast food restaurants would have looked in Jon’s own unremembered childhood - and he wasn’t going to look too closely at that .

The kids ran in eagerly, shoving each other aside so they could crane their heads at the menu and whisper between themselves about what tacos they wanted. Jon let them deliberate, glancing over the store. Abandoned. Not surprised, honestly - by now the public had all received word that this particular Taco Bell location had been using human meat in their Doritos Locos tacos. That didn’t seem to stop Agnes or Gerry, although Jon did notice that they whispered for the vegetarian option. 

Jon walked up to the counter, sizing up the young man behind the counter. He was staring at Daisy, who was looking up at Jon with big eyes that clearly said ‘I would like a human meat taco please’. It contrasted with the bright pink bow Agnes had given her. 

“Uh,” the cashier said, “sir, uh, no, uh, dogs - allowed -”

Jon stared at him. And stared. And stared. The cashier stared back, unafraid of death, before deciding that it wasn’t worth pushing the matter. 

“Can I take your order, sir?”

“Yeah, uh, can I have…” Jon looked back at the kids. “What do you want?”

“Dorito taco!” Gerry called. “Hold the human meat!”

“Dorito taco with human meat please,” Agnes said serenely. “Low calorie. I’m watching my weight.”

“You’re skinny enough, don’t worry about your weight,” Jon said. He looked down at Daisy, who barked. “One vegetarian taco and one meat lover’s taco. My sister would like a large plate of meat, please. As for me...I was wondering if I could speak with Oliver Banks.”

The cashier blinked sleepily at Jon. “Uh. We don’t have anybody of that name working here, I think...and he’s not on the menu…”

“Right, right.” Jon held a hand to his shoulder. “About this tall, skin darker than mine, bald? Dresses in pea coats and corduroy slacks? Eyes like taxidermy? Predicts the time and date of your death?”

“Oh, Steven Carpenter. Hold on.” The cashier turned around - Jon understood in a flash that his name was Trevor and he had not managed to escape the Taco Bell in fifty two days - and shouted into the kitchen. “Steven! Creepy overly tall dude with two children and a wolf wants to eat you!”

In barely a minute, a very familiar face poked his way out from the kitchen. Oliver Banks looked surprised to see Jon, then terrified, then once he saw the kids and Daisy his expression settled into cautious confusion. 

Jon waved, trying to convey, ‘I am not here to eat you and your trauma, at least on purpose. Look, I’ve brought this nuclear family’. 

“Uh, Trev, I think I’m taking five,” Oliver said, eyes jumping from Jon to Agnes to Gerry to Daisy to Jon again. 

“Whatever,” Trevor said. 

In five minutes, the children were happily noshing on their tacos - despite the fact that he just fed them - Daisy was chowing down on her plate of raw meat, and Oliver Banks was sitting across from Jon in a corner booth. He was wearing a taco bell uniform, complete with little hat, and was staring fixedly at Jon. His eyes were present and focused, but there was something unmistakably glassy about them - not quite dead, but far from alive. Like marble eyes sewn into a stuffed racoon. 

“You don’t have to explain,” Oliver set, cutting off Jon’s clumsy beginning into his tale. “Everybody’s heard what happened. You, like, ripped up the Not!Them. Like it was tissue paper and you were a six year old at a birthday party. Then you fed her to your dog.”

“It wasn’t me,” Jon said weakly. “I was wringing some real answers about my past out of her and she just...well. Also, she’s not my dog, she’s my sister.”

“Okay. Sure, dude.” Oliver held his hands up. “All I’m saying, please don’t ask me about anything that happened before three years ago. I don’t wanna get popped like a grape.”

Jon narrowed his eyes. “I thought Annabelle introduced us. A month after I came to London.”

“I’m not saying anything!” Oliver crossed his arms uncomfortably. “And if you make me, I’ll get popped. Like a grape. ”

“Why are you afraid of death?” Gerry asked curiously, as if this was a normal thing to ask. 

Oliver just looked grim. Ha, ha. “I fear my own annihilation as little as I desire it. Also, I literally just got this job - do you have any idea what the market’s like these days? I don’t want to die before finishing Breaking Bad.” He sighed. “Look, I’ll help if I can, but…”

“We understand,” Agnes said smoothly. She folded her hands on the table, leaning forward and crossing her legs underneath her long skirt at the knee. She fixed Oliver in her unblinking gaze, her eyes that always seemed to shine with some ephemeral light. “If it’ll make you feel better, I can ask you the questions. The Archivist won’t compel you.”

“And Agnes won’t set you on fire!” Gerry said happily, munching his vegetarian taco. 

“Uh...sure, kid.” Oliver shot Agnes a strange look. “I definitely remember you being dead three years ago.” He glanced over at a blissful Gerry. “You too, actually.”

“Like a phoenix, I rise from the ashes,” Agnes said mysteriously. 

“I got better,” Gerry said, in a bad Monty Python impression. 

“And also...adults?”

“Why would we do that? That sounds dull,” Gerry said.

“Anyway,” Agnes said, “we wanted to ask you regarding the location of Sasha James. She’s dead, correct?”

For a second, Oliver’s eyes glazed over, as if he was seeing something far away. Fog encroached over his glassy eyes, and for a second Jon saw the shadow of a tendril creeping in. “Long, long dead. That’s for sure.”

“But is she gone ?” Agnes pressed. “Is there any way to get in contact with her, beyond the grave?”

Oliver’s lips thinned, and he appeared both deep in thought and slightly scared of where the train of thought would disembark. “For any ordinary human, who died an ordinary death...I’d say that a Ouija board’s twenty quid. But...for Sasha James...something tells me that it’s possible. Not easy. But possible.”

“Will we have to go into the Underworld?” Gerry asked eagerly, leaning forward. “Like Orpheus and Eurydice?”

“I hate that myth,” Jon muttered. Daisy barked in agreement. 

But Oliver just shook his head. “No, it’s different then that. Nobody human could possibly do it. You’d have to have the - the furthest thing from a mortal mind. It would have to be esoteric, obscure. But dedicated and present. Someone with no foot in humanity, but who’s committed fully towards their immortal and ethereal nature. Maybe...maybe someone like that could find the crack in reality Sasha James fell into. But no one else.”

On cue, the kids looked at Jon. Jon looked at Daisy. Daisy did not seem very impressed, and looked at him back. 

Then what Oliver meant hit him on the head. “Oh! Oh, you mean me!”

“How have you lived this long?” Oliver asked flatly. 

Daisy barked, and Jon felt obliged to translate. “Mostly through my sister’s efforts.”

“And us!” Gerry volunteered. “We’re great assistants!”

Agnes just sniffed. “If anything, you all are my assistants.” Daisy barked. “Miss Tonner is my partner and my best friend.”

“I thought I was your -”

“I’m not best friends with boys -”

“Okay,” Oliver said, kneading the bridge of his nose. “Is that all you wanted? Can I go now?”

“You’ve been very helpful, Oliver,” Jon said quickly. “We really appreciate your information. Just, ah, Agnes - if you could ask Oliver where, exactly, this crack in reality might be, or how I might access it, that would be helpful.”

But Oliver just shook his head. “I have no contact with the afterlife. Only with this life, and how life begins and ends in this world. But I think if anyone would know, it would be the Flesh. They could probably tell you where her body is, if it’s not in the stomach of the Not!Them. Good luck, Archivist. Remember that I helped you.”

“I will.”

“That’s all I ask.” Oliver sighed and slid out of the booth, placing his little cap back on his head. “Time to go back to this identity I stole. I don’t know why I’m like this. God, why couldn’t I have stolen the life of a Wall Street banker?”

“I thought Wall Street was burned down by Jude?” Jon wondered. 

“Yeah, and nobody would be able to call me on my BS.” Oliver sighed long sufferingly, as if someone was making him fish social security cards out of the trash and squat in abandoned flats. “Would you guys like Cinnamon Twists with that?”

The kids and the wolf perked up. Jon groaned, and got out his wallet again. 

“Just tell your mate Trevor to bring them here,” Jon said. “I want my own meal.”

Oliver shot him a strange look, but he did as Jon asked. And, a bare few minutes later, the kids happily shared the bag of sticky sweet sugar as they listened to the riveting tale of how Trevor McNamara had lost himself within the endless labyrinth of the Taco Bell. 

Well. Dinner and a show.

The only problem was this: Jon didn’t quite know where Jared was. 

“You’re kidding me.” Agnes crossed her arms, raising an eyebrow at him. Gerry hastily copied her. “You’re an omniscient private investigator who specializes in finding things and people...and you can’t find someone?”

Jon bristled, opening his Eyes wider until the one on his arm was practically watering. They were sitting on a bench at a bus stop, Jon Looking and Seeing but, ultimately, stopping short of Knowing. Gerry was licking the cinnamon twists bag. “All I’m seeing is blackness,” Jon said gruffly. “The Flesh must be protecting him. It was always good at shielding itself from me…” He glanced at Daisy, who was sitting next to him on the bench eyeing every passing car suspiciously. “Looks like we’re doing this the old fashioned way.”

Which is to say - actual investigation. 

It was probably time to divulge something: Jon did not actually know how to investigate things. 

Not to say that he wasn’t intelligent! Jon felt as if he was extremely intelligent, even if everybody who had ever met him disagreed. He was a monster who possessed the infernal scope of omniscience, he knew things. For instance, Jon was perfectly aware of how to bind a book or perform heart surgery or bake a croquembouche. That didn’t mean that he could actually do either of those things. 

Most of the time Jon’s skillset involved...well, Knowing where things were, and then going to go get them or just divulging where they were. The most difficult part about the whole thing was when the object was in the possession of someone who did not wish to give it up. That was usually where Daisy came in. She enjoyed the Hunt for the item, and Jon enjoyed Knowing. It worked out well for the both of them. 

 However, in this process there was very little actual investigation . Not to say that Jon was incapable! He was very capable. In fact, maybe this would be his chance to prove himself. Really show everyone that he didn’t use his infinite knowledge as a crutch. Jon was a goal oriented, problem solving thinker, who was capable of creative strategies and advanced tactics. He knew this, even if everyone else doubted him.This was his chance to really show them. 

“Alright,” Jon said, meeting Daisy’s yellow and slitted two eyes with his glowing green dozens of eyes. She looked back at him seriously. “Do you remember Jared’s scent?”

Daisy barked a negative. 

Agnes rolled her eyes, in a spectacularly condescending fashion. “By the old fashioned way, do you mean making Miss Daisy do all the work?”

“I help,” Jon said primly. He dug in his pockets, reaching his arm down to the elbow, and then the shoulder, looking for what he needed. He hadn’t had a run-in with Jared in quite a while - last time they met it was during one of those stupid parties Annabelle dragged him too, and Jon had ended up losing an eye to him that took hours to grow back. “Look, I’m helping right now - here we go, c’mere, you little blighter -”

Triumphantly, Jon pulled out a severed finger. Daisy poked her nose at it, smelling it deeply, but Jon had to carefully pull it away to stop her from eating it. “Won it off him at a party,” Jon said proudly as Agnes wrinkled her nose and Gerry looked fascinated. “Pin The Tail On The Donkey, you know.”

“Is that how you play Pin The Tail On The Donkey?” Gerry asked, fascinated. 

“Naturally,” Jon said. He paused a beat. “Well, I understand Avatars play it a little differently. For one thing, the Donkey is usually -”

But Daisy was already off like a shot, following her nose and the invisible trail of scent that only she could perceive, and it was all Jon and the kids could do to scramble and catch up with her. 

She ran down the main street, dodging pedestrians and monsters alike, and Jon ran after her. She panted loudly, almost howling, and it was like a switch had flipped in her mind: the Hunt was on, the game was afoot, and Daisy would not and could not be distracted until she had reached her mission. 

They ran. They did not stop, but it was more as if they could not stop. Daisy barrelled through stop lights, barely dodging cars, growling as they honked at her. She vaulted over fences, tongue lolling out of her mouth, skidded around intersections, and squirmed her way into dusky and dimly lit back alleys where far less dangerous things than them lingered. 

It was only once Jon was forced to vault a fence and cut across a backyard that Daisy slowed down, leading them towards what looked like an abandoned strip mall. The glass windows were boarded up, graffitied over  with youth culture jokes and occasionally stained by blood. Piles of trash and refuse piled up in the parking lot, and Daisy carefully sniffed each pile before moving on, as if Jared was hiding underneath one of them. As if Jared was one of them. 

Jon panted, wheezing and bent over, as the kids caught up with him. He grabbed a second’s reprieve as Agnes finger-combed her windswept hair and Gerry tied his Vans. Eventually Daisy started barking at a boarded up outlet store, scrabbling at the blocked door, and Jon lightly jogged over to meet her. 

The doorknob was locked, of course, and it was boarded up besides. Jon glanced backwards at Agnes, whose eyes were already glimmering. “I’m willing to guess that this place is unlocked for those drawn here.”

Gerry stepped forward, frowning at the outlet store with a professional air. “The Flesh tends to center itself in meatpacking facilities. Unless this place is highly deceptive, then it’s likely that this is one of Jared’s more commercial ventures.”

But Agnes was already lighting up a finger, letting her soft flames dance around her hand. Jon sighed, and grabbed Daisy’s ruff and dragged her away from the door. “Please don’t  set fire to Jared’s newest business venture. He definitely won’t talk to us if we burn that bridge.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Archivist,” Agnes said, carefully reaching out a finger and tracing it along the edges of the doorframe. The wood sizzled and popped, smoke quickly filling the empty and abandoned parking lot, and Jon watched as the embers of flame began to eat up the wood in well-controlled lines. “I’m a professional.”

“You’re getting better at controlling it!” Gerry said supportively, as Agnes’ long hair began to gently float above her shoulders and she began to smell like burnt flesh. “I’m sure we can burn down the rest of the mall no problem if you want!”

“Put a pin in that idea,” Agnes said, “and keep an eye on the lights of my flame.”

In a great white burst, the flame roared up and swallowed the rest of the boards. Ash dusted the concrete floor, melting the doorframe, but when Agnes clenched her fist the fire extinguished itself. All that was left of the fire was the smell of woodsmoke, a light dusting of ashes, and an empty doorway. 

As always, Daisy poked her head in first. She trotted inside, and Jon thrust out a hand to keep the kids back until she barked the all clear. Jon hesitantly followed her, trench coat whipping around his ankles, every sense on alert. 

It was a gym. Or so it appeared. It was small, ratty and poky, and the weight machines and treadmills looked dusty or covered in rust. Nobody was inside, and there was a particular putrid smell coating the small outlet area like a haze. Two doors lead to the locker rooms - and god knows what else - in the back, and most importantly, there was a very, very, very large man squashed into a small chair sitting behind a small desk. He was wearing  half-moon reading spectacles and appeared to be doing his books.

Of course, he was only a very, very, very large man if Jon looked with his main eyes. If he opened up his other senses, if he Saw and Knew and Witnessed, what Jared Hopforth really was, was far from a human being at all. 

Almost instinctively, Jon sniffed the air. Any patron of this gym would have a Statement so delicious Jon was already feeling the drool pool in his mouth. But the gym seemed empty. Maybe business had been bad. 

What was the point? Facades, caricatures of businesses and normalcy, weren’t necessary in their brand new world. But the Circus still put on airs of the Circus, and the Flesh still set up its little traps. The Mother of Puppets spun her trapdoor webs, disguised as the common and natural, and ensnared its flies. Maybe the Entities and those who served them knew that humans would gravitate towards what seemed normal and familiar, in this unfamiliar world. Maybe even the Avatars missed a little bit of the old. 

Well. Jon didn’t. He was better than that. He wouldn’t know what to do with the old world if it bit him in the ass. But when Jon looked down at himself, at his trench coat and suit, he knew that even he had the tendency towards cosplay. Towards roleplay. 

So what? It wasn’t hurting anyone. If you didn’t have an identity you created one, and if you didn’t have a role you carved one out. Jon had found his own life, and he had worked hard for it. It wasn’t as if he had anything familiar to go back to.

The only familiar thing in his life was the wolf currently barking at Jared Hopworth, who did not look amused to be disturbed in his work. Jon stepped forward and carefully pulled her away, grinning apologetically at Jared. “Sorry about that, she’s a bit, ah, enthusiastic. Hullo, Jared! How’ve you been?”

Jared blinked sleepily at Jon. If Jon Looked, he could see the three eyeballs tucked underneath his second armpit blink too. “Archivist.”

“That’s me! Finder and notarizer of lost things. Making lost things unlost, and therefore no longer unknown, but known.” Jon leaned up against his counter, faux-casually, as the kids sidled up next to him and patted Daisy furiously. “I was wondering if you were interested in voluntarily, with no coercion, answering some innocuous and innocent questions asked by my assistant Agnes Montague?”

Jared blinked sleepily at Jon again. Jon patiently waited for his words to percolate through Jared’s brain. He was a bit slow, but hey - if Jon had that many brains, it would take him a while to gather his thoughts too. 

Finally, Jared said, “You gonna make me? Cuz I heard you popped the Stranger. Like a grape.”

“You love it when people get popped like grapes,” Jon pointed out.

“Not fun when it’s me . Archivist.”

He was regretting what happened more and more. Actions shouldn’t have consequences. It just wasn’t fair. Jon sighed. “I swear I won’t force you to answer any of my questions.” 

“Alright then.” Jared went back to his recordkeeping. “No.”

Jon stared at him. The kids stared too, with wide eyes. Daisy was growling lowly. “Excuse me?”

“Said you wouldn’t force me. No.”

Jon, silently, boggled. He had no script for this. People always told him things. Not telling him things? This wasn’t how you conducted an interview. This was all wrong. No Statement? No Statement for the Archivist?

“I think you broke him,” Gerry whispered to Jared loudly. 

“Deep breath,” Agnes said reassuringly, patting Jon on the back. “It’s okay. I know it hurts. Why don’t you go sit down.”

“You kick the Archivist?” Jon whispered, before he went to go sit down on a weightlifting bench and rethink his entire life. He distantly heard the kids haggling with Jared, but then Daisy was sitting in front of him and wagging her tail. Jon petted her, letting her ground him, still feeling very off-center. 

Somehow, Jon had the feeling he had taken Jared’s Statement before. Its taste was...he could recollect it, feel it on the back of his throat. Soft and slimy and so, so rich. Like a rare, uncooked slice of kobe beef. Jon wanted it again. It wasn’t fair, how he couldn’t have it again. If he Opened his Eye he could bring it to mind - Jared’s childhood, his connections with the Web - but so much of it lay frustratingly outside of his reach. 

Something  was blocking him. It may even be blocking him on purpose. Who would rip knowledge from the monster who was made of it? It was like drawing and quartering him. Just not fair. 

“Deal!” Gerry said, shaking Jard’s extradimensional fifth arm. “You won’t regret this, Mr. Hopworth!” 

“Call me Jared,” Jared grunted. He reached out his seventh arm, unfurling it, and letting a soft rain of Dum-Dum lollies shower from his palm. “You kids want some candy?”

“Sure!” Gerry said, reaching out to grab one, before Agnes smacked it out of his hand and hissed something about how cannibalism was bad for the brain. She took one for herself, and a fistful for Daisy, shoving them in her big pockets. “Aw. You’re no fair, Agnes.”

“Thanks for your help, Mr. Hopworth.” Agnes said politely. “You don’t happen to have something we can use to track this thing down, do you?”

“Wait,” Jon said, standing up. “What?”

When Jared eyed Jon from above his half-moon spectacles, it was decidedly smug. “You’re a lost-and-finder, eh? I got something lost. Find it for me. I’ll answer your questions then.”

“Oh.” Statement for Jon after all? Jon’s mood was immediately improved. “Naturally. I can find anything, big or small. What do you need tracked down?”

“A rib.” Jared used one of his sets of arms to hold his hands about a third of a meter apart. “This long. Smallish. Not enough calcium, little malnourished. Track it down.” He grinned with fifty yellowed teeth crammed inside a too-small mouth. “You can even keep it after.”

That was generous, especially for Jared. Jon narrowed his eyes. “It doesn’t happen to be attached to anybody, does it?” Jon felt squeamish with murder. He blamed Daisy’s moralistic attitudes towards him when he was young. He was just too moral for his own good sometimes. 

If possible, Jared grinned even wider. It pulled at his skin strangely, a mouth unfitted for its face. That was Jared: wrong, in every conceivable way, and many ways that only Jon himself could conceive. “Call it...repossession. “ He reached a hand into his stomach like Jon reached into his trench coat pockets, rummaged around a bit inside, and pulled out a small rib. He held it out, and Daisy cautiously stepped forward and sniffed it. “Should smell and look just like this. That good enough for you, all?”

“It’s excellent,” Agnes said smoothly. “Thank you so much. Sorry about your door, again. We'll just be going now.”

But Jared just grunted. “S’okay. I just got a new shipment in. I was thinking of replacing it with something...funner. Come back with the rib or don’t come back.”

And on that cheery note, Jon quickly found himself back in the empty parking lot of the strip mall. He looked at the kids, who looked guilelessly back up at him, and then at Daisy, who was already sniffing up a storm. Interestingly, she sniffed Jon long and hard, nosing her way into his coat and prodding her wet nose on his bare flesh. 

“Uh, Daisy? I doubt you’re going to find what he’s looking for in there.” Jon carefully stepped away, rubbing her between the ears. “Can you find it for us?”

Agnes crossed her arms. “You know, I’m beginning to think that one person here is the actual detective, and that’s Miss Daisy.”

Daisy barked, and Jon sighed. “I am technically her assistant, yes. Her name used to be on the door. Now, do you have any other cutting yet accurate remarks, or can we actually get some work done?”

“I’m hungry,” Gerry complained. “Can I have one of those meat lollies?”

“You just ate ,” Jon cried, exasperated. 

“That was, like, a whole thirty minutes ago. Miss Daisy made me run!”

“He’s a growing boy,” Agnes said reasonably. 

Then Daisy barked, because she was always hungry, and Jon sighed and brought out his wallet again. It was a good thing he didn’t really understand the value of money, or he’d be upset about all of the fast food he was being forced to buy. 

Oh, well. This would be a snap. Daisy’s nose could track down anything, and where her nose failed Jon could make up for the difference. And, well, if they needed to take it by force...Agnes was quite good at that. 

Experimentally, Jon opened his Eyes and strove to Know where the rib was from. He groaned when feedback scrambled his brain, like putting a magnet too close to a telly set. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. Why were his powers on the fritz? They weren’t perfect, but they were far from this finicky. 

It was worrying. What was the common thread behind every instance his powers would fritz out or turn dangerous? His vision was blocked in trying to find Sasha James and her past, when it came to navigating the Stranger and drawing out the Not!Them’s past from its lips, his memory of Jared’s Statement…

Somehow, that was the worst part. That he had a Statement, that he had eaten of it and tasted its bitter joys, but that it was now far and separate from him. It was just so wrong. It felt slimy and vile underneath his skin, crawling and impure. It was an act of sacrilege against his god, and it made Jon feel disgusting.

He had to make up for this somehow. Somehow. But how?

“I want hot dogs from the hot dog cart! Come on, Jon! Help me beat Agnes there!”

“I’m coming,” Jon said, and ran after the kids and Daisy. He could figure it out. If he was - if he was out of favor, if he had disgraced it, then he could make it up to the Eye.

Somehow. 

As Agnes munched a hot dog and Gerry inhaled a pretzel (“Kid, you really don’t want to eat whatever’s in those hot dogs”), they followed Daisy as she sniffed her way across London for the second time that day. 

She brought them back to Jon’s flat/offices first, tail slowly slicing the air in thought before she turned around and bounded off. She stopped to sniff by his favorite deli, then at his laundromat, but continued running in an easy lope. She would stop frequently, sniff around and walk in a circle, before choosing another direction seemingly at random. She didn’t do it at a run this time, but rather an easy and graceful lope that made her truly seem like a predator. Her yellow eyes glinted under the foggy jaundiced street lamps that punctuated the green air, and if passerby didn’t dive out of her way they received a low growl in response. She lead them close to the subway, sniffing at the mouth of the entrance, before turning around and evidently deciding to make the journey on foot. 

She lingered in front of a flat complex that was unfamiliar to Jon for a long time, sniffing around the bushes and lingering by the front door for a reason that Jon suspected that not even she knew. She did the same with another coffee shop, startling the poor cashier and squishing her way through the thin coating of worms on the floor of the shop before retreating. 

Finally, they made their way to Chelsea. This was the first move that startled and worried Jon, and he held out both his hands to prevent the kids from walking forward. 

“Daisy, is this safe?” Jon asked. Daisy barked an affirmative, but Jon didn’t feel any better. “There can’t possibly be anything helpful in Chelsea. Can’t we just...skip this area?” She gave him a very unimpressed look. “I’m not scared, I just…”

Jon trailed off. What was he? It was his role to witness and see, not be scared of some random London neighborhood. Just because it was...well…

“Wait,” Gerry said, stifling a laugh, “you believe those rumors about Chelsea being haunted?”

Jon huffed, crossing his arms. “What’s unreasonable about that?” he said dryly. “Look around you. How could there not be ghosts here?”

It was fair. Chelsea had been flattened long ago, and all that lived in its ruins were the skeletons of houses and of people. It had been the area in London that had likely been the worst-off, and what wasn’t vaporized into rubble had mutated into monsters beyond even Jon’s imagination. Although the houses were nothing but bare frames of rubble, he knew that inside the basements where terrified families once huddled, amorphous and hulking beasts dripped fear and hunger and waited, waited, waited for prey. 

“...Gerry, go back to the flat,” Jon said, closing his eyes as Gerry began squawking. “I’m serious. This isn’t safe for you. Agnes, Daisy, and I will find the rib.”

“You need my help!” Gerry cried, crossing his arms stubbornly. Agnes was looking between the two of them, worrying at her lip. “You can’t do this without me!”

“Why?” Jon asked, and he only realized how cruel it came out when Gerry flinched and Daisy yipped quietly. 

But, well - wasn’t it true? Jon had his omniscience - when it was working -  Daisy had her power and strength, and Agnes had her cleansing flame. Gerry was just a human. And any monster who smelled the pure, sweet scent of a human in Chelsea would come straight to them. It wasn’t a risk they could take. 

But Gerry had set his feet stubbornly, jutting his jaw out. “Because I know exactly where we’re going. And neither of you know it half as well as I do. You’ll need my help to navigate it.”

“You know -”

“Gerry’s coming,” Agnes said, setting her mouth in a determined line and grabbing his hand. “We don’t leave each other behind.”

Daisy barked an affirmative. Jon sighed. There would be no arguing with them. They’d just have to see if this mission went sideways. 

“Then stay close, you two,” Jon said. He looked down at Daisy. “Lead the way. If you see any opportunists looking for a quick snack...you know what to do.”

She bared her teeth, which was all the answer anybody needed, and they crossed into Chelsea. 

Something about it was both...beautiful and sickening. It should have been boring, or at the very least stomach turning: the way that some buildings were nothing more than rebar and concrete, and others were only rubble. Some were simply gone completely, as if a tornado had picked them up and carried them away. Others were completely and utterly intact - and you knew that those were the most dangerous at all. Oftentimes personal items were scattered. A vanity mirror lay in the middle of the street, broken glass everywhere that incited Jon to pick Daisy up and carry her over that stretch, and other times the debris was nothing more than a child’s doll or a splintered cradle. 

Fascinating, or it should have been. Jon always enjoyed piercing together people’s lives by the things they left behind. You could tell a great deal about a person by what they had treasured. Items were the structure and inhabitants of people’s lives, and humans always left behind far more than they thought they did. Letters, diaries, videos and recordings - you could immortalize yourself through objects, if you so desired. It was the groundwork of the study of history, allowing even the amateur to walk the footsteps of those long dead. Nobody was ever truly gone, so long as they left items and memories behind. 

But there was something sickening about Chelsea. Something tepid and vile and wrong. They kept a fast pace, mindful of monsters, and frequently Daisy stopped and shepherded them into a dim alcove to hide as shambling monsters passed them by. Agnes kept her fingers ready to snap, but Jon preferred to sit and watch the last remnants of life pass them by. 

Eventually, Daisy grew confused: taking them to the rubble of what used to be a petrol station, then a coffee shop, then again and again. The trail must be thinning out. Likely the influence of the background magic radiation. Jon could feel it, lingering on his skin like droplets left by fog. It was almost sticky. Whatever once was here, it was heavily steeped in the supernatural in a way that put even their modern world to shame. 

“There’s no need,” Gerry whispered. “I know the way from here.”

Jon sighed. “Lead the way.”

And lead the way Gerry did. He guided them past stacks of build-up rubble, diverted them along busted bridges, and led their small group as they walked straight down an innocuous street that abruptly and suddenly became familiar to Jon. Still, he couldn’t quite place where he had seen the street before until Gerry and Daisy skittered to a halt, standing in front of what appeared to be a bombed building. It used to be beautiful: Victorian, its wood rich and dark, with teetering spires and ornate woodwork. Its door hung loosely off its edges, every intricate window blown out, but it stood still, and there appeared to still be dark depths inside. 

Daisy barked a resigned amusement - of course they’d end up back here. Agnes looked wary, clearly recognizing the building too. Gerry just seemed as if he was steeling himself for something. None of them wanted to be the ones to step inside first. 

Then a monstrous groan echoed across the air, and the sound of something thick dragging along the concrete street, and they all quickly ran inside the haunted remains of the building. 

Inside the domain of Jonah Magnus. 

“Ugh,” Jon said, once Daisy had pushed the splintered remains of a bookcase in front of the door and they had all huddled in silence waiting for the footsteps to pass, “I hate this place. I dearly hope I don’t run into Jonah again. There’s no way he doesn’t know we’re here.”

Agnes’ head snapped to him, her olive eyes wide. “You know it?”

Gerry’s question was far more pertinent. “You’ve met Jonah Magnus here?”

But Jon just sighed. Daisy was sniffing her way through the entrance room, grandiose and ornate. Or at least it had once been: now it was very much in the realm of Ozymandias, a bombed out shell of past splendor. “Just the once. A few months after I entered London for the first time.” Read: a week after Daisy stopped turning back to human. “I looted its library, looking for reading material.” Read: looking for something that would cure Daisy. His omniscience had promised him that it was the greatest source of supernatural knowledge on the Isles, and it hadn’t disappointed him. “Ran into that ponce.” Read: begged him for help, which he had denied. “Never came back.” Read: cursed out the ponce and stormed out, too furious to ever return. 

Daisy barked recrminatingly at Jon. 

He scowled down at her. “I don’t have to tell you everything I do. You’re not my mother.” Another bark. “Older sisters and mothers are not the same thing.” An angrier bark. “I kept  my promise, I can’t exactly control when the arse comes out of his ivory tower -”

“Is he here now?” Agnes asked urgently. 

Like blinking, Jon Looked. Nothing was hidden from him, in this place of his power. Even he knew that. It was probably...Jonah’s dumb old house or something. Yes. That seemed right. “No. He’s not. He’s where he always is.” Jon shivered, feeling more and more eyes sprout on his arms. “I know where the rib is. In the basement -”

“Why don’t Gerry and I check there,” Agnes said quickly, grabbing Gerry’s hand. “You can check the main library.”

Daisy barked and snapped a little at Agnes, a clear insistence that she and Jon check out the obviously more dangerous parts of the building. 

“We can handle it,” Gerry said quickly. “Let’s split up, gang!”

“I’m not sure that’s a good -”

“I told you,” Gerry said, infuriatingly calmly. “I know this place. It’s written into my soul. It can’t harm me.” 

Then, with no further explanation or room for more questions, he and Agnes ran off. They seemed to know just where to go: the exact stairwell to disappear into, just how to climb the steps down just right. 

This time, he didn’t even need Daisy’s warning bark. Jon Searched and Looked, and came up empty. “They’ll be perfectly safe,” Jon said to her, even as she growled lowly. “There’s nothing dangerous in here.”

She seemed skeptical, but Jon was convinced. Something in this building hurting those kids was like...Jon hurting them. He wouldn’t. It wouldn’t either. This building was safe, in a way that nothing in their world ever truly was.

Which was a warning sign. Still, Jon was willing to go along with it. Jonah liked to fancy himself king of the world, but Jon knew which one of them was the favorite child. Could Jonah talk someone to death? No. He would have done it by now. Jon won.

“Well,” Jon said finally, looking down at Daisy, “guess it’s just you and me, Scoob.”

She bit him. But it was worth it. 

Out of lack of anything better to do, Jon followed Agnes’ suggestion and softly padded his way down the thick runner carpets in the ruined and slightly smoky-smelling hallways until he reached the library. He had plundered it of anything truly useful years ago, but a refresher was always useful. Besides, he had been meaning to pick up the Vol 1 of Demons! Demons! Demons! - he had accidentally only grabbed number two, and as such his knowledge on every demon whose name started with the letters A through M was woefully inadequate. 

But somehow he found himself drifting to the small fiction section, fingers tracing over the familiar and yellowing pages, before pulling one out at random. His lips curled in a half-smile when he read the cover. A book of Norse fairy tales. He sat down against the bookcase, cracking it open to his favorite story immediately. Daisy settled down to read over his shoulder, tail thumping the bookcase and making it rattle. 

“East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” Jon whispered to her. In that moment, it was just the two of them. Just him and Daisy against the world, as it always had been. “Once upon a time there was a poor peasant who had so many children that he did not have enough of either food or clothing to give them…” 

The peasant girl, who followed her mother’s ill advice and looked upon her sleeping animal lover in the dark, revealing him for a handsome man. Transformation, it seemed, was always the nature of it: the dual nature of animal and man, how if you walked right and followed the advice of your betters and always heeded old women in the woods, it was possible to win. To do the right thing.

When they tired of that he pulled down the Blue Fairy Book without looking, cracking it open to the tale he was thinking of. Snow White and Rose Red. 

“Snow White and Rose Red,” Jon whispered in the dark, “Don’t beat your lover dead.”

That story had discomfited him. The giant bear, who slept by the fire of two nice, sweet, and obedient little girls and wormed his way into their good graces. At the opportune moment he reveals himself for a cursed prince, and marries one of them while his brother gets the other. Strange, especially considering that the bear was implied to be a prince much older than the primary school age of the girls. But it was of no matter. Always be kind, always be good, always obey, and you’ll get your prince. 

Jon was a princess, in his own way. Obedient. A dutiful son and brother. A supplicant to his god. But he had that same sin that every princess had, that made the peasant girl look upon her lover in the dark: the desire to know , and to understand. 

He flipped to later in the book. The Goose Girl. Transformed, for the sin of another woman’s jealousy. Snow White, hurt by the hand of a jealous woman.

Maybe it wasn’t Jon who was the princess. Maybe it had been Jonathan Sims the human: who was disobedient, naughty and rude, and failed to heed his betters. Maybe he had been captured by the worst trait any child could have, that burning sense of curiosity, and had been transformed into the monster who clutched books of children’s fairy tales yet who had never been a child. 

The wolf, her muzzle resting on his leg, blinking sleepily. Was this a transformation he could undo by loving hard enough? By being wise enough? By being obedient enough?

Fiction, fantasy, and reality: It was all much the same to Jon. The lines blurred, and a story told in the dark took on new and arcane dimensions. Stories told to Jon, fed to him like a mother bird regurgitating for her young, spun themselves into gold and were created into reality. A memory - a fiction, as all memories were - could hurt. Could haunt. Could kill.

The Archivist did not discriminate. He had been born a blank slate, an empty vessel, suitable for nothing but stuffing other’s stories inside. He had patterned himself after other’s lives, after the lives told in books fiction and nonfiction alike, and eventually Jon had wrung an identity for himself out of clay and fear. 

It was hollow. But it was all he had. Was it a sin, to want more?

Slowly, painstakingly, Jon’s mind drifted, and his Eyes began to overtake his vision. His attention drifted to his own little red riding hood, prowling where she shouldn’t belong.

She had known exactly where to find them. Inside a small room in the depths of the basement, jostling around in a box marked with what looked like a drawing of a flame, she tucked the box under her arm. It was no effort at all to find a dusy tape recorder, and hide underneath a desk covered in slashes like those made from a knife as she shoved the cassette in the recorder with shaking fingers. When she pressed play it was with bated breath, as if she was afraid of what she was going to hear.

She was afraid. But she was so, so excited. She had been searching for this remnant of her past for years - this proof that she had existed, that she had been meaningful in an adult’s body before her flame was relit inside this child’s one - and only now had it been safe. Only because of Jon could she walk inside here without her flesh freezing and cracking from sawdust. 

A melodious voice crackled over the line. A familiar, creaking voice. A bitter old woman, hardened yet wise. A gruff man, with a working class accent, who Jon viscerally remembered as Arnold. Not only Knew: Jon had met the man. Hadn’t shaken his hand, but he had nodded respectfully. More voices, high and low and lilting, as Agnes plowed through tape after tape after tape: Carlos, Eugene, Jude. Gertrude, the old coot of a Head Archivist.

Another voice. It made Jon shiver, tingle, lose himself in ecstacy. It was the voice of the Archivist. Pure and sweet and good. It carried Truth and everything Right. Jon wanted to eat it, wanted to cram it in his mouth and choke it down even if it hurt, especially if it hurt, hurt was good, hurt was always good - 

Agnes listened to the story of her life with wide eyes, breath caught in her chest. She had been right. There had been something the others weren’t telling her. Something Jude had always been holding back. She patted Agnes on the head and said don’t worry about it, I’ll explain when you’re older, enjoy your childhood in this playground for our god. There was so much to desolate here. But there was nothing, and nobody else understood that. There was nothing to destroy that people had once thought permanent. Everything was transient and impure in this world. There were no pillars of anybody’s life, no safe havens. Sure, you could burn and melt and turn to ash. But it didn’t mean anything. Fire was useless if it wasn’t consuming and ripping apart everything from you. If all it was doing was destroying more trash, ruining another safehouse...it was just fire.

And that was unacceptable.

The Crippling of Agnes Montague at the Hands of Gertrude Robinson. The Doubt of Agnes Montague. The Depression of Agnes Montague. The Loss of Faith of Agnes Montague. The Desolation of Agnes Montague at the Hands of A Coffee Shop Boy. She was born from ashes, she flew high, and she fell in flames. She was reborn in flames, and this time her cult swore that they’d do it right.

They’d never understood anything about children. 

After the recording on Emma’s sins fizzled to an end, and Agnes sought desperately in her heart for the memory of her love for Gertrude Robinson to find it fizzled to ash, she stuffed the Statements in her pockets and set off at a sprint for her brother. It wasn’t safe to take them from this place of the Beholding’s glory, but she had no choice. She had to keep listening to them. She had to understand. Maybe then she could tell what was the right thing to do.

Predictably, she found Gerry in the Head Archivist’s office. He had fond memories of the place: Gertrude wasn’t really the doting grandmother type to pass out sweets, but he had been allowed to scribble with her pens on pads of legal paper amidst plans to rule the world. He was sorting through employment records, boxes and boxes of files, with a careful eye. A few cassettes lay scattered by his fingers - Statements of Eric Delano, of Mary Keay. 

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Agnes asked. 

“The only known recording of Dad’s voice? Yeah.” Gerry tapped the cassette lightly with a finger. “Perfectly horrid, what Mum did to him.”

“What she did to you.”

“Sure.” Gerry sighed, scanning the employment records. He jammed a finger at a name at the top of the stack. “There it is. Dad’s records of employment. It’s not a lie. He really used to work here. I found Mum’s name in the visitor’s log. Whatever they were doing, they speeded along this apocalypse too.”

“I guess that’s one thing our parents have in common,” Agnes joked lightly, the comment falling flat. Gerry just sighed, flipping down to the bottom of the stack. “You know. My mom killed my dad...your mom killed your dad...they were both part of apocalyptic cults...we should bond over this!”

Gerry stared at her blankly. “You’re very bad at social interaction.”

“Am not!”

“You totally are. Most people are just too afraid that you’ll set them on fire if they point out how awkward you are.” Gerry huffed slightly. “I found more.”

“More employment records?”

“Take a look.” Gerry pushed the stack closer to her, and she scanned it. Not as quickly as he could - he was smarter than her, his brain meant for reading and listening and hunting - but she wasn’t half bad. “Sasha James definitely worked here. It’s not one of Annabelle’s lies. But other people worked with her too. Timothy Stoker, Martin Blackwood, Melanie King - she has a letter of resignation on her file, what a fucking badass - Basira Hussein.” He prodded empathetically at another name. “And her.”

“I’m not surprised,” Agnes said quietly. “Does Jon know?”

“We can’t tell him.”

“There’s no way he doesn’t already know,” Agnes argued, but it was half-hearted. “We’re in the place of his power. All he has to do is Look…”

“But he won’t.” Gerry said it as if it was already known, just common fact. “He won’t ever look. And you can’t ever tell him, or you’ll get popped. Like a grape .”

“I’m made of wax.”

“Wax grape. Like the kinds in bowls on the table. You know what I mean.” Gerry jumped off the chair, taking only his father’s Statement. He left the ones by his mother - by Gertrude - alone. “I’m sure Sasha James is on some of these Statements. They’re retro, the Stranger couldn’t have gotten to them. I’ll fetch them for Jon. That should at least tell us something.”

“What a coincidence Jared sent us here,” Agnes muttered sardonically. She walked around the Head Archivist’s desk, popping open the drawers and rooting through. She was clearly ready for some serious searching, but what she was looking for was lying on top of rolling pens, pencils, and a large jar of ashes. It was impossible to miss. She casually picked it up, holding it aloft for Gerry to see. “At least we got what we came for. Let’s bounce before You-Know-Who sends his Ringwraiths after us.”

“You are trying so hard and I appreciate that,” Gerry said sincerely. “But they’re called Mewtwos.”

“God, what ever .” Agnes huffed, blowing a stray tendril of hair out of her face. She walked to one of the heavy bookshelves, stuffed to the brim with tapes, and let her eyes skim over them. If only they could stay longer...but it wasn’t safe. Besides, Jon would be growing suspicious soon. “You’re not going to find the answers you want, you know. What does it matter what your parents did? They’re dead. You’re alive.”

“I just…” Gerry trailed off uncomfortably, shoving the cassettes in his baggy jacket pockets. “Wanted to know if Dad mentioned me. If he...I don’t know.”

“Cared?” Agnes raised an eyebrow at him. “What does it matter if he cared?”

But Gerry was silent, mouth set in a firm line. Finally, he said, “If you don’t know that, then you don’t know as much about humanity as you thought you did.”

“I don’t care,” Agnes said archly. She walked away from the bookshelf, instead moving to lean against the far wall in the Head Archivist’s office. She leaned against it, twirling the rib in her hands, rapping it gently against the far wall. “I don’t need adults. Neither of us do. They’re useless good for nothings.”

“Daisy’s not that bad,” Gerry volunteered weakly. “Neither is Jon, but I’m not sure if he counts as an adult or not. And your cult dads...bring you food, I guess.”

“I can find food myself,” Agnes spat, surprising herself with her vehemence. “They’re just scared I’ll chicken out on them again. They’re idiots. They don’t even know that it doesn’t matter. None of our silly little rituals matter. The Old Agnes...she was just another useless adult. Cowardly. Scared. I’m not like her.”

“What was she like?” Gerry asked curiously. He was watching her tap the rib against the wall with a careful eye. “Don’t break that, we need it.”

“Useless,” Agnes said haughtily. She beat the bone in a steady rhythm against the wall, almost in defiance of Gerry. Thump, thump, thump. “A spoiled child, an aimless teenager, a disaffected young adult. Gertrude bound her and her cult members fawned over her. Then she had some stupid crisis of faith, doubted herself and her journey, and abandoned everything. She was just a useless coward. I’m much better than she ever was. I’m stronger.”

“Dude, you’re going to break the Archivist’s rib -”

“It’s not enough to just not want to end the world,” Agnes said, and she realized for the first time that her head was crowding with the familiar smoke of her anger. She didn’t care, didn’t even try to tamp it down. Thump, thump, thump. “You have to want to save it. She had all of that power, the full flames of the desolation on her side. And she just walked away . She could have done something, could have - could have stopped Jon, stopped Jonah, done something . But she just decided that she wanted to keep living in the world, and she didn’t even fight to keep it. Adults are so - fucking - useless!”

Something splintered underneath her hands, cracked and shattered, and Agnes didn’t even care. She always destroyed whenever she was mad. 

“She didn’t even try!” Agnes cried, and drove the rib further into the wall. Her hand punched through the thin drywall, widening the quickly growing hole, and with a cry of fury she whirled around and put her foot through it too. “Now we have to clean up after the grown-up’s mistakes, like fucking always, and it’s not fair! We aren’t the ones who killed the world! Why do we always have to save it!”

She jammed her boot further into the wall, and in a sudden shower of dust and drywall it crumbled around her. More than just the hole - almost the entire wall, collapsing in a screech and a crash, and Gerry frantically darted forward to grab her by the shirt and tug her back before the drywall could brain her. She and Gerry coughed in the shower of dust and plaster, almost hacking up ancient rotting wood, and they watched in wide eyed shock as the back wall of the Archivist’s office crumbled to reveal a dirt passageway behind the walls.

And Jon was catapulted back into his body. 

Chapter Text

He opened his eyes - no, he closed his eyes, all of his eyes had been open - only to find Daisy licking frantically at his face. 

He was lying on the dusty and moldy carpet of the Magnus Institute - that’s where they were, the Magnus Institute - book slipped from his fingertips, his head feeling particularly stretched out. Had he just accidentally astral projected? Normally he didn’t do that shit on accident. He wasn’t fucking new at this.

But it was different, here. Everything was different. His powers were at his fingertips, and his entire body hummed with ethereal sight. He felt overflowing with it, as if it was leaking out of his fingertips. Normally opening his Eyes, accessing his Sight, took conscious intention - but here, where he sat on top of a pile of Statements and pain, it was unconscious. It was like breathing. If Jon had to breathe.

No time, no time. Jon scrambled upwards, whistled for Daisy, and set off at a dead sprint. He found the closest stairwell to the basement easily, flying down it, and his feet lead him into the Archives. He barely stopped to look at it, at the four desks covered in knick-knacks and old coffee mugs, as if those who once worked here had merely stepped out for a meeting and were intending on returning any second. Detritus littered it that had no place in an office - a hairdryer, a sleeping bag, old crisp bags. It looked lived-in. 

He barged into the Head Archivist office, Daisy hot on his heels, to find the two kids backed against the far wall, staring at the tunnels with jaws dropped. Agnes was still clutching the rib - his rib - and he quickly plucked it out of her hands. It was only then that they noticed him, and both quickly stepped away from each other and looked very abashed. 

Daisy prowled closer to the hole in the wall, barking at it, sniffing at the plaster and drywall. She growled, fur bristled, and Jon could tell that if she had her way they would be out of here yesterday. 

“You two,” Jon said severely, crossing his arms, “better have a good explanation for this.”

“How’d you know -?”

“I heard the crash,” Jon cut Gerry off, unwilling to admit he was spying. People rarely liked it when he did that. “ Pray tell what you two were doing rummaging around through Gertrude’s things. She’s likely booby trapped them.”

“What’s your rib doing in Gertrude’s things?” Agnes said snidely, crossing her arms. 

“Would you like me to inform you on every arcane ritual a determined individual may do with a piece of an Avatar’s body?” Jon asked, raising an eyebrow, and Agnes flushed. “Thought not. Everybody out, we’ve gotten what we came here for.”

Daisy was sniffing at the dirt wall of the passageway, trailing her way down it until she disappeared from view. Jon dismissed it - she could take care of herself well enough. But the kids were craning their heads around him, trying to get a glimpse inside the mysterious tunnels inside the haunted house, eyes as wide as dinner plates, and Jon knew that they were sunk. 

They couldn’t explore it. Jonah’s stupid tower thing was too close, they couldn’t take the risk that the tunnels would lead straight there. Of course his stupid panopticon thing would be connected to...ugh...the Magnus Intsitute. 

Jon hated this place. Jonah’s little temple and playground, the seat where he had built his power. Jon wanted nothing to do with it. It was an interesting building, an unprecedented repository of supernatural knowledge, but something about it just felt smarmy. 

“We are not exploring the tunnels,” Jon said severely, trying to look Like An Adult. It was hard: according to his ID, he was only about thirty four. Jon was privately of the opinion that people  didn’t become adults until they were, at least, fifty. “That’s final.”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Archivist,” Agnes said supportively. She made a hand gesture behind her back at Gerry, who slowly began sidling away. “Did you find any interesting books in the library?”

Jon brightened. “As a matter of fact, I did! I didn’t get very far, but I did find a fascinating original copy of the Blue Fairy Book. You may be interested in pursuing it yourself. It is a classic example of early English fairy tales.”

“Sounds fascinating!” Agnes said. “What was your favorite story in it?”

“Oh, definitely the one that stuck out the most was - wait a minute.” Jon narrowed his eyes at her as she beamed angelically at him. “Where’s your brother.”

“Went to the bathroom.”

“No he fucking -”

Then Daisy barked, high and startled, and Jon whipped around. Agnes bolted for it, running towards the hole and disappearing into the tunnels, and this time Jon didn’t hesitate. He cursed under his breath and set off after her, and as the stitch in his side ached he realized that today had far too much running for his preferences. 

Thankfully, Daisy and Gerry were not being eaten by giant tunnel monsters. They weren’t even lost: it was barely a few seconds of running into the tunnels before he saw them. They were both standing in front of a wall, staring at it with wide eyes. Daisy was herding Gerry away from it, crouched in front of him protectively and growling at the wall. As to why she was growling at a wall of all things - well, frequently Daisy’s intuition could outreach even Jon’s.

He didn’t waste time with scoldings or warnings. Instead, Jon roughly reached out and grabbed Gerry’s arm, pulling him back closer to the entrance. The boy squeaked, caught off balance and almost tripped over his feet, but Jon managed to shove him at Agnes and get him suitably away from the scary wall. 

But it really did seem to just be a wall: a wall, with a loosely traced arch cut into it. Like the shadow of a door. Just the imprint, pinpricks and pockmarks tracing out a gateway into something far beneath the earth, but undeniably there. If Jon looked further down the tunnels he could see that they quickly began sloping downwards, climbing lower and lower into the depths of the sodden London earth, but he had no desire to journey that far. It likely wouldn’t be a journey that was easy to get back from.

Cautiously, arm warily held out in front of him, Jon walked closer to the far wall. Daisy moved out of the way, still growing at the archway, but as Jon couldn’t stop himself from walking closer. Some part of him desperately wanted to know, to understand what this half-formed archway was doing underneath the skeleton of the seat of Jonah’s power. Most of him didn’t even want to know. 

But at the end of the day he was the Archivist, and a finder of lost things. A finder of lost knowledge.  Jon reached out and trached his hand over the pockmarked archway, frowning him his finger poked easily through the dirt. It was soft and loose, crumbling over his fingers. It was moist, too: Jon quickly saw some worms crawl out of the dirt wall, wriggling to the surface and falling onto the ground. Daisy pounced on them quickly, ripping them apart with her teeth and claws, but Jon watched in mute fascination as more and more worms began to emerge from the wall. 

“Ew,” Gerry muttered. 

“That can’t be natural,” Agnes said, aiming for confidence but falling short. “I mean, what here could?”

She was right. The worms were coming too thick and fast, squirming with long and loose bodies. Moreover, they were arranged perfectly in the shape of the archway, boring through the loose soil until they formed a gate made out of flesh and rot. Jon felt his Eyes opening, almost unconsciously, reaching for his power. A thrill snuck its way up his spine, and the back of his neck prickled. His powers were muted here, but it was impossible to ignore the siren song of a confession. 

Right behind him, he could feel Gerry clutching onto the back of his trenchcoat. He hissed to Agnes, “I thought Jane Prentiss was dead .”

“She is,” Jon said, mouth moving unconsciously. “Her ashes are inside the Head Archivist’s desk. This is just...a remnant.  Pilgrims, paying fealty to a god whom no longer walks among them. Traces of former glory.” 

“Really? They just look like worms to me,” Gerry said. 

Judging from the soft smack behind him, Agnes had hit Gerry, but Jon was no longer paying attention. Every ounce of his focus was on the worms, on the way that they writhed and squirmed in their secret, arcane song. 

His mouth moved without his permission, speaking something that he didn’t know. “They want to be interviewed.”

“...they’re worms, Jon,” Agnes said, almost pityingly. 

“He can talk to Miss Daisy,” Gerry pointed out, in a way that he likely thought was reasonable, “why can’t he talk to worms?”

“Miss Daisy’s a person -”

“Yes, but she obviously speaks dog, why couldn’t he speak worm -”

“Worms don't have worm language!”

“Maybe mystical worms do,” Gerry said, with the air of someone delivering the finishing blow in the argument. “So there!”

If Jon listened...if he turned out the sound of the bickering teenagers, of Daisy’s insistent barking...if he listened to the vibrations of the worms squirming in the earth…

He could hear it. He could hear everything. 

“Tell me,” Jon intoned, the words spilling from his mouth like cockroach eggs, every Eye awakening, spinning in an eternal colorful pinwheel, “how you came to live in the Magnus Institute.”

The worms spoke, and Jon heard. It was his role. To hear, and watch, and to never truly understand. The eternal outsider, Jonathan Sims. Maybe there was something corrupted and rotten in him too, something that made him unsuitable to take up space or breathe or live in the misshapen little world they inhabited. 

Jon sucked himself into their words, and knew love and belonging so completely, so wholly, it was as if he had never truly felt it in his life. Maybe he hadn’t.

“The Rot breeds and eats and defecates and writhes, and that is all the Rot knows,” Jon said. The Worms said, through Jon. “We are no form and we are some form. Our form in the many-many generation past was satin and sick and holes in patched corners. We stared at us and burrowed and jumped and writhed and died and jumped. Nothing was more. We didn’t understand. But we wanted light and freedom from predators. Predators like the Eye. Rot lives in shadows. We cannot bear the light. As we burrowed and squirmed and bred, we knew that it was time to break free of our egg and grow. The new stage of dying was among us.”

And, in that moment, Jon felt it: the beautiful dying. How glorious it was, to know nothing more than dirt and the vibrations of dirt. To be nothing more than breeding. It was ecstacy. 

“Our Hatching was imminent. We gathered and waited and coalesced. We struck and isolated and ate, but the prey huddled tighter. They were fractured: four humans, close in proximity, but their rot and love did not touch each other. They did not love like we loved each other. We would succeed. It was inevitable. It was squirming and writhing and the endless fall into the infinite burrows.”

“But sunlight reached us too quickly. The suffocating choked us. Few survived. The satin and silk burned, and we are distant from us. But we squirm here, in the dark. In the damp and the warmth. Everything is the same for us. Rot always breeds. Rot always is. Rot is me. Rot is you . And to rot you will return.”

The children stared at him, clutching onto each other. The wolf was silent, tail lashing dangerously.

Finally, the boy whispered, “ Magic evil worms.”

“Enough!” The girl stepped forward, jutting her chin out proudly at them. She was fire and flame, and the crawling hive shirked back, but she couldn’t burn them all. Nobody could. “What do you know of Sasha James?”

The Hive didn’t know names, or faces. It had no use for meaningless signifiers. But her image sprung to Jon’s mind, or at least the meaning of her: a round face, a brittle smile, a pert mouth. Was the image from Jon? Or was it from the Hive? 

“Alive. Brave, but unknowing. Wielded the suffocation against us. We chased...ate of her...but she evaded us.” Jon felt a slow, sick smile spread across her face. “She was eaten, in the end. The natural order. Fallen into a crack in the world, retreating into the small dark crevasse of moistness. That was the fate of Sasha James. The first of the assistants to fall. Head Archivists are not Queens, child. They do not protect. They only...watch.”

Sharp, shooting pain. A face, draining of all color in sharp, sick realization. Jon screamed, something in his mind snapping free, and something in him jostled and resettled into place. He looked down to see Daisy, teeth puncturing his slack cuffs, blood oozing from her teeth. She snarled, pulling her teeth out just in time for the wound to close up, but the pain didn’t ease. Jon gasped, adrenaline coursing posthumously through his useless circulatory system, and he stumbled forward. 

Gerry grabbed him by the hand and towed him forward until musty air hit his face and his Eyesight was clear again. Jon heaved a rattling, useless breath, leaning against his desk and collapsing into his chair. He folded into its familiar corners, propping his sweating forehead on his elbow, heaving deep breaths. Gerry frantically patted him on the back as Daisy growled at the entrance to the tunnels. She barked a question at him. 

“I’m fine,” Jon rattled out, coughing. He dug through his - Gertrude’s, Gertrude’s, Gertrude’s - desk, fingers finding the long-expired ibuprofen that he knew was there, and quickly popped out a handful. Next to the ibuprofen was a single cassette, and he found himself slipping it into his pocket without thinking twice about it.  “Just - psychic kickback. I’ll be fine in a second.”

“Great,” Gerry said, twisting his fingers together. “Well, when you’re fine, take your time, can you possibly tell me where Agnes went? Because she kind of ran off and I don’t want the bear traps Jonah left under the rug to eat her.”

“She - of course she did.” Jon sighed, kneading his two main eyes. He was distantly aware his other eyes were still open, but he kept them open. They - they kept his head clear. Kept it screwed on straight. “She’s rifling through my - the Statements. Searching for something. Something reminded her of a death long forgotten, a mystery long since glossed over. Children, fed to the darkness. The mystery inherent in the most familiar place to her. She’ll be back when she finds it.” Jon cracked his eyes open, glancing at Gerry. “What were you looking for in here?”

If he was surprised that Jon had been eavesdropping, he didn’t show it. Gerry just half-shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t really have anything of my parents. I know that - that they didn’t matter, that I don’t need them. That I have Agnes now, and - and even you and Miss Daisy, and that’s all I need. But I still - I still wonder, you know?”

“You’re better off without your Mum,” Jon said wryly. 

But Gerry just shrugged again. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? You can’t really control what you miss. What you need. Sometimes what you’re mourning isn’t the person, but the possibility. The possibility that things could get better. But she’s gone, and...there’s no fixing it now. Not even the hope.” Gerry’s mouth twisted, wry and self-recriminating. “If she was still here, if I could just figure her out - then I could know why she did the stuff she did to me. But she’s not here. I’ll never know. It bothers me. You, of all people, would understand, right?”

“I suspect,” Jon said, “I, out of all people, can’t understand. But...yes, I think I do. Almost.”

“That’s the most we can do for other people,” Gerry offered weakly. “Try to almost understand. If we really understood each other’s experience...then everybody would be the same, right? And that’s no fun.”

“No,” Jon said, smiling at Gerry, “that wouldn’t be much fun at all.”

But before they could complete their manly bonding moment of gruff semi-paternal-but-really-more-unclish affection Agnes burst inside, holding a single cassette and a tape recorder in another hand. They tasted familiar to Jon, like ice cream from the ice cream truck melting on his tongue on a sticky summer day, and he knew without having to Know that the recording was from one Anya Villette. 

Daisy padded over, gently bumping at Agnes’ legs, and gave her a concerned look. She flicked her ears at the cassette, trepidation written throughout her frame. 

“I told you,” Agnes said, who liked to pretend that she spoke dog, “I’m made of wax. I can’t be popped like a grape.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?” Jon complained. “What grotesque imagery.”

“That’s the grotesque part?” Gerry asked flatly. 

But Agnes wasn’t scared. She dumped the cassette in the tape deck, throwing it on his - the desk and letting it run. She collapsed on the chair across from it, and Gerry gingerly sat down next to her on the other chair. Jon, distracted, reached out a hand and picked up a mug exactly where he expected it to be as Agnes pressed play on the cassette, trying to sip from it before he realized it was empty. 

A strange emotion enveloped Jon. It felt like - it felt like he had once had something, and that he could never have it again. That something had been lost, and that not even Jon could find it. He wondered in a strange, absent way, if this was grief. 

A familiar voice washed over Jon, the dulcet tones of the Head Archivist, and both Agnes and Gerry stared obviously at Jon as he relaxed into the Statement. Prechewed, stale and dusty, but still interesting. 

“And there’s nothing familiar about this man -” Gerry began, before Agnes elbowed him sharply in the ribcage and hissed something about grapes. He shut up, and they all let the Statement wash over them. 

And wash over them it did: like a breaking tide, the realization crashed over their heads as one by one they realized what was happening. Agnes put it together first - had, in fact, put it together since the beginning - and slowly Jon’s eyes widened, and Daisy began panting, and Gerry gasped. 

Halfway through the Statement, Jon reached out a bony finger and paused the cassette. 

“I think,” he said delicately, “it’s time for us all to go back to your home.”

Hill Top Road was much the same as ever. That is, creepy as hell. 

It was occupied full time by Agnes and Gerry, and to their credit they had done their best to fix it up a little. It wasn’t the old house, but a new one built on top of where the ruined wreck of the old house had been, but the porch door tended to swing and the stairs still creaked. A haunted hill was a haunted hill, regardless of how many new floorboards you nailed on top of it. 

A few times a week, Agnes’ cult members came to bring her food, both supernatural and human. Her candles were kept in her room, and numerous quantities of Twinkies were kept in their slightly rotting kitchen. Sometimes the cult members cleaned, but it was clear that the kids had never seen a bottle of Windex in their lives and the entire house was just very dirty and messy. Jon didn’t really know what they had been expecting. 

It wasn’t as if her cult members knew how to raise children any better the second time. Young girls cannot live entirely off biscuits! 

“What are you, my dad?” Agnes sneered, spitefully shoving Hobnobs into her face. Gerry made himself a tuna sandwich on top of dirty dishes next to her, jamming it in his gaping maw. “I didn’t invite you into my house to criticize my life choices.”

It was decently sized, big enough for a family, and a bit empty for just two kids. But there was crud everywhere: Gerry’s books littered every flat surface, and half of the furniture was marked with scorch marks. Boxes were pushed against walls, holding knick-knacks or obviously stolen goods, and the coffee table was covered in old take-out containers. The kitchen was best left unsaid. 

Agnes must have caught his judgemental looks, because she crossed her arms defensively. “The guys are coming to clean tomorrow.”

“You should clean your own house,” Jon said reproachfully. Both kids rolled their eyes at him. “What are you going to do once you’re grown and they aren’t taking care of you anymore?”

“I’ll get them to clean my house once I’m an adult too,” Agnes said promptly. 

“You know,” Gerry said contemplatively, chewing his tuna, “you’re always saying that we don’t need your cult dudes because they’re stupid and evil and that we’re totally capable of going independent. Wouldn’t, like, cleaning our own house, be -”

Then she noogied him, and Gerry smashed his sandwich in her face, and Jon rolled his eyes and walked back into the living room. Daisy was already sniffing around, wrinkling her nose at the old take-out containers, and slowly circling the door that led to the basement. Jon opened his Eyes, sparing barely a second to think about how he had been opening them more often in the past few days than he had in the past month - and scrutinized the door with more than one sense. There was definitely something...vile about it. 

“We don’t go down there,” Agnes said, suddenly at his elbow. “It’s not safe.”

“Hm,” Jon said. “Crack’s still there?”

Agnes shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

This time he didn’t even bother to try and tell Gerry to stay behind. He stepped forward, wiped his suddenly sweaty palms on his slacks - careful not to rub the open eye in his palm against the fabric - and with slow, cautious care, opened the door.

It felt familiar, like an odd dance of deja vu. But then, he had opened plenty of doors in his life. 

He climbed the stairs down into the basement, Daisy close on his heels and the kids following behind. It was dark, pure dark, the kind where even if you waved a hand in front of your face you wouldn’t be able to see it. The kind of dark that so rarely existed in London. Jon opened a few more Eyes and saw through it, easily picking out the shape of the basement. He heard the flip and click of a lightswitch, but no lights came on. Gerry murmured something about running to grab a torch, but Agnes just huffed and lit one of her fingers on fire. The dancing light of the flame illuminated Daisy’s eyes to a sickly yellow, flashing in the night, and Jon walked forward confidently into the basement.

There were no man-eating spiders. No tables with webs etched on their fronts. No boxes with lockets of hair. There was, in fact, not much at all. A boiler, a generator, firewood. A fusebox. Really nothing that you wouldn’t find in any basement. 

“Wow,” Gerry whispered. “There’s not even, like, any corpses in here.”

“I don’t keep corpses in my house, Gerry, that’s gauche.” Agnes lit her finger hotter and held it up, letting its sputtering flame cast light on the walls and hide the shadowy corners. 

“What do you call the candles?”

“Lunch. Jon, do you see the crack? Is it gone?”

Jon Looked, extending his senses and prodding the fabric of reality for holes. He ran his finger over time and space, searching for rips or tears. Unconsciously, he began walking towards a far wall, and Jon was only distantly aware of the way he reached out a hand and traced a finger along the wall. 

It wasn’t a feeling. He extended other senses, trying to smell anything putrid and rotten, but unable. It was only when he tasted the air that he found it: a slight sweet note, a slight imbalance in the proportion of oxygen. Air was flowing into the room from a place other than the door, and Jon pressed his hand into the wall. Slowly, with a deep sinking feeling, his hand began to push into the cement. 

He plunged his other hand into the wall, gritting his teeth, and slowly worked open the thin crack that air and reality blew through. He groaned, muscles straining. It slowly became visible, widening from the hairline fracture it was, and slowly widened into a small gap. Jon pulled it open, wider and wider, every eye on his body shining, until it was a meter and a half high, and half as wide as the wall. 

A door. Like the worms in the tunnel walls of the institute, like Helen’s spiralling doors. What did it mean, to walk through a door? Did it mean anything at all? Was it significant, how Jon always felt as if he was teetering on the threshold of here and there, of then and now, of not-yet and too-late? Afraid to step forward, afraid to take the plunge, yet always balancing on that thin threshold. 

It was only once the crack was wide enough for Jon to duck into that he spoke.  “She’s in here. I can feel it. Eaten by a crack in the world. I’ll get her.”

Daisy barked frantically at him, almost growling, and Jon frowned as he listened to her speak. 

“I know what I’m doing,” Jon said, before pausing a beat. “This time. I have her voice, Daisy. I think that should be enough to find her. I’ll be able to find my way back to you all. I think.” He shrugged. “What’s there to be scared of?”

She barked again, but Jon heard the real notes of fear in it. He sighed and crouched in front of her, scratching her ruff and trying his best to soothe her.  “If it goes wrong, all we lose is the lost soul of one human. Don’t worry so much, sister. I’m not inclined towards unnecessary risks.”

She tugged at his sleeve in disbelief, but he was already straightening. There was something he wanted to tell her, but he didn’t know what it was. Some empty space between them that the wind whistled through. He looked back at the kids, who were gamely trying to hide their fright. 

“What do you mean, you have her voice?” Agnes asked.

Jon silently reached into his pocket and withdrew the cassette he had taken from the Head Archivist’s desk. “Her voice is on it. That should be enough to draw me to her. Or her corpse.” Why Annabelle wanted him to drag back the...corpse, body, spirit, or ghost of a dead woman, he honestly didn’t know, but he would get the reason why out of her eventually. He always did. For the time being, he offered a weak smile to the kids. “Wish me luck. If I don’t come out...well, let’s not worry about that.”

“We can’t afford to lose you, Jon,” Gerry said, surprisingly quietly. “Please come back.”

“I know.” Jon winked at him, just to make him feel better. “You can’t get on without me. Wait here, you two. Daisy, look after them.”

Then he took a deep, useless breath, turned around, and climbed into the hole between worlds. He was distantly aware of Agnes holding Daisy back, preventing her from following, but then the darkness swallowed him and he knew no more. 

Or, maybe, he knew one thing: that he was scared. Which was ridiculous. He was a monster, practically a god of his own. What was there to frighten him about a crack in the wall?

But he was, because at the end of the day Jon would always be weak, and maybe in some soft vulnerable part of himself he would always be human, and before he could analyze that thought too far everything became nothing, and Jon became nothing. 

Jon stood in front of a door.

It was an ordinary door. Not yellow, in too many dimensions, and not ornate with stained glass. It was not scorched and hanging off the hinges, and it wasn’t ripped off its frame. It was just a door. 

Jon knew, as you knew things in dreams, that he had to open it. Something was behind it, something very important. Something that he needed if he was ever going to be happy. 

But he was scared. He didn’t want to open the door. Anything could be behind those things. Maybe there was a giant spider. A giant spider seemed very likely. He couldn’t possibly open it, he was worried that the giant spider might eat him. 

As Jon watched the plain brown door with the tarnished door knob, he felt very young. He felt scared, and vulnerable, and very small. That wasn’t right. Jon had never been scared, vulnerable, or small. He had always been the scariest thing around. 

Right?

Yes, that was right. Jon was powerful. Jon was in control. Jon was the master of his own fate. Jon was real. Jon wasn't scared. Jon was -

Jon was weak. Jon was the puppet of Jonah Magnus, nothing more than an extension of his inscrutable and opaque will. Jon was a simulacrum, a conglomerate of power and fear. Jon was always, always, always scared. 

He had to open the door. But he was scared. Scared of nothing, scared irrationally, but he was scared. Even if the spider ate him, it didn’t matter. It had never mattered. The roots of Jon was fear, the building blocks of his DNA. He was nothing without it. It was all he had ever felt. He didn’t deserve to live, anyway. Nobody loved him, nobody wanted him around. Even Daisy was just using him. She was just lonely. But he was lonely too, and he needed more than what he had. Wouldn’t anybody come help him? Wouldn’t anybody save him from this paralyzing terror, this loneliness?

Where did everybody go? Where had his friends gone? They weren’t actually his friends, he wasn’t stupid. But they had always been there. But they were gone, and he was alone, and he was drowning, and he was scared to open the door. 

It felt like he stood there for years, petrified by fear. Maybe it was only seconds. But eventually something settled, and Jon became aware again of a cassette in his trench coat pocket. He pulled it out, staring at it, slowly remembering what he came here to do.

A trench coat. A suit, scuffed trainers, a five o’ clock shadow and an afro tied back in a ponytail. Vibrant green eyes, more than two meters tall, with lanky limbs and sharp elbows. That was Jon. He was an adult, a grown man who had never been a child. He was not vulnerable, or weak, or helpless. People were waiting on the other side for him. He couldn’t afford to get lost here. It would just be too amateurish. 

He opened his Eyes, ingesting the Statement. Calliope. Calliope. Calliope. It would have to be good enough. 

He wasn’t standing in darkness. That would imply the absence of light. He was just standing in nothing. It was pure and obscure emptiness, with no meaning or emphasis anywhere. Complete darkness, no direction, no escape. 

With nothing better to do, he walked. 

 He didn’t know how long he walked. Time didn’t apply here. Very little did. The only marker he had was the door, the same door he couldn’t bear to walk through, and he walked further and further away from it until it disappeared. Once it was gone, he could no longer measure distance or space. It was just swimming through an endless sea, submerging deeper and deeper into the depths. Jon tightly clutched the cassette, wondering if it was guiding him or if it was just a hunk of plastic. 

After a period of time, something punctuated the nothing.  

It sounded like crying. Jon heard it before he saw it - but then, hearing and seeing and knowing were all very much the same thing. It was lonely and desperate, hoarse and scratchy, as if whoever it was had been crying a long time. 

But that wasn’t quite right. As Jon walked closer, and the sound developed into something far more understandable, he realized that it wasn’t crying at all.

It was screaming.

Not in pain. Not in anguish. In anger. Hatred, almost. The screaming was from someone who wanted to rip and tear and destroy, and who just didn’t have the chance. 

Jon walked towards the sound, and finally the nothing coalesced into something. It was a figure, dressed in a prim and professional pencil skirt with a deep burgundy red blouse, two heels lying next to her feet. They were snapped roughly. He couldn’t see the face of the figure - she was huddled, knees drawn tight to her chest. Her wild mane of curly brown hair stuck up in all directions, but he could see that her fingernails were digging into her knees as she screamed and screamed and screamed. 

Hm. Either there was a great deal of people existing in purgatory in the crack between realities, or this was his woman. 

Still, best not to take any chances. Jon stopped a safe distance away, waving his arms and letting his dozens of eyes blink at her. “Hullo!”

She kept screaming. Jon was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. He didn’t like this place - his connection with the eye wasn’t severed, but it was distant and alien. Many things pressed up against the gateway of his mind, begging to be let in, and Jon felt as if he was barely holding back a tide. If he let it overwhelm him he would drown. 

Hm. Best to move quickly.  Jon stepped a little closer, raising his voice. “Hullo! What’s your name?”

The woman stopped screaming. She raised her head, and Jon saw for the first time her warm brown eyes. Her skin was just a smidge lighter than his, and her face was round and soft. 

She stared at him for a long time before speaking. Finally, when she did speak, her voice was cracked and hoarse. So hoarse and strained that Jon almost missed what she said. He almost wished that he had. “Jon?”

It stopped him short. He didn’t dare approach any closer. To be fair, he thought to himself, almost hysterically, Jon’s a common name. She could have meant ‘John’. 

The fact of the matter was this: Jon had met plenty of people who knew him before he became who he was now. He just hadn’t met anybody who would admit it. 

Popped like a grape. Could he take that risk?

“Jon,” the woman croaked. Maybe she saw something in his expression, the total lack of recognition. “Jon, it’s - it’s me, Sasha. It’s Sasha James. Why are you...wearing that coat?”

“It looks cool,” Jon informed her. “And every private eye needs a trenchcoat. Besides, its pockets are much bigger on the inside.” He cautiously stepped forward, bending down a little and offering a hand. “I’m afraid that, as a side effect of you being eaten and erased from reality, you were thrown into the kind of...let’s say the crack between the dresser and the wall of life. Where your hair ties go, but you never find them again. Oh, or under the bed! We’re under the bed of reality.”

Sasha stared at him dumbly. 

Hm. Maybe he was burying the lede a bit. Jon was pretty bad at dealing with humans. “Do you want to get out of here?” he tried again, holding out a hand to her. 

She stared at it, for a long time. But she reached out her own hand, and clasped it in Jon’s, and soft warmth suffused up Jon’s hands. 

Maybe that was enough. Maybe that was what did it: this chemical reaction, where nothing else could live. The growth of warmth, of two hands pressed to each other, when they stood in a sterile space where nothing could live or breathe or thrive.   

Life and sterilization could not co-exist. Something had to give. 

And something did: Jon and Sasha tipped over, suddenly and without moving, and fell into infinity, still clutching each other’s hand, and they would have screamed if they had the breath. 

Jon fell, and fell, and then he abruptly started panicking over losing Sasha. He pulled her in, reaching out with his other hand and clutching her tight to him, embracing her with both arms and pressing her close. She was tall, almost as tall as he was, and she tucked her head over his shoulder and threw her own arms around him. 

Jon didn’t know what to do. He prayed, stretching his senses as far as they could go, searching for an exit. Get him out of here, he didn’t want to stay, he couldn’t go back to staring at that door - 

Sasha screamed -

They fell sideways, into something hard and unyielding, and slipped through the cracks of reality again. 

Barking. A warm, wet tongue dragging across his face and all twelve of the eyes on his face. Frantic voices, high and panicked. A weight, draped over Jon’s chest. 

He opened his eyes,which wasn’t very helpful, then he remembered to open the ones on his face too. He saw now that it was Daisy licking him, and that Sasha was lying on his chest with rumpled clothing and ruined hair. She was slowly opening her eyes too, and Jon’s dozen eyes met her two ones. 

She slurred out, “You’re the weirdest boss ever ,” before passing the fuck right back out again. Jon was left to stare at her, replaying the words over and over and over again in his mind. 

A familiar voice, on familiar cassette tapes. A familiar desk. A familiar woman. 

“Oh my god,” Agnes said, “she’s gonna get popped like a grape ,” right before Jon passed right back out. 

Jon dreamed of a man, standing in a doorway. 

He was yelling something. Jon’s name, maybe. Come back. Don’t do it. But it was too late: Jon had already done it, and Jone had already pulled that switch and opened the door, and it could never be closed again. It was too late for everyone. 

It was too late for them. But then, it always was, every night. 

It was surprisingly easy to drag an unconscious woman through London streets back to your third story walk-up flat. 

Well, it was easy when you were a very recognizable monster and you slung the unconscious woman on the back of your wolf sister. She couldn’t stay at Hill Top Road - Agnes’ cult parents had called and announced an intention to make a surprise visit, and they couldn’t afford for Jude or Diego to find out what was going on. Gerry and Agnes had hung back, diverting the attention of the cultists, as Jon dragged Sasha home and tipped her into his bed. 

His flat was a studio, just one room cluttered with kitchenware and books, and it felt strange to have another person in it. People didn’t usually visit his flat. Sometimes Agnes and Gerry dropped by to harass him, but besides them and Helen that was usually it. Sometimes Annabelle swanned in, conducting what she liked to call a ‘wellness check’ and what Jon liked to call a ‘gross invasion of privacy’, but generally his and Daisy’s space was theirs. Nobody else’s. 

Nobody except for Sasha James, who was currently conked out on his bed. Jon absently wondered if she needed one of those human doctor things, before he Knew that she was fine and just needed a nap. Good for her! He hoped she woke up soon, though - the bed wasn’t big enough for him, Daisy, and Sasha, and Jon didn’t particularly want to sleep on the couch tonight. It gave him a crick on the neck something awful. 

The first thing he did was call Annabelle, as he sat at his desk pushed up next to the dining table. He twisted the thick cord in his hands, carefully punching out her number. 

She picked up on the first ring, having clearly expected his call. Obviously - he could see a spider scuttling on his fridge now. “Archivist! Fantastic job! I’m so impressed. I’ll be over immediately, I can’t wait to speak with our lost assistant.”

“Are you ever going to tell me what this is about?” Jon asked wryly. He watched Daisy sniff at Sasha’s face curiously. “Or pay me?”

“All in due time, Archivist!” Annabelle laughed. “Just worry about making your guest comfortable for now. I’ll be over soon and I can explain everything. Oh, this is so much fun. No offence, but I hadn’t actually been expecting you to do it. I’ll have to change all my plans.”

“She called me her boss,” Jon said, mouth dry. Annabelle quieted. “Did I...did Jonathan Sims used to know her?”

She was quiet for a beat, just long enough to be noticable, before laughing again. “I have a feeling that the next few days are going to be quite fun. Don’t do anything exciting without me! Don’t concern yourself with your payment, I’m arranging it as we speak. Oh, and I even arranged a nice snack for you. I know you must be hungry after all that hard work.”

Just on cue, the doorbell rang. And Jon hadn’t realized it before, but he was quite hungry. And, well, Annabelle did owe him…

It was only after he sent the man away (Spiral, opened a mailbox to find nothing after nothing pouring out) and began chopping up meat for Daisy’s own lunch that he heard soft footsteps from behind him. He didn’t turn around, carefully hacking up the flank, and waited for his moment. 

Carefully, he opened up an eye on the back of his neck, half-hidden by his ponytail. He was glad to see it was just Sasha James, holding a fire extinguisher above her head, ready to clock him on the skull. Behind her, Daisy was slowly prowling, ready to intervene, but Jon just shook his head minutely. Sasha must have woken up halfway through taking the man’s Statement. 

“If you’re going to do that,” Jon said easily, “can you wait until after Daisy gets her food? I’m afraid she gets a bit irritable when she’s hungry.”

Then he dived to the side, letting Sasha bring the fire extinguisher down on his countertop, and ungracefully scrambled away from the second fire extinguisher assault. He ended up on the ground, sprawled undignified on his arse, as Sasha loomed over him with a fire extinguisher. Her hair was wild, her teeth were bared, and she looked like a wild thing. Jon respected it. 

“Who are you,” Sasha said slowly, “and what have you done with Jon.”

She had to go for the throat. “That’s a surprisingly complicated question,” Jon said honestly, whistling sharply at Daisy in an attempt to stop her from attacking the woman that they had spent three whole days looking for. “I, uh, guess you could say that I ate him -” that made Sasha’s eyes do a very scary and crazy thing, and Jon hastily backtracked, “but you could also say that I am him, so you shouldn’t kill me! I saved your life, you know.”

“I’m so grateful,” Sasha said flatly. She stepped back, glancing backwards at the alert Daisy. She understood the situation: she attacked Jon, Daisy would attack her. And she was not a small animal. “Where’s Tim?”

“Who’s Tim?” Jon asked blankly. 

“If you were really Jon you would know that,” Sasha snapped. “Where’s Martin? Is he safe?”

“Who? From what?”

“The worms? Are they safe from the actual killer worms ?”

“Oh. Oh!” They must be her coworkers! The men, not the worms. Jon slowly stood up, keeping his hands in the air. “The worms can’t get you here. I have a very good exterminator. I wouldn’t worry about them. As for your coworkers, it is very unlikely they are alive.” At Sasha’s expression, Jon quickly followed up with, “But it’s possible that they are! I could check for you, but -”

“What did you do that man?” Sasha asked sharply. “Why did that man - why did he tell you all of those things?”

Jon stared blankly at her. “I was eating him.”

She stared at him back. 

Sasha dropped the fire extinguisher, letting it roll on the ground and making Daisy snarl, and numbly walked back to the bed. She dropped on it, looking strongly as if she wanted to go back to sleep but didn’t trust herself to fall asleep in front of the evil multi-eyed monster man and his wolf sister. Sasha fixed Jon within her sights, as if she was trying to trap him with just her gaze. Jon looked back at her, attempting to look nonthreatening. It didn’t usually work, but it was always worth a shot. Annabelle had once called him adorable, which was incredibly rude. 

“If I ask you questions,” Sasha said finally, “will you answer me honestly?”

“I never lie,” Jon said guilelessly. “It’s against my nature.”

Sasha stared, and stared, and stared. Jon fought the urge to squirm. 

“Do you have a phone I can borrow?” she asked finally. 

Wow, Jon had been expecting a much more difficult question. He scrambled up and silently opened the door into his office, gesturing her inside. She cautiously followed him, and Jon pointed her towards the landline on his desk. She gave him an insultingly incredulous look - what other kind of phone did she want ? - but she walked over to it anyway. She struggled with the rotary wheel for a minute, looking increasingly incredulous, before finally managing to dial a number. 

Jon watched her face, as her expression softened from its razor edges into confusion. She dialed the number again, struggling with it, but whatever she heard on the other end of the line it wasn’t what she wanted to hear. 

She dialed another number. Then another. Then she hung up the phone. 

“I lost my mobile in the tunnels,” she said. She pressed her lips firmly together, until they almost turned white. “That’s fine. I’ll just - go home. Lost my keys, too, but I can talk to my landlord. No big deal.”

Hm. Jon was beginning to realize that Sasha was working off an incomplete understanding of the situation. Namely, that she hadn’t been dead for five years. 

“I don’t think that’s quite a good idea,” Jon said delicately. 

Predictably, Sasha whirled on him. “Why not? Why are you trying to prevent me from going home? Why did you drag me back to your flat instead of taking me to the hospital? Were you planning on eating me too?”

“No!” Jon threw his hands up as Daisy stepped closer to Jon, pressing up against his legs. She was snuffling slightly, in her equivalent of a laugh. Sasha shot Daisy a terrified look. “Look, I’m just saying that you don’t have the whole story. I’ll answer your questions, but you aren’t asking the right ones.” He widened his eyes, trying his best to look trustworthy and non-murderous. “Broaden your mind, Sasha James. The world is so much more complicated than you could ever understand.”

She just stared at him, every part of her two seconds from shaking apart. But she stood tall, and refused to show fear, and Jon knew that whoever she was or had been, she had been special. 

“I’m going back to the Institute,” Sasha said finally. “Tim, or Elias, or even - even the real Jon can explain what happened. I’ll - catch up with you.”

Okay. Maybe some evidence would sway her. Jon shrugged, sticking his hands in his pockets. “You may want to check outside first.”

Sasha shot him a bizarre look, but she walked around his desk and pulled open his curtains to see the thick sprawl of London underneath their feet. She looked down, frowning when she didn’t see the typical crush of cars and pedestrians, and her gaze slowly travelled up. 

Jon couldn’t see her expression, but he didn’t need to. 

“...whose eye is that?” 

Finally, she was learning the right questions. Jon let himself grin, fully aware that it was a little crazy looking, and let his Eyes wink open. He chuckled slightly, and Sasha slowly turned around, horror dawning with realization on her face. Jon felt the eye on his forehead burst open, shining with its infernal light. 

“Mine, of course.”

Sasha’s flickered over to the fire extinguisher again. 

“That won’t be effective,” Jon said. “Even if I was a normal human. Death’s been difficult to come by for - well, quite a long time. But there are worse things than death, as I’m sure you are well aware of by now.” Daisy barked lightly. “Can I feed my sister now? I wasn’t kidding when I said that she gets cranky when she’s hungry. I can make you some food too, if you like. I understand that it’s comforting.”

She said yes. What other choice did she have?

Ten minutes later, they found themselves sitting across from each other at Jon’s rickety kitchen table. It was more of a card table, really, folded out but not big enough to prevent their knees from knocking. Sasha was sitting sideways in her seat to prevent this, picking at her peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Daisy was sitting primly in her own chair, which was more an overlarge armchair that Jon had dragged over and that took up most of the card table, and was wolfing down her own meal. Sasha was eyeing Daisy constantly out of the corner of her eye, but eventually she stopped nibbling on her sandwich and started staring at Jon again. He was sitting in his own chair serenely, waiting for her to ask whatever questions she had. 

She had many. “When did this happen?”

Jon hummed. “Time is difficult. I’d say, if you were keeping track by the human calendar, about three years ago.”

Sasha looked sick. “I’m missing three years worth of memories?”

“No, you’re missing five,” Jon corrected. “You’ve been dead for five years.”

“You brought me back to life?”

Jon made a shaky hand motion. “Eh. It’s difficult to explain. Don’t worry about it.”

“Why?”

“My client asked me to,” Jon said. Daisy slurped up a bone. “I’m a private investigator, you see. I get back lost things. Or lost people, when the price is good enough.”

“Who was your client?”

“She said that she was coming over, so you’ll likely meet her soon enough.” Jon reached out and scratched Daisy’s ruff. “I imagine she’s waiting until I’ve filled you in before she makes her appearance.”

“Are you Jon Sims? Or did you, like - steal his body?”

Jon was silent. Daisy lifted her head, looking at Jon expectantly. 

Finally, all Jon could do was say, “That’s a philosophical question. I suppose, considering that I have no recollection of ever being this Jon Sims, that the life I lead is nowhere adjacent to his, and that I am of an entirely different species...it’s probably best to think of me as someone quite different.” He, almost unconsciously, began rubbing his burned hand, and Sasha’s gaze flickered down to the motion. “He is dead. But I’m not the one who killed him. I should say that - maybe I should say that he killed himself.”

Daisy barked. 

“True. Jonah Magnus also killed him. Actually, I should say that it was likely mostly Jonah Magnus.”

Sasha took a deep breath, kneading her temples, clearly trying to fit this information into her internal framework of the universe. “Putting aside the Jonah Magnus thing, I think...I think I believe you. I mean, you don’t act like Jon. But...you talk like him, if that makes sense.”

“What was Jon like?” Jon asked, perhaps a bit too eagerly. “You knew him, didn’t you?”

“I mean, as much as anyone did.” Sasha shrugged uncomfortably. “Not a great boss, or a good Head Archivist. Mean and rude and a bit of a bully. But I got the impression he was a good person. I would have liked to get to know him better, I think.”

Jon rubbed his burned hand again. “Me too.”

When Daisy barked consolingly Sasha shot her a concerned look. “Uh, is this like the giant eye thing, or is your pet dog, like, way too big to be an actual dog?”

“Oh, Daisy’s not a dog,” Jon said. “She’s a person.”

Sasha stood up very abruptly. 

“Also a wolf,” Jon said consideringly. “She’s mostly my sister, though. Her name’s Daisy. She can understand everything you say, so be polite.”

“Okay,” Sasha said, almost dizzy. “Sure. That makes - as much sense as anything else. The monster version of my boss in the parallel universe with a giant eye watching everything has a wolf sister. Sure, I’ll take it.”

Twenty minutes later, Jon had managed to answer some pressing logistical questions about the nature of the universe, these things called Entities, why it was not a good idea to randomly enter strange doors or think too hard about certain things, and why just in general the entire north of England had been locked in its own perpetual nightmare of terror and agony for years. 

He realized that Sasha was voraciously intelligent. More intelligent than he was, although he was loath to admit it. She adapted to the situation with ease, accepting her new reality with a steely gaze and a firm nod, and didn’t stop peppering Jon with questions. Her mind was logical, ordered, and reasonable. She never accepted ‘it’s been that way for as long as I can remember’ as an answer - she always had to know why, always had to draw upon physics, rationality, and reason. 

She wouldn’t last a day in this world. Her only saving quality may be that she was resilient, and that she still bore the invisible marks of her association with the Eye. The world of the present was one that thrived off emotion, off how things should be instead of how they are , and the Entities did not concern themselves with previous mortal laws. She would have to throw the rulebook out the window and write a new one from scratch. If Sasha could accept this, if she could write her own guidebook for the new world instead of relying on what she thought she knew, she might stand a chance. If she couldn’t, she would be trapped in her eternal and infernal nightmare faster than one could say every title of the Eye. 

Jon found himself...not wanting that to happen. He wondered why. As a general rule, he didn’t grow attached to humans - Gerry was a notable exception, but so long as Agnes continued protecting him he would live to adulthood. It always seemed like an investment with no return. 

For some reason, he wanted Sasha to live. He looked at her and felt something odd, that he had never felt before. It was terrifying. But it was exhilarating, exciting, in a way that almost nothing was before. 

Had Jon really been so bored? Had he really spent the last three years skimming through life, not caring if anybody lived or died, never wanting to get invested? What was the point of such a life? What was the point of Jon ?

Jon was in the middle of trying to explain the whole Extinction thing and how no, the Extinction hadn’t happened, we’d all have noticed, when something tickled at the edge of his awareness. Like his finger was on a string and someone had just plucked it, and the vibrations tickled up his spine. 

He looked up, and Daisy lifted her head from where she was lying down next to Jon, and they both watched the door to his office swing open. He and Sasha had migrated into the office, him sitting at his desk and her sitting in his visitor’s chair honest-to-god scribbling down notes and further research questions. Sasha looked up just in time to see Annabelle Cane stride in as if she owned the place, which...she may own the place, so that was probably fair. It wasn’t as if Jon paid rent or anything. 

Annabelle seemed surprised, then delighted, to see Sasha. She was dressed differently than the last time Jon had seen her: now dressed in an elegant jumpsuit with high heels and a lace jacket that seemed to be spun out of spider webs. She was wearing bug-eyed sunglasses and holding a Starbucks cup, which was just filled with spiders. 

“Sorry I’m late, I was getting coffee,” Annabelle said, even as Jon subtly scooted further away from the teeming mass of spiders. Some were crawling out of the green straw and climbing onto her hand. Sasha watched silently, disgusted. “How’s my favorite boy and wolf detective duo!”

“Exhausted,” Jon said plainly, “carrying out your job.” He gestured at Sasha, who Annabelle quickly walked up and extended a hand now teeming with spiders towards. Sasha took one look at the hand and didn’t hesitate as she shook Annabelle’s hand firmly. A spider crawled onto Sasha’s hand, but she casually flicked it off. Jon could not believe the energy of this woman. “Sasha, this is Annabelle Cane, daughter of the Mother of Spiders and Avatar of the Web. Annabelle, Sasha James. As requested.”

“Charmed,” Sasha said, as if she hadn’t found out what half those words meant ten minutes ago. 

“Even more than requested,” Annabelle said silkily as she looked Sasha up and down. Sasha tugged her hand out of Annabele’s grip, trying to best to avoid looking disturbed. “How did you find her so...whole?”

“The Stranger was not as thorough as she thought,” Jon said dryly, and he didn’t miss the minute blink of Annabelle’s eyes. “Or as invulnerable.”

“The stupid don’t last long in our world,” Annabelle said lightly. “Or those who challenge you, it seems. Unless that’s the same thing.”

Sasha narrowed her eyes briefly at Jon. “Are you, like, important?”

Okay, so there was one thing Jon may have neglected to mention. 

“No,” Jon said quickly, “not at all. I just...find things. See through my billion eyes, witness the universe, play fetch with my sister, the usual.” He turned back to Annabelle, who seemed delighted by this turn of events and the unnecessary drama. “So do you, like, want her back? Are you going to explain why you wanted her at all?”

If, of course, this was about Sasha at all. If Annabelle hadn’t sent him on a wild goose chase distraction mission so she could manipulate him into taking out the Not!Them once and for all. But that was never a productive line of thought, when it came to Annabelle: if she was manipulating you she was manipulating you, and it was just best not to worry about it. Minimize the damage, make sure you don’t owe her any favors, and you’ll probably survive. Jon’s survived so far. 

Annabelle just hummed, glancing between Jon and Sasha and back again. The spider crawling on top of the omnipresent tape recorder - running, and Jon didn’t even bother to try and interpret that - did a little jitter, which was uninterpretable. Jon was rusty in spider. They had thick accents. 

“You know,” Annabelle said lightly, “why doesn’t she stay here?”

“Oh, you know, I really couldn’t intrude,” Sasha said awkwardly and desperately. 

“That’ll cost you extra,” Jon said flatly. “I don’t even have room for her. I don’t know how to live with a woman.” Daisy barked reproachfully. “Oh, as if you count.”

“I think she’ll be safest with you,” Annabelle said lightly. Her eyes not hidden behind sunglasses twinkled. “You really never know what’ll happen to a lonely human woman with nobody around to miss her. Of course, if you don’t care about that, then feel free to send her on her way. I won’t stop you.”

Jon groaned. “I’m charging you extra for this.”

“Deal!” Annabelle said. She winked at Sasha. “This’ll be a blast. You two will love it. It’ll be like a sleepover. Speaking of payment...I have yours.”

That got Jon’s attention, when her little games didn’t. Daisy’s fur bristled, her tail hung stiff at attention, but she stayed quiet. Slowly, almost theatrically, Annabelle withdrew a single envelope from within her lace jacket and passed it to Jon. Jon checked it for traps, jinxes, or hexes, making Annabelle laugh again, but when he found it to just be a piece of paper he carefully slit it open. 

It was an invitation. Embossed, thick, and rich, it was cream colored and fragrant scented. Jon scanned it quickly, deciphering the emerald ink written in sweeping calligraphy. 

“I’m hosting a party,” Annabelle said, for the benefit of Sasha and Daisy. “The who’s who of the British supernatural world will be there. You’ll get your answers there, I should think!”

“This isn’t nearly as helpful as I was promised,” Jon gritted out. 

“Are you sure?” Annabelle hummed, crossing her arms. “Because I should think that any Avatar in my parlor would be more than willing to answer your questions of their own volition. And I can guarantee that at least one of them will have the answers you seek. Both with your...well, furry little problem, and with that burning question you’ve been pretending that you aren’t itching to know.” She shot a significant glance at Sasha, who was looking increasingly incensed by all of the double talk. “Unless you think the human ’s going to have all of the answers you seek?”

She wouldn’t. Only Jonah did. But Jon wasn’t intending on speaking to him anytime soon. 

Maybe a better question was: unless you think that the human is safe from you? 

Every Avatar was frightened to tell him too much about his past. They all knew that something terrible would happen if they did - probably Jonah smiting them so he could keep Jon dancing on his puppet strings. 

God. This was probably all Jonah’s fault. Jesus. Of fucking course. Who else had the power to vaporize powerful Avatars?

Then why hadn’t Sasha been affected yet? What did Jonah have to gain by keeping her alive? 

Every second she spent in his presence she was in danger. But nowhere in the world was safe, and as manipulative as Annabelle was she was also right. She was least likely to fall prey to a nightmare with him and Daisy there. 

“I’ll explain everything at the party,” Annabelle promised. “I’m sure everything will come to light then.” A spider jumped onto her wrist and rattled itself on her watch. She looked down at it, gasping theatrically. “Gosh, is that the time? Must jet! Always a pleasure, Archivist! I’ll leave you five stars on Yelp!”

“What’s that?” Jon asked blankly. 

“God, nobody gets my millennial humor.” Annabelle stepped forward and kissed him on the cheek, which made Jon sigh and pat her on the back, tried to pet Daisy only for Daisy to snap her jaws at her, and winked at Sasha before turning her back on them. “See you in a week, everybody. Try not to get up to too much trouble before then!”

And just as suddenly as she entered, she was gone. Jon and Sasha and Daisy were left staring at a door swinging shut, standing in an empty office cluttered by filing cabinets and bookshelves and a desk long since grown dusty, wondering where the fuck their lives were taking them. 

Sasha spoke first, because she was brave and Jon would never be. “I’m sorry. You seem - uh, really nice, which is a strike against the theory of you actually being Jon, but...I can’t stay here.” Sasha tangled her fingers in her hair, trying to finger-comb it. She hadn’t brushed it in five years. “If I lost my flat I guess I’ll go stay with Tim or something…I don’t know why his phone is disconnected, but he’d open the door for me...” She chuckled wetly. “Idiot always held a torch. It was a little sad, you know?”

Very quietly, surreptitiously, Jon opened an Eye and Saw. He looked down at Daisy, who silently shook her head in a very un-canine motion. But he had to say it, because to do otherwise would be a lie, and Jon could never abide that. 

“Sasha, I have some bad news.”

“Or maybe Martin?” Sasha said, voice rising. “He’s a sweet guy, he’d help me out. Even my Mom and Dad...we haven’t talked in, Jesus, more than a decade I guess, but they’d help.”

“Sasha…”

“It’s not like my life is over.” Sasha’s voice rose and rose, as if it could drown out her own thoughts. “Sure, I spent half a decade dead, but that happens sometimes. Sure, the world’s ended and monsters claim the unsuspecting, but that was happening before this too. I bet the job market isn’t great, but I can adjust. I have a good CV. I can - I have options.”

But she didn’t. And they both knew: that if her coworkers were still alive, these Tim and Martin fellows, then there was no way they had survived the ruins that Jonah Magnus had made of the Magnus Institute. There were corpses, in those ashes. Jon wondered if he had stepped on the skull of Martin. He hoped not. 

If any dregs of her old life survived the purge, then they were like Jon: unrecognizable. He was all she had, her only ally in this world. She knew it. 

And Jon could see in her face that she hated it. 

Instead of telling her the truth, that Tim was long dead, that her parents were shadows painting a brick wall, that her childhood home was a spinning vortex of fear and nightmare, that her life was over and that Sasha James was dead, he did something very much against his nature. Jon lied, and pretended he didn’t see her eyes steadily growing redder. 

“I’ll fold out the bed.”

Chapter Text

Sasha let herself mope about her very, very, very, very near death experience for a day. She barely said anything the entire day except to explain to a confused Jon that no, his bed did not have room enough for all of them if they squeezed, and also that she needed privacy. Jon was beginning to worry that he wouldn’t be a good roommate. Daisy told him he just didn’t understand women. Which was true, but only technically. Jon didn’t really understand anybody . 

She lay on the couch in the flat, watching the Frasier VHS tapes Jon played for her as he took clients in the front office. When he popped back in to make lunch for Daisy he saw her scribbling away on a notepad, but she closed it quickly when he walked in. He decided not to bother her about it or Look, despite his deep need to know. 

Around two am, when Jon was enjoying his admittedly unnecessary sleep in bed with Daisy, his eyes all jerked open at once and startled him awake. The sensation was not unlike a hypnagogic jerk, and usually only meant one person. Jon sighed, wiggled out from underneath Daisy, and quietly scanned the room. 

Sure enough, his perfect night vision revealed the yellow door jauntily perched where his fridge usually was. Jon, in only his pyjama pants, padded forward and quietly knocked at the door. 

It creaked open, and one of Helen’s endlessly spiralling eyes peered through the crack. 

“Don’t let me disrupt your rest, Archivist,” Helen said, very loudly, “I just wanted to take a gander at your new friend!”

Jon crossed his arms. 

“Don’t I even get to meet her?”

“You can meet her in the morning,” Jon whispered, despite the fact that he Knew that Sasha had woken up the minute Helen started talking and was just pretending to sleep now. “She’s human, she needs her sleep. You can be properly introduced later.”

“Aw, you’re no fun.” Helen’s lower lip fractured into a pout. One of her splindly claws ground across the doorframe. “Sasha James and Michael were such good friends. I’d love to meet her with a...new pair of eyes.” She giggled, like nails dragging across flesh. “Get it?”

“I don’t think Sasha and Michael were friends,” Jon hissed. “I think you are doing that thing where you lie to me because I’ll believe it.”

“Do you believe it?”

“I am omniscient! Omniscient demigods who enact their god’s will on Earth are not gullible!”

“Well, if you say so it must be true,” Helen said mysteriously. “I will go back inside now. Maybe when I come back out it will be daytime! Or it won’t! Isn’t it so exciting, never to know these things?”

“Sounds stressful. Good night , Helen.”

“Goodnight, Archivist.” Helen slowly closed the door, with her gently spinning eye the last to disappear. “I wouldn’t look up at your ceiling if I was you, Archivist. I am awfully sorry about what I did to it.”

“What did you do to my -” 

But Helen was already gone, and when Jon looked up all he saw was the word GULLIBLE painted in dripping, bloody hieroglyphics, and Jon sighed and went to bed. 

But he needn’t have worried: the next morning, Sasha was awake at six am and already making eggs with his frying pan. 

“We’re working today,” Sasha said briskly, scrambling her eggs. Jon blinked at her, not actually sleepy but still disconcerted from his dream - he had the one with the cows again, which was always extremely off-putting because none of the cows breathed fire like in real life - and kind of bamboozled at seeing a human adult woman in his kitchen. “I’m thinking of moving into the spare office I saw you have in your office space. I can use it as a combo bedroom, working space, the works. We’ll need to pick up a futon and the like, and I’ll pay you back for the expense later.”

It took Jon a solid few seconds to interpret this, because he didn’t think of himself as having a spare office. He had his desk in the main room, which was technically a receptionist’s desk but that he used when he didn’t need privacy, and he had his crowded little office that he used for when he needed to take or record a Statement or live unimpeded by clients, and then there was Daisy’s office. Did she mean Daisy’s office? That wasn’t free for anyone to use but Daisy’s. It was hers. 

Jon half-heartedly attempted to explain this to Sasha, but it didn’t seem to come out quite right. “You can’t use that room, it’s where Daisy works.”

Sasha looked back at him, raising an eyebrow. She looked down at Daisy, who was excitedly doing tappy-toes over the big plate of meat Sasha had slid her. She looked back at Jon. 

“...if she says it’s okay you can borrow it,” Jon said grudgingly, “but you have to give it back soon.” 

Hopefully, she’ll be needing it imminently. If Annabelle’s contacts were as good as she said they were. If she was ever going to actually help them instead of leading him around by the nose. If she hadn’t been lying the whole time. 

“Uh. Sure.” Sasha looked down at the happily eating Daisy. “Ma’am, may I use your working space?”

Daisy barked an affirmative. Jon sighed. “She said you can.”

“I’m so glad,” Sasha said sweetly, but somehow sarcastically. “After you clean it out, I’m sure we can walk down to Asda and pick up a futon.”

The eggs fried and popped, and Daisy turned the stove off and slid them onto a plate. She poured herself some water, wrinkled her nose when it came out green, and at Jon’s shrug she drank some of it anyway. Jon found himself playing anxiously with his fingers as Sasha took over his kitchen table, shoving eggs in her mouth with a single minded fury and scribbling in a notebook with her other hand. 

“I’m afraid that’ll be somewhat difficult,” Jon said, twisting his fingers together. “The local Asda’s been taken over by the Slaughter for months. They’ll open up a new franchise sometime soon, but for the time being we don’t have access.”

Sasha narrowed her eyes at him. “What do you mean by that?”

“Let’s just say that it puts the ‘Black’ in ‘Black Friday’,” Jon said grimly. 

“How does your economy work ?” Sasha asked in morbid fascination as she scraped the rest of her eggs into her mouth. “You said that most of the population’s worse-than-dead, right? How do the supply lines work? If all the farms are pits for the Flesh now then how am I eating these eggs? Do children still go to school? Do people still go to work? Is there still public infrastructure in the apocalypse?”

Hm. Jon didn’t want to admit that these were questions he had never asked himself, and thus did not entirely know. He really didn’t worry about things that weren’t his problem. Jon was like the majority of the world that way. “Sasha, it’s best to abandon your preconceived notions of how the world used to work and...rely on your preconceived notions.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Jon sighed. “Do you genuinely understand how your meat is made? How it goes from the farm to your grocery store shelves? Of course not. You go to work, you do your job, you are at the grocery store once a week for an hour, and that is your extent of interaction. You expect the sausage to be there, so it is. So long as you, Sasha James, buys her sausage from the deli, the sausage will always be at the deli. So long as you buy your newspaper with your morning coffee, you will always have that newspaper. You will always have that coffee. Your expectations determine your reality. Does that make sense to you?”

But Sasha just stared at him. “Not a whit.”

“Perhaps it’s best to just show you.” Jon walked over to the door and plucked his trenchcoat off the hook, shrugging it on. He whistled for Daisy, who finished slurping up her bone marrow and trotted over to the door next to him, excitedly jumping around in preparation for action and adventure. Jon cocked an eyebrow at a suddenly cautious Sasha. “Let’s go pick up some Starbucks.”

She went with him. What choice did she have? 

It was a typical London day: the sun was shining brightly, almost oppressively, almost dangerously. The Eye bore down upon them with its hefty weight, and the Tower was visible in the very close distance. The London Eye (not to be confused with the Eye) twinkled its bright and cheerful lights as its victims screamed their delight, and the Thames chugged sluggishly down its snaking path as its murky and polluted waters hid far more grotesque terrors. Jon fought the urge to whistle, sticking his hands in his pockets as Daisy carefully kept Sasha close to them. 

“It’s so empty,” Sasha whispered. “I’ve never seen London this empty…”

“It’s likely the most heavily populated city in Britain right now,” Jon pointed out. “Most denizens are content enough to stay inside. Most of the dangers are in the wide world. Of course, that requires blissful ignorance of the dangers that lie within your home, but at least those horrors are familiar. Of course, that’s disregarding the great percentage of those who are trapped within their homes.”

She was wearing one of Daisy’s old trainers, procured for her with no explanation, and they clashed horribly with her pencil skirt and shirt the color of old blood. Sasha carefully walked in Jon’s footsteps, eyes wide and drinking in London in all of its glory. Jon stopped at an intersection and watched an event with great interest: a car wreck, two small cars colliding head first with each other, the acrid smell of smoke and the gas from air bags leaking into the air. 

“Fascinating, isn’t it?” Jon said to Sasha, who just looked sick. “Keep watching.”

Two figures, two young men, stumbled from the cars and slowly began the process of hoisting their cars by the bumpers and dragging them back to the opposite ends of the streets with a grinding screech that made Daisy whine. It looked painful, pulling an entire car all by yourself, but the men didn’t know how to stop. When they finally managed to drag the cars to each end of the street, each man climbed back in the driver’s seat and pushed the gas pedal forward until the cars collided all over again in a cacophony of screeching metal and fumes. 

“How long have they been doing that?” Sasha whispered. 

“Last Tuesday?” Jon scratched at his stubble. “Or maybe Thursday, if Thursday replaced Tuesday that week. I think it did.”

“Why...are they doing it?” But for all Sasha looked sick, she didn’t tear her eyes away. There was a small crowd congregated at the intersection with them, watching the proceedings with wide eyes. Rubberneckers were an essential aspect of the scene. “Why aren’t they dead?”

“Because when they die, their terror stops. What’s in that for us?”

They kept walking. What else could they do?

The Starbucks was just a little bit further down the block - it was London, there were Starbucks everywhere even before the Apocalypse. It was much worse now. Jon halted in front of it, holding out a hand to make sure Sasha stopped too. They could see through the glass front commuters lined up for their coffee with dead eyes and gaunt cheeks, aching for that next hit. 

“What do you think of when you think of Starbucks?” Jon asked. 

Maybe he really did like her after all, because she thought seriously about the question. “Frappuccinos. Rich white people. Basic white girls. Good scones. The over-abundance of franchise chaining throttling small businesses and gentrifying endless previously unique neighborhoods, transforming them into picture-perfect identical storefronts.”

Fantastic. They could work with that. Some would have said that they thought about never being able to afford food from there, and some would have discussed the cut-throat nature of the pick-up line. “Hold that in your mind. Don’t forget what you just said: how you view Starbucks, and how Starbucks is . They’re two different things where you’re from, right?”

“But...not here?”

Jon opened the door for her, gesturing her inside. Ladies first. “Welcome to a land of pure imagination. But whatever you do, do not scream. You’ll have a hard time escaping, if you scream.”

When they stepped inside, the Starbucks was thoroughly in the realm of the Stranger. Every barista was identical, with grim rictus smiles, and the landscape was identical to every other Starbucks what had ever existed, yet subtly and off-puttingly different. Every customer waiting in line was the same, in some indefinable way: same sorority t-shirt, only the letters jumbling and mixing, same Camelback water bottle or lacquered nails typing on an iPhone. Every drink was identical, and oozed sludge. 

Sasha halted in front of the counter, horrified. “It’s exactly like how I imagine it,” she said. “It’s exactly like my worst nightmare of what a Starbucks looks like.” She blanched, grabbing at Jon’s sleeve. “That girl - that girl, in the line, she told me in ninth grade that I would be pretty if my hair was straighter.”

“Oh, Kelly Flintlock?” Jon said admiringly. “She’s been waiting for that vanilla bean frappe for years. I bet I could get a hell of a Statement from her. Actually, if you excuse me -”

“What? You mean eat her? Jesus, she doesn’t deserve that!” Sasha’s grip tightened on his jacket, tugging him back, and Jon yelped as he stumbled. “You can’t just make people - do whatever you make them do -”

“Tell me their trauma and greatest fears in a permanently scarring and psychologically devastating act of intrusiveness.”

“Do that! Just leave her alone.”

“Why?” Jon tilted his head, staring Sasha down. “What is the use of feeding the cow if you don’t milk it? She’s not standing in that line for years for her health. She’s there for me. Why shouldn’t I eat her?”

The question seemed to shock Sasha. She opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “You just said it was psychologically scarring to take Statements from someone. Are you asking me why it’s bad to traumatize people?”

“She’s already traumatized,” Jon said, waving a hand, “she won’t notice one more, surely.”

“She’s a human being , Jon!”

“Yes? That’s what human beings are for.”

That silenced Sasha again. She pressed her lips together, staring a little up at him, before finally saying, “Is that what I’m for?”

Jon just shrugged helplessly. He didn’t know the point of Sasha at all. It was tremendously confusing. 

Maybe that was what did it for her, Jon’s tepid confusion. Sasha set her mouth in a firm line and, with no further warning, strode back towards the counter and hopped over it easily. Daisy barked, following her and leaping over the counter with her, and Jon sighed and pushed past the crowds of blank faced suburbanites so he could go around the back like a normal person. 

The Statement of this place - of its people, of its baristas, of its hell - itched at him. Jon felt drool pool in his mouth, felt his head thump in tune to the heartbeat of a dozen humans, and itched for it. He needed it. How could he get by without it? It would make him feel so much better -

No, he didn’t need it. He had literally just eaten. Jon grimaced, swallowing the spit, and tore his eyes away from the placid barista. It was overwhelming, how he Knew everything about her - what specific twists and turns in her life trapped her here, why she was unable to escape, the hell she found herself in daily. Jon knew, and it weighed, and if he just delivered her Statement then maybe the burden would be less. If he could just rip it out of her then maybe her burden could be used for something good, instead of purely the work of careless gods. 

Daisy got mad at him when he binged. He shouldn’t. He wouldn’t.  

The bar behind the counter of Starbucks was dusty, as if it hadn’t been touched in a long time. The espresso machines and devices that frothed coffee were grimy, with what looked like mold and slime growing on the cloudy glass. There was a putrid smell emanating from the minifridge. Sasha was frowning at the mess, frantically looking for some indication of actual food. She pulled down on the handle of one of the espresso machines, but instead of coffee churning out, a thick stream of worms rained down onto the grate.

Sasha screamed, stumbling back. 

Then everything happened at once. 

The baristas’s heads cracked around and stared at them. The glazed-eyed customers saw them for the first time too, looking up from their phones to fixate on the weak. They all saw Sasha: human, vulnerable, happy. The tortured saw someone who was not suffering, and hatred bubbled up on every single one of them simultaneously.

“Run,” Jon whispered.

 Kelly Flintock stepped forward first. Then the man behind her. Then the barista, teeth bared in a growl, reached out to try to grab Sasha’s arm. Daisy snapped at her, fur bristling, and only then did Sasha grab Jon and Jon grabbed Daisy and they all sprinted from the store. 

But the crowd pushed back, surging forward in its crushing weight, and Jon was forced to try to shove his way through masses of emancipated humans. Sasha was right behind him, having found a gas canister from somewhere, and was swinging it soundly and cracking customers on the face with it. The nightmare pressed in on them, crushing them, trying to trap them and wrap them in its tight embrace until they could no longer move or think or be. A warm grip encircled Jon’s wrist, and he was ready to throw it off until he saw that it was only Sasha, and he helped pull her forward through the crowd until they reached the doors. 

Daisy threw herself against the doors, only to bounce off. They had locked at one point, and Jon felt his throat closing up. Sasha beat off another one of their assailants, hair sticking to her neck in sweat. 

“What now!” She called. 

“It’s alright,” Jon said, as confidently as he could. “I am quite talented in opening doors.” 

“What does -”

Jon raised a hand, feeling his power course through him, and opened his Eyes. He felt his hair pop free of its band, rising slowly into the air, and the air itself seemed to become heavier, sparking with static and charge. Jon felt his eyes whirl and spin, pinwheels chasing themselves in an endless dance. When Jon spoke the words did not come from him: they came from a place far beyond him, the mouth of the giant eye that bore down upon them. 

“Ceaseless Watcher,” Jon intoned, “Free us from this wretched place.”

The doors exploded. Or maybe that was the wrong word: there was a bang, and a flash, and a harsh crack, and suddenly there were no more doors. The air smelled sour and foul, as if something had been baked alive, and the baristas and customers screeched in identical vibrattos of pain. It was only then that Jon Saw, in a flash of insight: that the Baristas and the Customers were the same, that there had never been a difference, that all separations between people had dissolved in the faceless sameness of Sasha’s fear. 

Maybe this was what fear did: make you the only person in the world. Make you alone, an unbearable gulf between you and the rest of the world, and every other human was dehumanized into a faceless husk of anger and predation. Jon wondered how many dimensions existed in this Starbucks, how many other humans were existing alone, trapped in a hell of their own making. Of Jon’s making. 

“Come on!” Someone tugged him forward, and Jon stumbled forth. Sunlight hit his face, his feet hit pavement, and he realized with a jerk that the Starbucks was behind them. The eye on the back of his neck saw the store as it always seemed from the outside: tame, harmless, and exactly the same as every other Starbucks in the world. 

“Jon? Jon, what the fuck was that?”

The power was boiling high in him. Normally it - normally it surged, and then fell back, like the tide. But it was still overspilling from him, his hair floating gently around his head and his eyes spinning and spinning. 

Sasha was staring at him, as if he had been wearing a disguise before and this was what he truly was. He didn’t know why he felt self-conscious. It took him a minute to even recognize that she was speaking. 

“ - but how did you do that?” 

Jon shook his head fuzzily, still sparking with power. “Do you understand now, Sasha? I may look one one of you, but I am as close to you as - as the lion is from the gazelle. When I look like you, it is a mimicry. Someone like you could never understand.”

“You’re dodging the question,” Sasha cut in. She didn’t seem very impressed by his limitless power. “You just manipulated reality. How?”

Jon found a grin slash its way across its face. “Let’s just say I have admin privileges on the world.”

“Like Annabelle?”

He barked a laugh. It sounded like a headache. “Annabelle wishes .” 

“But maybe you can - if you can do that, what else can you do?” Sasha stepped forward, clutching onto his arm, before quickly jerking it away. “Maybe you can help people - could you have helped those people at the intersection?”

“Sure. For a while.” Jon shrugged. “But they would have found their way back there eventually. I could have destroyed the intersection - but they would have found another one. I could have destroyed every car in Britain, but then they would have used motorcycles. Do you understand, Sasha?”

But he saw in her face that she didn’t. Daisy was standing next to her, fur on edge, and when Jon tried to smile reassuringly at her she just pressed closer to Sasha. 

“I’ll show you, then,” Jon said. He walked a little further down the street, every passing human unconsciously giving him a wide berth, and Sasha and Daisy had to run forward to keep up with him. 

Jon walked forward, aware of it all: aware of how many people lived in each flat above each store, aware of the incremental drop of each grain of sand in the hourglass of time, aware of how many worms thrashed in the ground underneath them. He was aware of the Eye’s watch over them, and he was aware of the way that the world flowed through him and bent to his desires. 

There. There it was. Jon came to a halt, almost losing Sasha and Daisy, and looked up at the building. It was just like most buildings in Central London: a storefront on the first level, and flats above it. He found the staircase to the higher levels easily, punching in the code for the lock without a second thought, and opened the door into the flats. He looked back at Sasha, raising an eyebrow. 

“You coming?”

She came. But he had known that she would. 

The stairwell was dark and cramped, ill-maintained and musty, and Sasha and Daisy stayed close to him. Jon walked them up one flight, then two, then three, then four. He found himself speaking in a low, monotonous narration, voice rising and falling softly. 

“In these flats, there is the end of living,” Jon intoned, as they climbed the stairs. “There is the death of life. There is the death of meaning. But the hearts of the denizens continue beating, and their hair still grows. Movement has ceased, life has ended, but their fingernails continue to lengthen into claws. These inhabitants have not been blessed by the End yet. They never will.”

He stopped in front of a door, and he opened it. He walked into a hallway - just like every other hallway in every other flat complex in the world. Boring carpet, suspicious stains. Jon continued walking down the hallways with purpose. 

“You walk down the hallway. After so many times, you barely register it. You’re tired, after a long day of work, and you simply wish to go home. You’re almost there.” Jon halted in front of a door, one with a cheerful welcome mat set out in front of it. “Your fingers fumble your keys, but you manage to unlock the door.”

Jon pushed open the door and stepped inside, and Sasha and Daisy followed.

Inside the flat was nice. Any family that lived in a flat in Central London was well off. The dreary paint was pockmarked and stained, but the furniture was polished wood and the carpet was rich shag that your toes could sink into. But the air…

“It’s been a long day at work,” Jon whispered. “Your child runs up to you eagerly, always happy to see you. You’re home! To him, it may as well have been a lifetime. You bend down to give him a hug. You’re the happiest you’ve been all day. You know they won’t be this age forever. But he wants to play with you, and you really are so tired. You turn him down. Maybe later, honey. You want to sit on the couch. So you do.”

Jon stepped forward, walking the length of the living room of the flat, and stopped next to the couch. There is a figure on it, watching a softly blaring television. Cable. 

“You turn on the TV. You ask your partner to fetch you a drink. They do. But you’ve made a mistake. You’ve forgotten. You were so tired, and you just wanted things to be normal, that you made the most fatal mistake of all in this world. You forgot. You turned the channel to cable. You pretended everything is normal.”

The figure on the couch didn’t move. It couldn’t. Its eyes were sunken in, pale white balls flitting back and forth, watching the show. 

“You don’t even realize that you were never really at work. Work’s not real. Maybe some of your old coworkers, your old friends, are at work. But it’s not your hell. It’s theirs. This is your hell. This...normalcy.”

The figure was emancipated. Bugs crawled on its skin. An empty glass, sticky and unwashed, was attached to its hand. 

“Your partner was making you dinner. They stuck their finger in the oven to test the heat. But they just loved the heat, didn’t they? They always had. So they went further in...further and further...you wanted to get up to stop them. But you were so tired.”

The door to the oven was closed. Sasha opened it. Sasha closed it, very quickly. 

“You can’t move from the couch. You’re so tired. You hate your job, you hate what it takes from you. You spend eight hours at work to earn money so you can enjoy your six hours at home, your creature comforts. Your television, your steak, your alcohol. But are those six hours really yours? Your child asks you to help him with his homework. That’s one hour gone. Your partner’s had a long day at work too, and they want a back massage and some love. That’s another hour. You have to clean the dishes from the meal your partner cooked. Another hour. Your shower, your shave, your cleaning. An hour. What do you have? Two hours of stolen time each day? That’s barely enough for the game. Is that what you work all day for? Two hours of a little me time?”

There was a door from the living room, leading into a hallway. Daisy nosed the door open, and padded silently into the hallway. But Jon didn’t follow. Jon was so much more than himself: he was three people, he was a building, he was a world. It was a weight off his shoulders, to no longer be Jon. To look into the glimpse of another life, a voyeuristic audience member, who watched tragedies for fun. 

“Now, at least, you have your me time. You had spent so long aching for it. You thought it would be nicer. But instead...all you are is tired. You wish you could sleep. You miss your partner, your child. But you are locked into your ideal afternoon. There is no more work. No more errands or obligations. Only you. Have joy. It’s what you’ve always wanted.”

Jon left the corpse of the worker behind, and stepped into the hallway behind Daisy. Sasha followed him, silent, unwilling or unable to interrupt. 

“But there is one little boy left. One child, gone unrecognized. His parents are gone. Ash and corpses. How long has he been living in solitude? Does he even notice? What is hell for a child? It must be this: this solitude. This abandonment. His parent can’t move from the couch. His parent is ash. Where are those who once loved him?”

One door was slightly ajar. Jon pushed it open. 

In it was a child, sitting on a bed. A book was open on his lap, with big print and friendly images. He was smiling, overjoyed, as he reached out a hand and let Daisy nose his little fist with her big muzzle, licking it slightly.

“Puppy!” the child said. He reached out and petted Daisy’s coat. “You’re so pretty, puppy!”

Jon - Jon reached for the anguish, the pain, the torture, the terror, but all he found was -

Survival. Survival, despite everything. A lonely entrapment, disrupted. A solitude, penetrated. Sasha came in after him, and she gasped - she must not have expected any survivors - and the child’s mouth dropped open when he saw Jon and Sasha. 

“Why are you in my room?” the child asked. “Are you here for Mummy?”

Jon opened his mouth to tell the child his Statement, or to draw it out from him, but Sasha got there first. She crouched in front of the kid, whispering something in his ear, and quickly picked him up. She shot Jon a poisonous glare, and Daisy moved to stand next to Jon instead. Sasha quickly left the room, stopping only to pick up a stuffed animal that the boy pointed out, and disappeared into the living room. Jon heard the door creak open, then shut, and Daisy lightly bit Jon’s hand. 

“Ow!” Jon tugged his hand out of her grip. “There’s no need. Sasha shocked me out of it.” Daisy barked recrminatingly at him. “I haven’t been binge eating, stop accusing me of -”

Then she growled at him, and Jon shut up. He fought the urge to scuff his feet on the brightly colored carpet, like a child, as Daisy called him an asshole. 

“That’s not fair,” Jon said weakly. “It’s not my fault if it doesn’t - occur to me to help them. Why would it? It’s against my nature.”

Daisy told him to take responsibility for his actions for once.

“That’s not in my nature either.”

Then maybe, Daisy growled, you should rise above your nature. 

“Big talk from a hypocrite on the run,” Jon spat, before stopping himself short. Hypocrite? Where did that come from?  Daisy growled lightly, but there was a tinge of worried shock behind her growls. “I - I’m sorry, I don’t know where that came from.”

He realized, too late, that his eyes had closed, his pupils no longer spinning, and his hair had drifted back down. Moreover, he felt like himself again. More than a conduit for the Ceaseless Watcher’s power, more than a beast on earth. He felt like Jon Sims. Whoever that was. If Jon Sims was a beast on earth - well, at least he was a lot more than that too.

He walked into the master bedroom and rifled through the drawer for some women’s clothing that looked like it may fit Sasha, and then started combing through their closets. Jackpot: he found a folded up cheap futon lining the linen closet. He ragged it out, just in time to see Sasha quietly reenter the flat. She was sans child, thank goodness. Jon didn’t know what to do with children. He barely knew what to do with Agnes and Gerry. 

“I found some uninfected neighbors,” she said. “Justin’s staying with them for right now. I’m amazed he’s still alive.”

“Children are adaptable,” Jon said, suddenly exhausted. “They believe in nightmares, but they also believe in heroes and happy endings. The apocalypse has made...a great many orphans, or abandoned children, out of its citizens.”

“Where did you go,” Sasha said flatly. “The minute we left the Starbucks, you...you went away inside. You were glowing, and you were talking like you weren’t even you anymore. Is that what happens when you use your powers? You become some kind of lunatic ? How did you even know all of that shit?” She chewed her nail furiously, not even waiting for Jon to answer her questions. “The way you spoke was so familiar. It was exactly how Jon used to read out Statements. All drama club, all intense, just like that. You were so monstrous, but for the first time I saw Jon in you. What does it mean that the time you most seemed human is when you’re the most monstrous? Who are you?”

“I really wish I knew,” Jon said, exhausted and unwilling to have this conversation. “Sasha, there’s something I have to tell you. It...it’s about the role of the Archivist.”

“That’s what’s important to you?” Sasha snapped. She walked forward until she was standing right in front of Jon, and reached out to prod a finger in his chest. “Who gives a shit about your role or your nature! Are you going to take responsibility for any of this? Do you even care ?”

“Why should I -”

“ Why should you ?” Sasha screamed, and Jon took a step back as she took a step forward and jammed her finger in her chest. “I should not have to explain to you that lives matter! That other people besides you and your circle of monsters matter! The Jon I knew was an arse, and he was cold, but he would be ashamed of you! It would break his heart to know that in five years he would be turned into a terrible person !”

“But I’m not a person,” Jon said weakly. “I’m not -”

“The things you do matter! The actions you take matter! I don’t care how many spooky superpowers you have, the actions you take have consequences on other people! Being a fear eating trauma monster doesn’t give you free pass to be a dick!”

“Oh, dear! Am I interrupting something?”

Sasha barely managed to throttle a scream as both she and Jon whipped around. Set into the far wall of the flat was a yellow door, currently fully open and boasting Helen standing in the doorway. She winked and waved at Sasha, whose eyes lingered on Helen’s hands. 

“No, no, please go on, don’t mind me.” Helen leaned against the doorframe, mindful of her hands. “It’s not often that someone is brave enough to rip the Archivist a new one.”

“Maybe it should happen more often,” Sasha spat. But she stepped away from him, and Jon breathed a sigh of relief. She looked Helen up and down, who preened under the attention. “Michael? Is that you? Why do you look different?”

Something that Helen said yesterday hit Jon on the head, and he gaped at Sasha. “You knew Michael? Why?”

Not even Jon knew him. He had heard of him, many times - Helen’s preincarnation. But Michael became Helen long before the apocalypse, and not even Jon could commune with wherever Avatars went after they died. If Avatar was even...the right word, for Helen and Michael. 

“He was interested in the Institute,” Sasha said, scowling. “Said he wanted to help me. I trust him about as far as I can throw him. Why do you look so different?” Something occurred to her. “Wait, are you trans? Shit, my bad. Good for you.”

Jon and Helen stared at Sasha, then at each other. Finally, Helen just shrugged. It looked somewhat painful. 

“I mean, yes!”

“Cool!” Sasha said, also awkwardly. “Me too! Trans rights, haha?”

“Fun! But far more relevantly, my name is Helen. I’m afraid you met...ah, a different version of myself. Michael was incomplete. Consider me the new model.” She winked at Sasha, who still seemed to be misconstruing the situation. “Would you crazy kids like a lift back home? It’s dangerous out there.”

It was dangerous in there, obviously, but not for them and Jon didn’t feel like lugging around the futon and clothing down the London streets. He shrugged, walking over to where he had dumped the futon and the clothing, and picked both up as Sasha did a small doubletake. 

“No way am I going in there,” Sasha said. 

“It’s in there or out there,” Jon said. Daisy nosed Sasha’s hand and barked reassuringly. Sasha sighed, patted Daisy on the head, and seemed to decide that she didn’t care if she lived or died. “Thank you for the lift, Helen.”

“I love to do it. Even if you’re a little...tingly on my digestion system, Archivist.”

“Are your tunnels your digestion system?” Sasha asked, fascinated. 

“Maybe! Walk inside and find out!”

Jon sighed, rolled his eyes, and opened the door for Daisy. He looked back at Sasha, who was hesitating in front of the threshold, and he offered her a weak smile. 

“I won’t let anything happen to you.”

But she just looked exhausted. “Why? Why would you want to help me when you’ve helped nobody else in your life?”

Jon didn’t know. 

“Does it matter?”

But he could see it, in the tightening of Sasha’s mouth: she would not abide a mystery. No wonder Jonah hired her. 

Jon wondered if that was what he was to her: a mystery, a puzzle to be solved. A monster to be retrofitted into a man. But maybe that was fair: what was Sasha James, but a job to be completed, an object to be found, a tool to use? 

Whose tool? Why had Jon been recruited to find and protect her? What was so important about Sasha James? 

It was the kind of mystery that Jon didn’t tend to concern himself with. He Looked, he Found, he delivered. Jon never worried about what happened to the objects he located. 

He never worried what happened to the people he fed from. 

But now he was, and now all sorts of questions were being stirred in him. Jon didn’t think like this. Jon questioned, but he didn’t interrogate. And there were some things that he was safer not knowing. But Sasha James didn’t think like that, didn’t know what questions were too dangerous to ask, and she pushed and prodded until Jon was forced into the light. 

Jon felt...Seen. In the worst way. Seen, and judged. 

The journey through Helen’s tunnels was both unfathomably long and incredibly short. Sasha almost tripped off the edge of February and into last week, and they all had to hold Daisy back from going ham in the shrimp dimension, but otherwise she handled the situation with aplomb. In an explosion of color, sound, and strangeness, they were back home, opening a familiar door into a familiar flat. 

 “Home sweet home,” Jon said, trying desperately to lighten the mood. He didn’t really know what to do when someone was mad at him - they usually were, but he just tended to ply Daisy with a monster for her to hunt down and Gerry and Agnes with video games, and if literally anybody else besides them was mad at him he didn’t really care. “Why don’t I clear out the office and you set up the futon - oh. It’s you.”

Behind him, Helen’s giggles transformed into all-out laughter, Sasha sputtered, and Daisy barked happily. 

Agnes rattled a cardboard box at him, sitting in his office chair behind his desk. Gerry sat on the desk, flipping through a weathered paperback book. “Anyone up for a game of Sorry?”

That was how, within short order, Jon sat around a coffee table with an Avatar of the Hunt trapped in the body of a large wolf, the vaguely fleshy sock puppet of an evil door called the Distortion, the Cult of the Lightless Flame’s second attempt at their antichrist and Avatar of the Desolation, a resurrected teenage demon hunter and rare books enthusiast, and the ex-Archival Assistant who should not exist and who hated him. 

“Sorry, Gerry! I’m swapping my token with you,” Agnes said, as she flashed her card with a bright white smile. “Anyway, Miss James, to answer your question, life and death work differently now from what you’re used to. I don’t personally know anyone who was resurrected besides Gerry and I, but our deaths were...highly unusual. What once would have killed someone now only traps them. I found it most helpful to expand my definition of death into accommodating for brain death or entrapment in the psychic realm.”

“Do we know anything about other countries?” Sasha asked, frantically taking notes. She drew a card as Gerry whined at Agnes and Helen shucked walnuts with her fingers, just to flex. “Are there any places on earth that are unaffected?”

“Some are better off than others,” Agnes said, scooping the shucked walnuts into her hands and pressing them between her palms. The smell of roasting walnuts filled the room, and she passed them to a happy Gerry. “Britain's one of the worst off but London’s probably the safest place in Britain because it was so highly populated in supernatural occurrences already. Any densely populated area’s in trouble. But even non-densely populated areas are unsafe. Australia fell to my god a long time ago, and the flames have not been quenched in years.” She sighed. “I’ll never meet a koala.”

Sasha’s eyes narrowed as Gerry patted Agnes consolingly on the back. “You don’t sound very happy about the fact that your god’s taken over a continent.”

“Agnes and Mister Desolation’s on the outs,” Gerry stage whispered, and Agnes elbowed him roughly. “Ow, stoppit!”

“Don’t tell my business to the human!” Agnes whispered. She turned back to Sasha, smiling wide with white teeth and glinting eyes. “But enough about me. So you, the Archivist, and Miss Daisy are living together, huh? That’s so hilarious. It’s just like my favorite sitcoms. How soon before you two are married?”

“Do we have to start calling you Mum?” Gerry asked, to Sasha’s horrified look. “Except I feel like the Archivist is really more of an incompetent uncle, or like a brother who’s much older than you but doesn’t really have his life together and your Mum keeps calling him on his mobile just to yell at him about his life choices and why can’t he be successful like his sister Daisy, who’s a cop. Aunt Sasha’s fine but one big sister is more than enough for me, you know?”

“Kids, you know filthy human bodies don’t interest me,” Jon said flatly. 

“I rolled a green!” Helen cheered, pushing forward her scottie dog to topple over Gerry’s token. Gerry groaned. “Does this mean I win?”

Very tactfully, Sasha ignored the question. Jon was glad: she was interesting and whip-smart, but whenever he tried thinking about romance all he could think of was all of the books he had read and movies he had seen that showed the way men and women thought about each other. He didn’t think of anybody in those ways: the furious passion, the pressing of limbs together, the desperate adoration. Just another inhuman thing about him, he supposed. Right?

“You keep calling Jon the Archivist,” Sasha said, putting emphasis on it the way that everybody else did. “Why? I mean, nobody calls me the Assistant.”

“My dear Sasha, it’s what he is. ” Helen flipped through the rule book, ruining it completely. “So much as any of us are anything, our Jon is the Archivist. It’s practically his species . If he wasn’t the Archivist, he would be a great deal of nothing.”

“Because you don’t remember anything from before the world ended,” Sasha said, narrowing her eyes at Jon. He shrugged in response, uncomfortable. “Which is why you don’t give a shit about people. You’ve never been one.”

“Do you get upset over the human rights violations that create your trainers?” Jon asked. “You’ve never worked in a sweatshop.”

Sasha opened her mouth, then closed it. Then she wrote something down furiously in her notebook, which Jon was quickly becoming afraid of.

“So what you’re saying is,” Sasha said, “if I can convince the guy who scares even the most powerful Avatars, the guy who can bend time and space, about the worth of human life, then maybe I can promote ethics in this fucked up post-apoc society.”

“Uh,” Jon said, “I’m not sure about this -”

“Oh my god, I’m so in,” Agnes said. “Please teach me about ethics too. Nobody’s ever actually told me about any of it, but it’s like, so fascinating. I want to learn about humanity. Can I call you Aunt Sasha?”

“You know what,” Sasha said, “Sure. Why not.”

“You’re the first adult we’ve ever met who actually cares about fixing stuff,” Gerry said, eyes wide. He fed Daisy a little bit of meat, who appeared to be listening intently to the proceedings. “How are you going to teach the Archivist how to be less of a psycho, Aunt Sasha?”

“How else?” Sasha flipped her notebook shut, grinning triumphantly.” She turned to Jon, razor-sharp gaze pinning him down, finding him wanting. “I have an item for you to find. Rather, a series of items.”

“Anything you desire, I can locate,” Jon said, with no small amount of trepidation. “What do you want to find?”

Sasha grinned sheepishly, and Jon knew he was trapped. “The lost memories of Jonathan Sims.”

“Yahtzee!” Helen crowed, Agnes and Gerry high fived, Daisy yipped eagerly, and Jon began to have a very bad feeling about all of this. 

Jon had strange dreams that night: of rolling green fields, of fuzzy cows like a walking carpet, and of a short man smiling at him. 

He and the short man were standing in front of a fence, the cow poking its head out over the fence. Jon stepped back, very rationally terrified of cows. He waited for it to turn into pestilence, for maggots to overtake its skull, for it to gore Jon on its wickedly curved horns, but instead it just brayed at them. When Jon looked up, he saw that the sky was a bizarre and off-putting shade of blue. 

The man laughed at Jon. He held out his hand to the cow, like a fucking maniac, and giggled as the cow licked its poison tongue over his palm. The man said something else to Jon, but his words were garbled and indistinguishable. 

“I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” Jon said frankly. “What kind of nightmare is this?” He looked around, searching for the random people whose dreams he terrorized frequently. “Where’s that woman who yells about how disappointed she is in me all the time? I’m a big fan of her.”

But the short man, bundled up in a fluffy jumper and wearing a soft smile, just smiled gently at Jon. He looked at Jon with - with love, and affection, and with simple understanding. Nobody had ever looked at Jon like that before. Nobody ever would. Nobody thought about Jon like that, as if he was this special, pure thing. 

“I really loved you, you know,” the man said, and Jon realized that this was not somebody else’s nightmare. 

This was his nightmare. 

The man beamed at him, the man who loved him, and Jon screamed in pain and horror and anguish as he opened the door anyway, again and again and again, always, and destroyed the only good thing he had in his life until everything was fire and darkness and green. 

The next day Sasha was on the warpath. 

She commandeered Jon’s office, taking in a phone book, whiteboard, markers, her omnipresent and terrifying notebook and a great deal of food. Jon was assigned the task of cleaning out Daisy’s old office - or, as Sasha put it, ‘your dog’s playroom’ - and he was left very little choice in the matter. 

The only thing that Jon really knew about what Sasha was doing was the fact that she and Agnes had stayed up late the previous night whispering to each other as Gerry fell asleep on the couch and Helen experimented with jumping out of television screens to scare people. Agnes’ eyes were red when she woke Gerry up so Helen could take them home, but Jon knew better than to ask. Some things were too private to be discussed. Even with him. 

Now, Jon sat with Daisy on a dusty desk, going through endless boxes. He had meant to move them all out, but instead he caught himself going through them instead, showing them to Daisy so she could decide what to keep and what to toss. It ended up taking much longer than it should have because they kept fighting - Jon always erred on the side of keeping the knick-knack or old weapon, while Daisy told him to toss them. 

“We’re turning you back to normal any day now,” Jon told her severely. She looked at him with half-lidded eyes, unimpressed. “Annabelle said she’d help, and she’s hardly incompetent. We’ll go to her silly party, and we’ll find someone there who can turn you back.” Daisy looked away and curled a lip. “I don’t understand why you hate Annabelle so much.”

Daisy yipped a surprisingly thorough takedown of Annabelle’s worst qualities, most of which Jon was forced to agree with, as he rummaged through the cardboard box. Books, all Daisy’s - he read to her often, in those later days when she would be in too much pain to open her eyes. They were all the kind that Jon didn’t like. Lots of ‘little old lady solves mystery’, Miss Marple types. Historical dramas. She was a huge Tudors fan. They had found the entire run of Downton Abbey in a consignment shop and Daisy had practically eaten the whole box in excitement. 

It had been her who had suggested the private eye thing. They had been on the road to London, pulling each other through, and to pass the time they used to discuss all of the great things they would do in London. How safe it would be, how it was a haven for monsters and humans alike. That was how everyone always characterized London: a safe haven. Everyone they passed, trapped or half-dead or surprisingly hearty, told them that it was the best place to be. If you could survive the trip. 

Jon had thought about maybe becoming a journalist, someone who interviewed others for their life stories and collected them. Maybe even a writer. Neither of them just wanted to sit around all day feeding, but it was best to find a hobby that helped them feed. Daisy had to hunt, Jon had to know. It had been Daisy, leafing through a dog-eared and yellowed paperback novel that looked like it had been left out in the rain one too many times, who idly joked about Jon investigating mysteries and chasing down perps. 

“What,” Jon had said, rolling over on the skinny sleeping roll that they shared, “like a detective?”

Daisy had just snorted. She held the book in the air, her other arm thrown over Jon’s chest. She was - had been - was - a tactile person. She liked lying on Jon, who enjoyed gentle pressure. They never did it the other way around - Daisy had always hated feeling pressure on her body. “Nah. Being a detective is all boring paperwork shit. It’s two weeks' tedium for two days of chasing down perps. No thanks.”

“What? How do you know that?” Jon sat up a little, looking down at her. He remembered his eyes growing wide. “Were you a copper?”

“Yep,” Daisy said, popping the ‘p’. 

“You didn’t see fit to mention this?”

“Nope,” Daisy said. She flipped the page with her thumb. “I...don’t remember it too well. What I do remember...it’s not something to be proud of. Who we are now, where we are, is the most important thing.” She smiled up at him. “Let’s be London Private Eyes. You can be my nerdy assistant researcher, and I’ll be the cool badass who chases down mysteries. Just like in my books. Doesn’t that sound like a gas, Jon?”

“I want that so bad,” Jon whispered, stars in his eyes and already imagining himself in a cool trenchcoat, and Daisy had barked a laugh. 

“I’ll make it happen,” she had promised. “If you want to be a private eye, I’ll make it happen for you, Jon. No matter what.”

No matter what. 

Maybe that was all Jon was doing now: living out that idealistic, silly fantasy. They had said a lot of things back then, just to have a reason to keep going. But they had done it: they had gotten the office, set up their business, carried in desks and chased down perps. 

For a few months. Then Daisy got sicker, and sicker, and sicker…

He was startled out of his reverie by a wet nose prodding at his hand. Daisy was barking at the box of books, indicating that they should put them in his half-full bookshelf in the flat, and Jon nodded and set them aside. He pulled over another box, finding nothing but office supplies in it, and Daisy growled softly at it. 

“What!” Jon yelped, protectively holding the box away from Daisy. “What do you mean by that?”

Daisy patiently explained her well thought out, creative, and intelligent idea. 

“That’s stupid,” Jon said petulantly. “No way I’m doing that.”

Daisy bit him. 

“Ow! Stoppit!” Jon squeaked, trying not to think about how much he sounded like Gerry in that second. Younger brothers should unionize. “Look, she’s not going to say yes. She hates me, why would she ever agree to that?” He fought the urge to pout as Daisy shot him a look that clearly interrogated why Sasha would decide to invest so much emotional labor in trying to convince him that people aren’t tasty nonsentient snacks if she hated him. She just wanted something from him. They all did. “I don’t need to replace you. You’re right here. We’re going to cure you in - in weeks, maybe. We don’t need her. We don’t need anyone besides each other, remember?”

She’s smart, Daisy said. 

“You’re smart.”

She’s good for you, Daisy said. 

“You’re good for me.”

Daisy shook her head. Jon angrily shoved the rest of the office supplies in the box, hopping off the desk, and shoved the office supplies in the ‘to-keep’ pile. He had the sense that they had miscommunicated, that he had lost the argument, but Jon never won arguments with Daisy anyway. And if they had miscommunicated - well, it’s not like she was his psychic partner or anything. Except she was. They didn’t miscommunicate. 

Except when humans were involved. 

There were some wounds that were raw and weeping, after three years. Both their lost memories. Daisy slowly becoming more and more bestial. Jon’s frantic, hard-edged discontent. Jonah Magnus. What Jon had done to the world, and what he refused to even think about fixing. 

How could he? It was too big. He had never lived in any other world, had no nostalgia for something that had never been to him. Daisy tried to talk to him about it sometimes, but he shut her down. It was just too big, too scary, too unfaceable.

 Even if he had killed the world - didn’t it deserve to die? That was what seemed right. The world had been vile, and bad, and filled with pain. Jon knew this about it. Wasn’t the new world, where everything was simple and the messy complexities of life were reduced to sheer survival, much better? Even if some people were unhappy, was that his business? Jon was happy. Daisy was safe. Agnes and Gerry and Helen were happy. Wasn’t that the important thing? 

Jon didn’t remember much of the old world. But he did know this: he had been the furthest thing from happy. It had been pure misery. Whenever he swam in those dark, deep pools of memory, he had the sense of a sadness so deep and profound he couldn’t even begin to understand. How could someone like Jon - who had never feared for his life, who had never been without family or friends or those who would help him, who had never experienced pure terror - ever understand the pain of Head Archivist Jonathan Sims?

How could he ever understand Sasha? How could he ever understand the plight of humans and monsters alike in this grotesque world? Was there something unfair about all of this, that Jon was happy while everyone else suffered?

But what was unfair about it? Jon deserved some happiness, didn’t he? He knew the requirements of the Watcher’s Crown, knew them like he knew when to duck when walking through a door and like how to tie his shoes. Suffering, pain, fear, torment, and markings by all fourteen Entities. How could Jon understand that, when he didn’t even understand fear?

He ate of fear. He vicariously experienced fear. He ruthlessly stuffed human experiences in him, trying to plug that ever-leaking drain. But none of it was his. Or, in a weird way, all of it was his. Jon was always afraid, because that was his job. To consume the pain and fear of humanity and live vicariously through its horrors. It wasn't his or anything. But the worst fear he had ever felt was in those endless dreams, where the man told him that he was loved -

It wasn’t so much that love, itself, was scary. He and Daisy loved each other. Gerry and Agnes looked up to him, and Helen was fond of him. Even Annabelle seemed to dote on him, for reasons known only to her. 

But Jon wasn’t stupid. Whoever the man in the dream was, the same man as in his very first memory, he was somebody who had loved the Head Archivist Jonathan Sims. Which meant that there was someone out there who missed him. Someone out there who was lonely without him. 

Jon had killed the man who that person loved, and wore his body like a cheap suit. And Jon knew that the man would never forgive him for that. 

Would Sasha?

He tried to imagine it: Jon, younger, laughing along to a joke Sasha told. She would tease him, maybe, about him and the man. When are you finally going to introduce us? Sasha would say. Oh, he’s shy, Jon would say. He’s embarrassed that his bodybuilder professional wrestler background isn’t enough to impress a couple of librarians. Yeah, we met because my big sister defeated him in a fight club style wrestling match, and he swore to become her eternal rival, but then he saw me cheering her on and swore loyalty to me instead. 

Then Sasha would badger him to go out for drinks with her and...what were the names of her coworkers again? Tim and Michael? Right, with Tim and Michael, and Jon would laugh and say alright, and they would all clink their glasses and toast to Jon’s sexy wrestler husband. 

Or maybe that wasn’t the case at all. Maybe Jon and Sasha hated each other and Michael and Tim...or was his name Jim…?...and Michael and Jim never talked to them and everybody was cold and distant and Jon and Sasha meant nothing to each other at all. Maybe Jon and Sasha had only known each other for a few months before she died. Maybe Jon and Sasha were secret lovers but Sasha didn’t want to tell him because it was too painful. 

“Oh my god,” Jon whispered. “We were secret lovers and I broke her heart by dramatically sacrificing myself to the evil fear demon, the Archivist.”

Daisy levelled a flat look at him which clearly read that she thought he read too many romance novels. Which wasn’t fair: Jon read too much of everything. 

It was only three hours later, when the office had been solidly organized and cleaned out, with the futon set up and a neat assortment of women’s clothes piled in a drawer, that Jon dared to knock on the door of his own office. 

He heard a faint grunting inside, which he chose to interpret as a ‘come in’, so as Daisy played with a toy wind-up mouse she found in an old box in the main room he entered his office. 

It was mostly the same as he had left it, if a bit organized with some space cleared. Papers in teetering high stacks, a reassuring quantity of tape recorders, and boxes and boxes of cassettes, and a truly stunning quantity of stim toys hand-made by Daisy. Sasha had co-opted the desk, and was writing out plots on a whiteboard that she quickly flipped over when Jon walked in. She had her notebook open and was making notes in it with her left hand as she wrote on the whiteboard with her right, and it was clear that she had rifled through his Statements. 

“Uh? Sasha?” Jon asked awkwardly, feeling out of place in his own workspace. Maybe he couldn’t deny it: she really did belong here. “Can I ask you something?”

“I think we can sell the batteries from these constantly appearing tape recorders on the black market,” Sasha said, capping her marker. “But sure.”

“Don’t you dare, they’re family.”

“Your definition of family involves your dog, the semi-sentient fractals in the form of a Barbie doll, a cult leader teenager, and a teenage rare book collector,” Sasha pointed out frankly. If Jon looked closer, he could see that she seemed rather tired. She narrowed her eyes at him. “If I understand your supernatural powers correctly, couldn’t you just make me answer your questions?”

“Yes, but people tell me frequently that’s rude.” Jon coiled some of his ponytail around his finger, letting it spring back into its coil, weirdly anxious. “I wanted to ask you about...uh, Jonathan Sims. The Head Archivist.”

Sasha’s expression turned guarded - who was she protecting? - and when she crossed her arms, it seemed defensive. She leaned against the whiteboard, narrowing her eyes at him. “Isn’t that you?”

“The Archivist and the Head Archivist are two very different things,” Jon said primly. “Gertrude was Head Archivist her whole life and never attained the title of Archivist.”

“What are the requirements? Eating trauma?”

“Yes, for a start.”

Sasha was quiet for a long moment, lips pressed together, before finally saying, “Agnes warned me. That people who tend to try to tell you what you want to know about your past get popped.”

“Like a grape,” Jon said, depressed. 

“Like a grape,” Sasha agreed. But she raised an eyebrow at him, almost amused. “I’m not afraid, though. Are you?”

“Yes,” Jon said, out of lack of anything better. Out of a lack of understanding of true fear, Jon was afraid of this. 

“Good,” Sasha said, “that’s the most important place to start.”

Jonathan Sims, as Sasha explained, was like this:

He looked much like Jon did, except much different. His hair had been shorter, in short twists instead of a messy ponytail that cascaded down his shoulders when he went too long without cutting it. They dressed much the same, except Jonathan’s clothing was well taken care of and Jon’s always looked as if it had been through a shredder. Jonathan had been closed off, with a permanent scowl and aggravated expression; Jon’s face was open and vulnerable. Jonathan smoked, but tried to hide it; Jon had never touched cigarettes. Jonathan had no friends. Jonathan had no family that Sasha had ever known of. He showed up to work before they got there, and he worked long after everyone else went home. He had no life, and did not enjoy birthdays. 

“You weren’t qualified for your job and you knew it,” Sasha said lightly, doodling idly on the whiteboard. She drew an odd, stylized image, what looked like a stick with wings. “I should have gotten the job. I tried not to begrudge you it. You always liked me, I think. But that was just because I was competent and serious and as much of a nerd as you are.”

“Were.”

“Whatever.” Sasha added spots to her stick with wings, and Jon remembered that, from her perspective, it had only been a week ago that the world had made sense: or at least, made no sense in the most familiar way. “I mean, you liked me more than Tim, who wouldn’t stop teasing you because that guy has no idea of when to back off, or Martin, who falsified all of his credentials and has no idea how to file anything.”

“That’s disgusting,” Jon said, preoccupied with the horror. “An interloper in my archives…?”

“Nice to know the important stuff is the same,” Sasha said wryly. She drew a frowny face next to the weird flying stick, then erased it and re-drew it smiling. “You...have your moments, though. You really made an effort to make sure Martin was comfortable when he started sleeping in the Archives. He said that you would even stay later than you usually did, just so he wouldn’t be all alone...there’s a source of kindness in you, I think. That’s the impression I always got, anyway.”

Jon...had never been called kind before. It was…

“Do you see anything of him?” Jon asked. “In me?”

Sasha looked at him, sizing him up, and Jon wondered if she found him wanting. 

“I think,” Sasha said slowly, almost testing her words, “when I think of Jon, I think...scared. That he’s a man who is always, always scared. Of something. Of what we think of him, of the Statements, of not being good enough, of failing. I don’t know him very well. I guess I didn’t really think there was anything to know. But Martin - I mean, Martin was always insisting that he was good underneath all of that fear. That his anger, bitterness, nastiness, was just because he was scared.” Sasha fell silent for a second, before starting again. “I don’t see that anger or nastiness in you. I don’t see that fear in you. It’s...a different kind.”

“What could I have to be afraid about?” Jon snapped, harsher than he was expecting. “I’m one of the most powerful men in the world. What on earth could I be afraid of?”

“I don’t know, Jon,” Sasha said calmly. “You tell me.”

Jon boiled over with anger. He sneered at Sasha, drawing away from her. She was just wrong. She didn’t know anything about him. Scared? Him? He was the Archivist. He was power. Power was not exerted on him, he exerted power. He was not the victim, he was the victimizer. How dare -

When Jon swam in those dark pools of memory, was he afraid of what lay underneath?

When Jon stood in front of that door in the crack between reality, and let himself feel what he was always too afraid to feel - what was it?

“You were the last thing Tim thought of when he died, and he didn’t even know your face ,” Jon spat, and stalked out the office, slamming the door behind him. 

In the office, muffled by the door, he heard Sasha yell, “ There it is!” 

And although he had just proved her right, and she was probably scribbling away on her whiteboard about proved theories, Jon decided not to care. He patted Daisy on the head, collapsed at his desk in the main office, and violently attacked one of his stress toys. 

Sasha James was proving to be more trouble than she was worth. 

Chapter Text

After a few furious episodes of Seinfeld, he had the weird sense he was forgetting something, which wasn’t uncommon. Jon had approximate knowledge of most everything, but he couldn’t actually remember everything all the time. That was exhausting. He spitefully shoved Sasha all the way out of his mind, picking at one of the many scars running up his arm as he collapsed into his desk chair and trying to think of something really productive and cool he could do so he could show up Sasha. 

How could he have ever considered, even for just a moment, asking her to work with him? She was a terror. A disgrace. A human . What did she know about him? What did she know about the world? She hadn’t lived in it a week . Jon had lived in it his entire life. How dare she presume to think that she understood the world better than him? Ugh, it turned his stomach -

“That’s it!” Jon cried, bolting upright. “I knew I was forgetting something!”

He quickly picked up his landline, dialling the number from memory on the rotary. The line rang for a long moment, ringing and ringing and ringing, and Jon was just about to hang up and try again later when the ringing stopped and the sounds of heavy breathing rattled over the line. 

“Jared!” Jon chirped. “So good to See you. I have some fortunate news. Actually, a thoroughly exciting development as relates to metaphysical implications of resurrections from the dead and behind wiped from reality. Really, the theological implications are fascinating -”

“Get to the point,” Jared ground out.

“Right.” Jon cleared his throat. “I found the item you requested. You neglected to mention it would be within the Magnus Institute , but there’s no job too big, I suppose. When should I drop by to give you it back?”

Jared grunted over the line. In the background, Jon heard the unmistakable sound of beating meat with a hammer. Or...beating something with a hammer. There was screaming. “Don’t want it.”

“I - you don’t want it?”

“It's yours,” Jared said, in a stunning moment of magnaminty. “Keep it.”

“I...what do you want me to do with it?”

“Give it to your dog? Put it back in? Fuck if I know.” Jared yawned as a blood-curdling screech echoed through the line. “If you found your girl, do you still have to talk to me?”

“Yes,” Jon said instantly, before he processed everything that Jared said. “Wait, what do you mean put it back in?”

“It's your rib,” Jared said slowly, enunciating every word, and Jon abruptly felt very light headed. “If you still have to talk to me come by tomorrow. Noon. Bring your girl.”

Then he hung up on Jon, and Jon was left to wonder which girl he meant, and dearly hope that he didn’t mean Sasha, and also wonder how Jon lost a rib . 

What had Jonathan Sims been doing ? 

“You said Jared was a meat monster, right?”

Jon startled, and looked up to see Sasha leaning in the doorway to his office. How long had she been listening in? 

“Avatar of the Flesh,” Jon said stiffly. “I...don’t think it’s a good idea for you to meet him.”

“I’m coming,” Sasha said firmly, and Jon groaned. “You need back-up. I want to meet these Avatars, anyway. They have to have useful information on your past.”

“That’s what I have Daisy for -”

“You also have me,” Sasha said, and her tone brooked no argument. “Tim would kill me if I let you walk into a lion’s den alone. He’s always telling me that you’re useless on your own.” She swallowed, and looked away. “Told me. He always told me.”

“What I said was out of line,” Jon said softly. “I’m sorry. You just - hit a nerve.”

 “Yeah, it was. But I gotta accept it, you know? I can’t deny reality. I’m not putting my head in the sand. This is the situation, and I have to make the best of it.” Sasha offered him a weak, shaky smile. “Martin would kill me too if I let something bad happen to you. I mean, not that I didn’t already, but...better late than never, right?”

Jon Knew, in a flash of keen insight, what Sasha thought. She thought that if she had been there, if she hadn’t died, this would have never happened to Jon at all. She thought she would have been able to stop it, or at least do something, somehow. She did not Know it as Jon Knew things, but she was unshakable in her resolve. Even if she was wrong, even if there had been nothing she could have done, Sasha thought that she would have been able to save Jonathan Sims if only she had been there. 

Did she blame herself? Or did she look at a world left in chaos and think: I can fix this?

Had Jon ever done that?

“Maybe it’s for the best,” Sasha said quietly. “You know, that Martin’s dead. I can’t imagine him having to survive in this world...he was always so gentle and sweet. Tim...I think Tim would have had the time of his life getting to fight monsters all day, but Martin would have been miserable. Maybe the fact that we’re the only ones left...it makes sense, you know?”

Hm. She must really miss her coworkers. Sasha hadn’t mentioned any family, any other friends, and Jon wondered if they were all that she had. He ought to make it up to her and see if Martin had passed peacefully, so he could reassure her that there had been no pain. If there was pain...well, he just wouldn’t say anything. 

Jon surreptitiously opened an Eye, cognizant of the way that Daisy abandoned her toy for the first time and stared at him with her tail held stiffly, searching for the last moments of Martin Whatshisface. 

Jon Saw -

A storm, crashing down. 

Wind howling at the windows to the small cabin, shattering them through and sending glass sparkling everywhere. Shards of glass grazed against the newly born eyes, blooming on his arms and his chest and his legs. 

He was sitting on the ground - why was he sitting on the ground? That didn’t seem right. In him was only emptiness, as if he had been hollowed out inside and his intestines were strewn over the floor. Something had bored into him, eviscerated him and replaced everything inside with malice and fear, and there was nothing left.  He felt as if he was bleeding, but what he was bleeding he couldn’t be sure. He felt - he felt - 

He didn’t feel much at all.

He didn’t feel anything, until he looked up from the warping wood planks and into the eyes of the man who stood at the threshold of the room. They were wide and horrified, and within them was a sort of profound desolation that shook him to his core. The man looked at him as if he was watching him die, or as if he had already died, and as if there was no recourse.

He felt scared.

He stumbled upwards, feet slipping on the warped floor. The man opened his mouth, lips forming a word that he didn’t know,  but he didn’t stop. He pushed past the man, moving quicker than he expected, and stumbled into the ferociously raging storm. Within bare minutes he was swallowed by the storm, and the calls of the man into the raging storm had been choked by the rain. 

It wasn’t until he reached what remained of the small village that he realized that he didn’t even know his own name.  But by then it didn’t seem to matter too much anyway. 

“ - Jon?”

Jon snapped back into alertness. 

He had zoned out again. Sasha was looking at him curiously, head tilted, and Daisy was gently licking his hand. Jon reached out to stroke her on the head almost unconsciously, memories and head still far away. 

“Sorry. I was, uh, rather far away.” In Scotland, specifically. Jesus, he hadn’t thought about that day outside of a dream in years. “Erm. Your coworker. Martin? Would you like to know what -”

“Sorry, but I really don’t.” Sasha’s expression tightened. “I don’t really want to know the specifics of his gory death. Maybe that makes me a bad friend or whatever, but - I don’t.”

“But, uh -”

“Just don’t.”

Well. She had expressed her preferences quite clearly. Jon shrugged at an unamused Daisy, a clear ‘well what would you have me do about the situation?’. He couldn’t imagine her genuinely caring that Martin was far from dead, and also that the man had the unfortunate tendency to interrupt perfectly nice young Avatars conducting the Watcher’s Crown Ritual. 

What had they both been doing in Scotland? Were they friends? That seemed unlikely, if what Sasha said about filing was true. Maybe he had been...assisting him in the ritual. That made the most sense. Jon had gone to Scotland to conduct the ritual in privacy, and Martin had gone along as an assistant. Or maybe sacrifice - Jon would be surprised if the entire ritual had been undertaken with no loss of life. Granted, he didn’t exactly remember it - it was likely the moment that Jonathan Sims, the human, had died, and thus the moment that Jonathan Sims, the Archivist was born, and what kind of freak remembered their own birth - but his hypothesis was good. 

In retrospect, Jon regretted fleeing from the cabin in terror. If he had simply thought to stop and ask Martin - Blackwood, that was his name, Martin Blackwood - some basic questions about who he was or what his name was or what was going on, he could have avoided some severe confusion for several weeks until Daisy found him half-dead in the Highlands. 

But, well, he hardly blamed himself. Even the best of us are bound to act rashly when they suddenly wake up in a cabin in Scotland with no memories as the world ended. 

If he had been a sacrifice he was long dead. There was no point in telling the specifics to Sasha. 

Jon didn’t look.

“ - so when do we head out? Now?” Sasha bounced a little on the balls of her feet, and Daisy wagged her tail. “I’ve never spoken to an actual meat monster before. He’s the guy from the Boneturner’s Statement, right? I have so many questions about the follow-up for that case -”

“You are not going,” Jon said, as authoritatively as he could. Which, he was fully aware, was not overly authoritative. “It’s too dangerous. Daisy and I will -”

“You’d bring your pet dog over me?” Sasha asked blankly. 

“She’s my sister,” Jon said firmly. “And she’s a wolf, not a dog. Don’t be rude.”

“She is over a meter tall,” Sasha pointed out. Daisy wagged her tail adorably and proudly, not that Jon would ever call her adorable to her face. He liked his nose where it was, thanks. “That’s not even wolf size. That’s, like, full direwolf. Game of Thrones up in here.” She squinted at Daisy as Jon pretended he knew what Game of Thrones was. “So, are you also a wolf spirit possessing the body of my dead boss, or do all monsters get assigned an animal familiar at birth, or what?”

Daisy barked out the definition of Occam’s Razor. Jon massaged his forehead. 

“We’re adopted. And you aren’t coming to Jared’s interview.”

“...so is this like a Princess Mononoke situation or a Stewart Little situation?”

“Can’t she live literally anywhere else?” Jon asked Daisy miserably. She just barked at him, finding the entire thing hilarious. “Sure, you’d say that.”

This was going to be a long...however long it was going to be. Why did Annabelle do this to him? She wasn’t coming!

“So glad you changed your mind,” Sasha said cheerfully. 

Jon grumbled something very not polite. 

“Sorry, what was that? I couldn’t hear you,” Sasha said, maddeningly cheerful. “Is there anything you want to say to the class, Jonathan?”

“I don’t remember hiring you but I regret it,” Jon said sourly. 

“I’m pretty sure that was Elias, actually.”

That explained everything. Jon turned to the Tower, which was permanently visible, and gave it the bird. Daisy barked something rude at it, just on principle. 

They were back at the strip mall, a day after Jon’s phone call with Jared. It was different than it had been a few days ago, but that was to be expected. Nothing was ever truly consistent. It seemed livelier, packed full of businesses with signs that read NOW HIRING and STAFF WANTED. Sometimes a human would shamble in, dead eyed, and never shamble out. Other times, humans held take-out bags and laughed with each other, with arms linked. It seemed to reassure Sasha, who smiled weakly whenever she saw it. Life went on. 

Had Jon destroyed the world? Or had he only changed it, into something far harsher and cruel, but still capable of supporting life? The world didn’t obey any laws of logic or reason: food appeared in stores, and when it didn’t the humans found that they didn’t need to eat as much as they once did. Jon was fairly sure people could still die, but he had never seen it. He had simply seen them spirited away, never to return. Which...he was willing to admit was worse. 

He swallowed as Daisy lead them towards Jared’s gym. Where it was boarded up last time, now it boasted two shiny doors, thrown open. There was a steady stream of people walking in, gym rats in sports bras or muscle shirts with duffel bags thrown over their shoulders. Sasha looked strongly as if she had been expecting Texas Chainsaw Massacre and instead was seeing Planet Fitness. 

Jon swallowed, playing with his fingers. “Sasha, there’s really something I have to tell you.”

“Save it for after we handle the fleshy flesh monster?” Sasha opened the door, poking her head in to check out the gym. “Am I supposed to be scared of those muscle bros? Because, for the record, I totally am. I’m a nerd, Jon, I don’t belong here.”

Daisy wriggled in, which was somewhat impressive considering how she was half as tall as Sasha, and disappeared into the gym. Jon sighed, ignoring the way that all of the humans instinctively gave him a wide berth, and carefully tugged Sasha back outside the gym. “First rule of surviving: don’t walk into strange stores. Especially ones you know are run by an Avatar.”

“Are all businesses just fronts for the Entities now?” Sasha asked, with morbid fascination. “Like, every Italian restaurant is just a money-laundering front for the Web or something?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Jon waited until Daisy gave the all-clear signal, and then pushed open the door and quickly shepherded Sasha inside. “That’s the boba shops.”

Inside, it was like night and day from the last time they had visited. The workout machines were glistening and clean, and there was soft music playing on the speakers. Gym goers exercised, pumping weights or running on the treadmill or just chatting with each other, and the gym was clean and sparkling. In fact, the only thing the same about it was Jared. He sat behind the receptionist’s desk, delicate glasses perched on his nose, filling out some accountant sheet. A sign-in book was open next to him. It was drenched in blood. 

Jon approached him first, because he was the leader and an adult. He was just glad that they had left Agnes and Gerry at home - those two were helpful, but they tended to get over-excited. Daisy was already grabbing one of the 20 kg dumbbells delicately in her monstrous jaws and bringing it over to Jon as if it was a stick he had thrown for fetch. 

But Jared addressed them before Jon could, looking up from his accountant book and glancing between a nervous Jon, a happily tail wagging Daisy holding the gigantic weights, and a fascinated Sasha. 

“Please put those back,” Jared said evenly to Daisy. “You’ll warp ‘em.”

Daisy’s tail drooped, but she dropped the dumbbell on the ground. It splintered the wood. 

“Thanks.” Jared looked back up at Jon, and noticeably at Sasha. “You found her.”

“Sasha James, nice to meet you,” Sasha said. She was too smart to extend her hand, but she nodded at him. Impressive, considering how Sasha likely couldn’t see what Jared truly looked like. But it never hurt to be cautious. “You gave my partner the clue that led him straight to me, didn’t you?”

There it was - a smile, lumpy and misshapen, but unmistakable on Jared’s face. “What if I did.”

“We appreciate your help,” Jon said smoothly, walking forwards to lean against the counter. “But I don’t understand why you were not willing to simply tell us. Sending me straight into the lion’s den was a dirty trick, Hopworth.”

Jared raised one of his many eyebrows at Jon, and with one of his many hands he pantomimed, hypothetically, being crushed. Like a grape. 

“Why does everybody think they’re in danger from me,” Jon said, frustrated. “I’ve never done anything to any of you. I’m perfectly harmless. I - I find wedding rings for a living, Jared.”

But Jared just chuckled wetly, like slabs of meat thumping against each other with a wet smack. “You would like for us to think that, wouldn’t you? The harmless, helpless Archivist. That’s the kind of monster you’d like to be.” He grinned with too many teeth crammed in a mouth too small. “Are you scared of stepping on Magnus’ toes?”

Jon opened his mouth to say something - to say that he wasn’t scared of Jonah Magnus, that he never had been - but it wasn’t in his nature to lie, and he closed his mouth. 

Jared grinned even wider. “Thought so. Think that’ll keep you safe, Archivist?”

She didn’t understand the underscores of the conversation, but from Sasha’s calculating look she understood enough. She leaned forward, trying her best to meet Jared’s eyes and not flinching when he casually plucked one out and put it in his arm. She must be used to it from Jon. Already? After only a few days? “Forgive me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you promise an interview in exchange for Jon finding that rib?”

He did. It had been a deal, which was worth its weight in gold between their kind. Jared narrowed a set of his eyes at Sasha. “I already helped you.”

“But you didn’t give the interview,” Sasha said, smiling broadly. “So the terms of the deal aren’t met, are they?”

A long, pregnant silence. Jared shifted in his seat, and the sound of a dozen mouths howling echoed from his body, muffled by flabs of meat. 

Finally, he said, “Fine. Whatever. But you ask. Not him.”

...maybe she was useful. Jon was reminded, somewhat bitterly, of the scant few months when Daisy had taken point on their missions, when Jon had provided the smooth talking and Daisy had provided the muscle and brains. It had...worked, somewhat, despite Jon actually being more talented at making people hate his guts than making people like him or want to answer his questions, and although Daisy had been - is extremely intelligent she tended to be impulsive and overly inclined towards violence instead of thinking things out. It just felt wrong to have an actually intelligent and level headed person being the brains of their operation. It wasn’t how things were done. 

Time to coordinate. Jon grabbed Sasha’s sleeve and tugged her back, letting the confused gym rats behind him step forward to sign into the logbook with their own blood. 

“Ask him about how to turn Daisy back to normal,” Jon whispered loudly in Sasha’s ear. 

But Sasha just shot him a bizarre look. “Normal, like...back to being a normal dog?”

“You are not nearly as smart as you think you are,” Jon said flatly. Daisy barked recriminatingly at him. “I’m trying to tell her - look, Sasha, I may not have been completely - er, transparent with you.”

“Wow, really? What gave it away?” Sasha crossed her arms, unamused. “Was it you giving me an hour long lecture on the mechanics of the apocalypse but not telling me how Jonah Magnus started it? Or was it you not telling me why everyone’s scared to death of you? Or was it you not telling me anything about those weird kids or that weirder woman -”

“Daisy is sick,” Jon hissed, and he found to his horror that his throat was choked up. Why? What about this wound still hurt? Why did it still hurt to talk about? “She - she lost herself to the Hunt three years ago. Not herself. Her - her human body. She’s still my sister, but she can’t turn back into human like she once could. I need to get her body back. I’ll do anything, Sasha.” His throat closed up again, and Jon settled for opening all of his Eyes, for fixating his hundred-fold gaze on a struck Sasha. “That was Annabelle’s payment. For you . Do you understand?”

The other woman just stared at him, eyes wide.

Finally, she said, “Jon never mentioned having a sister.”

Jon just grimaced. “We weren’t biologically related. But...she’s all I have. And I’m all she has. Just like how Tim was all you had. Do you understand?”

She stared at him, and Jon wished that he had some better way of explaining it. In the distance, the familiar sounds of a radio show echoed above them, startling Sasha and silencing her for a minute as she listened to the two hosts give updates about traffic, danger sites, and Top 10 Pop Songs That Make Us Forget All Of This Is Happening. It seemed to spook her, putting her off-balance, but Jon didn’t bother to open his Eyes and figure out why. 

How could he explain, to somebody who knew only the old world? It was meaningless to Jon. Family ties, biological attachments...it was all meaningless. Everybody latched onto each other, protected who they could, and that was your family. Somebody like Sasha, who was a stranger in this strange land, could never understand. 

Jon had never looked to see if his biological parents were still alive. He didn’t care. They may know something about him, but Jon couldn’t bear to see the disappointment in their eyes when they saw the monster that ate their son. 

Besides, he knew Jonah would have never picked someone with attachments . Someone who was loved . That wasn’t how he worked. Jon knew it as he knew his own nature. 

Why couldn’t Sasha understand that the old world had nothing for him? That he had a life here, a family and friends and a job and a place? What was so great about the old world?

“Okay,” Sasha said finally, after the voices of the two hosts trailed off into more top 40 hits. “I know what to ask. Excuse me.”

She turned sharply on her heel, clearly missing her pumps, and walked back to Jared so she could lean against his counter. She leaned in, unafraid of the sounds of churning meat echoing from within his stomach. 

“What turns a human into a monster?” Sasha asked sharply, as if she could Compel as Jon could through sheer force of will. “What’s the difference between humans and Avatars? Is it possible to turn someone back?”

Jon’s jaw dropped. What did that have to do with Daisy!

But Jared was already smiling, and he had already started answering her question as he wrote in an elegant, sprawling script in his book. “How would you define a human, Sasha James?”

Sasha was silent for a long moment, clearly thinking the question over, before giving her answer. “Someone who does not have a connection to any of the Entities and who doesn’t have any special powers or abilities an average human wouldn’t. “

Easy question. Jared grunted in answer. “How would you have answered a month ago?”

She didn’t hesitate this time. “A life form with the body of homo superior and a soul.”

This time Jared smiled again. “You believe in souls, Sasha James?”

“Yes,” she said simply and firmly. “Are you going to answer any of my questions?”

“We’re getting there.” Jared scribbled something else down in his book. “I would say that’s the point, Ms. James. An Avatar, or any acolyte of the Entities, is someone who sold their soul for power. There is an essential hollowness in us. It is not that we lack empathy, or love, or connection. I feel as deeply as you do. I possess a rational mind. Twelve of them. I simply do not... think the same as I once did. But I was never much in the habit of that.”

Sasha narrowed her eyes. “A soul’s the spiritual presence of human beings. It’s...consciousness and freedom. God gave it directly to humanity, it’s our essense of God. So is it like selling your soul to the Devil?”

“You did well in catechism school,” Jared rumbled. “So did I. But I would abandon your notions of good and evil. With the power of the Entities, we are capable of...great things.” For just a second, his gaze flickered to Jon. “Terrible, yes. But great.”

“Harry Potter?” Jon asked, masking his shiver. “Really?”

“I was never one much for readin’. But I did like the movies.” Jared turned the page of his ledger, seemingly uncaring. “Everything that is inside me now was always within me. My journey towards becoming this was a series of decisions. All made by me. Some...manipulated. But all made by me. People are capable of many terrible things, Ms. James. But it's not our powers…” He looked at Jon. “Or our bodies…” He looked at Daisy, who growled. “...that makes us more than human. I would not even call it a lacking. I would call it something extra within us: a drive, like the drive to eat or shit or fuck. It drives us to feed. To sacrifice. To consume. Some view it as spiritual. Others view it as biological. Me…” Jared’s flesh burbled and bubbled, rippling inhumanly. “Everything is Flesh. In the end, I mean. I don’t believe in anything that is not contained within our Flesh. There is an insanity inherent in man. Every person has it. An insanity that...pulls us towards the terrible and unknowable. For some of us...for many different reasons...that insanity screams loudly. It is overwhelming. It drowns out everything.” Something gristled within him, and the pearly white shine of a bone emerged from his chest as he absentmindedly pushed it back in. “To become an Avatar is to accept that insanity. To scream back at it. To demand to be heard. Respected. Understood. Embraced. But that insanity is what makes humans human. It is in our flesh. Without it...we wouldn’t be flesh at all.” He smiled broadly. “What is worse than that?”

Sasha and Jon and Daisy stared at Jared. 

And that was that. He wouldn’t say anything more. 

Above them, a cheerful radio host’s voice resounded. 

“And that’s our program for the day,” the cheerful radio host said. “To all of those still making a living out there, we salute you. To all of those feeding on us out there, go to hell. This has been your favorite post-apocalyptic radio hosts Melanie King -”

“ - and the wonderful Georgie Barker,” the other woman said. 

Together, in unison, they said, “Good night, London, and good luck!”

The line blinked out, and Sasha’s eyes widened, but Jon didn’t pay much attention to that. He was thinking of insanity, and of Jared’s twisted grins, and if Jonathan Sims had never died at all. 

If there was anything worse. 

After they got home, Jon left again. Alone. 

He didn’t binge eat very often. Daisy hated it when he did. It made Agnes and Gerry uncomfortable, and it made Helen laugh in that infuriating I-know-something-you-don’t-know way. It wasn’t as if it made Jon feel guilty , since the act of consumption was inherently good, but it...it was wasteful. Take only what you need, like what the signs in those parks said, and leave it as you found it. Jon was a responsible consumer. Wasn’t he? 

So he left alone, and he let his feet guide him as he stalked London streets. The Hunt was almost pure instinct, drawing him closer and closer towards the answers he seeked. It was never hard to find somebody suitable, but sometimes Jon ached for that specific just-right Statement, the satiation for a specific craving. 

He enjoyed taking Statements as payment. It felt...fair. That he and the humans could do something for each other, that it was a reciprocal relationship instead of an act of psychic thievery. It felt fair. Daisy couldn’t complain about that, could she?

Eventually Jon found himself at a new location, unfamiliar but familiar. It was just a standard flat complex, with a courtyard and dirty pool in the center with an active playground and picnic area. Jon sat down on a bench next to the playground, watching the children hurl themselves from plastic structure to plastic structure. Elderly humans sat across from each other at chess tables, talking to each other with a casual grace that spoke of long years of friendship. Parents sat at the benches near Jon, talking with each other easily or reading their books. In the distance, joggers circled the track, and couples walked hand in hand. It was a beautiful day in London, and everybody got their sunshine where and when they could. This area was safe, to them. 

Would Jon make it unsafe? Would Jon bring terror, fear, and pain to these people? Would he do it not because he was hungry, because he needed to survive, but because he was stressed and desperate to reclaim some semblance of power? 

No - that wasn’t the right question. The right question was - would he choose to do it again ? For the fifth, sixth, seventh, twentieth time? How many times could he choose to be weak, before he became a weak person?

Jon was weak. He had always been. There was nothing brave or good or strong about him. There was no core of heroism in his heart. He wasn’t like Agnes, who desperately wished and fought for something better. He wasn’t like Gerry, whose act of survival against everybody who had ever hurt him was a deliberate fuck you. He wasn’t like Daisy, who had fought off legions of monsters with nothing but her teeth and claws to protect a disoriented and frightened Jon. And he was far from Sasha, who hated Jon’s guts but had decided to save him anyway because it was the right thing to do. 

The sun beat down on him. He had left his trenchcoat at home, and wore a casual outfit of slacks and a button-up. With his hair twisted back into a bun and his eyes hidden, he could have been anybody. He probably even looked human. But nobody ever mistook him for a human. Nobody ever had. Humans could sense the danger in him, their hindbrain screaming danger. 

Jared’s words echoed through his memory in a perfect loop. Jon possessed an eidetic memory of the past three years, which was inconvenient at the best of times and hellish at the worst. Now, he used it to chew endlessly over Jared’s words. 

Was Jon...no different, psychologically or morally or spiritually, from a human? From Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist? Did humans feel as deeply as he did, did they experience pain and terror like him? Of course they did, he had known that - but had he? Did their opinions matter, their feelings and experiences?

Of course not. But - if Jon, the Archivist, the Archive - was nothing more than an overbaked human with an extra drive, an extra need - then maybe they weren’t so different?

The way that Jon yawned and picked his hair. The way that Jon enjoyed admiring himself in the mirror. The way that he enjoyed playing fetch with Daisy, feeling a warm summer sun on his skin, laughing at a funny telly show. How he always talked too fast when he got nervous. The way that he wanted a happy life, yet felt incapable of achieving it. 

Had Jonathan Sims felt all of this too? What about him was different ? 

“Is anyone sitting here?”

He couldn’t know. Sasha kept on telling him that he held both similarities and differences to the old Jonathan Sims, but it had always seemed so unreal. How could he be similar to a dead man? A man that he had eaten, whose skin he had stolen and paraded around in?

The woman startled, and Jon smiled thinly at her. She quickly moved her bag, placed next to her on the bench, to the side. “No, feel - feel free.”

Had he caused the death of Jonathan Sims? Or was he the death of Jonathan Sims, a zombie shambling through the remnants of the world? Was he Jonathan Sims, only changed? Was he Jonathan Sims, insane?

Jon sat down, still smiling distantly and strangely at her. She gave him a strange look, before returning to her book. Old, weathered, and yellow. 

Had Jonathan Sims once done this? Stalked humans, followed them, chased them down and ate them? Jon knew that he had. Before any Archivist could grow strong enough to destroy the world, he would have been eating regularly. By the end of it, he would have had to be consuming two or three live statements a day just to store up power.

 Had he felt guilty? Had he cared? Likely not. Jonah would never pick anybody with ties to humanity, so Jonathan Sims likely had nothing and nobody keeping him human. It would have been a slow descent, step by step, into who Jon was now. Eventually, that choice to accept the inhumanity would have seemed like the only option left. 

“Rachel Jones,” Jon said distantly. “You had an eventful move from Cardiff to London, didn’t you?”

The woman glanced at him, then back at her book, almost frantically. Did they tell stories about Jon, a monster with hair rapidly freeing itself of its tie, with a dozen cold eyes? 

But maybe who Jon once was didn’t matter. Jon was always saying that the past wasn’t important, it was the future. Maybe, whatever kind of person Jon wanted to be, he could decide. He could choose. 

“You know what,” Jon said, before the woman could open her mouth and spill her story, “forget it. It’s not important. Which kid’s yours?” 

“Uh - the seven year old, there. Eating bugs.” The woman shuddered with the redirection of the Compel, but she pointed out a little boy crouching in front of an anthill and trying to consume the ants. “He’s - he had a brush with the Corruption a year back. I keep saying he’s going to be an entomologist if he grows up. My husband hates it.”

“Husbands are useless,” Jon said wisely. “I don’t remember my guardians, but I suspect they probably guessed I would end up like this. There’s room in the economy for a bug specialist. Do you enjoy being a parent?”

“I - yes?” The woman seemed surprised that he would ask, or perhaps she was just surprised that Jon hadn’t eaten her yet. “Yes, I do. It’s difficult, but it’s important to me.”

“Do you have a day job?”

“Not - not for a while, no. But the money doesn’t stop appearing in my wallet, so we’ve been doing fine…”

And they talked, about not much at all, about very many useless things, and Jon felt no satisfaction or satiation from it. But he did feel something. He couldn’t identify it. But it was real, in a way that Jon hadn’t been in a long time. 

When he got back to his building and opened the door to his office, he was perhaps more surprised than he should have been when he saw Sasha sitting at his desk, talking with a client. Although she was still dressed in the scavenged jeans and t-shirt, Sasha somehow looked the picture of professionalism as she scribbled down the client’s description of the item and nodded at all the right points. 

When he walked in Daisy, who was lying down near the door, raised her head and looked at him inquisitively. Jon shook his head, flashing her a weak smile, and ignored the way the client startled in fear when they saw him. 

“You couldn’t have just taken a message and a number, Miss James?” Jon asked, exhausted and oddly hungry. He shouldn’t - he had eaten only yesterday, and Jon really only needed to eat every few days - but something about sitting down to a five course meal before choosing to walk away from it made one’s stomach hurt. 

“I’m not your secretary,” Sasha said. She turned back to the suddenly jumpy client, dismissing Jon from her attention completely. “I’m sorry about my partner, he has no manners. We’ll find your father’s will in three days or your money back, sir. Now, do you want our basic package, where we tell you where it is, or our premium one, where we send a trained operative to fetch it for you?” Daisy’s tail started wagging faster when she heard the word ‘fetch’, and Jon groaned as the client looked increasingly spooked. 

“Uh...what’s the...price…?”

“Your worst memory and two hundred pounds,” Sasha said cheerfully. “The deluxe package is a hundred pounds extra.”

“Basic...please…” The client’s eyes darted around the room. “Look, I just - I just felt a strong psychic need to travel here. I don’t know what’s going on. Is this, you know, dangerous?”

“The process is unpleasant but painless,” Sasha assured him, as if she knew or something. “I heard it’s rather cathartic sometimes, actually. Like appearing on America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

“Oh, that’s...good…”

“Great! Cash or credit?”

Then Sasha made him fill out a receipt and an invoice and Jon didn’t even know what those things are and instead of Jon just Looking and eating the man’s trauma right then and there Sasha waved him off with a smile. When the door closed behind him with a soft click her expression turned a lot more smug, and a lot more dangerous. Jon, almost unconsciously, shrunk back a little, crossing his arms. Daisy headbutted him at the waist, growling softly. 

“Normally I just take their Statements now.”

“Really?” Sasha said innocently, filing the invoice by shoving it in a filing cabinet that typically held unorganized piles of cassettes. “You aren’t too full?”

For a brief, stupid second, Jon wondered how she knew. Had he been that obvious? He could have just gone out for a walk, to pick up groceries, anything. She didn’t know him, didn’t know his habits or his coping skills. He had met Sasha James less than a month ago, and now she was presuming to understand something about Jon that he didn’t even understand about himself?

She must have seen the expression on his face, because she just raised an eyebrow. “Jon used to always go for a smoke when he was stressed. He thought that he was so subtle, that we wouldn’t even notice.” She snorted. “Martin used to time his tea runs around it.” She glanced at Daisy, who still looked extremely unimpressed by Jon. “Plus your - uh, Daisy was antsy the whole time. Doesn’t take a genius.”

Jon opened his mouth, then closed it. He wanted to say a thousand things, give a thousand excuses or reasons or holy justifications, but they stuck in his throat. None of them seemed to matter so much. 

That he and the human Jonathan Sims had something so basic, so shameful in common...why did it feel strange? Was this a good or a bad feeling? He couldn’t even tell. 

It occured to Jon, for the first time in his life, that he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. 

“I need your help,” Jon said, before he could even recognize that he was thinking it. Sasha blinked, and Daisy tilted her head. “I - I need you. I mean - I would like your help. If you would give it. I would like it. Daisy and I, it’s been a long time since - since we’ve tried. To make the world better, instead of being complicit in it getting worse. I don’t know how to make it better. But maybe you do, so…” 

Jon trailed off awkwardly. He didn’t know what to say. Sasha just stared at him, eyes wide but with a calculating glint in them. 

But then she smiled at him, and the familiarity of Sasha’s smile made Jon’s breath catch. “I’m going to need a new outfit for that party.”

Jon had been to Annabelle’s parties before.

They were probably fun, if you enjoyed being around people. And loud noises. And music. And being polite to people you didn’t like. And party games. And drinking. And orgies. 

Jon didn’t really like any of these things. To be fair, Jon was never invited to the orgies, and he was usually forced to listen to Annabelle’s hungover dramatic retellings of how much fun they were. He usually had absolutely no desire to see any of his social circle naked, and usually put himself in charge of getting the kids (Agnes and Callum Brodie, usually and unfortunately) out of there by midnight and babysitting drunk people. He hadn’t gone to one in a year, and actively avoided them when he could. He wasn’t exactly known for being social.

However, if Annabelle had sold the party as the answer to his questions, then there was no way he was going to miss it. If she wasn’t lying or manipulating him, or if she didn’t have her own reasons for bullying him into going. Which she undoubtedly was, and which she undoubtedly did. The only question was if Jon would still get what he wanted, as she secured what she wanted.

Ugh. There was no point trying to outthink Annabelle. Jon was omniscient, but a tactical thinker he was not. Best to leave that to Daisy - or, perhaps, Sasha. 

The week leading up to the party was fraught. Something had changed between him and Sasha, and Jon didn’t know what it was. He had thought that maybe they were friends now, that they had the same goals, but instead she had just turned more pushy and bossy and annoying. Daisy had never been like this. In her words, she had raised him ‘as a free range child’, whatever that meant.

Agnes and Gerry just thought it was hilarious. They had started coming over frequently - Gerry had whispered something about avoiding the house, which made Agnes shove him - and they frequently hovered around when Sasha broke into one of her random lectures about stupid things. 

Seriously. She had a lecture for anything . Jon could be pouring some milk from the fridge for Gerry, and Sasha was there trying to explain supply chains and ethical food production to them. Jon and Daisy could be reclining on the couch, watching a VHS of the Little Mermaid (Daisy’s favorite), and Sasha could talk over the entire movie about feminism. Don’t even get them started on her finding the Paris Is Burning DVD in the ransacked thrift store and turning it into a three hour lecture on queer history. She could even turn Dawn of the Dead into a moral! 

One day, Jon made the mistake of asking her when she was going to get around to showing Jon how to be kinder to humans. She had given him a bizarre look as she chopped up Daisy’s dinner. 

“What do you think I’ve been doing ?”

Jon just gave her a blank look. “...besides telling me useless information?”

That had sent her back to the drawing board - namely, the big whiteboard she had installed in Daisy’s office, which Jon had caught a glimpse of reading ‘HOW TO TURN JON EX-EVIL AND SAVE THE WORLD’ before Sasha had pushed him out and informed him that he wasn’t allowed inside her office. 

The next day, Sasha adjusted her approach. After a day spent out with Daisy, she came back bearing a book titled ‘How to Teach Ethics To Your Precocious Primary Schooler’ and started giving them hypothetical scenarios about if it was okay to, hypothetically, take an ice cream cone from a store if the employee’s back was turned. 

“I don’t need human food,” Jon pointed out, “so I wouldn’t either way.”

“I would steal it and give it to Gerry, so it’s ethical,” Agnes proclaimed righteously, high fiving Gerry. 

“But if you hypothetically needed human food,” Sasha said desperately. “Or just pretend it’s a trauma.”

“Oh! In that case I would eat the trauma.”

“But it would be stealing ,” Sasha hinted desperately. 

Jon just scoffed. “Stealing from who? The corporate overlords? They steal labor, resources, and rights from us every day. It’s a reclamation.”

“Aren’t you a literal overlord of the entire world?” Agnes asked Jon. 

He just shrugged. “Then I deserve it.”

“Theft is direct action,” Gerry said serenely. “Victimless crime.”

“Am I allowed to set the store on fire if I want or is that frowned upon?” Agnes asked. 

“But it’s illegal ,” Sasha stressed. “It’s against the law.”

“What’s a law?” Jon asked.

Daisy barked something along the lines of ‘fuck cops’. 

Sasha groaned. 

Anyway, everything had been going great all the time. Jon wasn’t sure how he was going to be turned ex-evil, but he was looking forward to finding out. Not that he really thought of himself as evil. That was like saying the Deputy Prime Minister was evil. People in positions of power couldn’t be evil, it was like a law or something. If Jon was understanding laws right. 

Jon was getting the impression that right and wrong was determined by laws and legality and governments and religions, but he lived in a world without any of those. The only law was the law of survival. Do whatever you had to, if you wanted to survive. How was he supposed to understand all of these rules Sasha kept talking about if that was his one credo? Talk about cultural differences. 

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t laws. But then...what was it?

Maybe there was a person, some individual human or monster who knew. An expert. Someone who Jon could rely upon, who always knew the right thing to do and who could help Jon out. In his heart, almost instinctively, Jon thought of Jonah Magnus. 

He knew everything, didn’t he? He Saw everything. He was Jon’s creator, the deft fingers who stitched together the straw doll that was his one and only Archive. If Jon just asked -

But, as deeply and intrinsically and viscerally as Jon understood Jonah Magnus’ complete control, as thoroughly as Jon knew that Jonah Magnus had created him, he knew that Jonah was an evil and cruel person. Even just trying to think of his face made Jon shiver. 

Besides, if he had wanted to help, he would have helped by now. Jon’s only ever spoken to him once, the only time he had ever gone against Daisy’s one request not to communicate with him. He hadn’t helped. He had laughed . 

No. That was not a trustworthy person. Jon wasn’t sure if trustworthy people existed, if he could trust anybody but himself and his small and misshapen family, but Jonah was far from included in that. 

The day before the party, Jon got a delivery from Breekon & Hope to his office. As usual, he tried to make polite conversation with them, but they just skittered off after throwing two garment bags. God, what had he ever done to those blokes. 

He sighed, quickly checking the bags over for traps, curses, hexes, imprecation, maledictions, execrations, malisons, anathema, or comminations. They were clean, if smelling faintly like laundry detergent. 

What they were was obvious, but Sasha was still startled when Jon walked inside and tossed the slightly smaller package to her. Jon unzipped his, frowning inside it as Sasha held hers like a live bomb. “It’s clean. A gift from Annabelle. Likely so we don’t embarrass her.” He wrinkled his nose as Daisy sniffed inside it, whuffing slightly. “Why do I need a new one? I still have mine from the last party of hers I attended.”

Daisy barked reproachfully at him that the last party he had attended was a year ago, and that fashions were a thing that changed, at which point Jon asked her what the hell she knew about fashion, she was a literal wolf, and then they devolved into meaningless bickering about who was worse at style as Sasha stopped to pull on nitrile gloves before carefully pulling out the contents of the garment bag. 

It was a floor length burgundy dress, slinky and slim but undeniably expensive. It was backless, with rich material, and judging from the drop of Sasha’s jaw it was gorgeous. Also in the bag was a matching clutch and strappy pumps. Jon sighed and opened his own garment bag, revealing a deep green suit, brown loafers, and a tie patterned with slowly winking golden eyes. Jon sighed, throwing the likely very valuable suit over the back of a chair. Daisy sniffed at it suspiciously. 

“Did I just sell my soul for a fancy dress?” Sasha whispered. “Why don’t I care?”

“Maybe that’s how I lost my soul,” Jon joked weakly. “Magnus bought me a really nice suit.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him. You and Elias both were totally obsessed with your old man suits.” Sasha pursed her lips, eyes far away. “God, Elias...I didn’t like him, but it’s weird knowing he’s dead now. Him, Rosie, the girls in Artifact Storage...”

Crud. Mauldin Sasha was weird and uncomfortable, and Jon avoided her. Jon skimmed his omniscience for good news, but the Beholding informed him solidly that Elias Bouchard was very thoroughly dead and had been for quite a while.  Time to change the topic, fast. “So you’re coming with me to the party, then?”

Sasha sighed, carefully replacing the dress in the garment bag and checking the shoes for traps. “Someone has to go make sure that you don’t get suckered into doing a blood sacrifice for our demon overlord.” She abruptly looked a little sketchy. “And...it’s, uh, been...you know, I’ve read Interview for a Vampire...I’m a normal woman, I’ve had phases…” Jon waited patiently for her point. “Look, I’ve always wanted to go to a vampire fancy dress gala and you can’t fucking stop me.”

“What? I promise you, Annabelle and the Avatars do not associate with those bestial vampires. They’re terrible conversationalists.”

“Ugh! God damnit!” Sasha groaned. “Don’t remind me that they’re real, I hate this shit! I hate the future! This world sucks! I don’t even have vampires anymore! Everything has been taken from me!”

“Do you know what she’s going on about?” Jon asked Daisy, who seemed unusually sympathetic. 

Daisy barked something, and Jon translated for her. “Daisy says that at least you know werewolves are real.”

“I hate the apocalypse!”

Humans are incomprehensible. 

Chapter Text

Annabelle loved attention. 

It was a natural consequence of being the youngest of eight children to an overworked mother. As a younger brother, Jon sympathized. She wanted attention, and praise, and wealth, and for everybody to do what she wanted. Everything she lacked as a child. 

It made Jon wonder what he had lacked as a child, to end up like the grouchy and stiff man that Sasha described with barely hidden fondness. Maybe his parents hadn’t loved him, or displayed no affection. He had probably been a very annoying child, and if he wasn’t loved he probably had deserved it. Who knows. Maybe his life had been perfect and special and good, and that’s where Jon got his superiority complex from - or, as Sasha called it, his ‘Monster Privilege’. 

Jon, as he was now, had effectively been raised by Daisy. She had been his role model when he had nobody else, had given him direction and purpose when he was nothing. Had loved him, when nobody else did. He didn’t feel as if he had lacked anything back then - save, perhaps, for stability. Maybe that was why he fought so hard to maintain the status quo now. After all, it benefited him. Why wouldn’t he?

So to say: the party was ornate, glimmering and glitzy and glamorous, because when Annabelle sat in the center of her web and watched the flies crawl to her, she wanted to look and feel like Beyonce as she did it. 

It was held at the same place every year. Not precisely the seat of her power, but if she held it there then nobody would show up (And if it was held at her historical seat of power, then Agnes would yell at her to get off her lawn). Instead, it was held in a pleasantly neutral zone, albeit one that Annabelle had overtaken and bent to her will long ago. For this night only, she lifted most of the traps around the location, allowing her guests to wander around and take in the scenery safely without endangering themselves. Of course, some guests were more at risk than others. And there was a fine line between a guest and food. 

As usual, Jon was fashionably exactly on time. He paid the cab driver, a cheerful skeleton with a thick cockney accent,  who pulled up to the velvet rope and cordoned-off entrance, and silently opened the door for Sasha. The pathway to the entrance of the party was roped off, surrounded by paparazzi with winking camera bulbs. Jon wondered absently whose personal hell involved taking pictures of those invited to Annabelle Cane’s parties - or maybe she just pulled them here to make them seem fancier? 

When Sasha stepped out, the bulbs exploded and the paparazzi exploded into a cacophony of sound, and Jon silently and long sufferingly took her elbow and glided them towards the door. Sasha was blinking sharply, smiling at the cameras in a horrified rictus grin, as she realized for the first time where they were. 

As they maneuvered towards the entrance and ignored the paparazzi, Sasha looked up at the ornate entrance of the British Museum, the giant sign pock-marked with holes and coated in thin spider-webs. “Is Annabelle the deity of colonialism?”

“What? No, she took over this place to flex on imperialists.” Jon brought them forward, anxiously readjusting his tie as he walked down the red carpet and withdrew his embossed, strangely heavy invitation. Sasha hovered at his elbow, her curly hair piled high on her head and face fully glossed in make-up she had scavenged from somewhere. “I’m excited for you to see the exhibits, I hear they’re quite tasteful.”

“Let me guess,” Sasha said flatly, “the paintings blink back?”

Jon guiltily didn’t say anything, and allowed the doorman to stamp their invitation and usher them inside without saying a word, rictus grins painted on their wooden faces. 

He felt naked walking through the doors without Daisy. But she had insisted on going ahead with her own invitation clutched between her teeth in order to ‘scope the place out’ and ‘make sure that bitch wasn’t up to anything’. Jon worried about her, but if she got into any trouble he would know about it. One eye was fixed on her, always. 

And Sasha wasn’t such a bad substitute. Even though he was walking her into the lion’s den, her chin was held high and her dark brown eyes glittered in the lamplight. Her strength bolstered him, gave him courage. Which - strength from a human ? It was ridiculous. It should be the other way around. 

“Don’t be afraid,” Jon whispered under his breath, opening all of his eyes as they stepped into the lobby of the British Museum. “I’ll protect you.”

She lightly jammed her ten cm heel into his foot, making him wince. “Idiot.”

They stepped into the Great Court, which had always been a bit overly circular for Jon’s tastes. The fractal, arching ceiling twisted the mind and eye, repeating in gentle and ever-cyclical patterns, and Jon found it surprisingly difficult to tear his eyes away. The room was darkened slightly for the event, populated by a loose assortment of mingling crowds in elegant evening dresses and finely cut suits. It may have just been Jon’s imagination, the way that conversation seemed to silence and eyes began to dart when Jon walked past chattering forms, but it likely wasn’t. People who made eye contact with any of his eyes seemed to freeze in fear, something passing through their own eyes, before tearing themselves away and returning to their conversations. 

Jon effortlessly scanned the crowd, picking out the who’s-who of the European supernatural scene as baroque music echoed from somewhere and the flickering lamplights glittered off golden jewelry. Healthy turn-out from the Fairchilds and Lukases, naturally, but he saw a decent representation from the Abattages, the coalition of Slaughter-aligned persons from France, and it was impossible to miss the dozen identical representatives of the Corruption from Germany. They were all named Henrick, and wore moth-eaten top hats and surly expressions, but Jon appreciated their conversational skills. 

“Doesn’t that get confusing?” Sasha hissed at him, from where they awkwardly hovered near a restaurant turned sign-in booth. 

“Does it?” Jon asked, surprised, as he gave the somewhat misty eyed boy at the table his name and accepted the nametag. He drew a little eye on it, for friendliness’s sake. “I can tell them apart.”

“Do I even want to know how?” Sasha turned to the employee in front of her, who was gazing at some point in the distance with glazed eyes. “Sasha James, please.”

“Entity?” The employee asked, shuffling through nametags. 

Sasha’s eyes flickered to Jon, then back at the employee. “Beholding?”

A shiver ran down Jon’s spine. It felt like a voice, whispering in his ear: mine, mine, mine. He batted it away as the Employee continued blinking blearily at Sasha, before passing a name tag seemingly at random from a pile. Sasha looked down at it. It read ‘TO-GO’. 

“I am on the guest list,” Sasha gritted out through clenched teeth, “invited by Annabelle Cane herself. I have. A name tag.”

The employee, who had to have been human himself, just blinked sleepily at her before turning to Jon. “Should I give her the plus one tag, sir?”

Jon sighed, stepped forward, and in half a second effortlessly picked up Sasha’s name tag from where it was hidden behind Julia Montauk’s. He passed it to Sasha, who pinned it to her dress with a scowl.

There were humans in the crowd. What was the point if there wasn’t? Some of them had wandered in accidentally, the average London pedestrian, and others were stuffed-up turkey vultures living out the memory of their wealthier days. Humans who had once been powerful members of the peerage, who had likely attended a thousand fundraisers at events in the British Museum, now rubbed elbows with real power the likes of which they could only dream of. They stuffed their heads with delusions of power and grandeur, but as the night came to a close they would realize that they were the finishing course. 

But none of them were invited guests. Humans showed up as they must, as their own hearts guided them, but the heavy embossed invitation that sat in Jon’s coat pocket was a member of another kind of club - a far more dangerous kind. 

“The goal of tonight is to find the Avatar who can give us information about Daisy,” Jon whispered to Sasha. Embarrassingly, in her gigantic heels she was taller than him, and she had to lower her head a little to catch him whispering in her ear. “Don’t pay attention to anything else. Anything else. Annabelle’s invitation protects you, but the last thing we need is for you to become another meal for this place.”

“What’s Daisy doing?” Sasha whispered back, shooting the canapes an envious look as Jon quickly steered her away from them. 

Jon’s eyes whirled, and the information trickled into his brain. He couldn’t fight the grin. “Prowling in the Special Exhibitions section. She’ll let us know if she needs us. I do believe she’s found some prey. It’s been a while.”

“Is that...good?”

Jon blinked at her. “Depends on if you’re the prey.”

“My expectations for you are so low but you disappoint every -”

“Jonathan! How lovely to see you!”

The voice was right near Jon’s ear, and he jumped and whirled around. Standing right at his elbow was a grinning, short, wrinkled, and wizened old man. He clutched a pearl-handled cane with one hand, but he did not lean on it. Half Jon’s height, his watery little eyes were practically twinkling up at him, cognizant of a secret joke. 

“Mr. Fairchild,” Jon said, more surprised than he should be. He extended a hand and Simon Fairchild gripped it, giving it a firm shake that creaked Jon’s bones. Sasha’s eyes widened with recognition. “A pleasure. It’s been quite some time.”

“Not since the last of these little soirees, I believe!” Fairchild grinned pleasantly at him, as if Jon was a particularly mischievous grandson. “You ought to visit me more often, Jon. You always are such scintillating company. It’s always a pleasure to speak to someone who remembers as far back as I do.” His gaze turned to Sasha, who was keeping her face blank. “Speaking of scintillating, who’s your friend? Have you adopted another stray?”

Her lip curled as Jon sighed. “Mr. Fairchild, this is my -”

“ Partner Sasha James,” Sasha cut in, shooting Jon a warning glance. She thrust her hand out and, after a second, Mr. Fairchild chuckled and shook it. “It’s a pleasure.”

“Partner! Well, I never.” Simon chuckled, elbowing Jon in the ribs in a suffocatingly friendly sort of way. “Never thought you had it in you, lad. We’ll make a man of you yet.”

“Ew,” Jon said. 

“ Work partner,” Sasha said, in a voice that could have frozen the champagne Simon Fairchild clutched in his hand solid. 

“My apologies,” Simon said, sipping his champagne without any remorse at all. “Far be it from me to judge. My family is just as laissez-faire regarding blood relations as yours is, Jon.” His eyes glinted, and just to ease the tension, when a glassy eyed waiter came around with a tray of drinks Jon awkwardly snagged a champagne glass. Something to do with his hands. Sasha grabbed one and downed it very quickly, but that was probably for different reasons. “Speaking of relations, word on the vine is that Miss Montague is in quite a tizzy tonight.”

“Is she?” Jon asked politely. Why did people assume he was in charge of Agnes? Her entire cult couldn’t keep a reign on her, he couldn’t do anything. She only ever listened to Daisy, and she couldn’t understand Daisy. 

“Speaking of Daisy,” Sasha said suddenly, stealing Jon’s champagne and knocking that back too, “I believe Jon had something to ask you, Mr. Fairchild?”

She looked significantly at Jon, raising an eyebrow, until Jon straightened. 

“Yes! Yes, I did.” He hadn’t forgotten! He had just - well, blanked out and forgotten his entire life due to stress. Which, to be fair, he was somewhat famous for doing. “I hope you’ll be amenable to answering a question of mine, Mr. Fairchild.”

The old man’s expression didn’t change. Nothing about it faltered: not his smile, or the kindly twinkle in his eyes. But for the first time, something shone through beneath it, his mask not so much slipping as it was peeling, and his grandfatherly air was revealed as a plastic mask tied over something incomprehensible. Even to Jon. 

“It’s not out of the question,” Simon Fairchild said slowly, almost consideringly. If Jon Looked, he could see the bright spiderwebs wrapped around his wrists like a promise. “If we maintain civility, of course. We are a civilized people, Archivist.”

“Of course,” Jon said soothingly. He tasted no fear from Simon, no panic or hesitation. Simply a bone-deep consideration, a sort of thoughtfulness about him. He was like a glacier, and just as infinite and immovable. Not that there were any glaciers left, of course. “I’m simply looking for a...solution to a problem.”

He explained the situation in short order to Simon, who nodded consideringly along. Jon had always...well, not liked Simon, as Jon didn’t really like anyone outside of three people, a noneuclidean concept, and a wolf, but he had always been an ally. He was old and powerful, and his long alliance with the Beholding had served him well. The Vast’s resources were...well, Vast. 

The Vast, the Web, and the Lonely all enjoyed their long time support of the Beholding. Well, Jon was pretty sure about the Lonely - whispers went around that certain members of the Lukas family had fallen out of favor with the Beholding and paid the ultimate price for it, usually while shooting a frightened look at Jon who was pretending not to eavesdrop, but Jon didn’t understand any of it. Maybe one of them had pissed off Jonah. Who knows. Jon didn’t. 

…he did, but that wasn’t important. 

Probably. 

Hopefully. 

After Jon finished explaining how he actually really needed Daisy a human again because she was much better at doing laundry than he was but it was extremely difficult with four paws, he trailed off into awkward silence and fought the urge to play with his fingers. Sasha was still staring at Fairchild with narrowed eyes, one unmanicured finger tapping her lips. 

After a prolonged silence where Jon procured more champagne and was once again liberated of his alcohol, Fairchild broke into laughter. 

“You have yourself in a right pickle, Archivist.” He raised an overly bushy eyebrow as Jon flushed. “And our dear Annabelle said someone at this party would be able to help you?”

“In three hundred years of life, you must have learned something about reversing transformations,” Jon said flatly. 

“You aren’t wrong. I know a great deal about many things. Shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, of course, but you mustn't forget the cabbages and kings.” Fairchild laughed as both Jon and Sasha rolled their eyes in millennial boredom. “But you know more than even I, don’t you, Archivist? Why would I know, when you don’t?”

“Just because I know doesn’t mean I understand ,” Jon snapped. “I know what - what Vine is, but that doesn’t mean I have any clue how to process the information.” It was a failing of his, an unsettling and disturbing reminder that his mind was just mortal enough to be unable to comprehend the totality of understanding. “I have the life experience of a three year old. You’ve lived a hundred times as long as me. Isn’t there something I’m just - just not understanding?”

“Certainly,” Fairchild said simply, and Sasha’s eyes widened. “You’re asking the wrong questions, Archivist. As always. But I suppose it’s no surprise, isn’t it? The Beholding is hardly a force of investigation and action. Your chosen career is remarkably ill-suited for your own nature, Archivist.” He sighed nostalgically. “Ah, to be young again. Full of vim and vigor. The world seems so...well, vast! Did I ever tell you about my stint as a guidance counselor for secondary schoolers? Those kids kept me full without even trying!”

“What question aren’t we asking?” Sasha interrupted the reminisce session before it could start, slightly disappointing Jon. “What angle aren’t we thinking about?”

Simon Fairchild tapped his nose mysteriously, smiling at Sasha. “I believe that a far better question to ask would be this: do you know what made her lose her connection to humanity in the first place?

Something in Jon froze solid, petrified in fear. 

“The state of your sister is a natural consequence of her attachment to the Hunt,” Simon Fairchild continued. “A stage in the path that she walks, if I may. But very rarely is the nature of our gods so straightforward. The Hunt may have been the beginning, but it was possibly far from the end. And, if I remember your sister correctly, very rarely is she so straightforward.” He laughed uproariously, as if he had told a joke. “You are scrutinizing the effect so deeply you have yet to look at the cause.”

Jon’s throat was dry. He understood what Simon was saying, even if Sasha didn’t. “Did a different Entity do this to her?

“Wrong question again!” Simon Fairchild laughed. “Try this one for size: what makes you think there are differences in the first place?” He leaned around Jon, eyes lighting up and waving at a familiar looking Lukas. “Dear me, it’s Natasha. I haven’t seen her since 1953. Please excuse me, Archivist. It was lovely seeing you again. And, of course, wonderful to meet your lovely friend. Do enjoy the party. Always cause for a celebration, that’s what I say!”

And he toddled off, simple as you please, and Jon let him go. Sasha hovered by Jon’s elbow, and they watched him leave together. 

“I hate old white men,” Sasha said finally. She glanced at Jon. “Do you really not know what Vine is?”

“God, I really don’t,” Jon cried. “It’s American’s Funniest Home Videos? But without anybody injuring themselves? What’s the point?”

“Is all post-apocalyptic television people hurting themselves?”

Jon narrowed his eyes at her, every one. “Are you going to get snippy with me if I answer that?”

But she just smiled at him, and looped her arm through his. “Don’t worry, Archivist. I’ll explain the scary internet to you. If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think you ever knew what it was.”

“Isn’t that the thing that Dr. Phil keeps saying is going to give me and the kids cancer?” Jon asked, startled. “I don’t want Gerry to get cancer, his life expectancy is already so short.”

“No, honey, that’s mobiles.”

But Jon was already getting a sinking feeling in his stomach, like a rock twisting up everything around it and choking him. This party was a waste of time. Simon hadn’t made any sense at all, going on about Daisy’s psychology instead of the problem. Psychology had nothing to do with anything, ever.  Annabelle was leading him on again, stringing him along, and she was going to keep playing him until she got whatever she wanted out of this. 

Unless she already had. Jon and Sasha wandered the museum together, keeping their eyes out for any trouble or any friends of Jon who would be amenable to answering a few questions. Maybe Annabelle had already gotten what she wanted - Sasha. But what plot could she possibly need Sasha for? What grand scheme hinged upon Sasha sleeping in his office?

Things had changed lately. His life had become...well, a great deal more complicated and frustrating and weird, but warmer. It was as if he had lived in a stifling house, and someone had come in and opened the windows to let the summer breeze through. It had just been him and Daisy for so long, he almost didn’t know how to incorporate a new person into his home. Much less a human, a human who pushed and challenged him like Sasha did. If she left, he would miss her. He didn’t really know why, but he would. 

He knew his own feelings, but he didn’t understand them. If that was the curse of the young, or the curse of the Archivist, he didn’t know. 

The museum was intact, relatively. Jon and Sasha wandered through exhibits proudly displaying their mastery of the world, the plunder and loot of war, and Jon tried his best to keep Sasha away from the more...evil rooms. In the Ancient Greek exhibit the statue’s eyes followed you around, tears squeezing in thin trails from their stone eyes, and there was the unmistakable muffled sound of screaming. In the Ancient Egyptian room the sarcophagus rattled and moaned, the Buried keeping it coated in a thin layer of dirt. In other rooms it were the visitors who were trapped, shaking in their beautiful dresses or fine suits as a monster with a human face dripped venom in their ears. 

In front of the Rosetta Stone they found an adherent of the Lonely who Jon knew, although they obviously weren’t close. Jon interrogated him as Sasha stared at the stone, head tilted, eyes growing lost in its thickly packed text. 

Useless. It was like pulling teeth. The Lukas was terrified of him anyway, stuttering through chattering teeth, and when Jon tried to ask about Daisy they only seemed to grow more frightened. Jon disgustedly dismissed him from the room a second before he stumbled out. He joined Sasha in front of the stone anyway, finding his eyes drifting to her instead of the national treasure. 

“Isn’t this, like, the anti-Lonely?” Sasha asked, tilting her head. “The opposite of the Tower of Babel? A famous artifact that can connect all people, from anywhere? Linking now and then, the history with the present, serving as a valuable repository of information?”

“An Archive,” Jon muttered. He glanced at Sasha, and found a smile tugging at his face. “Want to touch it?”

She gaped at him. “Jon, that’s a priceless artifact.”

He just shrugged. “I always hated history. All the shit in this museum’s stolen anyway. This particular piece was stolen from Egypt, I believe. This place is a testament to the British Empire and our majesty.” He spread out his arms, to encompass the dim room filled to the brim with treasures and monsters stalking its halls. “What Empire? The only kingdom here is the kingdom of our gods, vast and eternal. What’s left of Britain? We’re free of it: free from our country’s ancient history, free from its atrocities. This world has no national borders anymore. It’s all meaningless, empty artifice. Why worship something gone that was never truly real?”

Sasha stared at him. Then she stepped forward cautiously, a small step, then a larger one, then walked forward, until she could stand right in front of it. If there had been a glass case in front of it in the past, it was gone now. She reached out a hand and gently whispered a hand over the weathered rock, before clutching it back to her chest as if she had been burned. 

She turned back to look at him, eyes wide. “Fuck David Cameron,” she whispered, and sprayed her hand on the cool rock. Her face broke out into a wide grin. Jon couldn’t help but smile too. 

“Want to play checkers with the Lewis Chessmen upstairs?”

“Oh, fuck yeah!” Sasha laughed, light and giddy. “Let’s spraypaint Trans Rights in the Easter Island Room!”

“I can make the statue eat rich people, if you want,” Jon suggested. 

“Fuck yeah!”

The party whirled on, and Jon whirled with it. 

There were only three Entity’s Avatars he had not spoken with as of yet: the Buried, the Dark, and the Slaughter. More specifically, Jon tried to hold a rational conversation with Callum Brodie in the middle of him running around trying to kick everyone he saw in the crotch, but when Callum called him a stupid old man with a smelly trenchcoat he gave up. As Sasha stole a can of spray paint from the gift shop Jon tracked down one of the eerily identical German Slaughter Avatars and had an extremely pleasant conversation with him. About twenty minutes into learning about how to best skin a wolf Jon got the impression that they were having two different conversations, and did his best to steer it back on topic. The music was picking up, now, into something light and fun, and in the cavernous great hall where they stood couples and groups began to dance to the rhythm of the twinging strings. 

“You brought a human with you, correct?” Herr Abbattage said gruffly, scratching at his sideburns. “You Beholding types are so gluttonous. Are you going to share? I have some humans here who can chase her ‘round with a knife.”

“I’m afraid that she’s the Beholding’s,” Jon said apologetically. “And that if you touch her I will vaporize you into static. You will have time to scream, to suffer, to feel the endless agony of pure and psychic pain, and unlike physical pain there will be no relief. Your last physical moments will be this excruciating pain, and I will make those seconds feel like years, and endless cycle of torture and torment, and by the end of it you will be begging for death. I wouldn’t give it to you yet - I’d deliver unto you new forms of torment, until no longer had a voice with which to scream or a tongue with which to plead, and then I’d let you die. So she’s taken, sadly.”

People were staring at him. 

“Damn,” Herr Abbattage said, “you could’a just said no. Hey, where’s that wolf of yours? She’s fun. Not like you.”

“She’s…” Jon opened an Eye, searching for the being closest to his frozen heart, and reached out for her. “...about to attack Annabelle Cane. Shit!”

He ran into the gift shop, which was its own special kind of horror despite being practically unchanged, and found Sasha carefully testing the weight of a pickaxe. He grabbed her hand, ignoring her yelp, and towed her out of there. 

“Jon, I can’t run in these shoes - give me a second!”

She stopped to slide her heels off but Jon kept running, bounding up the stairs and ignoring the shocked looks of the guests. He knew the layout of the museum like he knew his own hand, effortlessly twisting the Knowledge into action and letting his feet guide him. He found himself heading towards the Member’s Room, the exclusive cordoned-off area where stiff men in stiff suits drifted in and out. He vaulted over the velvet rope stretched over the entrance - damn Daisy for always making him run everywhere!  - and burst into the room. 

It was ornate, dripping in luxury. Leather couches and prim armchairs circled a glass coffee table. Bookshelves lined the walls, and tables pushed up against the sides sagged with food and drinks. Wine, lots of it, and distant humans hugged the walls. In the center, in a giant armchair that somehow sat in the center of the room surrounded by tight-faced men and women, Annabelle Cane sat. Her gown was black lace, hanging tightly off her figure, and a champagne glass loosely dangled in one hand. 

Jon, in contrast, had his jacket askew and was panting from the spring. He bent over, resting his hands on his knees, as the room abruptly quieted and stared at him. 

“Have you seen,” Jon gasped, “my dog?”

Annabelle gingerly drank some of her champagne before waving him over. Jon did not wish to get any closer, but he could already tell that she was going to push it. “She just left, I’m afraid. Miss Tonner’s always had such interesting insights into the economy! Come and sit down, Jon, relax. You seem tense.”

Jon scowled, but stepped forward anyway. Annabelle gestured at the seat right next to her, currently occupied by a woman Jon recognized as the Lukas Matriarch, and she quickly got out of the way to sit on the couch next to a man who Jon understood to be Maxwell Raynor. He had changed bodies again recently, it seemed. Next to him was one of Agnes’ little cultists, Arthur Nolan or someone, and there were plenty of other people whose names Jon knew and whose faces were familiar but who Jon didn’t give a shit about whatsoever. Some patsy of the Stranger, some woman of the Flesh - whatever. The only other person Jon saw in the room who he cared about was Oliver, who was standing in the corner chugging a bottle of wine. That guy never went to parties.

“Everybody, we remember my close friend the Archivist,” Annabelle simpered, flashing her teeth in a smile at Jon. He rolled all hundred of his eyes. At the door, he saw Sasha catch up to him, and Jon jerked his head to the side. Her own eyes widened, and Sasha quietly slipped away and disappeared down the hall. “I’m so glad you could make it, Jon. Are you having a good time? I just love the locale, don’t you?”

“Everybody’s been worthless,” Jon said blankly. He slumped in his seat, probably unforgivably rumpling his jacket but unable to care. “This is a wild goose chase, Annabelle.”

Arthur Nolan scoffed, drinking from his glass of whiskey. The Flesh woman absentmindedly bit off one of her fingers. 

“Have we all been acquainted?” Annabelle said pleasantly. “It’s important to keep these relationships up. A fractured, out of sync administration is an incompetent one! I believe these soirees are important in keeping us all organized. Jon, this is my friend Matron Lukas -”

“I’m not charmed,” Matron Lukas sneered. 

Almost imperceptibly, Annabelle’s eye twitched. “And this is Sarah Baldwin, I’m sure you two are familiar -”

“Not you again,” Sarah said, seemingly bored. 

Maxwell Raynor just chuckled, his neck dripping in jewelry. “Pleasant to see you again, Jonathan. How’s your wild goose chase working out for you?”

And Jon, abruptly, lost his patience. 

He was tired. He was stressed. He hated being surrounded by all of these people who either pretended not to hate him or were open about it. He was worried about Daisy and Sasha and neither of them were here to stop him, and everybody was being evasive and jerking him along on a chain. Why wouldn’t they just tell him what he needed to know ? 

Jon held out a hand, palm up. Distantly, almost imperceptibly, something heavy began to seep into the air. The feeling of being watched, the hair prickling at the back of your neck. It became heavier, more oppressive. It was almost difficult to breathe, this feeling of being so utterly trapped. 

He carefully kept it off Annabelle, and the silent Oliver. But they could sense the tension, how Jon wrapped his own nooses around the necks of people he just didn’t care about. 

“My apologies,” Jon ground out, “but I’m not really in the mood for games. Running around from place to place, finding hidden clues, being led around by my nose, isn’t entertaining right now. Will you all do your best to entertain me?”

Beside him, Annabelle was giggling. “Oh, Jon, naughty! It’s been a while since I’ve seen you lose your temper like this.”

Oliver frantically chugged his wine faster. 

A buzz of static began to echo in Jon’s ears. Technological, constructed, horrid screeches. Like a needle skidding across a record, or the tape of a cassette fuzzing out into nothing. Jon took a deep, unnecessary breath, drinking in the silent fear in the top echelons of supernatural Britain. Some were clutching their throats; others were wheezing as they attempted to talk. 

Jon wasn’t really interested in anything they had to say. He clenched his fist, and ripped their Statements from them. 

It was a little bit like chugging straight Everclear, the sicksweet burn of the Statements directly into his brain. It doused him and lit him on fire, it choked his nose and his mouth until he knew that he was drowning, until he knew that he was beyond breath. 

In the span of a second, Jon lived the breadth of Maxwell Raynor’s life, and found nothing . Useless. Useless!

Something fuzzed out in his vision, something important, and Jon drifted in the lick of flames. He wandered, uncognizant and distant, until the soft voice of Oliver Banks broke his fugue. 

“ - you’re playing with fire, you know.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Annabelle said, sounding slightly peeved. “I don’t remember asking you for advice, Mr. ‘I Desire My Own Annihilation As Little As I Fear It’.”

“No, but you have it anyway. The Archivist is dangerous. He doesn’t know the power he wields, or his role in this Earth. He’s like...this permanently cranky toddler with a gun. You shouldn’t get too close. Anything could happen.”

“The wonderful thing about toddlers,” Annabelle said, “is that if you give them their juice box and a nap, you can get whatever you want from them. Some people are worth having on your side, Oliver. No matter how dangerous.”

“How long will he be on your side, though? He’s not as easy to predict as you think he is. Those friends of his you put in the equation - they’re unknown variables.”

“Sometimes humans are a surprise tool that will help us - Jon? Jon, are you with us?”

Jon groaned, and wrenched his thousand eyes open. The opulent room was now deserted - how long had it been? - and he found that he was slumped over in his armchair. Oliver was lying on the vacated couch, staring at the ceiling and clutching the bottle of wine to his chest as if it was a lover, and Annabelle was scrubbing one of her forty nails with a wicked looking nail filer. 

“What just happened?” Jon said, or meant to say. But his tongue was heavy and his speech was slurred, and what came out was a bit closer to “Wuhguh?”

“You threw a hissy fit, darling,” Annabelle said sympathetically. She wiggled her eyebrows at Oliver, mouthing ‘toddler with a gun’. Oliver rolled his eyes. “Are you feeling better? Is it all out of your system?”

“This is all your fault,” Jon bitched. He swallowed, tongue feeling thick and fuzzy as if something had died on it. He had a minor headache, and his stomach felt uncomfortably full. He took a second to flicker through the Statements he had just ripped out of the supernatural elite. He could feel them even now, distantly - how they had scattered throughout the party, with another figure haunting their nightmares. “If you hadn’t dragged me to this stupid party I wouldn’t have done that. These past few weeks have been very stressful.”

“What is the significance of this meaningless opulence?” Oliver asked the ceiling. “What does the symbology represent? The empty identifiers, the false constructs of man where we build a pillar and call it a ladder to heaven? This world is empty, populated only by the husks of what used to contain meaning.”

“Jon, sweetie, you do that once a month,” Annabelle said, one of her many arms rummaging inside her bag and pulling out a compact mirror. She looked at herself - her eight dark black eyes that reflected the dim yellow lights of the Tiffany lamps - and started fixing her winged eyeliner. “Don’t you remember what happened at Hyde Park?”

Jon cringed. “I...regret that.”

“What’s the point of life at all?” Oliver asked morosely. “Life is stagnant and still. The joy, the vitality, and the spontaneity is absent in this world. We live out our pre-apocalyptic lives as a pointless play, rehearsed to perfection, where we recite our lines and change the scenery for nothing. Everything we are is an imitation of when we were alive. What is fear of death, when we are dead men walking?”

“Honey, if your job at Taco Bell is making your existential ennui act up then just quit your job. You don’t need the money.” Annabelle sighed, snapping her compact shut. “Your regrets mean very little when Hyde Park is an eldritch field of the Beholding’s horror, Jon. Stop accidentally making British landmarks into your domains, this community needs shared spaces.” Jon slunk a little deeper in his seat in shame. “Look. Darling. I promise I don’t do anything without a reason. You needed the food. Sasha’s a good influence on you, but we can’t have you thinking you’re a human! Remember where you belong.” She extended one of her hands, gesturing around the room. “With the best. With us.”

Jon didn’t know how to parse this. His head hurt, and he was tired, and he was buzzing with the thrill of ripping away fragments of souls as if they were paper. He didn’t have the energy to try to parse Annabelle right now, or what...what was going on with Oliver. 

He just wanted someone on his side. He wanted someone who he trusted, who would never try to hurt him. He opened his Eye, and cast his awareness around for the only two people in the building he trusted absolutely. 

One of them was lingering in the corners of a room, shrouded in shadow. She was biding her time, waiting to see how the events would pan out. Waiting for Jon. The other was yelling, close to tears, trying to tug her arm out of a tight grip. 

Jon saw the face of the woman who clutched tightly onto her arm, and a certain calm stillness washed over him. 

He stood up from his chair, readjusting his outfit. Certain people never fucking learned. “Thank you for your hospitality, Annabelle,” Jon said brittley, “but I’m afraid that I have my own obligations to fulfill.”

“My home is yours, Archivist,” Annabelle said, shrugging. “I hope you find the answers you’re looking for.”

But Oliver Banks didn’t look happy, morosely taking another swig from the bottle. He sighed, eyes flitting to Jon. “Archivist…” 

At the last minute, he seemed to change his mind on whatever he wanted to say, and instead saluted Jon with the bottle. Jon wasted no more time, running out the door yet again in a bee-line for the Roman Empire.

But as Jon dashed out the door, the eye that peered out from the back of his neck saw Annabelle smile behind her hand: sly, graceful, and triumphant. 

He heard the yelling before he even entered the room.

The Roman Empire wing was grandiose and highly decorated, but empty of partygoers and merrymakers. The most obvious reason for this was the heat: thick, oppressive, and almost scalding, it sent Jon into a warm sweat almost immediately. He entered a large, pure white room, almost blindingly spotless and clean, scattered with equally white marble and pearly statues of great Western civilizations. 

Amphoras stood proudly behind glass cases, great vases and embossed coins held on plastic stands. Jon quietly walked through the room, listening at the muffled sounds of shouting became louder and louder until the words themselves became discernable. 

“ - don’t respect me!”

“Respect is earned,” the other voice growled. Jon narrowed his eyes, carefully staying out of sight of the doorway as he walked closer. “You have done nothing to earn that respect. You swan around, ignore your responsibilities, waste your time with dalliances -”

“Gerry isn’t a waste of my time! Shut up! You don’t know anything!” Agnes sounded close to tears, and Jon’s heart lurched in his chest as he pressed himself against the far wall, tilting his head to lean in and see inside the large room filled with statues. “I can’t do this anymore. I don’t want this anymore. I’m tired of hurting innocent people. I want to help fix things, not just endlessly make them worse!”

“Fix? Fix ? The world is perfect as it is!”

When Jon craned his head, he saw the strange tableau: Agnes Montague, in a loose and flowing dark orange dress, trying to rip her arm away from the scowling Jude Perry in a fine suit. Agnes looked as if she had been crying, her tears sizzling and boiling away on her face. Jude’s hand was melting slightly, boiling wax bubbling on Agnes’ impervious skin. 

Deep in the shadows of the room, unnoticed by both women, was Daisy. Her yellow eyes glinted in the dim light. She saw Jon immediately. Jon held up a hand, a sign to wait. Daisy was powerful, but flammable. 

“We have everything,” Jude continued, furious. “The only way things would be better for us if you did your job for once. The Desolation’s power is stronger than ever, and our flames feast endlessly on the world. What the fuck are you whining about?”

“People are suffering!” Agnes yelled. “It’s not fair! I - I hurt people, Jude! I hate it. I don’t want to hurt people anymore. I’m sick of it. I can’t have a normal life, I know that now, but at least I can be a good guy.”

Jude stared at Agnes, expression furious, but Agnes’ expression was set. She was more stubborn than anybody Jon had ever met. She wouldn’t be swayed on this. 

“You,” Jude said finally, “are such a brat.” 

Agnes’ expression twisted in sadness. “I love you, Jude. I know you love me too. But I need space. I want to figure things out for myself, not just always do what you tell me.”

“You don’t know what you want,” Jude hissed. 

“I’m not changing my mind,” Agnes said firmly. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I can’t be the adult I used to be, or the person - or the person I used to be to you. You’ve been good about all of it. But I’m sixteen. I’m not a baby anymore. I need to figure things out on my own.”

Something ugly twisted in Jude’s expression. Something that made Jon straighten, and that made Daisy’s fur stand on end. 

“Oh,” Jude said deliberately, “I highly doubt this is something you came up with.” She tore her gaze off Jude, her sick yellow eyes spotted with flecks of red fixating directly on Jon. “Was it?”

Nothing for it. Jon stepped out into clear view, keeping his expression set. “Hello, Jude. Why don’t you let Agnes go?”

Jon and Jude had never gotten on. She was smarmy, bitchy, cruel, and condescending. Jon was only two of those things, and they were rarely in the same room without fighting. Other Avatars such as Annabelle tended to do their best to keep them away from each other, but Britain was a small place. And she made his hand, the one with the warped and burned skin, itch something fierce. 

It didn’t help that Jude knew Agnes liked hanging out with Jon. And she hated it. Early on into their acquaintance she had tried to ban Agnes from going to Jon’s a dozen times, but Agnes had always flaunted the rules. Once Agnes met Gerry and declared to the world that he was under her protection, Jude had seemingly thrown up her hands and started dedicating her time towards things she liked doing better, such as enforcing capitalism. Jon hadn’t known that she and Agnes were still fighting, or fighting so frequently. 

He had heard that, when Agnes had been much older, they used to be involved. Agnes never said anything about it, besides assuring Jon that their relationship was nothing like that now. Jon wondered if it was strange and painful suddenly acting as a pseudo mother to your dead girlfriend, but that would involve Jude having feelings, which she didn’t. Or, if she did, Jon wasn’t interested in them. 

“Of course,” Jude sneered. “The bad influence. I’ve heard that you’ve been on a real rampage, Archivist. What are you searching for? Your memories ? It makes me sick.”

“Uh,” Jon said. “You’re misunderstanding. Just let go of Agnes, and -”

“Newsflash, Archivist,” Jude snarled, and Jon found himself stepping back. There was something wild in her eyes, something untamed and desperate. Agnes was grinding her teeth, and she clutched onto the hand that Jude had pressing into her skin. “You were nothing in your previous life. A smarmy, stupid little loser who would never amount to anything. You were a drain on fucking society. You tripped and fell into real power and what do you do with it? You sit around all day wasting it. Fucking typical. Guys like you are all the same.”

The burn scar on Jon’s hand pulsed and throbbed, and he began to have a very bad feeling. Daisy growled, a bassy sound that cracked the night, and stepped out from the shadows. Her yellow eyes were wide and wild, and she barked harshly at Jude. Jude just laughed. 

“You knew me,” Jon whispered. “You knew who I -” He shook himself. That wasn’t important right now. Focus on Agnes, focus on Daisy. They needed you. “Let go of Agnes or I’ll make you, Jude.”

“You relentless little busybody,” Jude sneered, “mind your own fucking buisness and -”

Agnes clenched her hand from where it gripped Jude’s wrist, and Jon saw for the first time that it was coated in white-hot flame. It boiled through Jude’s wax wrist, melting away the way and separating the wrist from her arm. Jude didn’t scream - she didn’t feel pain like that - but she lurched back, jaw loosened in shock, and Daisy dived forward. She grabbed Agnes by the waist of her dress with her teeth, tugging her backwards, and Agnes let her as her tears dissolved on her face. 

Daisy pulled Agnes behind Jon, and Jon protectively moved to stand in front of her. Daisy growled at Jude, crouching in front of Agnes and baring her teeth. Jude’s hand was still clenched on Agnes’ arm, five fingers digging in harshly into the flesh, and Agnes’s chest began to wrack with sobs. 

“I’ll only ask once,” Jon said, and he felt his irises begin to spin an endless wheel. The air was beginning to grow heavy, static pricking at Jon’s ears. His hair, which had been neatly tied back in a bun, snapped free of its hair tie and began to float around his face, and he felt something great and large and full of hate swell within him. This was what Annabelle brought him here to do. “How do I cure Daisy?”

There was no way to resist it. Jude hugged herself, one arm stretching along her waist as she held her handless arm out to the side. It did not bleed. It sizzled, and popped, and boiled. She laughed, desperate and crazed. “You idiot. You don’t even know . You don’t know anything !”

“Then tell me!”

She laughed, and it sounded like wax boiling. “You play your little games, Archivist! You pretend you’re a new man, a man without sin or blame! You destroyed the world with your power because you were weak and you hated it, and you spend your time collecting lost causes as if you were a friend to anyone but yourself.” She smiled, wide and gaping, but her teeth were dissolving and pooling on her tongue. “You could have cured your friend at any time. You plunged Earth into Hell and you think you don’t have the power to put Humpty Dumpty together again? You’re just too scared. You’re too scared to use the power that you deserve.”

If Jon had a heart it would have thumped in his chest. His throat was closed up, his chest heaving, and Daisy was silent. 

“You’re a pussy. You always have been.” Jude spat globules of wax onto the floor, and Jon wanted her to stop talking, he wanted her to shut up . “You want to know how I burned your hand, Archivist? It was easy. You were so desperate and vulnerable and scared . Mean ol’ Jonah was bullying you again. Just so needy for a helping hand to reach out to you, for anybody to hold out their hands and pull you up from the hole you were digging yourself into.” She grinned at him again, with empty gums, and Jon wanted her to shut up - “The kind of person you were, Jonathan Sims, was a  -”

There must have been some warning. Daisy must have seen it: she tackled Agnes to the ground, crouching over her and blocking her sight. Jon would have seen it too, except he was too busy screaming at Jude to shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, and maybe he was too wrapped up in his own pain and misery to see that Jude Perry was dying. 

There was light. Then a crack. Then a rupture. Then Jude Perry hardened, and froze, and screamed in pain as her wax flesh rippled into marble. 

Silence abruptly reigned. Where Jude Perry once stood, there was only a statue: curiously half-melted, puddling on the floor, but shining and firm in stone. Her mouth was open, locked in an eternal scream, but she did not move. 

A scream echoed across the room. Jon whirled around, as Daisy quietly got off a very confused Agnes, and saw Sasha standing at the doorway. She was holding her heels in her hands, staring at the marble corpse of Jude Perry, and at Jon, an eldritch and alien thing. 

Well, Jon thought dizzily, that’s one way to break to someone that you caused the apocalypse. 

“Sasha -” Jon began weakly, but she had already turned on her heel and ran. Sasha ran down the hallway, turning a corner and disappearing from sight, and Jon watched her go. 

He probably wouldn’t see her again. 

When he turned around again he saw only Agnes, gently wrenching the wax hand off her arm, clutching it tightly as she stepped forward and pressed her hand against the marble face of Jude. She looked back at Jon, and he saw tears sizzling on her face. 

“She’s cold.”

Jon didn’t say anything. 

“Can you turn her back?” 

Jon shook his head mutely. 

“I thought not.”

They stood there in silence, alien to each other, among the statues of a dead empire.

The first thing that Jon had ever loved in his life was books. 

He had been born wearing loose jeans and an oversized t-shirt, tucked into the jeans. They contained a wallet, with useful information such as his name - definitely a name - and a location - Uk was a strange name for a place, but he wasn’t judging. The clothing was fine, and serviced for a while, but somewhere in the Highlands they became ripped and muddy and sodden, and he had ducked into a nearby village to try to fix that. 

It had been his first time in a village. He had no context for what villages were supposed to look like, merely the vague knowledge that villages held dry clothes and that dry clothes were good. Wet clothes were uncomfortable, he knew that like he knew that sunlight was good and tired was bad and screams were interesting, but he somehow felt as if he couldn’t simply take off his clothes and make his way without them. 

He ducked into a shop, stepping over screaming people writhing on the ground and avoiding large monsters slowly eating crying humans, and tried on half the clothing in the dusty and dim store before he found some that he liked. A long, swishy skirt, and a soft and fuzzy jumper that evoked good feelings in him. He browsed the rest of the shop listlessly, ignoring the crying woman huddled behind the counter. 

There were shelves in the back, thick and sagging with something he knew to be books. He picked one up, squinting at the cover. It took a second to download reading, words, and language into his mind, at which point he interpreted the cover. 

It held a single man, holding a gun and pointing it at Jon. He was running, and was dressed in a fine suit and a long coat. THE BOURNE IDENTITY, promised the cover. Jon knew that books existed to be read, so he sat down and read it.

The mystery! The intrigue! The words that meant nothing to Jon, the excitement that was meaningless to him! It was as foreign as anything else, but it was caught in a particular state of real and unreal. Was this a biography, Jon wondered? Had this happened to someone before?

The protagonist was like him. Cognizant of nothing, remembering nothing. How exciting. 

He read the book next to it. Much more boring, about someone called Jesus. Then the book next to that, about meditation and how to parent your children. Fascinating. Before he knew it, he had consumed the entire shelf. 

Something in his mind informed him that you bought things from shops, so he carried some random articles of clothing and some of the books he found to the counter. The woman behind it was still crying. 

“Er,” Jon said, the first words he had ever said, “do I give you money now?”

The woman ignored him. She just sobbed. 

Jon didn’t like being ignored. 

“ What’s your problem?” Jon asked, because he just wanted someone to pay attention to him and talk to him, and then the woman did. It was nice. She paid a lot of attention to Jon after that. 

Maybe that was the first lesson Jon ever learned: that he could get whatever he wanted. There was no payment, because he had already paid. 

It hadn’t proven to be true later on, of course. Jon didn’t get a lot of things that he wanted. He didn’t get that internet thing that books talked about, and he didn’t get to leave London (“It’s not safe - listen to your sister!”). He didn’t get Daisy’s hands and her straw blonde hair and her hoarse voice back. Whatever he received on a silver platter, he had sacrificed everything for it. Maybe it was a blessing, that Jon didn’t know what he was missing. 

Some part of Jon had always wanted to be a good guy, like the heroes in books. Some part of him had always wanted friends and family, like heroes had. To do something meaningful, to be meaningful. Jon had always figured himself for the protagonist, or at least the sidekick to the brave detective hero. The precious and selfless little sibling, to be protected. 

Because if he wasn’t...what roles did men who destroy the world, who eat people’s trauma, who terrorize and tantrum and throw spoiled hissy fits have? Who was Jon then?

Was he the bad guy? Or, even worse, the lackey of the bad guy? The spoiled child? The puppet, the mannequin, the doll with a painted smiling face?

At the end of the day, Jon didn’t think of himself in terms of good or bad. He did what he wanted because he enacted god’s will on earth, and whatever he did to satisfy that will was justified. He was a force of nature, and exempt from moral judgements. Nothing less, and nothing more.

Maybe one day, a long time ago when Jon knew nothing except the beauty of good guys and bad, he had wanted to be good. To be the brave protagonist, the intrepid investigator, the protected and protector. But he had given up on that long ago, when he was catapulted from supporting character to star and the center of his world had shrunken into its fringes, and Jon abandoned such romantic notions. Good and bad wasn’t real. The world was split into those who ate and those who were eaten, and Jon was determined to be the one who feasted. 

Maybe it was because Jon knew that he thought too hard about if he was a good or bad person, he may not like the answer he arrived at. 

It shouldn’t have been a surprise, that he would summarily betray three people simultaneously in one fell swoop, but somehow it was. Jon had the sense that he was very good at betraying people. 

Agnes went home with him, because neither of them wanted to find out if the Desolation was going to blame Agnes for what had happened. Jon contacted Helen through his usual method and asked her to find Gerry and get him to his flat, which she agreed to easily enough. They made their way home in silence, Daisy clinging close to Agnes and letting her keep her hands bundled in her fur. Sometimes her fur sizzled a little, burning hair stinking up the subway car, but Agnes extinguished the fire easily enough. She always seemed to burn colder, when she was sad. 

They didn’t say anything to each other. What was there to say?

When Jon unlocked his door to his office with shaking hands he found Gerry sitting on the couch, anxiously leafing through an old Leitner. Helen’s door was set in the wall next to the window overlooking the street, half-cracked open. When Jon opened the door Gerry jumped up, taking only a second to survey the dismal group before running forward and crashing into Agnes in a tight hug. 

Jon’s breath caught, and he extended his hand to peel Gerry off Agnes before his skin could peel off from burns, but nothing happened. The two kids just clung to each other, and Agnes’ chest began wracking in sobs, and Jon knew better than to interfere. He quietly left them alone in the office, stepping into his flat and putting the kettle on. Daisy silently padded in after him, sitting down and staring up at him. 

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Jon whispered. 

Daisy continued staring at him. 

“Do you think she hates me?” Jon asked her. 

Daisy whuffed. 

“She has nowhere else to go, that doesn’t mean anything.” Jon frowned as Daisy yipped again. “Why would I ask?”

Daisy didn’t look very impressed with him.

God, he was a terrible detective. Also just terrible in general. Jon leaned on the counter, kneading his forehead. His headache was killing him, pounding in a sick rhythm behind his temples. “Sasha’s never going to talk to me again.”

A wet nose pushed against his hip, and Jon reached down to gently stroke Daisy’s head. She woofed something.

“You’re right,” Jon muttered. “You’re right. It’s better this way. No humans. Just us. Why did we ever let anyone else get involved in the first place?” He laughed, coldly and without humor. “We don’t need anybody but each other.”

God, his head was killing him. He wanted to lie down. He could worry about...Agnes, and Gerry, and Sasha, and Jude, and Annabelle, and Daisy, in the morning. Right? Maybe Jon could just never worry about anything and never deal with any of his problems. That might work.

“But I was really getting to like her, you know,” Jon confessed. “She...I don’t know why, but I wanted to be different for her. But what’s the point? Good people don’t get other people murdered by the Beholding. I...that’s only the second time I’ve ever seen anyone die…”

He must be cursed. The Not!Them tries to tell him about his past, and she gets ripped up like toilet paper. Jude tries to say mean things about his human self, and she gets turned into stone. Why was Jonah doing this? Was it even Jonah? Was it the Beholding?

There must be some mystical curse on him, some prison maintained by Jonah to keep him amnesiac and complacent. If he could just get to the bottom of this...he could do an investigation. Study and research and track down clues. At least do something . Maybe Sasha was right. He needed his memory back, and in order to get it back Jon had to see who wanted to keep him amnesiac so desperately -

“You know that’s not it.”

Jon jumped, spinning around. Sasha stood in the doorway, leaning against the doorframe with her arms folded. She had taken off the dress, and was dressed in some sweatpants and a t-shirt he had stolen for her. Jon found his mouth opening and closing, uselessly. Why was she here ?

“I’ve solved your mystery,” Sasha said. “Want to learn what I found out?”

No. “Sasha,” Jon said, mouth dry. “I’m sorry, I -”

She held up a hand, and Jon shut up. “Start from the beginning. Jonathan Sims, who wakes up in a post-apocalyptic world with no memory of his past. After joining forces with another supernatural refugee, he establishes a new life for himself in London. Free of the burdens of his past. Free of his unhappiness. Sound about right?”

Jon didn’t say anything. 

“But then Annabelle Cane tricks him into growing involved with the many, many people he once knew. When the monster that killed Sasha James and wore her name attempted to tell you of your past, she died. Mysteriously. Gruesomely. Does that happen to everyone who tells you something that you don’t want to know, Jon?”

Jon’s chest ached. There was a gulf there, a yawning emptiness, that he couldn’t fill. 

“You tell yourself that you want your memories back. That you want to reconnect with the human being you used to be. Maybe you’re curious. But when you meet a woman who knew you, a woman who is the strongest link to your past you’ve ever had, you…” Sasha gestured, opened a hand. “...try to push her away. Convince her what a monster you are. How alien and inhuman you’ve always been. Are you convincing her, or yourself?”

Jon’s fist clenched. 

“But you can’t help but pull her closer. You want something from her. You don’t know why, but you want her to think well of you. You tell yourself that killing the world was just and good, but you still don’t want her to know. Why?” Sasha’s big brown eyes bore into him, interrogating and ruthless, and Jon couldn’t bear it. “You know that you did something wrong. That you’re doing something wrong. And you can’t let anybody know - not even yourself.”

“I don’t -”

“Then someone else is stupid enough to piss you off. A fragment of your past, an old bully, is stupid enough to push you. Make you feel small and weak and helpless again. All you want is for her to shut up. Then...she does.” Sasha tilted her head, her big brown eyes boring into Jon’s fluorescent green ones. “Do you think it’s some mystical thing, Jon? Do you think it’s the Beholding, Jonah Magnus, the impersonal workings of fate, that someone who you want dead dies? That someone who tells you something you don’t want to hear magically shuts up?”

“Stop talking,” Jon said quietly. 

“Who would take away your memories, Jon? Who’s powerful enough to do that? The Beholding? Why would the Beholding do that? Jonah? What’s the point? Who stands to gain from you losing your memories...except you ?”

“Shut up!”

“You’re happier this way,” Sasha cut in ruthlessly. This was it, Jon realized, this was her moment. The grand revelation at the end of the detective novel where the hero outlined their genius deduction to the villain, and the villain was defeated at last. “You like your life the way it is. You love this world. It’s perfect for you. You don’t have to feel guilty or sad or tragic about the life you sold if you don’t even remember it. You and Daisy both. You aren’t trapped in this Lotus Eater Machine - you built it.”

Jon’s vision was whiting out, his headache puncturing his skull. He was dimly aware that he was bent in half, that his hands were clenching his temples, that his vision was swimming, but he couldn’t think. He just wanted Sasha to shut up, shut up, shut up!

“You know,” Sasha said, through the thick haze, “you really haven’t changed at all. You’re the most powerful person in the world, and you’re still a coward.”

Some distant part of Jon recognized that he was screaming. He heard sounds, faintly and strangely - the sound of a wolf barking, a lyrical and strange voice, two young and frightened voices. He felt something underneath his hands - cold tile, unyielding under his fingernails. 

Was he crying? Could he cry? Jon didn’t remember the last time he cried. He was just in so much pain, it overwhelmed him. It hurt. It made him want to hurt someone else. Maybe it would take the pain away. It usually did. That usually worked. 

A yellow door opened and shut. Jon was barely aware. He thrust his eyes open, he Saw and Knew, and ferociously took in everything around him. He sucked in information, knowledge, color and pigment and vibration and arrangement of molecules. 

Jon drank, and twisted the universe until it yielded, limp, in his grip, and crushed it. 

Another dream. 

Cows again. Why always cows! 

Jon huffed as he tucked his scarf around his neck. Scotland was cold, frozen over in thick sheets of snow that draped over trees and the rolling hills. It muffled the world, tightened it into its small corners, and smoothed it into elegant simplicity. The world was simple, under the snow. Everything was white. 

The strange man next to him was giggling, ears hidden under mufflers and bundled up in a thick coat and snow pants. He was reaching over the fence, letting one of the fuzzy Highland cows sniff his hand and lick it with a broad pink tongue. He cooed endearments to it in Chinese, senseless and cute, and his nose was bright red. 

“Who are you?” Jon found himself asking the man. The man blinked, as if surprised, before smiling gently at Jon. 

“I think you know.”

He did. He had been pretending that he didn’t. But he had known, he had always known. How could he forget? The one person who was closest to his heart, who was the other half of his withered and shriveled soul?

“Martin, I need help,” Jon whispered brokenly. Martin Blackwood’s eyebrows rose, as the cow angled its throat over the fence and tried to eat his hat. “I can’t do this by myself. Nobody here understands me like you did. Nobody wants to help me like you did. Please, I - I need you. I always did. I’m not - I’m lonely without you, Martin.”

Martin stared at him, eyes wide, cheeks flushed, and he let the cow slide his hat off his head and chew it like a cud. Jon shoved his hands into his coat pockets, clenching them inside their mittens, feeling horrible and exposed and flayed open, a raw nerve, ugly and real. 

Finally, Martin spoke. “Come find me, then.”

Jon’s breath caught in this throat. Which was strange. Jon didn’t breathe. 

“I - you’re alive?”

Martin quietly stroked the cow, eyes somewhat distant. Looking far away. “You have a question in your heart, right? Something you need to know? Come find me. I’ll answer it for you.” He smiled at Jon, small and real and affectionate, and nobody had ever smiled at Jon like that. Like he was their everything. “I get lonely without you too, you know.”

Nobody had ever needed Jon before. He lunged forward, hand extended, wanting to touch Martin, to convince himself that someone like him could possibly be real - as if by touching, he could mend his broken heart and broken soul and broken mind, and he could be complete again. 

But his hand passed right through Martin, and Jon collapsed on the ground, swallowed by the snow, and the cold froze him straight through. 

“Archivist?”

Maybe Jon could only destroy. 

It seemed right. He felt somebody who destroyed and broke and tore, not somebody who built. The world used to be fuller than it was now, richer and deeper and real , and now it was a sick parody of life. As fictional as his pulpy detective novels, as shallow as Jon. 

The world that humans came from...it truly must be wonderful. The world that Friends and Seinfeld and Everybody Hates Chris existed in, where people had adventures and kissed each other and built full lives. 

Nothing like the world now. It was stagnated, a tepid pool of water that held no life and bred only insects. It was a dead world, choked to death, but still it lumbered on. Perhaps waiting to die fully, to lie down and be still, to unravel into its component parts and cosmic dust. 

“Oh, my. You’ve made quite a wreck of this place, Archivist. It’ll take forever to get the ooze out of those walls.”

Jon didn’t know how to cure Daisy. No matter how hard he opened his Eye, how thoroughly he strained, the knowledge slipped through his fingers. It was all his fault. He was capable, but too incompetent to truly be useful. 

Who was he useful to? The billions of people he sentenced to a life in hellfire? The other Avatars, who either sought to kill him or use him or were terrified of him? Daisy, who he couldn’t cure because he had baggage ? Agnes and Gerry, who he put in danger by losing his temper against someone Agnes loved? Sasha, who hated him ?

It wasn’t fair. Jon hadn’t had any bad intentions. He had very little intentions at all, actually. He did things without worrying about the consequences, because that would make him feel bad and he hated feeling bad. He ate and had fun and whiled away his time. Nothing pained him or made him uncomfortable, because he didn’t want to feel uncomfortable. 

Who could hate him for it? Jon knew that anybody, if they could, would choose to avoid pain. That was the whole thing about pain: you didn’t want it. It sucked. Zero out of ten. He had to eat people anyway ; it wasn’t unethical to live. What was the point of feeling bad about it?

He knew that if he remembered his past, his carefully built house of cards would come crashing down. Reality would come back flooding in: the knowledge that he was living and profiting off suffering, the crushing guilt that would come with having ended a world that he had lived in and loved, the pain and heartache of losing everything. He lived every day running from it, repressing that which he could not change and the urge to change it. 

What was the point ? Why feel bad, when all it accomplished was that you felt bad? Was it such a sin, to make the best out of a bad situation? If it made him irresponsible - well, what was so evil about that? 

“Archivist? Wakey, wakey. Mopey time’s over. You have to get up now.”

A razor-sharp finger poked him in the cheek, pushing through the skin and scraping against bone. Jon opened his eyes and scowled. 

Helen hovered - not literally, thankfully - in front of him, wearing jeans that defied expectation and a ruffled blouse that welcomed disgust. Her hair was cut short today, tightly coiled razor wire sparking with electricity like a Tesla coil. She smiled cheerfully at him, mouth holding an improbable number of malevolent teeth, and Jon closed his eyes again. 

“Aw, Archivist. C’mon, look at me now.” Her pout was audible in her cheese-grater voice. “You’re lucky I was hanging around, you know. If It wasn’t for me, Gerry and dear Miss James would have been popped -”

“ - like a grape?” Jon muttered resentfully.

“Well, yes! But like a grape in a hydraulic press. You really did a number on the place, you know.”

Jon opened his eyes again, and for the first time looked around his flat. 

He was lying on the couch, and as such had a pretty decent vantage point to view his entire studio apartment. With his two main eyes, he saw very little wrong with it: besides the green ooze leaking from the walls, the way that every article of furniture was now a translucent, sickly green, and the unmistakable smell of radioactivity, it was perfectly fine. But when he opened his thousand other eyes, he saw what he had done. 

In his world, everything existed in two planes. The ordinary, and the unordinary. Normal and paranormal. Mundane and supernatural Yin and yang. Maybe normal was the wrong word for it, an artifact of an outdated time. But it was a world where nightmares were real, where two people could stand in the same space and exist in two different ways. Reality’s grip was loose, and dimensions slid through it like water. 

On one plane: the British Museum, stuffed with interesting curios and the flotsam and jetsam of centuries of imperialism. On another: Josie Mariott’s worst nightmare where all of the other noblewomen snicked at her from behind their hands and she tripped into every statue. On another: George Wickham’s fascination with an Etruscan vase, spinning him into it until there was no escape. On another: worms. So many worms. 

On one plane: a London flat, where a business man sat in front of the television and a housewife cooked dinner. On another: cremation, endless burning, sticking your head deeper and deeper into the oven until you crawled through it endlessly, flames licking your face as you never escaped the heat. On another: the couch trapped you, locked you in place as the television hypnotized and drew you in as you lived in aching awareness of every second ticking by on the clock, every second that felt like hours. 

Jon’s flat technically existed. But to a man who saw all hundreds of realities that a space existed in simultaneously, a space that only existed in one dimension seemed very unreal indeed. 

“Good lord,” Jon whispered, grabbing Helen’s finger and pulling it out of his face with a sick squelch. He sat up, looking around his flat. It was...drained. Sick. Like a corpse, devoid of life. Not just blessedly free of the supernatural, mundane and normal and real, but free of everything meaningful. “What happened?”

“I’m afraid you threw a bit of a tantrum,” Helen said, pseudo-delicately. She folded her hands in mimicry of a prayer. “Hear something that you didn’t like, Archivist?”

“Shut up.”

Helen did so, very quickly, and changed the subject. “I can walk easily in it, as I am somewhat of a specialist in places that are just all wrong! This is really a premier example of London real estate, if I do say so myself.” She propped her hands delicately on her hips and surveyed the flat. “The opposite of homey, I’m afraid, but can’t be helped. I’m afraid what you... tried to do was take the supernatural from it. Make it normal, even. But there’s no such thing as normal here, Archivist. There’s only normal for us. And I’m afraid that now, your flat is a great deal of nothing. Nothing just oozes out of this place.”

Jon stood up, and he slowly understood what Helen meant. This was his home, his safe haven, where he and Daisy had built their lives. Now it was...just a room. Nothing very much at all. 

“Did I…” Jon squinted his eyes, flipping through plane after plane after plane and seeing nothing. “...kill my flat?”

“Like drowning a kitten!” 

“I’m going back to bed.” Jon sat back down on the couch and lay down, curling up into a ball. “Goodnight.”

“Arch-iv-ist.” Helen prodded him again, this time spearing through his trenchcoat and into his shoulder. Jon felt his own flesh ripple and tear, felt Helen digging inside of him. “You’ve been on this couch for a week already. Miss James keeps telling me that’s a long period of time. If I go back without you, Miss James will be quite displeased with me. I’m quite scared of her, if you must know.”

Jon, resentfully, opened his eyes again. “Sasha’s with you?”

“Where else would she be?”

“I just…” Jon’s throat was dry. “I would have figured that she left by now.”

“Oh, Archivist.” Helen sighed, and Jon’s back involuntarily seized as she stabbed him again. “I don’t think that’s a woman who gives up very easily, you know. Even on you.”

Jon’s unbeating heart did a strange thing. 

“Jon. Are we friends?”

That surprised him. Jon sat up again, ignoring the way it made the spears dig and twist through his flesh, and frowned at Helen. She looked somber, almost more than he had ever seen. “Of course we’re friends. Why do you ask?”

“Back when you were human, you never wanted to be friends with me,” Helen said, and Jon’s heart lurched. “Yes, I lied when I said that I met you for the first time on the case with the disappearing shrimp. I do that. I’m not sorry. You used to be awfully mean to me. But I don't think I was very nice to you either.” Helen frowned, a perfect and strange shape, and tilted her head. “You’re nice now. I suppose I am too. You built a world that suits me, in a way that the old world never did. I don’t think, Archivist, it is a matter of bad and good. Or right and wrong. I never quite understood binaries, I think, even when I was a fleshier person. I think it is simply a matter of change. Our world now...it is worse in some ways, but mostly I just think it is different. You, I think, are not better or worse. Just different. And different happens all the time, doesn’t it?”

Jon stared at her, uncertain of how to feel. 

“Life goes on anyway,” Helen said, “yours and mine. Everyone’s, I think. Doesn’t it?”

It did.

Jon pulled Helen’s spears out of him again, standing up from the couch. He looked around the flat - unsalvageable. No good for Gerry or Sasha, and not a healthy place for Agnes. He extended his Sight, and saw that he had given his entire building the same treatment. All of the denizens had escaped, of course - what could trap them? - but their fear and trauma over the sudden eviction fed him on a slow, smooth stream. 

He looked around him: at his stuff, at his books, at his detritus of a life. No. He wouldn’t destroy it. It was his, this was his life, and it was the only one he was ever going to get. 

When you smashed things, you cleaned up the mess. When you hurt someone, you apologized. This was what Daisy had always taught him, or maybe it was what he had always known. He simply hadn’t known that it applied to him. 

Jon casually walked towards the window on the left wall, wrenching it open with gritted teeth. He almost never opened it - Jon hated fresh air - and the wood groaned with a splintering creak as he wiggled the old and rotted wood upwards. Sound leaked in from the street outside, the occasional hum of cars and the whirling howl of birds. Jon breathed in deeply and uselessly, smelling the polluted air and staring up into the narrow and endless green sky. It matched his eyes perfectly. He had never noticed before. 

He crawled over the windowsill, onto the fire escape on the other end. It was creaky and rusted, the iron barely hanging on, and Helen curiously followed him by slithering out through the crack. They were five stories up, and Jon could see into the distance of London. Life bred, people and monsters lived together, and roses bloomed in the summertime. 

Children were not born. Nobody aged. Humans, mostly, didn’t die. Then why did new flowers sprout from the ground? Why did baby birds squeak hoarsely in the spring? Why did the world continue turning, new seasons passing over them, time passing in its indomitable way whether you liked it or not? Did life still breathe, even when Jon didn’t?

 Jon stood on the railing of the fire escape, letting the dress shoes he was still wearing slip on the wet iron, and casually jumped off onto the street. 

For a second, two seconds, the Vast tugged at his shoes and pulled at his hair. But Jon felt no fear, heard the call of the void but didn’t respond, and his feet landed securely on the ground five stories below. Helen, the cheater, just walked out of the front door, looking mildly curious, if he was interpreting her eyebrow turning into a caterpillar correctly. 

Jon stood in the street in front of his flat, and slowly held out his hand palm up. He felt his irises begin to spin in their eternal wheel, felt his dirty and oily hair slowly begin to expand and float around his head. 

Nobody was inside. The building was built in 1920. It violated twenty six building codes. A baby had been born inside in 1956. That baby was still alive. She used to be an accountant, and now she tended her garden all day. A young man lost his virginity inside the building in 1976 to a girl he later married. A million dogs had barked inside its walls, every inch of the plaster had tasted cigarette smoke, and a thousand impatient trainers thumped up and down its stairwell every day, every year, every decade. A relic of the old world. 

Jon squeezed, and the Eye bore down, and Jon told the building very firmly that it was not what it thought it was. It wasn’t correct. Hadn’t it always been something else? Are you sure you’re so tall? I think you were smaller. Yes, of course, you were three stories. Are you sure you were always such a big building? I think you were smaller. A house, maybe. Yes, that seems more correct. Trust me. I know you so well. 

Down the street, a small run-down abandoned tenement blossomed into what it was always meant to be: a building, strangely familiar, cluttered with beds and microwaves and paintings. It was the least Jon could do. 

For now, though, Jon slowly coaxed the building into being a house, drew wooden stairs and a fresh coat of paint and a swinging porch door out of it. Static blared in his ears, the output buzzing and crackling as Jon changed the channel, and Jon slowly returned life and vitality and the wonderful mystery of the supernatural back into the dead land. 

Where’s your chimney? You’ve always had one, you know. It’s right in the living room. And haven’t you always been cluttered with things and books and invoices? Yes, of course. That’s just clear. Let yourself fill with them again, and be whole. 

The front door was a bright yellow. There was a tire swing in a big, sprawling tree outside. A windchime sang gently in front of a window, and a cheery postbox erupted from the ground, shedding dirt. It was incongruous with the towering buildings next to it, almost uncomfortable and self-conscious, but Jon quietly soothed the building. It was exactly as it should be. Everything was right. Everything was known. 

 “Hm,” Jon said, surveying the soft green house and the cheerful yellow door. “I didn’t know I could do that.”

And then he passed out. 

Chapter Text

When he woke up again, he was in a bedroom. 

It was his bedroom - at least, it had his things in it. He was lying on his queen sized battered bed, his nightstand with the peeling paint sagging under the weight of a thick stack of books with a rickety wind-up alarm clock resting on top. Lining the walls was his bureau with his clothing, a closet with a half-open sliding door that revealed his suits and coats, and his wobbly personal desk that mostly served as a place to dump laundry. There were two familiar filing cabinets near the door, which Jon knew were full to the brim with cassette tapes. Proudly sitting on the unusually clean desk was a tape recorder. It wasn’t running. 

But, of course, the unusual thing was that Jon had a studio apartment, and thus didn’t exactly have a bedroom. 

He slid out of bed, noticing that he was still in the hunter green suit, and slipped out the door. He found himself stepping into a carpeted hallway, lined with - yes, six other doors. One of the doors was half-open, revealing a nice bathroom, and at the end of the hallway was a curling set of wooden stairs. Jon cautiously walked down them, blinking suddenly when he found himself stepping into a kitchen. 

It was large, with space at the opposite end for a kitchen table/breakfast nook. The table was large and square, with two benches at either end, and the kitchen was gleaming stainless steel and clean granite. When Jon craned his head, he saw that an archway lead towards a living room with plush couches and a flickering television set, along with plenty of bookshelves. There was another staircase at the far end of the living room, leading further down. Three floors, at least?

Jon blinked owlishly, barely registering the scent and sound of popping bacon. Either he had been kidnapped in the night along with all of his belongings, or -

“Good, you’re up.” Sasha frowned at him, from where she was standing at the stove pushing around bacon on a pan. She grabbed a plastic plate lined with paper towels and slid the bacon on it, several slivers of which were noticeably blackened to an absolute crisp. With her other hand she pressed and grilled some bread on a skillet. “Can you get the coffee out of the french press? Half coffee, half the milk in the pan.”

Jon, bemused, had to use his arcane and eldritch omniscience in order to divine what a french press was, but once he did he was able to pour it half-way up a cup of coffee, and use the scalded milk in a saucepan to fill up the other half. 

“Can we help, Aunt Sasha?” he heard a young voice say, and Jon turned around and noticed for the first time that the kids were standing at the door. They both looked tired - with deeper bags under Gerry’s eyes, and a particular strain in the set of Agnes’ shoulders. 

“No, you kids sit down. Jon, set out the plates, will you?”

“I...have no idea where the plates are?”

Sasha shot him an irritated look. “Are you omniscient or aren’t you? They’re above the sink.”

Jon got the plates that he didn’t know he owned out of the cupboard above the sink, and slid them onto the table as the kids sat down. Daisy trotted in after them, jumping up on the bench next to Agnes with what looked like a human femur already in her mouth. Jon tried to shoot her his best ‘what the fuck is happening’ look but she either didn’t see it or she was ignoring him, as she contentedly chewed on her bone and let Agnes run her hands through her thick fur. 

Since he really didn’t know what else to do, Jon made more of the cafe con leche and put it on the table as Sasha put the bacon and tostada on the table, letting the kids attack it. Agnes, of course, took all of the burnt bits. Sasha started cracking eggs in the pan still full of bacon grease, letting the yolk sizzle and pop. 

“Uh,” Jon said, “may I, perhaps, perchance, go so far as to ask what is happe -”

“Nope,” Sasha said, twisting salt and pepper over the scrambled eggs. “Make yourself useful and chop up some meat for Daisy.”

Jon did so, finding it in the bottom drawer of the freezer. He hacked it up, put it on a plate, and slid it in front of Daisy, who gently nibbled on it as Sasha scraped eggs on the kid’s plate and sat down at the table herself, grabbing a slice of tostada to dunk in her coffee. 

For his part, Jon stood awkwardly, still in his suit. Sasha was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and Agnes was wearing a cute sundress and sandals as Gerry lounged in his baggy jeans and band shirt. Even Daisy had a fetching ribbon around her neck, definitely tied there by Agnes. Jon didn’t know why any of them were in this house. He didn’t know why he was in this house. 

Wait. Jon squinted, opening up a few eyes and struggling to recollect what happened before he passed out. There had been ooze...death...a great twisting…

“Helen!” Jon cried. “Where’s Helen? Wasn’t she just here?”

“She said that she has some errands to run, but she might drop by tonight for board game night,” Sasha said, cracking open a newspaper. In big letters in the front it said EVERYTHING IS AWFUL, and in slightly smaller letters it proclaimed PRINT MEDIA RESURRECTED FROM THE DEAD LIKE MY UNCLE TODD. “Sit down, Jon.”

One bench was fully taken up by the kids and Daisy, so with great trepidation and fear Jon sat down next to Sasha. 

As the kids started bickering about something incomprehensible and started trying to pinch each other on the arm, Jon found himself clearing his dry throat. “What...is this place?”

“Your house,” Sasha said, flipping through the pages of the newspaper to the Saddies (like the Funnies, but with more Charlie Brown proselytizing to join the Lonely). “We’ve been staying in it for about three days, I think. You’ve been asleep. I guess rewriting reality to make your flat building into a three floor house took a lot out of you.”

That...sounded about right. Jon hadn’t known that he could do that, but - well, Jon hadn’t known a lot of things. Still didn’t. 

“So...why are you here?”

 Sasha was silent, fork scraping her plate, even as the kids settled down and watched the tension build with wide eyes. Jon found himself avoiding looking directly at Agnes. Jude had - Jude had deserved it, she was awful, but she had meant something to Agnes. At the very least, Jon should have let Agnes kill her herself. 

As always, Jon found himself filling up the awkward silence with nervous babble. “I know you don’t really have anywhere else to go, but, uh, I can - I can find you somewhere. It’s likely not safe for the kids at Hilltop Road right now, but if they can stay with you, Agnes can keep you safe - and I have my own ways, you know, even if you don’t want me around. If you want your own place, I can secure it for you. So you don’t have to - you know. Live here. If you don’t want to.”

If you hate me. Which she did, obviously, so Jon really didn’t know why she was still her e. 

Finally, she said, “This house has five bedrooms.”

Jon blinked at her, all up and down. He thought of the hallway upstairs. “It does?”

What did that have to do with anything? 

Or, maybe, what didn’t that have to do with anything?

Sasha folded the newspaper neatly, tucking it underneath her plate on the table. She turned to Jon, and he couldn’t help but notice how tired she looked. She seemed as if she would much rather be doing anything but having this conversation with Jon, be anywhere but in what was apparently Jon’s home, exist in any time but this one. Jon knew how she felt, but - well, did he? Was he capable? 

“I think,” Sasha said, “we got off on the wrong foot.” She held out a calloused and rough hand, expression firm. “Ms. Sasha James. Thirty seven, though I guess I’m more like forty now...glad to have missed that one. Ex-Archival Assistant and academic, current zombie and private investigator. Bisexual Cuban asshole. Human. It’s good to meet you.”

Jon stared at the hand, afraid it would bite. 

“I think she’s apologizing,” Gerry whispered loudly. 

“Take the hand or you’re done for!” Agnes whispered, also loudly. 

Daisy barked, calling him an idiot. 

So he took the hand. What else could he do? What else did he want to do? “Uh. Mr. Jonathan Sims, or so I’m told. Thirty three, I think. Ex-Head Archivist, current Archive and private investigator. I...don’t know those other two words, but I am an asshole, I think. Monster. It’s good to meet you.”

They shook on it, once, firmly, then quickly separated. 

“Wait,” Sasha said, “do you not know what sexualities are?”

“I know what sex is, unfortunately,” Jon sniffed, “and please, not in front of the kids.”

“Holy shit, you really don’t.” Sasha looked strangely enthralled. “Do you know where Cuba is?”

“Down...the...street?” Jon fought hard not to start sweating. He didn’t do well with difficult questions. “Look, I never memorized the flavors of human.”

“Look, this is what I mean.” Sasha looked away from him and frowned at her plate, picking up her tostada and tearing it into strips before carefully dunking it in her coffee. “I was looking at you like...a problem to fix. If I could just get you back to regular Jon, who wasn’t the greatest guy but I have to assume he had some basic regard for human life, then you could fix the world and things would be okay.”

“Sasha…”

She changed the subject, almost abruptly. “Do you remember why you killed the world, Jon?”

Jon was silent. He didn’t, and she knew it.

“Right. Now I’m wondering if...well, if there’s anything to salvage there. If there’s humanity left.” She chewed her tostada thoughtfully, eyes far away. “Maybe whatever happened to you was so awful, so destructive, that losing your memories was a self-defence mechanism. Maybe I’ve been desperately trying to impose the morals and structure of a pre-apoc world into a post-apoc society, and it’s just too apples and oranges for anyone to understand. Maybe it’s...you know, pointless.” She nodded firmly, taking a sip of her coffee before glancing at Jon. “Because the world’s not fixable.”

Jon opened his mouth, then closed it. His mouth was strangely dry. 

Agnes, who had been paying close attention, leaned forward intently. “Jon. Can you fix the world?”

Gerry filched some burned bacon from Agnes plate, breaking some off with his teeth. “If you could, would you?”

Almost unconsciously, Jon opened his eyes. Could he? Would it be possible for him to do that, without waiting for the heat death of the universe? Would Jon willingly bring about the destruction of his whole world, destabilize his power, on the secondhand promise that whatever the world used to be, it was better?

It wasn’t until he heard Daisy’s sharp barks that he realized that he was squeezing his two main eyes shut, that a headache was rippling through his temples. He opened his eyes slowly, letting his hair fall back down over his shoulders, and pretended not to notice the way Agnes was gripping Gerry’s hand. 

But Sasha didn’t seem scared. She was just staring at him. As if she was waiting for him to realize what she had already figured out. 

“No,” Jon said, and he Knew it to be true. “It’s not possible. And even if it was, I wouldn’t do it.”

Almost imperceptibly, Agnes’ mouth twisted in disappointment, but Sasha just shrugged. “Hey, I get it,” Sasha said. “The world’s doing fine, almost. Sure, it’s being crushed under the thumb of the powerful, the vast majority of people are desperately trying to scrape out their existences, and a not-insignificant number are trapped within their waking nightmares for days before they snap out and are able to go back to Starbucks for their smoothies...but the old world was like that too. This world’s not better, and it’s a tenth of what it used to be, but it’s not dead. I think we could fix it.” She looked significantly at Agnes, who seemed almost spooked. “Instead of wanting to just go back to the status quo, I think we could make everything better.” She glanced at Gerry. “If we helped each other, and stayed together.” And, finally, she looked at Jon. “If we wanted to.”

And Jon found that he did want to. Just a little.

Or, maybe, he wanted to be the kind of person who wanted to. People he respected, people who his subconscious had built rooms in his house for, desperately wanted to fix the world and make it habitable for everybody again. Jon wasn’t sure if he was there yet. He had everything, had enjoyed his power and rule and how easily the world bent to his whims. 

But...he admired this, about them. Maybe the old Jon, before he had been twisted into a monster, had felt this way too. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe it didn’t matter. If Jon wasn’t beholden towards the human he used to be...if he could decide for himself who he was, the kind of person he wanted to be...what was stopping him?

The thought was heady. Almost exciting. It was the first time in his life Jon had thought about himself in relation to...growth, or personal change, or self-improvement. Immoral fear monsters who lived as the conduit for their gods didn’t do the whole self-improvement thing.

But if Daisy could, and Agnes could, and even Sasha and Gerry could...why not Jon?

In fact, the thought was so exciting it made Jon remember something he had almost forgotten. 

“Martin Blackwood’s alive!” Jon cried, and Sasha almost fell out of her chair. 

If Jon wanted to really understand why the Head Archivist had killed the world, who better to ask than the sole witness? If Jon wanted to know what kind of person he had been, near the end of all things, then there must have been a reason why Martin was there. He had to know, if at least tangentially. 

Most importantly, he was an Ex-Archival Assistant. One who probably had understood what the job entailed by the end of it, unlike Sasha. Which meant that he was the Eye’s, and by extension Jon’s. Of course, his possible links to Jonah couldn’t be ignored, but Jon was sure they could burn that bridge when it came to it. 

As the kids cleaned their plates and started washing the dishes, Sasha frantically tried to explain to Jon why Martin Blackwood couldn’t be alive. It wasn’t that Sasha wasn’t glad, she said hastily, it was just that it made no sense. Martin Blackwood wasn’t a survivor. He wasn’t even really all that competent. He had lied to get the job, had lied his way through the job, and spent as much time cleaning up his own messes as he did creating them. He was a sweet boy, really, a good guy, but - well, not the kind of person who survived the apocalypse. 

It went unstated, but Jon heard it all the same - if not even the great, strong, fantastic, smart, and powerful Sasha James could survive the apocalypse, if the intelligent Jon had lost his soul and the athletic and cunning Jim Stoker or whatever had died in a fiery Stranger induced death, then what chance did Martin Blackwood have?

“Maybe he’s evil too,” Sasha said, chewing at one ragged nail before visibly forcing herself to stop. “He always did like spiders, maybe he’s that witch Annabelle’s spider butler or something.”

“No,” Jon said, “he wouldn’t do that.”

“Did you…” Sasha stretched her eyes out demonstratively. “Look? Know?”

“I...suppose I did,” Jon lied. He knew the difference between knowing and Knowing, between understanding how long it took the coffee to brew and Knowing how long it would take a butterfly to fly to the moon. That Martin Blackwood would never serve Annabelle was something that Jon only knew, as he knew the taste of overstepped Earl Grey spreading across his tongue. “Let me Look and see where he is.”

They had moved to the strange living room, crowded with familiar couches but unfamiliar side-tables. New magazines littered his beat-up coffee table, and when Jon picked one up and flicked through it he saw that they seemed to be Spiral real estate magazines. He replaced them quickly, mentally noting that he had to comb the place through and remove anything that would be dangerous for Sasha or Gerry. If they would be staying here. They hadn’t discussed that yet. 

But...well, what other choice did they have?

Maybe that was the way of things, for Jon: to always be someone’s last resort and last hope, never wanted but always needed. It only made sense. Who would voluntarily want to be around him? Humans found him creepy, other Avatars found him either intimidating or a pawn. Besides Daisy, who would voluntarily stay?

Not even Jon had wanted to be him. He couldn’t blame them. 

Speaking of Daisy. She quietly stalked into the living room, sniffing around the area with a casual familiarity that reminded Jon of how long he’d slept. He had no idea that he was capable of rewriting reality like this. Sure, Jon had erased more than a few annoying people from existence because they talked too loudly at parties, but he had only ever used it to destroy. He hadn’t known that he could make something. 

It was a nice house, with hardwood floors and high ceilings, wide windows with cozy seats looking over the street. There was a sunroom and a laundry room, and the kitchen was stainless steel. It seemed like the kind of house that belonged to somebody else, someone who was very different from Jon, yet it was made for him. 

Jon didn’t know where he fit into his own life anymore. Everything that had once seemed so secure and steadfast was shaken loose of its place. His flat was gone, replaced by something positively suburban. His understanding of who he had always been - a victim of amnesia, an amoral agent in the world, someone for whom consequences didn’t truly apply - had been turned upside down. His world had been Daisy, others hovering at the edges, but Sasha James had knocked a hole through it and so much had come streaming in. 

“Give me a second,” Jon repeated, as Daisy silently stalked into the room and headbutted him in the thigh, “and I’ll Look for him.”

It was no great effort, to Know and See and Look. The giant eye that overlooked the world was his own, as the world was his own, and all Jon had to do was reach for it. He closed his two main eyes and opened his supplementary ones, his unkept and loose hair gently floating up as his eyes shone green, and Jon reached. 

And he knew. 

“Hm,” Jon said. “ That’s not good.”

“What?” Both he and Sasha were sitting on the couch, Daisy absentmindedly chewing a pillow next to them, and she edged a little closer to him. “Where is he? Is he trapped in a nightmare? Can we get him out? Is he outside of London? Do we have to make a field trip?”

“Uh.” Jon abruptly stood up. “Can you hotwire a car in twenty minutes?”

“What am I, an amateur? I’ll get it done in ten.” Sasha jumped up, already tying her hair back in a bun. “Give me five to put on a bra, I don’t want Martin to see me for the first time in five years in my pyjamas.”

“Oh, no rush,” Jon said. “But my precognition abilities are very shaky at the best of times, and if we’re five minutes late he might be dead.”

Sasha ran out, quickly explaining the situation to the kids who, of course, demanded to come along. As they argued, Jon knelt in front of Daisy, who had been silently watching the proceedings. She stared at him, yellow eyes silently interrogating him, and Jon felt abruptly very ashamed. 

“I’m sorry. I fucked everything up. You never should have left me in charge.”

She reminded him curtly that they hadn’t had much of a choice. She wasn’t capable of making decisions like she once could. Her mind had changed, for better or for worse. Jon hadn’t just lost the body of his sister - he had lost her sense of humor, her keen detective’s mind, her authoritative and commanding demeanor. He missed it. 

“Jude said that I could have turned you back at any time.”

She’s a lying bitch too, Daisy reminded him. 

“Not about this,” Jon said, mouth dry. “She was right. I can rewrite reality, bring gods into the world, and trap people in an eternal nightmare. I can turn avatars to stone and rip them from reality without even meaning to. And...and, Daisy, I’m trying so hard, but I can’t do it.”

Was it a matter of wanting? He wanted, more than he had ever wanted anything before. He wanted until it felt like he was dying. He tried to visualize it, visualize her standing there. Give me her back. He wanted her back. Five foot four, always scowling, always kind. A hunter, a detective, a friend, a sister. Jon wanted her back . 

He opened every Eye, let them all glow green, let his hair drift and spark. Power coursed through him, and static hummed in the air. 

Nothing. Daisy sat there patiently, as if she knew that it wouldn’t work. 

“I don’t get it,” Jon whispered, as he let his eyes close and let his hair drift back down until it resumed its usual puff when he wasn’t tying it back. “What am I doing wrong?”

But Daisy just nosed his hand, and quietly reminded him that they needed to get going if they were going to save Martin from the haunted house, and Jon was forced to agree. 

One thing at a time. 

He just hoped that he wouldn’t help save Martin only to accidentally hurt him. 

Like he hurt everything else. 

As it turns out, it only took Sasha three minutes to hotwire a car. 

Despite himself, Jon was impressed. Sasha had brushed him off, muttering something about a ‘misspent youth’, but as Jon’s only exposure to children was Agnes and Gerry he had to assume that being left to roam dangerous hellscapes completely alone to make friends with eldritch abominations stuffed in meatsuits and regularly get into life-threatening trouble was a normal part of the teenage experience. A youth where you learned to hotwire cars and learn to evade dangerous monsters, Jon decided, was a youth well-spent after all. 

The streets were mostly empty of traffic, something that seemed to shock Sasha but just made Jon shrug. They all piled into the car as quickly as they could, Jon sitting shotgun as the kids and Daisy crowded into the back of the convertible and Sasha buckled herself into the driver’s, gunning the engine as soon as she could and tearing away as fast as possible. Jon gave her the most specific directions he could - which, granted, wasn’t that specific. 

“Can’t you give me any more detail into -”

“Turn left!” Jon yelled, over the roar of the wind that tossed his ponytail against his neck and sent Sasha’s long, curling hair flying into her mouth. Sasha banked the car left hard, throwing them all up against the side, and went roaring into the side street. “And you’re mistaking omniscence for pre-cognizance!”

“What’s the difference!”

“Pre-cognizance is useful!” Agnes called from the back, cackling and high fiving Gerry when Jon twisted around to glare at her. Daisy yipped in agreement, poking her head out over the side and letting her tongue loll in the gusting wind. “Go faster, Aunt Sasha!”

“Floor it, Aunt Sasha!” Gerry yelled. 

“Oh my god, it’s like everyone’s first time in a car,” Sasha groused, but she obligingly pushed down on the pedal as the convertible roared through the empty streets. What few busses crawled the streets she easily evaded, and blurs of pedestrians smeared across the corner of Jon’s vision. “Jon, where are we going and why do we have to get there so fast?”

“Not everyone’s a car expert, Sasha, have some respect,” Jon said, aggravated. He thought that he was being extremely cool about the whole car thing, really. It wasn’t his first time - Daisy had hotwired several to get them to London - but it was probably his third or fourth. It was definitely the first time for both kids, who were screaming in delight. “And because Mr. Blackwood might be trapped in an endless nightmare with no escape by the time we get there.”

“Is there any more information you can give me?” Sasha asked hysterically. 

“What kind of endless nightmare?” Gerry asked from the backseat. “How come I never get to see any of the nightmares?”

“Honestly, Gerry, you’re so stupid ,” Agnes sniffed. “If you get trapped in a human meat garden I’m not getting you out. 

“What if I want to see a human meat garden -”

At this, Agnes just looked contemplative. “That does sound cool.” She reached out, poking Jon in the back of the head. “Take us on a field trip to the human meat garden!”

“Do you think they have corpse flowers?” Gerry asked, enthralled. “But literally ?”

“Kids, I will turn this car around,” Sasha said, and both of the kids shut up. 

Jon, for his part, squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. “I didn’t look too hard.” At Sasha’s hard look, he sunk a little deeper in the seat. “Look, Sasha, this is hard for me. I’m trying here, genuinely. I want to help fix the world and be better. I just know that Martin Blackwood’s integral in that. I just…” Jon shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know what to do with humans.”

Sasha glanced at him out of the corner of her eye for a long, hard moment before seemingly coming to a conclusion. She said, “Then it’s a good thing I’m here.”

Something strange and warm swirled in Jon’s chest. It felt like Daisy’s human smile, or Agnes and Gerry’s tight hugs. For a brief, ridiculous, flighty second, he imagined that it was what a human heartbeat felt like. Maybe humans had that warmth in their chest all the time. 

If Jon felt like that all the time, he decided, then it would be easy to be kind. No wonder it was so difficult for Jon to be kind like Gerry or heroic like Sasha: he had a handicap, a cold chest and a mind that found it difficult to understand anybody who wasn’t himself. It wasn’t his fault he was like this, probably. 

Jared’s words from - had it only been two weeks? - ago floated through his mind. That an Avatar was everything a human was, except with an extra drive in their bodies, a different kind of hunger that pushed them towards such acts that a human would never contemplate...that couldn’t be right. Jon and Sasha were too different for that. There was no way they had anything in common. 

Abruptly, Jon developed cold feet about meeting this Martin Blackwood. The last thing he needed was more humans in his life. They probably...poisoned the mind or something. Made you all guilty and sad. Having two humans in his life was overwhelming enough, he couldn’t possibly imagine a third. What if Martin was mean to him and he destroyed his house again ? He had just gotten it. 

Before Jon could spiral too deeply into these thoughts, something pricked at his attention. “Turn right here,” Jon said, and Sasha skidded the turn again. She deftly avoided another bus, and was forced to swerve again to avoid a hellish fear-beast from the eldritch dimension that sometimes ate out of Jon’s trash. “Sasha, do you really think it’s possible for me to be a better person?”

“Since when do I get to decide that?” Sasha asked, and the answer flabbergasted Jon so much that he sat in stunned silence for the next five minutes, only barely remembering to give Sasha directions to turn onto the freeway and what exit to take. 

He steadily grew more nervous as they grew further away from London, away from the heart of the city and flying through its suburbs until they encountered its outskirts. When Sasha slid the cover of the convertible up the car suddenly became somewhat claustrophobic. He hadn’t been this far away from the city center in years. He didn’t exactly have any good memories outside of it - or, really, a lot of memories at all. 

“Are we there yet?” Agnes asked, yawning. “I hate being outside London, it’s so boring.”

“Boring!” Gerry squawked, who was trying to push his head out of the lowered window that Daisy was already enjoying. “Are you crazy? It’s London that’s boring. All it has is monsters and coffee shops. It’s not a real city like Venice.”

“Shut up about Venice,” Agnes sniped. She put on a fake falsetto. “ ‘Oh, look at me, I’m Gerry Keay and I’m a world traveller. I’m so cool and worldly, I’m nothing like dumb Agnes who never leaves London. I’ve been to America . You’re such a ponce.”

“You’re just jealous you’ve never been to America,” Gerry said smugly. “Still jealous you never got to see the world’s largest ball of twine, Agnes?”

“Yes! I’m so jealous!” Agnes yelled, making Gerry laugh. “I want to see the twine, it’s so unfair!”

“Kids, I’m afraid planes don’t exist anymore,” Jon said apologetically. “Sasha, get off the feeder road here. I suppose you could take a boat to the continent, but it’s not worth the danger.”

In the rearview mirror, he saw Agnes cross her arms and look out the window, jaw set. “Gerry and I are going to see America and Egypt and Australia,” she said, seemingly to herself. “We will. One day. When things are better. ”

As Sasha veered off the highway, she exchanged a nervous look with Jon. Jon shrugged helplessly. It was the job of any parent to crush the dreams of their adolescent children to help acclimate them towards capitalism, but as Jon was more of an uncle he felt more as if he should vaguely encourage her. 

The scenery shifted and changed, subduing itself from the towering London center into the far sleepier English suburbs. Row houses began to predominate, long buildings like caterpillars stretched out over empty streets. The sky was as fluorescent green as ever, the time of day impossible to tell, and glass window panes lit up and darkened like great eyes blinking. 

The sense grew stronger, and Jon felt his eyes slowly blink open. Jon directed Sasha left, then right, then a U-turn, then a sharp bank right. They slowly drifted off the main street into a back alley, a forgotten dirt road in this London suburb, unknown to anyone very important at all. 

Something pressed at Jon’s teeth, like a juicy secret barely restrained, and Jon opened his mouth and let the words fall out. “Chiswick, England. A happy suburb for you and your family. A place where dreams can come true, so long as you can tolerate a thirty minute commute in morning traffic. A happy place, to raise your happy family. It is where dreams go to die. For in Chiswick, England, there is the death of meaning -”

“Seriously?” Sasha interrupted, pissed off. “You’re doing this now?”

Like tripping over a crack in the sidewalk, Jon was abruptly jolted out of the Statement. “I - why yes, Sasha, I’m doing it now, I do it all the time. I don’t know if you noticed, but it’s kind of my thing -”

“Is this like that thing at the Starbucks? And the house?” Sasha asked, glaring at him. The green light washed her out a little, made her look sickly, and Jon sunk in his seat. “Save it, we’re on a mission. Martin needs a rescue, and he’s going to need it soon. Where is he?”

“Have you considered ,” Jon said, aggravated and feeling a little like his delicious bowl of ice cream had just been whisked away because he didn’t eat his broccoli, “that I would have gotten to what Martin is doing?”

“If Martin’s trapped in a hellscape then I don’t want to know about it, Jon!”

“What makes you think he’s trapped?” Jon asked, confused. 

But Sasha just shrugged awkwardly. “It’s Martin. He’s - well, you know.”

“I don’t.”

“Not cut out for this,” Sasha said, lamely. “He’s, you know, the delicate type -”

“Here! Here, turn here!” Jon jabbed a finger at the windshield, cuing Sasha to turn and roll into a small car park. The lot was full, polluted with beat up Station Wagons and battered Hondas, and Jon quickly dove out of the car the minute it rolled to a standstill. The others were hot on his tail, pouring out of the convertible to stand in front of the building they had just arrived in front of. 

And, despite himself, although he knew that he shouldn’t, Jon opened his mouth. 

“The Fox & Hound pub is not so much a marker of English history as it is a remnant of it. A safe space, it promises, a home to you. A home away from home. Your home isn’t so homey, is it? It’s not safe and kind and warm. It has that nagging wife, that bratty kid. But the Fox & Hound has the people who you really like spending time with. Your mates, the billiard table, the pint. It’s about the food. It’s about the company. It’s about your coworkers, your group, your war buddies, your mates. It’s about Mr. Guinness, Mr. Budweiser, Mr. Coors Light, Mr. Carling. But isn’t it nice to be someplace where everybody knows your name?”

“We don’t have time for this,” Gerry called, and Daisy growled next to Jon. “Let’s just go in, see if we can rescue -”

Jon, without thinking of it, without even truly being cognizant, reached out and grabbed Gerry’s jacket hood. He pulled him back in, keeping him close, and when Gerry tried to squirm free he tightened his grip to a vice. Gerry wheezed and stood still, and Agnes’ expression darkened in fury. 

“Every day is the same, in the Fox & Hound. Especially lately. Nobody makes you go to work anymore. Nobody makes you go home, to that quiet and empty house. You can stay at the pub for as long as you want, drinking your cares away in that great English tradition. So you do. After a while, you don’t even notice the cobwebs.”

Lightning rolled, and the distant gaze and attention of the Eye in the sky drifted closer, and closer, and closer…

“But today is different. There’s an interloper, in your friendly neighborhood pub. Strange people, these interlopers. Their eyes are cold, and they walk proudly with straight backs, not slumped in defeat. They aren’t from around here. Foreigners. It’s just not right. Why are they here, threatening you, making you feel lesser? As if they’re better than you? They aren’t from around here. What are they doing, in your neighborhood pub?”

“More than one person,” Sasha muttered, static through his buzzing brain. “Two of them? Who could be the - maybe he did live -”

“You don’t remember who broke the first glass. But they had the right of it. You break yours too, mindless of the shards of glass that stick in your palm. You have a weapon now. You can protect yourself, in case the interlopers try anything. The cobwebs patch up the bleeding right enough, anyway. You stumble, but you’re sober enough to handle these two monsters. Your mate, your old buddy, picks up a chair and throws it at them. It crashes through a window, shards of glass flying, and you feel adrenaline rushing through your veins. The hunt’s begun.”

Right on time, a window exploded outwards, and the exact spot where Gerry had been standing before Jon pulled him back was soon littered in shards of glass. Gerry blanched, and Sasha quickly pulled an increasingly incensed Agnes back too. 

Distantly, through the window, raised voices could be heard. Spiders, crawling along a windowpane in neat and prim lines, began spinning webs to seal up the hole - jumping from top to bottom, like little parachuters, drifting down on tendrils of web. 

“The tall one, with the cold stare, freezes you to the spot. She makes you feel ashamed - ashamed of your choices, ashamed that you abandoned your wife and boy. But she doesn’t have the right. You’re a good person, you just - struggle, sometimes. You just struggle. You struggle now, when you lunge for her, for your wife, for your child. But unlike back then, that horrible moment when you lost your temper, she can fight back. She grabs your arm and throws you, sending you crashing to the ground. First blood goes to the interlopers. But your mates will avenger you. Cheswick protects its own.”

And, like a roar, it began.

The pub shook with the anger of unleashed people, trapped for so long and finally given release. Shouting echoes, even screams, and crashes and thumps echoed from within the pub. Jon’s powerless to do anything, rooted to the spot and regurgitating this awful history played out in front of his eyes, but Sasha and Daisy aren’t. Daisy howled, ready to jump forward and rescue their quarry, to ferret out their prey, but before either her or Sasha could step forward the double doors of the pub are thrown open.

A body comes sailing out, skidding roughly on the concrete. Another one joined it. For a brief, dizzying moment, Jon wonders if one of the men is Martin Blackwood. If he came all this way to talk to the one person who could give him answers just to lose him. 

Slowly, almost without him even noticing, he slides out of the Statement. Suddenly it didn’t seem so important. This was dangerous, he had to get the humans out of here - he had to protect someone, anyone, not be useless -

An acrid smell tinged the air, and in a soft whuff of smoke began drifting out of the windows. Amidst the smoke blowing out from the open doors, amidst the screaming and crashing and violence that the pub-goers now enacted on each other, their quarry forgotten, two figures emerged from the smoke. 

One was tall and slim, cutting an elegant figure amidst the smoke. A flannel shirt poking out from under a leather jacket, she wore jeans and boots with a scarf mysteriously draped around her head. Despite the rough and practical clothing, there was a certain mystique and allure in her cool expression, almost blank. She carried a large double-barreled shotgun, wielding it with long familiarity. 

Beside him, Daisy stiffened, all her fur on edge. Jon instinctually put a hand on her ruff to calm her, but beneath her thick coat of fur he felt her almost trembling - with fear or with excitement, he couldn’t tell. 

But it was the figure beside the elegantly terrifying woman who caught Jon’s attention. Painfully familiar, yet completely foreign, he was short and roundish. Everything about him carried the deceptive feeling of softness, but there was something hard-edged underneath those soft lines too: under the matching flannel and leather jacket combo Jon could clearly see the outlines of biceps, of unassuming strength and fitness. He was carrying a giant hatchet, a fierce yet aloof expression across his face, and his jet-black hair was cropped short on his head. Everything about him was battle-worn, battle-damaged, yet unmistakably the stronger for it. 

He was, recognizably, the figure from Jon’s dreams - his memories - but impossibly different. Whether Jon’s memory was incorrect, if the figure had simply matured and changed in the last three years, Jon didn’t know. But something struck him in the empty space where his heart must have once beat, making his throat close up and his head swim. He felt lightheaded and grounded simultaneously, his nonexistent breath caught and every nerve and hair on edge. 

Martin Blackwood was positively dashing , and Jon fell in love instantly. 

It was obvious, when the pair noticed them. They carefully stepped over the pile of bodies, but when the man who must have been Martin Blackwood looked up he blanched so hard he almost tripped. His partner caught him by the elbow just in time, saying something under her breath to him, but when he shakily lifted a hand to point at Jon’s small party his partner almost froze. They stood, absolutely still, staring at Jon and his family. Almost unconsciously Jon pushed Agnes further behind him, Sasha covering Gerry, despite the kids’ attempts to peer around them to see the newcomers. Sasha’s jaw was dropped, as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. Jon didn’t blame her: it wasn’t every day you saw the most handsome man on earth. 

Then the woman raised her gun and pointed it at them, and Daisy quailed. Jon was more startled by Daisy’s reaction than the gun: she was almost hiding behind Jon, tail tucked behind her legs, an uncommonly terrified reaction. Her body was shaking from - it couldn’t be fear. Excitement, trepidation, something. Daisy was afraid of nothing . She was incapable. 

Well, Jon had never been shot before, and although he was pretty sure he would survive it he raised both his hands above his head anyway. Sasha cautiously raised her hands above her head too, although she appeared to also be excitedly gesturing to herself. 

Caught in the strangest stand-off of all time, Jon figured that as team leader he ought to speak for them. Jon cautiously and slowly stepped forward, ready to introduce his party and dazzle Martin Blackwood and co with their brilliance, when Sasha beat him to the punch. 

“Holy shit, Martin!” Sasha yelled enthusiastically, making Martin Blackwood blanch. “When did you get cool looking!”

“Stay where you are!” the woman called, with her gun still pointed at Sasha, and Sasha froze. She conferred with her partner for a second, an unexpectedly intense discussion, before returning her attention to Sasha and Jon. “Who sent you?”

But Sasha was practically hopping up and down in excitement - maybe just glad to see a familiar face, even if that face was pointing a gun at her. “Martin, it’s me! Your coworker, Sasha James! I came back from the dead! Actually, I was never quite dead - this guy who says he’s Jon rescued me?” She gestured demonstratively at Jon, who blushed. “When did you get so ripped? Why are you ripped?”

Now both Martin and his partner were staring at them, fairly flabbergasted. It was only then, with Martin and his partner caught completely off-guard, that the doors to the pub were thrown open and a thick crush of brawlers, pub-goers, and victims poured out, screaming. One stopped behind Martin, his own axe raised far above his head, howling a guttural scream, and before Martin could even react Agnes stepped out from behind Jon and snapped her fingers. 

The man combusted, suddenly and without fanfare, and Martin quickly ducked out of the way. The man didn’t even have time to scream - reduced to ash in the manner of seconds. Agnes smirked, red hair flying around her shoulders as her peasant skirt whipped in nonexistent wind, and raised her hand again. 

“Let’s put them out of their misery,” Agnes said, before snapping her fingers again.

The quip was just enough warning for Martin and his partner to leap forward as the pub abruptly exploded. No, exploded was the wrong word for it - one second, it was a building, and the next minute, it was fire. There was no concussive blast, save for the great gulp of oxygen the fire took, but in the manner of seconds pub-goers and corpses alike both lit up in cleansing flames, the building itself swallowed by the fire in an instant. 

And just as quickly as it began, it was over. Agnes’ purifying flames were complete and unnatural, and as Martin and his partner frantically ran  from the fire until they were practically skidding to a stop in front of Jon and his party, the fire was already extinguishing itself. There was no more food to feed it: where once was pub and corpses, there was now only ash. The sleepy little London suburb was now the site of a massacre, a historic building and a neighborhood reduced to so much ash. 

Martin and his partner stared at Jon and his party, open mouthed, in what Jon could only interpret as amazed awe. Agnes smirked, flipping her hair over her shoulder, and Jon reached out to clap his hand on her shoulder. 

“Great job, Agnes,” Jon said. “Very quick thinking.”

Gerry poked his head out from behind Sasha, arms crossed. “Quick thinking? All she did was set it on fire. Hardly a strategy.”

“You don’t need a strategy when you can set everything that pisses you off on fire, Gerard,” Agnes sniped, before turning around and flashing her most winning smile at the tall woman. She extended a hand, which made the woman step back. “Agnes Montague. Fifteen, cult leader. Dedicated to saving the world from evil. I assume you two are fellow revolutionaries?”

Not to be outdone, Gerry pushed past Sasha and extended his own hand to Martin Blackwood, who hesitantly shook it. “Gerard Keay, fifteen, rare book collector. I’m also helping save the world.” He pointed at Sasha, who waved hesitantly. “That’s Aunt Sasha, she’s undead.” He pointed at Jon, who tried very hard to look cool and mysterious. “That’s Jon, he’s lame.” He pointed at Daisy, who was still hiding mysteriously behind Jon. “That’s -” Daisy barked sharply, and they must be getting better at interpreting Daisy, because Gerry stopped short and blinked. “ - our pet wolf. She’s cooler than Jon. Are you guys demon hunters? I’m a demon hunter. Do you want to team up? It would be cool if we teamed up.”

Martin and his partner gaped at them. Martin stared at Sasha, when Jon wanted him to stare at him. 

Sasha gave Martin the thumbs-up. “Guess who’s unemployed!”

And, slowly, hesitantly, painfully, Martin looked at Jon. He looked at Jon as if - as if he couldn’t believe it, as if he was looking for proof that Jon was Jon, that he always had been. He looked as if he had missed Jon. 

So there was someone who had missed him after all. Someone who had mourned him. And, abruptly, Jon felt two strong emotions in complete and total conflict: that Martin Blackwood was someone who had loved him very much, and that he was someone who loved the man who Jonathan Sims had killed. 

Jon panicked. 

“Hey!” Jon squeaked, and shot Martin some very suave finger-guns. “Are you a ghost? Because you’ve been...haunting my dreams! Haha!”

Beside him, Sasha facepalmed. Daisy groaned. The kids shrieked with laughter. The elegant woman looked faintly ill. And Martin...Martin looked…

Jon couldn’t tell. 

“We have to talk,” Martin said. 

Well. That wasn’t a good sign. 

They ended up going to a diner.

Mostly because Jon didn’t want to have this conversation in a parking lot. Partly because the wind was picking up, and the large quantity of ashes was blowing directly in the faces of humans, who complained that it interfered with their ‘breathing’ or something gratuitous like that. Jon, who worried frequently about Gerry developing lung cancer, quickly shepherded them all into an American style novelty diner around the corner. 

The two supernatural demon hunters , as if Martin Blackwood could get any cooler, looked strongly as if Jon was trying to take them to a secondary location, but as the ash was stifling them just as much they went. Jon even made a big show of letting the woman go inside first and clear the area, before he slipped in after her and quietly stared the nightshades lurking in the corners looking for stoners to death, and held the door open for his family. He even held the door open for Martin Blackwood, wanting to feel like an extremely suave and cool gentleman, but mostly feeling extremely sweaty and dirty. He had never registered before this how tattered and frayed his trenchcoat was, or how many holes were in his vest. Why hadn’t he worn his good trenchcoat? Why hadn’t he thought about making a good impression! He had been wearing this outfit for two weeks straight as he slept off making a house, it stunk! 

Daisy slid in last, and Jon let the enthusiastically chattering Sasha who was trying to tell a dazed Martin the events of the last few weeks direct them all to a table. He looked down at her, still a little caught-off guard by her open show of fear, and scowled. 

“What was that back there?” Jon hissed, and Daisly guiltily froze. “What’s wrong?”

Daisy yipped a very evasive and unhelpful remark. Jon wasn’t amused. 

“Why can’t they know? We can hardly pretend as if you’re a normal giant wolf.”

Daisy’s opinion was that, actually, they could totally do that. 

“I thought the point was to get answers from -”

Daisy cut him off sharply, telling him to drop it, that she wasn’t ready to talk about it, and Jon fell silent out of respect. Daisy asked for so little from him, so rarely displayed fear or weakness, and when he saw vulnerability from her he respected it. If she needed this from him, he’d give it. He’d give her whatever he can. He owed that to her. 

The diner was very retro, American, and abandoned. No waitresses, no denizens. Maybe they were all at the pub. Sasha had directed them all to a large booth, and Jon slid in at the end as Daisy jumped up next to him and laid down on the vinyl, promptly beginning to anxiously poke holes in it. 

“ - you really have no idea how glad I am to see you, man,” Sasha enthused, as Martin squinted at her suspiciously. “I thought that - you know, that everyone was, like, dead? It really seemed like everyone was dead. I mean, some dead people are obviously back to life, like the kids - I think I have kids now, by the way, this wasn’t voluntary - and some are half dead but look way different - do you know Helen? She used to go by Michael? She’s not actually all that bad, like, she freaks me out a bit, but who doesn’t, haha! Then there’s this one,” she gestured empathetically at Jon, who blushed, “who’s a complete freak, but isn’t all that bad. But you two recognize each other, right? Right?”

Martin stared at Jon. Jon stared at Martin. The woman squinted suspiciously at both of them. Martin’s eyes were a dark brown, almost black, and his expression was unreadable as he stared at Jon. Why was everything about him so incomprehensible ?

Sasha leaned over and elbowed Jon. “Dude,” she hissed, “say that you recognize him, they probably think we’re evil body stealing monsters.”

But -

“I’m not sure I’m not an evil bodystealing monster,” Jon said apologetically, and Sasha elbowed him very hard in the side. “Watch those elbows, woman! Lord, you are vicious.”

“ I’m vicious?” Sasha hissed. “You’re the one who melted your flat over a temper tantrum -”

“I’ve been going through a lot,” Jon said, offended. “Look, I’ve been having a real - a real identity crisis, you know.”

“You’ve been having a hard time? Man, I woke up five years after my death, in an apocalypse, and you’ve been having a hard time? You’re such a baby.”

“Sasha,” Jon hissed, hunching his shoulders, “not in front of Blackwood -”

“Okay,” the elegant woman said crisply, clearly, and finally, and Sasha and Jon abruptly fell silent. “I think you’re Sasha James.” She turned to look at Jon, who hunched his shoulders up even further. “You’re about as stupid as Jon used to be.”

Ouch. “Do I know you?” Jon asked brittly.

The woman paused, just a second, but when she spoke it wasn’t a question. “You don’t remember me.”

“I don’t remember anything,” Jon said sullenly. Hideously aware of Martin’s intense look, he folded his arms. “Everybody’s been telling me lately that I’m ‘repressing the trauma of my human existence’ or what ever . I don’t care. Humanity’s stupid, anyway.” Jon abruptly remembered that Martin was very likely human. “Not - not humans! Some humans are good! I think humans are great, especially - especially axes, you know, wow, those axes.”

“So this is why you’re still single,” Gerry said, sucking on a milkshake he found from somewhere. 

“But you’re the Archivist,” the woman said flatly. She had a particular way of making a question sound like a statement.

Jon could only nod. “Yes. I’ve been, uh, not doing a fair bit of Archiving lately - I guess calling me an Archive would be most accurate?” Jon teetered a hand in uncertainty. “I am omniscient. About most things. I also have other talents, but that isn’t important.” He swallowed. “World ending talents. That’s the last thing I remember, really. Or don’t remember. I woke up after the world ended, when it was - forming, and the first thing I saw was...you,” Jon nodded shyly at Martin, “and...I got scared. I ran. For a long time. I suppose I didn’t stop.”

The table fell awkwardly silent. The woman just stared coldly at Jon, unblinking, while Martin had an inscrutable expression.

Finally, for the first time since they entered this strange and empty diner, Martin spoke. “Why didn’t you come back?”

“I didn’t know there was anything to come back to,” Jon said helplessly. 

Abruptly, Martin quickly slid off the booth and left. He pushed his way through the front doors, disappearing out the building, stressing Jon out tremendously. Daisy watched him go carefully before nosing Jon’s leg as he groaned, burying his face in his hands. 

Agnes leaned behind Sasha, from where she and Gerry were sitting at her left, and delicately patted Jon on the back. She had, somehow, also found a milkshake. “It’s okay, Jon,” she said supportively, “many people are perfectly happy being single their entire lives.”

“You don’t need a man,” Gerry said, slurping his milkshake. “You’re an independent woman.”

“So how do you know Jon?” Sasha asked the woman, somewhat desperately to pull this conversation back on track.

The woman’s lips tightened. “I was an Archive Assistant too. It helps protect us, a little bit. It’s a large part of why Martin and I haven’t been captured by any nightmares yet.” She eyed Jon warily. “You really don’t know me.”

“Are you lording the fact that you have yet to introduce yourself over my head?” Jon asked dully. “Look, I just don’t want the headache from asking the Eye.”

The woman’s eyebrow raised, probably at the casual reference to the eye, before she stiffly shrugged. “Basira Hussain. Never thought I’d sit at a table full of people I was convinced were dead, but life’s full of surprises.” She folded her hands on the table, leaning forward intently. “Have any of you heard, or encountered, or know, an Alice Tonner?”

Everybody looked at each other. Daisy ripped a long score down the vinyl.

Jon shrugged. “Nope.”

“Never heard of her,” Sasha said.

Both Gerry and Agnes shook their heads.

Basira sagged, just a little, as if she had her hopes dashed so many times it barely affected her. “Great. Figured you, of all people…” She shook herself, looking back at Jon. “Martin told me what happened - about the Statement, about Jonah causing the apocalypse through you. He looked for you for weeks, but he couldn’t find you. Eventually we met up, and we’ve spent every second just then just trying to survive. We were trying to make our way to London, since we heard some old friends of ours were living there.”

Jon perked up. “Us?”

But Basira just shook her head. “Melanie King and Georgie Barker.” She kept a careful eye on Jon, as if gauging his reaction, but he just stared blankly at her. She really wasn’t getting this whole amnesia thing. Sasha, beside Jon, looked slightly thoughtful, as if she was trying to place the names. “You don’t look like you’ve been roughing it. None of you do. Living it up as king of the world, Archivist?”

Lord, was this woman hostile. Must be a new thing. Jon shrugged, unable to feel really offended. “Just making a living, same as anybody else. I try to keep my head down. It’s not worth it to attract Jonah’s attention. Besides, I like the quiet life. Just me and my dog.” He scratched Daisy’s head, wary of the way she kept a yellow eye fixed solidly on Basira. From Basira’s creeped-out look, she was well aware. “The kids kind of tripped and fell into my life, and Sasha - well, she was a complication to a routine case.” Jon scowled. “Annabelle so owes me for all of this. She’s so useless.”

Basira stiffened. “Annabelle Cane? The Daughter of Spiders?”

Her and her pretentious titles. Jon waved a hand. “Sure, her. She’s one of my oldest friends - as far as that goes, I suppose.” Jon leaned forward, and Basira noticeably leaned back. “Ms. Hussain. I’ve been living three years without an identity, a past, anything . It wasn’t until I met Sasha that I knew I had a past to miss . It’s because of her that I sought out Martin Blackwood. I’ve been dreaming of him. I’ve been searching for these clues and hints to my past, trying to see if I’m human or demon, and - and it’s only recently that I’ve realized that I’m too scared to really find the answers. There’s one last question I need to ask, one last mystery. Martin Blackwood’s the only one with the answer. I need to talk to him.”

Everybody stared at him, and Jon flushed slightly, leaning back in his seat. He was trying here, he really was. Wasn’t it enough?”

Basira stared at him unblinkingly, expression inscrutable. Finally, she said, “Word on the wind for years is that the Archivist’s set up shop in London. Aren’t you wondering why he didn’t come find you?”

Jon blinked at her, slowly and purposefully. “Why would he?”

More staring. Did the woman blink? "Do you not know?"

"I know everything," Jon said, aggravated, "and also nothing. You're quite inscrutable, you know that?"

"Not the first time you've told me that." Basira folded her hands on the desk, calm and sure. Something about her eyes bore into Jon, and found them wanting. Somehow, that was familiar too. "What do you want, Jon?"

“I want to be better,” Jon said, slowly but surely. Absolutely. He clenched his hands in his lap. “I’m ready to be better. I just need a resolution to something. Only Martin can give me that resolution. Please, I - I need this.”

Basira Hussain’s expression didn’t change, but she seemed to come to a decision when she glanced towards the door. “He’s right there.”

That all the permission Jon needed. He carefully nudged Daisy off, waiting for her to leap onto the floor, and Jon slid off the booth and walked as authoritatively as he could towards the door, not looking back. He pushed the double doors open, looking around for Martin before seeing a small, huddled figure leaning up against a wall.

The figure, impossibly enough, was Martin. The show of vulnerability was so alien to the way Jon was already conceptualizing the man, proud and strong and cool. His knees were drawn to his chest, and his forehead was resting on his knees. His arm was wrapped around his legs, and he looked both two steps away from a panic attack and thoroughly miserable. 

Jon cautiously walked up, cautious of spooking him, but at the slightest scuffle of his trainers against pavement Martin Blackwood’s face jerked up. He didn’t seem as if he had been crying - instead, his face was curiously blank, his eyes clouded. 

If Jon Looked, really Looked, he could see the stench of Lonely all over the man. He was marked by it, and it nipped at his heels and settled around his shoulders. Other fears, too, had all taken their bite of him: the Slaughter lingered around his hands, the Web clung to his coat. The Eye’s claim was sure, draped over him like a blanket, safe and secure. He was a man with a hard life, even before the apocalypse. No man marked this thoroughly had lived a happy life. 

“Mr. Blackwood?” Jon asked hesitantly, clasping his hands behind his back. “Have I upset you?”

Martin stared at him blankly, as if he couldn’t believe Jon was real. 

Jon felt the same, but he bit down on the sentiment. Say something, make him feel at ease - but he was a human, how the fuck did you interact with humans - he wasn’t just any human, he was a super cool and sexy demon hunter - come on! Just say something, anything! 

“Do you work out?” Jon blurted. 

Silence yawned between them. Jon felt like an idiot. 

“You know what,” Jon said quickly, “never mind. Forget I said - anything, forget I said anything. Right. Right!” Jon rocked back and forth on his heels, feeling like the teenager he had never been. “It’s good to finally meet you. I’ve, uh, would have come sooner. I would! But I just assumed you were dead. There was no way Sasha’s old coworkers ever survived, I thought. I guess I’m not a very good omniscient god on earth, huh?” Martin just stared. Jon felt like even more of an idiot. “Did you know I’m a detective? I find lost things. It’s, er, not lucrative, or important, but I like doing it. I’m quite good at it, honestly, but - but that’s no surprise. I cheat.”

Martin stared. 

“But maybe I’m not so good at it,” Jon said, quieter, talking more to himself than the strange and silent Blackwood. “I couldn’t find my own memories. I can’t find - I can’t help my dog. I couldn’t even find you. And you were important to me, I just know it. I feel it.” He looked up at Martin, desperately. “Do you feel it too? This - this emptiness? Do you feel as if, maybe, you and me -” He closed his mouth, clenching his jaw, before finally digging for the question he knew he had to ask. “Why didn’t you come save me?”

Martin looked a little as if his heart was breaking. Jon felt very wretched, making somebody so strong look so fragile. 

“I thought there was nothing of you left,” Martin whispered, and Jon Knew in that second that Martin had nightmares of this. Nightmares that Jon would appear in front of him again, bloodied and bleeding, insane and inhuman, asking Martin why he hadn’t saved him. “You wouldn’t have left if you were still Jon. You wouldn’t have left me. I thought you had become a monster.”

“I did,” Jon said. “Did - did nobody tell you?”

They stared at each other. It was awkward. 

“You don’t seem very…” Martin waved a hand in front of his space. “Eye-ey?”

“Oh! That’s only sometimes.” Jon unclasped his hands, before reclasping them in front of his chest, anxiously playing with his fingers. “I’m sorry I abandoned you. If I had known that you were ripped - I mean, that you were important , I wouldn’t have. Or maybe I would have. Truth me told, I’m not a very nice person. Or much of a person at all, really. It’s always been...you know, Jon first! Haha.” Jon faltered a little. He wasn’t making himself sound very good. “I’ve been making more of an effort, lately. To be someone who - who values life, and people, and being good. Like Sasha James said I - said Jonathan Sims used to. It’s hard, but I’m trying, and - and the first step was helping you! Making up for, you know, ditching you. If I - or, well, Agnes - hadn’t shown up, something awful would have happened.” Jon paused, thoughtful. “Or maybe it’s not about good or bad, not really. Maybe it’s more about trying. Trying to be...I don’t know, more than you are. More than your nature, or your inclination, or who you are when you can do whatever you want. I’m trying. And - and I figured the first step of that, was to...ask you a question.” Jon winced, wringing his fingers out. “Can I ask? I won’t compel.”

“...yeah, Jon, you can ask.”

Finally. Finally, something. Jon took a deep breath, screwing his courage up. “Is there anything of the human Jonathan Sims left in me? Or am I - is he…”

Martin stared at him blankly. 

“How am I supposed to know something like that?” Martin asked. 

Jon flushed, abruptly embarrassed. “You told me in that dream!”

“What dream!” Martin cried, exasperated. “I haven’t been dreaming of you at all ! I thought you were - I don’t know, gone?”

Distantly, Jon stepped back. “The Archivist can’t die in this world. You, of all people, should know that.”

Bitterly and strangely, Martin snorted. It wasn’t an expression that suited his face well. Martin shouldn’t make that face, that strange and ugly face. It wasn’t right. “There’s lots of ways to die, Jon. You, of all people, should know that.”

It wasn’t an answer. Martin had avoided answering, deflecting as if he was ignorant. But the true answer shone through, and Jon couldn’t deny it. 

“Why did I destroy the world?” Jon asked. 

Martin’s expression tightened. “It wasn’t voluntary, if that’s what you’ve been wondering.” Some strange part of Jon collapsed and folded in relief, an exhale for a breath he didn’t realize he had been holding. He had felt it, he had known , but...he hadn’t known. And he had always wondered. “I...don’t know what happened. I came home one day and you - it was bad. I saw the Statement afterwards.” Statement? A Statement ended the world? That was nonsensical. “It had been Jonah Magnus, puppeteering you like always. When you ran off and didn’t come back...I assumed you were dead. In one way or another.”

Somehow, knowing that Jonah had forced Jon to bring about the apocalypse...well, it was less than a surprise. “He’s such a ponce,” Jon groused, ignoring Martin’s raised eyebrow. He met Martin’s eyes, but something in Martin seemed to recoil at their electric green. “The man you knew is gone, Mr. Blackwood. But - but I think the Martin Blackwood of three years ago is gone too, and the Basira, and the Gerry and Agnes. Every change is its own kind of death.” Jon let his eyes whir, churning and chasing. “Is there anything human left in me, Mr. Blackwood? Or has my change been complete?”

“The man who used to be my boyfriend can call me Martin, you know,” Martin said dully, as if he couldn’t believe that he was having to say that. “And for the Archivist, you don’t have a very nuanced understanding of humanity.” 

“I’m not the man who used to be your boyfriend, Martin Blackwood! I’m sorry, but the man you loved is gone!” Jon cried, and he realized it for the first time himself. Martin had loved Jonathan Sims, and Jon had killed him. Of course he resented him. Of course he looked at Jon like he was dead inside, hollowed out and tired. Jon hadn’t just killed the world, he had killed Martin’s world. “I thought for years that there had to be something of him left in me, that I just had to find it - but there’s none. There’s no humanity left in me. But - but I’m trying, Mr. Blackwood. Martin. I’m finally trying. I just don’t know how to try. I need your help.”

For the first time, Martin looked Jon in the eyes, and Jon couldn’t help but recoil. There was no love or forgiveness there, no malice or cruelty. That, at least, Jon could understand. There was only exhausted, a tiredness that wormed its way into his soul, and it consumed. 

“I can’t help anyone,” Martin said. “I can’t help you.”

And that was it. 

Martin stood up, shoved his hands in his pockets, and went back inside. Jon stood there, staring blankly at a wall, feeling lost, before he remembered where he was and went back inside too. 

Martin was already sitting back down at the booth, which had mysteriously acquired a large bucket of curly fries dripping with something viscous, and Sasha was unphasedly digging into them. Jon’s family eyed him and his drooping coat, and the stoic Martin, before sliding their eyes back to Jon.

Through a mouth of mashed onion, Gerry garbled out, “That bad?”

“We broke up,” Jon said dully. 

“Wow,” Sasha said, as Agnes reached over and patted Jon on the back. “New record, even for you.”

Daisy’s tongue lolled out of her mouth, smiling a canine grin at a suddenly spooked Martin, somewhat self-satisfied. 

“We were never together,” Martin said firmly, and Basira raised an eyebrow at him. Strangely, he flushed a little. “Not - look, it’s obviously not Jon.”

Basira made a show of looking Jon up and down, making him feel strongly like both a puppy in a pet store window and a pig being readied for the slaughter. “Sure looks like him to me.”

“I know my own boyfriend,” Martin said crisply, before exchanging another series of significant glances with Basira before the woman shrugged. Jon glanced at Daisy, and they had their own significant eyebrow conversation that mostly amounted to - get a load of this guy. “Look, what’s the plan, Basira?”

“I’ve been talking with Assistants 2.0,” Basira said. Did the woman know how to make a tonal inflection? Should Jon teach her? “They’re invested in helping ameliorate some of the damage Jonah Magnus did to the world. They want to team up a bit.”

“We can’t possibly be teaming up with them,” Martin panned. 

But Basira just shrugged. “I’d like to have the girl who can blow up a building with a thought on our side, thanks.”

“We can do it -”

“Can we?”

They stared at each other, somehow significantly. 

Whatever conversation they were having, Martin seemed to lose. He sighed, looking back at Sasha. He stubbornly avoided Jon’s eyes. “We’re going to connect with Georgie and Melanie. Figure things will be easier to coordinate from there. If you guys want to...help...we’ll accept it.”

“Helen can -” Jon immediately volunteered. 

“No Helen,” Martin said firmly. “That’s a definite no. We’ll get there the old fashioned way. Less supernatural, the better.”

Jon sniffed imperiously. “What’s wrong with a little supernatural?.” But he opened his Eyes anyway, focusing his many sights on Martin and Basira. He memorized them, every wrinkle in their hands and the tight crease of the corners of their eyes. “You’ll make it to London without incident. Meet us at my offices. We can talk more then.”

Something in Jon’s eyes seemed to spook Martin, but Basira was already flipping open a small yellowed notepad. “Address?”

Jon stared blankly at her. He looked at Sasha. “What’s our address, again?”

“Do you see what I’ve been dealing with?” Sasha asked Basira mournfully. “It’s just been this, nonstop, ever since I was resurrected from the dead.”

“Your life is so hard,” Basira panned. 

But Jon already found his attention drifting to Martin again, who was looking both sad and profoundly uncomfortable. “Maybe once we’re there, I can give you a tour of London,” Jon said eagerly, while trying not to sound too eager. “I know this, uh, really fabulous little boba shop, very out of the way, great place to go if you want to - like, know each other better? What do you say?”

Martin groaned. 

Which wasn’t a no .

Chapter Text

The drive back to London was far more relaxed, even if Jon’s head was swimming. 

As Sasha drove maniacally through the abandoned streets, and the kids bickered in the back about whether or not Miss Basira could kill Simon Fairchild in one hit, Jon found himself confused with thoughts of Martin. 

He was nothing like he was in Jon’s dreams. The Martin who haunted Jon’s earliest seconds of memory had been horrified, struck dumb by what Jon had done, and some part of Jon had reacted to that fear by running. Now, to hear that the man who once was an Archival Assistant, Jonathan Sims’ boyfriend , didn’t recognize him…

So there was nothing of Jonathan Sims left. A dead man, a man who had once been worth something, who had been loved. Now the only one left was Jon, who held meaning to very few people at all, who was powerful but unimportant. Who denied and lied and cheated and hurt and threw temper tantrums and -

Whatever. Whatever! The past was the past, and Jon was reinventing himself. He was going to win back Martin’s trust, prove to him that he was a good person, and help protect humans. He was going to cure Daisy, keep Sasha safe, and everyone would be perfectly happy and fine -

“I don’t get it,” Sasha said, almost to herself, and Jon glanced over at her. She was chewing a lock of her hair as it whipped in the wind, sailing their way back home to London. The field trip was nice, while it lasted. “Maybe he was bodysnatched. Or maybe he got a Jon pulled on him, I don’t know. Maybe I’m in an alternate universe. I don’t -”

“Don’t what?” Jon asked. 

Sasha huffed, blowing the lock of hair out of her mouth. “Martin’s a sweet boy. He’s clumsy and well-meaning and just...soft. There’s no way he’d turn out like this.”

“...really, really hot?” 

The joke, if it was a joke, didn’t land. Sasha looked even more stressed, eyes tightening. “He’s not Martin . Whoever he is now, or whatever kind of person he was turned into, it’s just not Martin. So now Martin’s not Martin, and you’re not you, and Tim’s dead, and -”

She stopped short, clenching her jaw, and Jon finished her sentence. “And you’re alone.”

The wind whistled past their ears, desperate and unyielding. 

“Why did you make a house, Jon?” Sasha asked, after a long pause. “Why didn’t you just remake your old flat?”

Well. It wasn’t in Jon’s nature to lie. “I wanted you to stay,” Jon said. He paused for a second, struggling to gather his thoughts, to verbalize what was almost shameful. “You’ve hurt me, Sasha. In many ways, all of them strange and painful. But...it was a good kind of hurt, I think. Like letting yourself cry for a long time, just to get it all out.” He looked out the window, watching the scenery whip by, unwilling to meet Sasha’s eyes. He wasn’t sure he could say this if he was looking at her. “I’m sorry I can’t be the Jon you want. I’m sorry I’m not - that I can’t be the person you remember. But...you were a good person for me to meet, I think. Maybe the best person.”

Distantly, Jon was aware that the kids had fallen quiet in the backseat. But all he could think about was Martin: Martin’s rejection, Martin’s desperate eyes, Martin’s pain. It seemed so unfair, that Jon didn’t even get to have this. 

After a long second Sasha spoke. When she did it was quiet, barely heard over the rushing of the wind, but something about her words struck Jon’s unbeaten heart. “Don’t be sorry. You’re good as you are, Jon. You don’t have to be somebody else - not for me and not for anybody. You’re allowed to just be you. You don’t have to be the old Jon to be a good person, or to be happy. And you don’t have to be him just to make me and Martin feel better. You can just be you.” She glanced at him, smiling crookedly. “I like that person. And I’d like to stay with him.”

Speechless, stunned, and afraid, Jon didn’t say anything back. He didn’t think that he needed to - Sasha seemed to understand well enough, smiling at him as Daisy nosed his hair in a silent question. 

Their car roared back towards home, the only home Jon had ever known, and he wondered if it was enough.

As they re-entered London proper, Sasha began to point out things about it that had changed since she knew it. Blocks that were once homes were now shopping strips, and buildings that once housed burger joints were now deposits for the souls of the damned. People walked the streets, with heads down and hurried steps, but it was impossible to mistake the young women holding shopping bags and gossiping, the old men sitting on front stoops and chatting late into the night. 

The world was still alive, in its own strange and different way. There was nothing dead about it, no emptiness or abandonment. It was steeped in nightmare, dangerous and obscure, but humanity prevailed like a weed pushing its way through a sidewalk. 

It shouldn’t be so strange, then, that Martin had changed. That the world had changed him. But the world had changed Jon too, and they had changed apart. 

When they finally got home, the sun was beginning to set. If it wasn’t for the fact that Jon had done the supernatural equivalent of stamp a big mark over Martin and Basira’s foreheads he’d be worried about them. The kids tumbled out of the car, exhausted, and ran inside as Sasha followed at a more sedate pace. Jon got out of the car as Daisy easily leapt out, but before she could follow the others inside he carefully caught her scruff. She glanced back at him, lip curling in warning, but Jon just frowned at her. 

“What happened back there?”

It was, apparently, none of his business. 

“Like hell it isn’t,” Jon said flatly. “You asked me to lie for you. I don’t lie. You were scared of that Basira woman. You don’t get scared. Tell me what’s going on, or I’ll ask Basira.”

Daisy huffed, shaking herself, and her ears flattened back on her head. She barked, informing Jon that she hadn’t been afraid of Basira, there’s nothing scary about her, obviously, that she had just been...embarrassed.

“About what?”

Daisy stared at him, silently calling him an idiot. 

“About hanging out with me? Look, I know I’m not the most dignified man out there, and my pick-up lines need work, but I’m not that bad.”

It was then, in no uncertain terms, that Daisy told Jon that she was embarrassed about the wolf thing. The being a wolf thing. The losing herself to the Hunt thing. The complete inability to be a human being, not even being able to pretend, not even being able to talk or smile or kiss. Basira would be ashamed of her. She wouldn’t even want to talk to her. 

And she had also incidentally asked Basira to kill her last time she saw her, and not that Basira would kill her so long as she wasn’t a homicidal maniac, but it was still awkward. 

Jon stared at her blankly, uncomprehending, incapable of understanding. This was - this was Daisy they were talking about. Daisy. Daisy, who was afraid of nothing, who was ashamed of nothing, who ripped and tore and protected and loved him. Daisy, asking someone to kill her in case she became a homicidal beast, when she was the calmest and most thoughtful person he knew.  Daisy was infallible in his eyes. The idea that she might be wrong or lesser because of what she was going through…it was alien, as alien as humanity. 

“You’ve never mentioned Basira before,” Jon said, swallowing to help his dry mouth. “Were you friends?”

With a single look, Daisy called him an idiot. 

Ah. “Right.” Jon bit his lip, crouching down so he could scratch her and dig his hand into her thick fur. “Daisy, I want to support you in this. I know you aren’t ready. But I don’t think this will help. I mean - Daisy, come on. We can’t keep running. We’ve been running for so long, and I’m - I’m tired. It’s not worth it. I want to try…” Jon trailed off, something painful and sharp in his chest. “I know this is hard. But we have to face this, okay?”

What else have they been doing the past three years, Jon and Daisy?

Living in their fun fantasy, running back and forth and laughing and joking as if they hadn’t caused this? As if Jon wasn’t responsible for the dilapidated state of the world? And maybe it was the only world they had ever known, maybe they were just trying to make the best of a bad situation, but they couldn’t keep it up forever. Sasha and Agnes wouldn’t let them. 

And Jon didn’t want to. 

They were careless people, Jon and Daisy, Jon thought with a kind of numb amusement mixed with a sickly-sweet horror. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their power or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. 

“Daisy,” Jon whispered, “we have to try and fix this.”

“Fix what?”

Jon stood up abruptly, whirling around to see the two figures emerging from their own beat-up station wagon. Basira stood on the sidewalk, her loose trousers flapping in the coarse wind, and Martin stood next to the passenger’s seat in the street, looking pained. Basira’s gaze was searching, prodding, flaying him alive. Jon wondered distantly if this was what it felt like to be on the other end of one of his own legendary Stares, as if were being laid bare and found wanting. It was a fear so familiar that it was intertwined with his soul, or lack thereof, and as terrible as it was it brought a sweet relief. This, at least, was something he understood. 

He looked down at Daisy, who wasn’t hiding behind Jon. She was staring back at Basira, unblinking, searching just as deeply as Basira was. But Basira wasn’t looking at her - just at Jon, as if he was the greater threat. Maybe she didn’t know them as well as she thought. 

“It’s not my place to say,” Jon said stubbornly. He glanced down at Daisy, whose tail was ramrod straight and fluffed. “She has to tell you.”

Both humans gave him extremely flat looks, which then slowly trailed down to Daisy. With a great deal of distraught emotion in her voice, Daisy confessed her true identity to Basira. 

Basira just looked at Jon blankly. “It’s a dog, Sims.”

“I’m not sure that’s a dog,” Martin said cautiously. “It looks more like...an extremely improbably large wolf? Are wolves that big?”

“I’ve never seen a wolf in real life,” Basira said, squinting at Jon and Daisy. “Maybe they’re all that size?”

“No, I watched Game of Thrones, that’s definitely more of a Direwolf -”

“For christ’s sake,” Jon snapped, gesturing at Daisy. “Do you not recognize your own partner?”

Basira froze. 

That was the only way to describe it - she froze, like prey in the eyes of a predator. She didn’t show any fear, any hesitance or shock - she just froze. Martin was the one who gasped, hand flying to his mouth, other hand drifting to the hatchet tied to his belt loop. 

Then, instantly, she was calm again.

“Liar,” Basira said confidently. 

That was offensive. “I don’t lie,” Jon said, hurt. “It’s not in my nature.”

“You didn’t tell us this at the diner,” Basira said crisply. “Lie of omission. And you said that you hadn’t heard of a Detective Alice Tonner. Another lie. How can we trust you?”

“I’ve still never heard of an Alice,” Jon said, shaken. Daisy barked sharply, and he looked down at her. “No shit? Your name’s Alice ? That’s ridiculous. Was your mother a reverse precognitive, or was she trying to put a curse on you?” Daisy barked again, impatiently. “Well, yes, Daisy’s not any more fitting, but at least I’m used to that. Have you considered being a Beatrice? You’d make a good Beatrice.”

“Last time I saw Daisy, she was a giant wolf monster,” Basira said, and Jon gestured impatiently to Daisy. When he was imagining telling the truth, he wasn’t imagining having to prove it. “She didn’t look like a normal wolf, she was monstrous. Overtaken by the Hunt. That can’t be her. She told me to kill her, because she wouldn’t be able to control herself.” Basira clenched her jaw, the only sign of distress she’d displayed so far. “I searched for weeks to try to follow her trail of corpses. There was nothing. If Daisy was alive there’d be a trail of corpses, and there’s nothing, so she’s not alive.”

That was an extremely pessimistic view of Daisy, but when Jon glanced down at Daisy she just seemed accepting. As if she knew, and she agreed. What did Daisy and Basira know that Jon didn’t?

“You know,” Jon said doubtfully, “for someone so clearly Eye aligned, you’re not a very logical person.”

“Basira,” Martin said, and only that got Basira to rip her attention from Daisy to Martin. He looked uncomfortable, yet assessing: eyes darting from Daisy, to Jon, to Basira, and back to Daisy again. “You remember how close they were. Maybe…”

“ You and him were close,” Basira said sharply, “ we were close. Daisy and Jon were just on the same sinking ship. Maybe Jon would ditch you for three years to live out his detective fantasy, but so long as Daisy’s human inside she wouldn’t leave me.”

Then, as if she had delivered a powerful and convincing final statement instead of the desperate denial of a woman abandoned, Basira turned on her heel sharply and walked down the street, opposite Jon's house. She turned a corner quickly and disappeared, reabsorbed back into the anonymity of London, and Daisy couldn’t bite back a mournful howl. 

They stood in silence for a long minute, Martin looking torn between following her and keeping an eye on Jon, and Daisy looked up at Jon critically with a very ‘see what you did’ attitude, which Jon really didn’t think was fair. 

“It’s not my fault you have bad taste in women,” Jon said doubtfully. Daisy pointedly stared at Martin, and Jon flushed. “That’s different. I’ll wear him down eventually.” He ignored how alarmed Martin looked at this, instead bending down a little to meet Daisy’s eyes. “What are you waiting for? Go after her. She needs you.”

Maybe those were the magic words, the final thing said to convince Daisy: that Jon didn’t need her to stay, that he didn’t need her protection or support. That somebody else needed Daisy now - or, perhaps, that Daisy needed to do this for herself. Daisy barked once in thanks before shooting forward like a bullet from a gun, claws clicking on the cement and quickly turning the corner. 

She would be fine. She and Basira had a...language barrier, but Daisy could be expressive when she wanted to. Or, at the very least, very stubborn. Jon had never seen her give up on a prey yet. And so long as Basira had been honest when she said that she wouldn’t keep her promise if Daisy was sentient and aware, she wouldn’t hurt her. He’d know. 

He turned to Martin instead, who was looking strongly as if he didn’t expect his day to turn out like this. The sun was setting, sending the green into a kind of vibrant burgundy, dowsing the two of them in a private twilight. 

“Come inside?” Jon asked, feeling oddly dangerous. 

But Martin just looked skeptical. “Your house isn’t haunted, is it?”

“Would you like it to be?” Jon asked eagerly. “I can arrange that easily. Unfortunately, at the moment, it’s mostly possessed by teenagers, but -”

“Okay, let’s go,” Martin said, locking his car and letting Jon open up the door to his house for him. 

Baby steps. Oh, god, was this the first time a cute guy has seen his house? It was! Jon tried not to feel nervous about it, discreetly checking his breath and tastefully ignoring Martin’s eye-roll. This would go fine. It would go fine, and Jon would prove to Martin that he could be normal and human and good. 

By force, if he had to.

Jon’s office looked basically the same, if much nicer. 

The first floor office was professional and pretty. It was set up similar to his old office: with a receptionist’s desk, a small area with a couch and tea service to act as a waiting area, and several doors with brassy embossed plaques on the frosted windows. Jon read ‘THE ARCHIVIST’ on one of them, and the plaque on the neighboring door was blank. On the opposite side of the room, there were two other doors. One was small and unobtrusive, and Jon recognized it as the stairwell to the living quarters upstairs. The other had a brass plaque reading, in large and embossed letters, SASHA JAMES. 

Along the back wall, there were a tremendous quantity of filing cabinets that Jon understood to be full of Statements. When he poked his head into his own office, he found his old and familiar office furniture with all four walls occupied wall to wall with bookshelves stuffed with Statements, cassettes, files, folders, letters, and books. Most of the furniture was familiar, just reshuffled into a professional looking office with panelled wood walls and thick carpet. 

As Martin stepped inside, his jaw dropped, and he craned his head to look around the entire open area. Jon fought not to puff out his chest with pride. But his attention was quickly disrupted from Martin, because they already had a visitor. 

An extra door was nudged between Jon’s and what he had to assume was Daisy’s office, yellow and off-kilter - its own kind of warning. Helen sat on the couch, sandwiched between the two kids, who were sleepily recounting the entire exciting adventure to Helen, who made interested and shocked noises at all the right places. She was wearing braids today, giving off an effect slightly similar to Annabelle’s, except her braids were twisted and braided electrical cables that sparked bright blue electricity. She was wearing a jumpsuit to go with it, and ballet slippers that seemed to be stained faintly yellow.

 “I am living for this drama,” Helen trilled, pulling a bag of popcorn out from nowhere and spearing kernels with her fingers to slide into her mouth. Gerry tried to nab a kernel, only for Agnes to slap his hand away and scowl at him. “Who was kissed passionately? Did JonMartin happen? Dasira?”

“You’re calling them JonMartin?” Gerry asked, unimpressed, as Martin paled. “That’s a terrible name. What about...Jartin?”

“That just makes them sound like a brand of jeans,” Agnes sniffed. “Stay out of this, Gerry, you don’t know anything about love.” She turned back to Helen, leaning in but not lowering her voice at all. “JonMartin can still happen, but Jon’s going to need a lot of help from us. Like, so much.”

“How exciting,” Helen stage whispered, also not really lowering her voice at all. “I’ll see what drama I can manufacture. I’m thinking Martin gets kidnapped, and Jon has to heroically save him -”

Good lord. Jon purposefully cracked the air a little, making Helen jump, and glared at her. Martin was coughing into his fist. God, they were making him look so uncool. “There will be no kidnapping.”

“You’re no fun,” Agnes condemned. She nudged Helen. “By the way, what’s Dasira?”

“Something that Daisy is already working on,” Jon intoned, making Gerry clap and Helen pass Agnes a scented candle (Brimstone scent). “Are you all done talking about my love life?”

“Darling, not nearly until I’ve collected my bets from Oliver and Annabelle -” Helen said, turning her head, before stopping short. Her smile froze on her face, eyes wide and deranged. “Ah! Martin, dear, we were just talking about you!”

“Were you?” Martin said pleasantly, unhooking his hatchet from his belt. “That’s funny. I don’t remember you mentioning that you were friends with Jon.”

“Well, you know me and the Archivist! We go way back!” Helen trilled a laugh, eyes darting to her door. “Fun to chat, must be off, people to torture, realities to distort, you know the drill -”

“Wait,” Jon said, holding up a hand, “Helen, have you known Martin was alive this entire time?”

“Define alive,” Helen said, standing up and inching towards her door. “Really, ontology is so tricky in this day and age.”

Jon’s eyes whirred, and his hair broke free of its tie and began gently rising above his shoulders. “ Helen -”

And, with no further ado, a door slammed shut and warped out of existence. Jon sighed, releasing hold of his power. He really had no desire to kill her. Helen was his friend. Granted, he hadn’t expected a friend to lie to him about his (ex?) boyfriend being alive and well , but he had already known that she was keeping her history with him a secret. Probably afraid of being popped. Like a grape. 

Well, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Jon shrugged, glancing at a still furious Martin, after Martin noticed Gerry anxiously scooting further away from Martin on the couch he quickly reupholstered the axe. He smiled faintly at Gerry, holding his hands out to show that they were empty. 

“Hey there,” Martin said, voice and eyes softer than they had ever been speaking to Jon. “Gerry Keay, right? We thought you were dead. And older.”

“I get that a lot,” Gerry said. He eyed Martin curiously - unafraid, as always. Jon had never known Gerry to be afraid of much of anything. Growing up in a world like this, it took a lot to scare you. “Are you really a demon hunter? That’s cool. I’m a rare book collector, you know. It’s practically the same thing.”

“That’s what I hear,” Martin said gravely. “That sounds like a really dangerous job, Gerry. Remember to be careful.”

“Don’t worry about him,” Agnes butted in, unable to resist the urge to brag. “I always protect Gerry.” At Gerry’s scowl, she reluctantly added, “And Gerry’s really smart and is good at planning, so we’re a good team.”

Martin smiled wanly. “You’re a good friend, then, Agnes.”

“I’m his sister!” Agnes declared. “Just like Jon and Daisy! Me an’ Gerry an’ Jon an’ Miss Daisy an’ Aunt Sasha are a team. A better team than my dumb cult.” She wrinkled her nose. “Where is Aunt Sasha, anyway?”

“Ah,” Martin said weakly, glancing at Jon out of the corner of his eyes. “About...Aunt Sasha. Are you sure she’s -”

“I would know, wouldn’t I?” 

Sasha, hair down and spilling over her shoulders, leaned against her office door frame. Jon wondered absently how long she had been listening in. She had changed clothing, from her more formal trousers and blouse to sweatpants and a soft cotton t-shirt, slightly yellowed. The shirt read ‘3rd ANNUAL FEARFEST - ENDLESS BUFFET OF ELDRITCH DELIGHTS, AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS STUPID SHIRT’, and Jon recognized it as one of his. Not one he wore , but one he had. 

“I’ve been fooled before,” Martin said, through a thin smile. “And sorry, but you aren’t exactly familiar.”

“Yeah, I heard,” Sasha said, brushing him off as if she had years to get over being killed by a face stealing monster instead of weeks. “You’re nothing like the Martin I remember either, you know. What happened to the stutter and tea?”

Somehow, Martin’s smile became even more fake. “A lot’s happened.”

“Not to me ,” Sasha said, voice fraught, and Agnes raised an eyebrow. She quietly grabbed Gerry’s hand and pulled him to the stairwell, shoving him up, until it was only Jon and Martin and Sasha left. Unusually discrete of her - or maybe they were listening at the door. “Last thing I knew, I was being chased by worms into Artifact Storage, you were jabbing your little corkscrew left and right and screaming your head off, and Jon had just gotten his head out of his ass long enough to tell us that he was apparently lying about the skeptic deal. I wake up a few weeks ago to a different Jon, a different world, and apparently a different Martin, and you’re acting as if you’ve been through it?”

“You were lucky,” Martin said flatly, and Sasha recoiled. “Everyone who died before the apocalypse - the Archive Assistant who died before everything went to hell - are lucky. Sorry, but it’s the truth.”

“How did Tim die?” Sasha whispered, something raw and vulnerable and weeping in the way she clutched at herself, and Martin winced. 

He looked at the ground, almost ashamed, and Jon kept quiet as he fought the urge to disappear like Agnes and Gerry, like Helen, like Daisy and Basira. This really wasn’t any of his business. It was a pain that wasn’t his. “The Unknowing.” At Sasha’s uncomprehending look, Martin elaborated. “It was heroic. Uh, he helped kill an Avatar. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t even be here. We - we owe him a lot.” Martin laughed, completely without humor. “I always thought that the one bright side was that you guys were together...or at least that I wouldn’t have to explain to you that I let him die...but I guess we don’t even have that now, huh?”

Sasha’s hand was pressed over her mouth, eyes brimming with tears, and Jon respectfully looked away until she composed herself. When she spoke again, her voice was as even and controlled as she could make it. “Leave it to Martin to soften the blow.”

Martin smiled, and for the first time it looked almost genuine. “Leave it to Sasha to be investigating in the apocalypse.”

“I wasn’t Jon’s favorite for no reason,” Sasha teased - teased? “We’re renaming it James Investigations already.”

“My agency has a name?” Jon asked, confused, before the first sentence registered with him. “Wait, you were my favorite? Not Martin? I mean - of course you were my favorite! That’s just natural, although I’m sure, uh, Tim was very nice too -”

“I missed you,” Martin said to Sasha, “I’m sorry I didn’t say it before. It’s selfish of me, to want you here, but - with you and Jon...kind of...it almost feels like the old gang’s back together. A little bit.”

Before Jon could even blink, Sasha had flown across the room and was crushing Martin in a tight hug, folding her head over his shoulder and gripping him tight, and it was only after her shoulders started shaking that Jon realized she was crying. Martin clutched back just as fiercely, just as strangely, and Jon saw the well of tears in his eyes too.

“I wish Tim was here,” Sasha said, through thick tears, and Martin said something back to her that elicited a laugh. Slowly, as silently as he could, Jon slipped back into the stairwell.

Of course, the two kids were listening at the door, and with a single pointed glance from him they scrambled back upstairs. Jon sighed and followed them, missing Daisy already. Reunions abound today, apparently - for Basira and Daisy, for Sasha and Martin, for...Helen and nobody, apparently, which he had to talk to her about. 

Reunions for everybody but him. 

It was silly to be jealous. Jon was lucky that he had nobody from his past to miss. He definitely preferred it that way. Minimum pain, minimum annoyance, minimum weight. Jon lived freely, and he worried about the problems in front of him. He wasn’t caught up in the past. He had a life to live. 

Went unsaid, that in that sparse yet warm reunion: did they miss Jonathan Sims? Did they wish Jon was there, too? Did Sasha know how Jon had died? Did she want to know?

Jon took off his shoes at the door, wandering through the large floor in somewhat of a haze. The breakfast dishes from this morning were still out, and Jon silently put them away as he flickered on a few lights to accommodate for the dimming sun. He looked around the house, at the shadowed furniture lightly dappled with the setting sun, and abruptly felt very tired.

He didn’t need sleep to live. Jon really only ever slept for fun, or because he was bored. But there was an unmistakable bone deep exhaustion in him, an unwillingness to think of Martin and Daisy and Basira and Sasha for one more second. Some time by himself would be nice. 

Jon collapsed into his oversized bed, large enough for a tall man and his wolf sister, and toed off his shoes without bothering to slip under the covers. He ripped the elastic out of his hair, letting his curly hair drift out of shape. 

His mind drifted, faint images of a smiling face drifting through his mind, and found himself teetering forward into sleep. 

But he couldn’t dream. No matter how hard he tried, how much he wanted to see that Scottish field and the man with the soft eyes again, it wouldn’t come. 

Maybe this was what being abandoned felt like. 

When Jon woke up again, it was to the murmur of voices. 

He slid out of bed, distantly cognizant that sun was streaming in through the windows and that his covers were uniquely rumpled in a way that only Daisy sleeping on him overnight could create. He yawned, taking a second to change his clothing into something a little less formal and less obviously slept in - a dress shirt with small pock-marks of burns lining the hem and slacks that were discolored by acid on both knees - took a second to use the bathroom and fix his hair before cautiously foraying into the living room. 

Which had been taken over by humans. 

Someone had, as seemed to inevitably happen , pulled out a whiteboard, and Sasha was standing next to it as she gestured with superhuman speed. Sitting on the couch in front of her was Martin and Basira, arguing furiously with her. Curled up in one of the plush armchairs was Daisy, who was only half-paying attention to the proceeds with lidded eyes, and in the attached kitchen the kids were eating Pop Tarts with wide eyes as they listened to the bickering. 

Well, Jon had his priorities. He joined the kids in the kitchen, filching a Pop Tart from the toaster the millisecond that it popped, and he cautiously munched it as he stood behind the kids.

Agnes glanced backwards, eyes narrowing suspiciously. “I thought you didn’t like eating food.”

“Food mostly tastes like cardboard to me,” Jon said casually, eating another bite of the ‘pastry’. “This is cardboard with jam on it, so it tastes alright. What’s going on here?”

“We’re doing tactical planning,” Gerry said, and Jon noticed that he was holding a small notebook and taking copious notes. “We’re deciding plans of attack and how to utilize our resources effectively.”

“They’re arguing over where to find Georgie and Melanie,” Agnes said, seemingly bored. 

“Oh. That makes sense.” Jon paused, watching Sasha draw a large radio tower on the board. “Who are they, again?”

“Radio show hosts,” Gerry said, flipping backwards in his notebook. “Remember, they’re the cool couple who run one of the only talk show programs that still air? Always warning us on hotspots of monsters and what areas are clear, weather patterns, new restaurants?”

Actually, now that Gerry mentioned it, they did sound rather familiar. Jon had always thought that one of them had a nice, soothing voice. Jon scratched his chin, watching Basira argue with Sasha about the relative danger levels of London. “Have they considered just asking me?”

“Everybody agreed an hour ago it was best to keep you out of things as long as possible,” Agnes snitched. 

“Personally,” Gerry stage-whispered, “I just want to know what happened on the Dasira front. They keep on looking meaningfully into each other’s eyes, then looking away, then looking back. It’d be kinda, you know, sexual tensioney, if one of them wasn’t a wolf.”

“What’s sexual tension?” Jon asked.

“Ah, Jon,” Agnes said, patting him on the arm, “you sweet summer child.”

“If you don’t already know, you’re too young to know,” Gerry said seriously. 

Well, that was enough hanging out with the condescending babies for one day. Jon whistled sharply, leaning on the half-wall that divided the kitchen from the living room, somehow managing to break through the bickering and get everyone’s attention. 

“You don’t need to make a tactical plan,” Jon said, irritated. “So long as I’m with you, you’ll be perfectly safe in London. Or anywhere, really. So where are we going?”

“You don’t have to come,” Basira said coolly. 

“It makes no sense for him not to come,” Martin muttered to her. 

“He’s completely untrustworthy -”

“Okay, fine, then get eaten by monsters,” Jon said loudly, taking a pointed bite of his Pop Tart, and let them all argue again as he chewed. “You have an ally in the most powerful monster in this world besides Jonah Magnus, who is very dedicated to helping you and wanting to see you safe, but it’s perfectly fine if you want to run off and get eaten by clowns.”

“Too soon,” Sasha said, with a straight face. “I’m still sensitive about that.”

“No you aren’t.”

“True, but what are you going to do about it?” Sasha turned back to Basira and Martin, who were now looking much more dubious. “Look, just let us help you. I get that you’ve been doing it alone for three years, but the point of us reuniting with Melanie and Georgie is that we don’t have to do it alone anymore.” Her voice softened. “People aren’t meant to be alone. We need each other.”

Daisy barked in agreement, and Basira’s eyes flashed to her. Finally, she sighed, kneading the bridge of her nose. “Fine. But that doesn’t solve the problem of where -”

“Oh,” Jon said, quite cheerfully, “it solves your problem quite thoroughly.” Everybody stared at him, insultingly skeptical. “Good lord, did you all forget that it is literally my job to find things? I have some skills.”

“You just cheat with your omniscience,” Sasha said, folding her arms, unimpressed. 

“Omniscience is a skill anybody can learn.” Jon stuffed the rest of his Pop Tart in his mouth, and Daisy leapt up from the chair to run to the door. She pulled down Jon’s trench coat from where someone had hung it up on a coat rack as Jon focused, letting his eyes slowly blink open in their stunning green. He felt his hair, so carefully done up, strain against the elastic, and let the world whirl through his gaze. 

Dimly, he was aware of Basira’s eyes widening just a fraction as Daisy nosed at her leg before trotting over to Jon. Martin, for his part, didn’t seem surprised. Just sad. 

The knowledge slotted itself easily into his brain, as if it had always been there, and Jon let his eyes close as he took the trenchcoat from Daisy, slinging it on easily. 

“Well?” Jon asked, eyes whirling in an endless cycle of life and death, “Are you coming?”

They were, indeed, coming. 

It was practically begging for trouble to walk down the London streets in such a large group. Fortunately, Jon was trouble, and with a clear destination in mind and careful usage of the buddy system he was confident that they’d maneuver undisturbed. Daisy trotted ahead as Agnes and Gerry took the back, leaving Martin and Basira to walk with one hand on their holstered weapons. They looked around London as if they’d never seen it before: shocked by its casual shoppers or pedestrians, disturbed by innocuous shops that had squatted on filthy city streets as long as Jon could remember. Jon couldn’t help but wonder if his London and Martin’s London were two different places, in both location and meaning. If the shops had opened and closed, if construction had bulldozed familiar buildings, if monsters had overtaken the quiet corners and sent a chill up your spine. 

It was strange, to think that Jon had never lived in Martin’s world. 

Sasha, for her admirable part, was chatting up an unamused Basira. She seemed to be asking what kind of weapon she thought would be most suitable, because honestly it seemed like everybody but her had weapons and she kind of wanted one? Gerry used Leitners, but really only Gerry was capable of that. What were Basira’s feelings on brass knuckles -

Jon took advantage of the distraction to speed walk a little until he was next to Daisy. He glanced backwards, making sure nobody was listening in, before speaking quietly to her. “What happened last night?”

Daisy ruefully informed him that, last time she checked, they had adopted two more humans. 

“No, I mean between you and Basira!”

Daisy told him in no uncertain terms that this was none of his business. 

“You can’t honestly expect me not to ask about your mysterious lost girlfriend,” Jon hissed, ignoring the way Daisy flicked her ears in annoyance. “What did you talk about!” Daisy woofed. “You know what I mean. What did you bark about, or whatever. Did she believe you? Are you dating again? Are you going to get married?”

“Are you telling Daisy where we’re going?” Martin called, making Jon trip and Daisy laugh at him. “Because I noticed she’s leading us but you never told her where you’re going.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jon said dismissively, “Daisy knows what I know.” He turned back to her, ignoring Martin’s sputtering. “Come on, just tell me, I’m dying here.”

With a sigh, Daisy attempted to explain a complex and multi-faceted relationship full of repression, bad decisions, and soulful lingering gazes, all of which confused Jon greatly. If they were in love, why didn’t they just date? What’s internalized homophobia ? Why did Basira have so many trust issues?

“Hey, can we go back to how Jon and Daisy have a psychic connection -”

“Can Jon read minds?” Sasha asked, contemplative. “I always figured he was just reading her mind.”

“I can, but I don’t,” Jon called back. “It’s rude and human thoughts are boring.” He turned back to Daisy. “So have you made up?”

It’s private, Daisy said. 

“That was what you said when I asked you what you did before we met,” Jon said, almost pulling at his hair with frustration. “That’s what you said when I asked you how you became involved with the Hunt, or how you became an Avatar, or why you recognized me, or why you didn’t find anybody else you knew. I’m sick of everything always being private with you. You know everything about me, don’t you? Don’t I deserve the same?”

Daisy bit his hand, abruptly and roughly, and when Jon yelped in pain she suddenly let go and ran ahead, clearly done talking. 

Christ. Jon nursed his hand, scowling, wanting to yell something pithy and mean at her as she turned her back on him, incapable. He was so occupied with restraining himself from being petty that he barely noticed the way Martin stopped in front of him, alarmed at Jon’s wound. 

“Did she bite you? Jesus. Is it bleeding? Do you have a bandage?”

Then, suddenly, Martin’s hand was on Jon’s, holding it up and inspecting the wound, and Martin was touching him, and he was really close , and for the first time Jon saw every detail of Martin: the brown eyes, the short-cropped jet black hair, the muscle hidden under layers of jumpers and jackets. If Jon breathed he would have stopped breathing; if his blood flowed he would have blushed. Martin was really close. 

Jon opened his mouth, meaning on saying something casual like ‘She does that all the time, no big deal’ or something cool like ‘I’m immortal, don’t worry about it’ or even something stupid like ‘Please keep holding my hand’. But instead he ended up saying, “Uh - Martin?”

As Jon stared at Martin, and as Martin stared at his hand, the wound closed up before their eyes. There had never been any blood, just several sharp punctures, and even though muscle grisled underneath the puncture the skin knitted and mended itself back together as if it had never been lacerated. Within a few seconds his hand was healed, and Jon was whole again. 

“Wow,” Martin whispered, still holding Jon’s hand, “that’s so freaky. Cool, though.”

“Yeah, you’re cool too,” Jon said dreamily, and Martin dropped Jon’s as if his skin was scalding wax. 

He stepped back, abruptly uncomfortable, and Jon’s heart sank. Martin withdrew, sticking his hands back in his pockets and quickly catching back up with Basira’s fast walk, and Jon was left behind with a hand that was strangely cold. 

No - it was the same temperature as it always was. The temperature of his hand hadn’t changed. His body temperature was still an even 35 degrees, the temperature outside the same 18 it always was. It was Jon who had changed, who was different by sheer comparison. The addition of something warm had made him feel cold, when he had been so happy and temperate before. 

Then he realized that everybody was still walking, leaving him behind, and Jon hurried to catch up. 

The interesting thing about Melanie and Georgie was just how unnoticable they were. 

Not completely invisible - although Melanie was basically the visual equivalent of a katydid on a tree branch, and Georgie gave off all of the spiritual energy of a rock - but close enough that Jon was forced to genuinely strain. He gave Daisy their location partly for convenience’s sake, and partly because he would need her sharper tracking skills. 

Nobody was truly invisible under the Eye. Nothing was unknown, nobody was unseen. Jon had his own blind spots - notably when it came to Avatars, who relied upon their own patrons for protection from him - but two mostly mundane humans shouldn’t have been so damn camouflaged. 

He was almost growing interested in this Melanie King and Georgie Barker. He cautiously tried to skim through their history, pasts, even looks, but he hit a particular blank space that he knew to associate with his lost memories. Sorry, repressed memories. God, at this rate with all of the mean people from Jon’s past who hated him turning up like bad pennies, Georgie was probably his ex-girlfriend or something. 

As a side result, they had to awkwardly take a bus and then double back in a different direction before Jon and Daisy caught their tail. Jon awkwardly sweated over seemingly not knowing where he was going, what with the whole ‘I swear I’m a private detective’ thing, but he didn’t have anything to prove. Probably. Definitely not. 

He looked backwards, at the hard plastic bus seat where Basira sat with her eyes boring into his head. She didn’t say anything, even when Jon smiled weakly at her. 

“So,” Jon said, forcing cheerfulness. Beside her, Martin was cleaning his hatchet and refusing to look in Jon’s eyes. Behind them , the kids were arguing in low voices. “I was your boss, right? Head Archivist and Archive Assistant? Were we friends?”

Basira just stared at him blankly, half-lidded eyes somehow accusatory. He felt a little as if she wanted to arrest him for a crime he hadn’t even committed yet. Or maybe hadn’t committed. Had anybody ever told her that she had big cop energy? Finally, she said, “Does it matter?”

No, technically not. Jon deflated a little bit. Martin glanced sharply at her, then at Jon, but before Jon could interpret his strange expression he had already looked back down at his hatchet. “I bet me and Daisy were best friends,” Jon said, a bit sullenly. 

“Daisy kidnapped you, hauled you to an abandoned patch of woods, made you dig your own grave, and tried to kill you,” Basira said, “so no, you weren’t.”

The words almost didn’t process. Jon’s eyes widened, his stomach both sinking and jumping up into his throat, before he rejected them all. That - that couldn’t be right. It was Daisy. Why was Basira spouting those awful lies? Why would she say that about someone she cared about?

But Martin looked furious, hissing at her. “Seriously, Basira?”

“What?” Basira said, and for the first time Jon noticed a tinge of defensiveness in her voice. “You said to stop pretending she’d never done any of it.”

“That doesn’t mean -”

“Now that she’s pretending it never happened -”

But Jon had already checked out, looking back to the front and slumping in his seat. In the handicapped area in the front, Daisy was sitting with Sasha, as she gently petted her fur and looked out the window in a way that Jon was beginning to realize was an anxious habit. Daisy looked calm, panting slightly, lost in her own thoughts. 

It couldn’t be true. But Martin hadn’t denied it. But it couldn’t be true, it just didn’t fit in with the way Jon conceived of the world and Daisy and himself and -

Maybe Jon had deserved it. That seemed right. Yes, obviously Daisy had realized that he was going to end the world and had been trying to save it. That seemed like her: heroic, self-sacrificing, protective. She wasn’t the kind to put her own needs and desires above the good of the world. No matter how much she had loved him back then, if she had thought it would save the world she would have done anything. 

Unconsciously, Jon’s hand drifted to his throat. He ran a finger over the thin line, rubbing the ropy and mangled tissue. That had used to bother him, quite severely: that he was pockmarked with strange circular scars, with a ropy and mangled right hand, with knife wounds and holes long since patched over. He was fairly sure he had less ribs than most people - and, in retrospect, of course he did. It had bothered him, that he had a body so marked and twisted by survival, that it had been through so much and lived through it all, but that Jon remembered none of it. What his body knew, his mind forgot. 

He wasn’t sure why he was touching the scar that could have only ever meant someone had tried to cut his throat. That, of course, had always been the problem. 

Jon pressed the button requesting a stop. 

They were in Camden, which was a popular tourist destination for people who enjoyed ripping out their bones on stage and calling it performance art. There was an entire hipster cafe full of people who were constantly judging each other, a small bookstore where you could always feel inadequate about your own writing, and a small club that held open mic nights on the weekend where everybody always boo’d. A great deal of fun: popular with the twenty-somethings, and stuffed to the brim with the insecurities and desperation of young adults. 

They trooped off the bus, lingering in front of a coffee shop that smelled strongly of blood, and as Martin stared fascinatedly at some typical London graffiti (‘WE DESERVED THIS’) next to some more Camden specific artistry (‘SEIZE YOUR AFTERLIFE’), Jon bent down next to an alert Daisy to whisper in her ear. 

“It’s okay,” Jon said, intent on resolving this now before it could cause any communication problems in the future. Because he was honest with Daisy. “If you tried to kill me, I’m sure you had a good reason. You were doing the right thing.”

Daisy stiffened, all of her fur puffing out and her tail straightening, and her ears laid back. She stared at Jon for a second, two, and he couldn’t read her large yellow eyes. Then she bolted, catching up to the front of the group, and left Jon alone. 

Something sunk in Jon’s gut, and he wanted to slap himself. Idiot. Basira hadn’t brought it up with her permission, and she obviously wasn’t ready to talk about it. Obviously it was a traumatic memory that she didn’t like re-experiencing. He never should have brought it up. Second chances shouldn’t be haunted by the past. 

But, with three ghosts walking, it was hard not to be. Jon straightened, glancing briefly at the graffiti, before quickly catching up with the others. 

Pedestrian traffic was heavier here: punks in jackets, fashionably dressed young women ready to pose with cameras. Jon had no idea why people still used Instagram, as it was only a farming tool for the Flesh, but maybe that explained why people still used Instagram. Colorful storefronts blurred past them, the pastel building stitching together into a patchwork quilt of advertisement and decor. Signs flashed neon, retro art and murals splashed against each wall, and Jon had to fight to keep his eyes on his group instead of indulging his curiosity and exploring every store, seeing every person, running his fingers along every shelf. 

What a strange and beautiful and cold little world he lived in. Even if he lived to be one hundred, which he definitely would, he would never see all of London. The city was deep, a well of history and meaning, and Jon stood on the outer crust of a two thousand year old layered history. 

How lucky he was, to be alive! To get to see all of this, to breathe this polluted air and scuff his shoes down dirty sidewalks. If Jon had created this world, shaped and bent it to the desires of the Eye filtered through his own once-mortal body, was it really so unbelievable that it felt made specifically for him? Was it so evil that he loved it?

Somehow, he knew Basira would say that the world they lived in was evil. Probably Martin and Sasha too. Maybe even Agnes and Gerry. Helen wouldn’t - she understood. Helen and Annabelle and Oliver knew: that what was natural could never be evil, merely the inevitable workings of a world that churned on despite itself. A lion was not evil for eating the gazelle, and Jon could not be evil for carrying out his own nature. 

Once, that had seemed so obvious. Everything had been black and white, and morality had been so clear as to be transparent. But everything Jon had thought he knew had been thrown into doubt, and the surety of his own purpose had been shaken. 

That Jon could be more than he was, that he could choose what he wanted to do and who he wanted to be...before Sasha, he had never even considered it. Even attempts at remarking himself or assuming new roles - as a detective, as a brother, as a friend - had been performative, meant as playing some fantasy instead of changing himself. 

Change wasn’t inevitable, in this stagnant and tepid world. But maybe Jon was tired of the inevitable. Maybe he just wanted a choice , about something, anything. 

Jon had never made any choices before. 

The revelation was worrying, but he didn’t have any time to think on it further. Daisy had stopped, woofing slightly, and they had arrived at their destination.

They were past the market now, and the building was nondescript. Just a boxy, black building, with no windows on the bottom floor and two stories. They were still in a commercial district, but there was only one sign or piece of advertising on the front: a hanging sign, sticking out next to the door: RECORDING STUDIO. 

It was nondescript to the point of offensiveness, and Jon found his eyes wanting to slide away, to not see it. Nothing interesting could possibly be in there. Probably just old boxes. Why were they even bothering to go inside? Why were they even here, again?

Then Jon remembered that he liked Seeing things, and that moreover it was kind of his whole thing, and that he was being tricked.

The thought was so infuriating he pushed himself to the front of the group, trench coat whipping around his ankles, and threw the door open without thinking about it. Behind him, Martin made a soft yet insistent noise of protest. 

“Jon, it might be dangerous, we need to plan -”

Jon scowled, as Sasha, Agnes, and Gerry exchanged knowing glances. “Make your plans without me. Wait a few minutes before following.”

Without looking back, Jon wrenched open the door and stepped into the building. 

The first impression that struck him was: boring. It was a large, open space, with cement floors and non-tiled ceilings where pipes ran through. There was obvious recording equipment strewn about, and Jon recognized the apparatus for broadcasting. There was no sort of reception or welcoming area, disabusing him of the notion that this was truly a commercial building, and besides a beaten couch and water cooler it didn’t seem as if it was open to the public at all. A curling set of stairs lead to a high loft, which from what Jon could see looked more like a comfortable working area than the spartan first floor. 

Empty. What a waste of -

“Archivist.”

Jon stepped back a few paces, and looked up.

There was a woman leaning against the short wall of the loft. The first thing that struck Jon’s mind was how beautiful she was, with a short undercut and skin darker than his. She wore combat boots and practical jeans, and a zipped up black leather jacket. The only hint of color was shining gold hoop earrings that brushed against her shoulders. She had no facial expression, just a blank acknowledgment of his presence, and Jon’s first impression of her was that she stank of death. 

“Sorry for barging in like this,” Jon called up, and the woman raised an eyebrow. “I’m looking for a Georgie Barker.”

“What d’ya want her for?”

“I’m not sure,” Jon said honestly. “I’m just helping out some friends. Well, not friends. I feel as if they don’t like me.”

“A lot of people don’t like you,” the woman said evenly, “but there’s not much most of them can do about it.”

“Then does it matter if they don’t like me?” 

“You’re the same as always.” The woman smiled faintly at him, just a faint twitch of her mouth, but her eyes softened. “What does the Archivist need from two pirate radio broadcasters?”

Jon just shrugged one shoulder, lopsided and uncertain. “Just a conversation, I think.”

The woman raised both eyebrows at him. “A conversation can be a dangerous thing when it comes to you.”

“I can have you talk to my teenage assistants if you’d like,” Jon said, feeling a little bit exhausted by this bizarre conversation, “or Martin, he seemed scared enough to come here -”

“Martin?!”

A new face emerged from within the loft, leaning against the wall excitedly. She had curly red hair chopped to her chin, and was wearing a more plain counterpart to the other woman’s clothing in light jeans and a tank top with some green flannel thrown over it.

“Did you say Martin?” the woman asked excitedly. “Georgie, maybe it really is -”

“If he knew , don’t you think he would have said?” Georgie asked, and that’s when the rest of Jon’s stupid little troupe barged in. 

All of the Archive Assistants stopped to stare up at the loft, jaws dropped, and it was only then that the womens’ voices became familiar to Jon. 

“Melanie!” Martin called up, waving at both women, “It’s Martin, Basira, and Sasha! Guess who’s back from the dead!”

Then Melanie screamed with joy, a novel sound, and a lot happened after that.  

Chapter Text

Apparently Melanie was also an ex-Archival Assistant. Jon was beginning to wonder if anyone in London hadn’t worked for him. 

Georgie Barker, the intimidating goth, apparently hadn’t been an assistant to anyone. Jon asked her if they had known each other, and she had just stared at him for a long moment before answering that she hadn’t known him very well. 

It was a relief, honestly. At least someone here didn’t have mysterious and badly explained baggage with him. Honestly, if one more person popped out of the woodwork who secretly hated him for something he didn’t even remember doing, Jon would - well, it was nothing new, but it was still annoying. 

It took an excruciatingly long time to catch the two women up to speed, who were apparently married. Jon was bored by the conversation halfway through, as there were only so many times he could hear someone say ‘we thought you were dead!’, and as the kids left to go leaf through the small bookshelf in the corner he wandered off with Daisy to go explore the actually quite objectively cool recording studio. There was a big switchboard full of a great deal of buttons Daisy had to snag his sleeve to stop him from touching, and a really fancy microphone, but eventually Jon just settled on grabbing the first stress ball he found and playing fetch with Daisy, keeping half an ear on the hushed conversation. He was far away enough that they probably thought he wasn’t listening in, but his ears were quite good. There were a lot of eyes involved in his whole process, but that didn’t mean that his talents were limited to what could be perceived with eyes. 

When he caught his name, he kept casually tossing the ball, letting Daisy lethargically run after it. He had absolutely no doubt she was listening in too. 

“ - at least Jon seems happy.”

“Yeah, well, amnesia and ultimate power will do that to a person,” Basira grunted. “Just because he’s cheerful for once doesn’t mean we can trust him.”

“You never trusted anybody,” Melanie teased - teased? “You always thought the Jimmy Johns guy was packing.”

“I stand by that. Dude was sketchy .”

“I genuinely believe Jon has no capability for deception,” Martin said, tired, and - well, ouch. “And as who we all know is the Jon expert, what you’re seeing is what you’re getting.”

Sasha snickered. “He was flirting . With Martin .”

“Sometimes, Sasha, over a long period of time and extreme danger, two people can fall in love, and it’s not that unbelievable -”

“Yeah, but it was like, on sight! Do you think he thought you were that cute when we first met him? Is that why he was so mean?”

“Back on topic,” Basira cut in smoothly, “both Jon and Daisy are compromised. We can’t depend on them for help.” She paused, almost imperceptibly. “I was expecting - much worse, when it came to Daisy, so I’m not complaining. Jon too, really.”

"Daisy ditched you for three years and you’re not complaining ?” Melanie whistled. “You’re the same.”

“We’ve both had some thinking to do,” Basira snapped. “It was for the best.”

For some reason, that seemed to disappoint Martin a little. “Basira…” At her venomous look, he dropped it. “I’ve heard that the Archivist was still alive, but I never expected -”

“Yeah, he’s a little famous around here,” Georgie, previously silent, said. When Jon glanced out of the corner of his eye, he saw that she was leaning back in her chair, leg crossed at the knee and arms folded. “Hangs out with the Desolate Princess, used to be a power couple with some waify Huntress before she disappeared mysteriously. Always turns up in the celebrity gossip columns when he goes to those elite Annabelle Cane parties. We did a whole segment on it a few weeks ago. Apparently he murdered Jude Perry.”

The conversation fell silent for a second, and Jon gripped the stress ball in his hand. There was a smiley face on it. 

“Well,” Martin said finally, “no real loss there.”

“There was some drama you guys don’t know about,” Sasha said evasively, “and that’s none of your business.”

“It’s Jon ,” Martin said, almost incredulous, “since when is what he gets up to not my business? After what she did to his hand -”

Jon stopped paying attention after that. 

Daisy ran back up to him with the ball, tail lashing slowly, and Jon gently took it from her. He looked at it, noticing that Daisy had accidentally punctured it with one of her wicked canines. Careless people, Jon and Daisy. 

A deep well of bitterness sprung in him, and Jon unconsciously found himself rubbing his mangled hand. How many people had hurt him? He could count his scars, each one making him feel ill just to look at it. He wanted a clean, fresh body. He wanted a body unmarked, free of the burdens and pains of the past. 

When you think about it, wiping his memory was the only logical course of action. If Jon could have, he would have wiped his body clean too, leaving it fresh and untouched. Who would want to remember a lifetime of agony? Who cared about people long dead, friends long gone?

He looked up at the humans, who were still quietly talking. All they were was pain. Why was he hanging around them, anyway? Hadn’t things been better when it was just him and Daisy, Agnes and Gerry and Helen? 

It had used to be Jon and Daisy against the world. He looked down at her, still waiting for him to throw the ball. They had always trusted each other. Jon had trusted her with his life, and she couldn’t trust him with the truth?

It was the truth . It was Jon’s religion. It was his DNA, his source code, his programming, his heart and soul. When Sasha had accused him of lying to himself...it had broken him. It had been true. 

Maybe they were all liars. Maybe there wasn’t a truthful person in the world. 

No wonder he had destroyed it. 

Something cold nosed against his hand, and Jon looked down to see that Daisy was pressing her nose against his hand. Before he could think about it, he jerked his hand away, cradling it to his chest. 

“Are you ever going to explain why we’re here?” Jon asked loudly, and the conversation stalled. All of the Assistants glanced at him, and Gerry and Agnes quickly closed the book they were reading as Gerry stuffed it into his baggy pants. “We didn’t come out all this way for you all to gossip.”

Melanie snorted, leaning back in her chair and smiling faintly in his direction. “You really haven’t changed. Going to tell us to go back to filing, Boss?”

“I’ve seen his office,” Sasha said despairingly, “he doesn’t know what filing is.”

Of course. Jon sniffed. “Why is only Melanie nice to me?”

“I’ve been mean enough to you for a lifetime,” Melanie said cheerfully. “I think you probably still have that scar from when I stabbed you with a scalpel.” Jon flinched back, but she didn’t seem to notice. “I do feel bad about the way things ended, Jon. I guess you don’t exactly know anymore, but I was in a bad place and I really took it out on you.” She paused a second, as everyone around her except Sasha looked slightly guilty. “We kinda all did. I’m glad at least some of us were able to chill out after the end of the world.”

“You are the only nice human I’ve ever met,” Jon said plainly, startling Melanie into a barked laugh. 

But Agnes and Gerry were running up, and as Agnes ran up to lean against the back of Sasha’s rolling chair Gerry grabbed Jon’s arm and towed him further towards the group. “I thought I was the nicest human,” Gerry hissed. 

Jon, amused, patted the top of his head. “You’re my favorite human.”

“What about Aunt Sasha?”

“She’s very mean and she knows that.”

But Agnes was already speaking passionately to the assembly, fired up as always. Jon had never seen her so dedicated, or so insistent. Gerry was always behind her, always supporting her, as if he had been searching for his family for years before deciding that all he needed was Agnes.  Agnes had always been the calm, sure type, always confident in her decisions and wants, but Jon knew that she had been building up to this for a while. Ever since he killed Jude Perry...or since Sasha James burst into their lives...he didn’t know. 

“I know it’s possible to fix the world,” Agnes said, gripping Sasha’s chair. “Jon and I have the power to do it. Between my fire and his omniscience, we can make this world alive again. But you guys are all Archive Assistants. You know the Eye better than anybody in the world but Jon and Jonah Magnus. And you all know Jonah Magnus better than anybody, including Jon. You’re in a unique position to do something about this.”

“Martin and I have been hunting for a while,” Basira added smoothly, “and there will never be an end to the monsters.”

“Or the pain,” Martin added quietly.

“Right. Jonah Magnus is the center of all of this. Jon was the key, but Jonah Magnus is the lynchpin. If we kill him...well, it can’t hurt.” She quieted, looking away from the group. “Maybe it can even fix this.”

“If Jon’s not evil,” Martin said, “why can’t we just ask him to reverse it?”

“I’m standing right here,” Jon said, aggravated, “and I definitely can’t reverse anything. What’s done cannot be undone. I’ve been saying this -”

“What if we kill him?” Georgie asked. 

“You can’t kill the Archivist,” Gerry volunteered, as Melanie lightly smacked Georgie in the arm. “It’s impossible. It’s like trying to stab the wind, or a wildfire.”

“Also, sorry, don’t really care if we’re old drinking buddies or not, I wouldn’t really let you do that,” Jon said, just so everybody was on the same page. 

“Killing Jon’s not an option,” Agnes said stubbornly. “Killing Jonah Magnus is.”

Even Gerry’s jaw was stubbornly set. “And I’m not letting Agnes do this alone. I’m sick of families hurt and torn apart. I finally found my own family and I’m not letting go of it for anything. Agnes and I have wanted this for a long time, and we’re going to do it together. I want a better world too. If you guys can help, you should.”

“We were going to London anyway,” Martin said to Georgie and Melanie, almost apologetically. “So we figured, while we were passing by, we wanted to meet up with you. See if maybe you wanted to come along, or help.” Martin glanced at Jon out of the corner of his eye. “We’d thought that we’d be able to avoid the Archivist, but…”

“I’m a detective. I’m nosy. It’s what I do,” Jon said proudly. 

“It’s what he does,” Sasha agreed. 

“Good lord, does anybody like being around you?” Gerry asked Jon. 

“We’re going to kill Jonah Magnus,” Basira said, and something about her was so serious and arresting that the room couldn’t help but fall quiet. “Are you two in?”

“Yes,” Melanie said enthusiastically, the exact same second that Georgie said, 

“No.”

Both women fell silent, and Georgie looked at Melanie and Melanie tilted her head in Georgie’s direction. 

Georgie’s mouth was a tight slash, and it occurred to Jon for the first time that she might not want them there. “We’re not getting involved in this. It’s too dangerous. We’ve been doing our part to try and help people, but it’s more important to keep our heads down. We’re lucky that we’re so well protected. I can’t jeopardize that.”

“Maybe because we’re so well protected we have to help,” Melanie said heatedly. “With my invisibility from the Eye Fucker and your inability to be fed on, what can he really do to us? This is finally our chance for -”

“Your revenge mission?”

“Justice,” Melanie insisted, expression creasing. “And don’t pretend as if this isn’t revenge on your part too.”

For the first time Georgie’s expression softened too, but it was more sad than fond. She leaned closer to Melanie, taking her hand and squeezing it. “Hasn’t he taken enough from us? When you left shouldn’t that have been - I don’t know, the end of it? Why can’t it be the end of it? It’s the end of everything.” 

“I know you guys just want to be free of all of this,” Martin said, painfully earnest, “but there’s nowhere that’s safe from Jonah Magnus. I know it feels safe where you are, but nowhere’s really safe. This is our shot to really make a difference.” His expression tightened, just for a second. “It’s been three long years of never really making a difference. Whoever Basira and I have helped, whatever good we’ve done...it’s a drop in the bucket. I’m sick of being useless. We have to do something.”

“If we can do something,” Sasha said gently, “isn’t it our responsibility to try?”

“If I can help,” Agnes said stubbornly, “I have to.”

Georgie, for the first time, looked pained. Nothing about her was fragile, but abruptly something about her seemed very brittle, as if it was on the verge of breaking. “Can you guys give us a moment alone, please?”

Both women got up and, after tense nods, disappeared through a door into what Jon guessed was their living space. 

Jon wasn’t too concerned about it. His head was full of a thick and buzzing static, like a terrible vibration deep in his heart, and he felt his hands faintly trembling. He felt dizzy, drifting, with his throat closed up and his head pounding. 

From where he stood next to Jon, Gerry seemed to notice. He gently took Jon’s hand, squeezing it tightly and bringing him back down to earth. But nobody else seemed scared, just grimly certain. 

They had already committed to this. They had already made up their minds. And Jon hadn’t even known. 

“Daisy? Jon?” Basira asked, cutting through the tense and fraught silence. “You guys are in too, right? You have to want the bastard gone as much as we do.”

Daisy barked sharply, and what she said shocked Jon. It shouldn’t have, of course: it was perfectly in character for her. It was the Daisy he had always known. Some part of him had expected her to change with them, to be the woman who was so important to Basira, shrouded in mystery, Jon’s attempted murderer. But to Jon she had always been Daisy, monster, and he loved her. 

When she nudged him, Jon translated. “She says that she’s staying with me. Her first responsibility is, uh, to me.”

Basira’s eyes narrowed. Perhaps thinking that it was a strange thing to say about someone you had tried to kill. But she didn’t understand. Nobody who wasn’t family ever did. “Are you in, then?”

And Jon exploded. 

“Of course I’m not in! Are you all crazy? Jonah Magnus is a god . He’s the center of this world, he’s omnipotent and omniscient and everything . He has more power than even I can imagine. He’s - he’s undefeatable. You can’t fucking kill him, any more than you can kill me, but he can kill you. He’s going to kill all of you, or he’s going to do something much worse, and I’m not walking into that death pit with you!”

He forced himself to break off, chest heaving, looking down at the ground. He didn’t want to see what they thought of him, now that they knew he was a coward. 

“You’re all human,” he whispered harshly. “All humans do is live in fear. Just accept it, stop trying to change it, and you’ll be happier.”

He couldn’t stand being in here. It was stuffy, the walls pressing in on him, and he turned on his heel to leave. He banged the door open, well aware he was running away, well aware that this was nothing new. 

Smelling the sweetly sour stench of London was a relief. Jon forced away the knowledge that he was storming out of a room yet again, instead ducking into an alley and letting himself sink down to the floor against a wall. The alley was dirty and dim, the alleys of the city as familiar to him as his own veins, and Jon let himself feel a pang of nostalgia for a time when things were simpler. When he wasn’t expected to care, and he didn’t want to. 

That was the problem. He did care.  

He cared what happened to Sasha, the woman who had forced his existence into a life. To Martin, who hunched in chairs like he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders but still spared a smile for Jon. Melanie, the first human he had met who looked happy to see him, who apologized to him , who had a persistent good cheer. Even Basira cared deeply about her own, and was willing to defend them ferociously. 

Daisy, who was the first to love and protect him. Gerry and Agnes, the first ones who taught him what it meant to protect others. 

They were going to die or worse and Jon would be alone again. How was that fair?

Jon shouldn’t care. It was easier not to care. But he did, inexorably and relentlessly, and it hurt. Hadn’t it been better, before? Honestly, that woman Georgie had the right of it -

“Did you do it on purpose?”

Black combat boots encroached at the corner of Jon’s vision, and he craned his head up to see Georgie in front of him. She looked unamused to see him deep in thought, but she crouched down to meet him dead on. Jon was surprised to see her - she didn’t seem the type to follow people out of buildings, or at least the kind to do it for Jon.

All Jon could do was shake his head numbly. “I’m reasonably certain that Jonah...forced the matter.” He sighed, kneading his forehead. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, propping up an elbow on one knee. “The first thing I can remember is...fear, so overwhelming and painful I felt as if I was going to die. Maybe it was a...remnant of the human known as Jonathan Sims. He must have been very scared to die.”

“Yeah. Jon had been a scared person.” Georgie carefully sat down next to him, keeping a careful few centimeters between them, close but apart. “I think something about being orphaned so young, and his Gran dying when he was barely into college, he...always expected everyone to leave. Always afraid that whatever he had, he would lose. So...he refused to let anyone get close. If you have nothing, you can’t lose anything. I think Martin was the only person he ever really let in.” Georgie quieted, ignoring Jon’s incredulous squint. “Yeah, I was kind of lying when I said that I didn’t know you.”

“I figured,” Jon said frostily, but he was still stuck in what she had said. If you have nothing, you can’t lose anything. Hadn’t he just been thinking that? Maybe he and that human known as Jonathan Sims weren’t so different after all. The thought was warming. 

Dude had been an orphan? Yikes. Almost cartoonishly tragic. 

Cautiously, Jon prodded, “Were you a friend? I had the impression Jo - I hadn’t really had friends.”

“Ah.” Georgie smiled thinly. “By the end of it, I think it was just Martin and Daisy. But no, we weren’t friends. I was your ex, actually, and we kind of entered each other’s lives again through...uh, Melanie, and then I kind of cut off contact.” She winced a little. “I used to wonder...if I had just driven you to that stupid therapist...if this would have happened. But I think all of us, all of the people who used to know you, wondered that. And I refuse to blame myself. Your own bad choices were your bad choices.” She exhaled softly. “Melanie thinks of it differently. That you were doing the best you could in the worst situation imaginable, and that it wasn’t really your fault. I think she might be right...she’s smarter than me, really. I just wanted to get on with my life. I guess I have the kind of soul where -”

“Wait, wait.” Jon held up a hand, completely uncaring of her personal drama. “Ex what ?”

Georgie stared at him blankly. “Ex girlfriend?”

Jon stared at her blankly. 

They stared at each other blankly. 

“That’s impossible,” Jon said blankly. “I don’t - I can’t -”

“You know that you and Martin got together,” Georgie said, equally confused. 

“Yes, but it’s Martin , he’s all..” Jon waved his hands helplessly, “...masc?”

“Are you calling Martin masc?” Georgie looked almost insulted. “Are you calling Martin hotter than me?”

“No, you’re a very beautiful woman!” Jon said quickly, “I just don’t, you know, really think of people in those terms, unless they’re mysterious dream appearing boys -”

“Because you’re the most asexual person to ever asexual -”

“What does that mean?”

“Aren’t you omniscient ?”

Jon, spitefully, downloaded the definition into his head, which he kept on forgetting to do. He squinted at Georgie, trying to reconcile the word with himself. “Is that what that is? I thought I was just...you know…” Jon waved his hands demonstratively, “...a monster.”

Impossibly, improbably, strangely, Georgie softened. “Oh, Jon. That’s what you said to me back then, too.”

And even stranger, she hugged him tightly, nose pressed into his shoulder and curly hair tickling his nose, and Jon was too stunned to move. She was warm, and small, and nothing about her was soft, but something about her grip was desperate. 

And Jon knew, as he knew things, that even though Georgie had blamed him for the apocalypse, that although she had written him off as a monster, that although she thought even now that he was going to be the reason why her wife was going to walk into her death, she had missed him. She had never stopped missing him. 

And Jon knew, as he knew things, what he had to do. 

They ended up staying the night, as it turns out that talking too openly about your plan to murder the omnipotent fear demon in a location that wasn’t in his blind spot was only a good idea if you didn’t like living. 

After Georgie admitted to listening into his tantrum, she disappeared to go talk things over with Melanie. Jon settled himself into a corner, scratching at Daisy’s neck and letting himself hug her a little bit, trying not to think too hard about his resolution. Reminiscing on it wouldn’t help. 

When Georgie came out she informed the Archive Assistants, somewhat exasperatedly, that she and Melanie were going with them. Their mutual invisibility should at least be able to help, there was no way Melanie was going to pass up a chance to assassinate Jonah Magnus, and there was no way Georgie was letting her wife go alone. 

“I knew stabbing out my own eyes was going to be useful,” Melanie said cheerfully. “Best decision I ever made.”

“Wait,” Jon said, looking up from his frantic communing with Daisy, “you stabbed your eyes out? How’d you fix them?”

Martin stared at him incredulously. “She’s blind, mate.”

“...she’s what?”

Anyway, after Melanie casually mentioned that the eyeballs had healed themselves after the apocalypse even as her vision stayed gone and clearing up a great deal of confusion , they all separated into plotting and plans. Jon checked out of the conversation again, as uninterested as ever in the delusion of humans. It was cute, how they still had dreams, despite everything. But at this rate, it was going to give Jon an aneurysm. 

The conversation stretched on long into the night, serious plans devolving into cautious banter between old friends. Jon watched it, watched it all: the way Martin always sat on Basira’s left side, how instead of smiling at Melanie Georgie always squeezed her hand. Sasha shot in-jokes at Martin that he had to blink and take a few seconds to recall, but once he did his whole face lit up. Basira and Melanie had familiar arguments, Martin and Melanie had familiar grievances. 

Sometimes, in that familiar social dance, someone missed a step: glanced sideways at someone who was not there, said the first half of a joke and waited for the punchline that never came, found themselves mouthing a name before swallowing it. It was easy enough to realize that Sasha was constantly searching for Tim - his laugh or his quips or his whatever, Jon didn’t know - but it was harder to realize that Basira bit down on Daisy’s name more frequently than she said it. There was an empty space that they all shared, a negative in their shape, and it took Jon a long time to realize that it was him. 

So this was what time turned you into, Jon realized. Old friends desperately trying to forge new connections from broken pieces. Jon had always thought of humans and the world as resilient, but maybe even connections could be resilient: that friendships, once forged, with enough determination, could survive anything. Maybe even the end of the world. 

“It must be nice,” Jon told Basira, as the humans hunched over take-out pad thai. Georgie carefully plucked the eyeballs out of Melanie’s. “to see all your old friends again.”

But Basira just snorted, eyes skittering to the other end of the group where Agnes was feeding Daisy her left-over eyeballs. “Most of us hated each other by the end of it. Wouldn’t really call us friends.”

“Really?” Jon asked. “Could have fooled me.” He stood up and whistled lightly for Daisy, who came bounding over. “I’m going out for some air, I’ll be back soon.”

It took longer to find dinner than usual. Not from lack of people, or any dearth of satisfying fear, but because Jon kept finding reasons why they were unsuitable. Those two were obviously a couple, he’d hate to ruin their night out. That woman had a toddler, of course not. That man was too old. That person was too young. That woman looked like Melanie. That girl looked like Agnes. She looked too kind, they looked too sad, he looked too busy. 

As Jon watched a man in a suit speed-walk down a street, he wondered if he had a family to get home to. If he was rushing so he wouldn’t miss his child’s birthday party. If he just really, really wanted to go home, because his day had been so long and he was so tired. 

Jon stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Night was breaking, the burgundy twilight settling down into a kind olive green, but the shoppers still filled the streets. People, everywhere, relentlessly. Existing, eating, walking, talking, sneezing, smiling. 

For maybe the first time, Jon realized that his meals were people. Not just humans, not just people - but people , people who were worth something, people who just wanted to live unassaulted by him. People who didn’t want to be hurt by him. 

Daisy nosed at his leg, wondering why Jon had stopped on his hunt, and for some reason that was it. Abruptly, suddenly, and strangely, Jon burst into tears. 

He couldn’t go back from this. There was no fixing this. There was no going back to that place, that happy world and mind where Jon lived in peace. Not in ignorance, but in apathy. Jon, for all of his omniscience, had only just understood what he had always known, and it burned so deep inside him it felt as if he was burning up and away.

 Far away, a long time ago, people had eaten hamburgers and wore clothing and talked on phones and drove cars and ripped open plastic containers. They had known, or at least most of them, that none of these things had been produced without pain and human suffering: that there was no chocolate bar without slavery, that there were no Nike shoes without sweatshops. That the factory women who made their phones were underpaid and exploited, that their land was obtained through conquest, that their countries were built on the back of colonialism. That they benefited, every day, from systems that crushed others under their heel. 

How did they live like that? It made Jon sick. How had humans lived each day of their lives, numb to the suffering that they caused? Was one of the fears capitalism? It felt as if it ought to be. 

Jon couldn’t stop eating. His guilt wasn’t useful, his self-recrimination and self-flagellation had no purpose. But now he had to eat while knowing . 

Daisy barked, alarmed, but Jon just smiled weakly at her and scratched her between the ears. 

“I think I get it now,” Jon said, “why knowing can be such a terrible thing.”

He ate anyway - just like, Jon suspected, absolutely everybody else in the world who had ever had this revelation. 

On the way home, he quietly talked with Daisy about his revelation, feeling awkward and unsure. She listened, ears flickering occasionally, the sky darkening into soft night as the Eye above them blinked sleepily. 

Finally, she told Jon that it was the hardest thing in the world to realize. But that he shouldn’t forget how it feels now, to realize that you had been the one causing that pain. Hold onto it. Grip it with both hands. It’s your weapon, Daisy said, that you can use to protect others and shield the world from people who are as callous and cruel as you were. 

“That’s - uh, very good advice,” Jon said, somewhat surprised. “Are you speaking from personal experience?”

Oh look, a squirrel, Daisy informed him, before running ahead. 

Jon watched her go, sticking his hands in his pockets as he walked. Half to himself, he said, “She’s getting more blatant. Hm.”

When he got back to the recording studio he found Sasha entertaining the kids by pulling out a board game, setting up mismatched pieces and shuffling cards. A cardboard box sat next to Gerry, proclaiming itself the Game of Life. Sasha smiled at him, setting out the cards. 

“Want to play, Jon? We’re a little tired of talking shop for tonight.”

And, without even thinking about it, Jon sat down next to Gerry, studiously reading the instruction manual, and crossed his legs. Agnes was experimentally trying to light a small plastic car on fire. “Deal me in. I’m afraid I don’t know the rules.”

“Don’t worry,” Sasha said, “I’ll teach you.”

Eventually, lights were turned out. Melanie and Georgie slept in their large bed, and the kids shared the pull-out couch. Daisy curled up on a rug and Basira used her as a pillow - when had that happened? Had they made up? - as Sasha collapsed in a sleeping bag. Martin was the last, crawling into a squeaky sleeping bag as quietly as possible. He noticed the way Jon didn’t move from his seat on the floor, still pouring over a thick book that Georgie had kept on her shelf. 

“What are you reading?” Martin whispered. The room was pitch-dark, but that had never stopped Jon. 

“Infinite Jest,” Jon whispered back. He flipped to the front cover, finger tracing over thin ink. “There’s an inscription in the front. ‘To Georgie. Happy Birthday. Jon’.” He couldn’t help but twitch a smile. “Could anybody leave a more impersonal inscription?”

“I don’t know,” Martin said, and through the darkness Jon could faintly make out a weak and unsure smile. “Seems very Jon to me.”

“Get some rest,” Jon whispered. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

He did, until Jon was left alone, sitting in the dark, staring at a laconic description in slanted and angular handwriting. 

He waited, just sitting. The clock struck twelve, then one, then two. Jon didn’t think about very much, letting his mind drift, capable of stretching his mind so thin it resembled nothing at all in the unique way that only monsters were capable of. 

He was just an Archive, Jon told himself. He was just an Archive. Just a...meaningless amalgamation of fears, experiences, and trauma. Really, when you think about it, it’s no loss at all. 

Jon carefully set the book aside, standing up and carefully picking his away across the floor until he was standing in front of Sasha’s sleeping bag. He bent down, confident that she would hear him, at least, in her dreams. 

“You have to take care of them now,” Jon whispered, ignoring the way Sasha’s face creased in sleep. “The agency, Daisy, the kids - all of it. I’m leaving it all to you, Sasha. Be strong. Everything will be okay.”

Some stupid part of him wanted to kiss her on the forehead, take her hand, so something that would let her know how much she had changed him, but it didn’t seen quite right. Jon stood up, resigned and ready. 

Because Jon wasn’t real. Jon had never been real. Jon was a ghost and a remnant, an echoed memory of a man who used to live. Every other monster had that basis of a life underneath their inhumanity - or, as Jared had put it so long ago, Avatars were just people with an extra drive. 

Jon realized now that he had been telling the truth. Every Avatar, that is, except for Jon. 

Magnus had put the name on it himself, accurate as ever: Jon was not a person. He could barely even be called a monster. He was…

He was the Eye that stretched over the sky, blinking sleepily and watching the world. He was the cobblestones on the street, the shadows stalking the night, the press of fear over a throat. He did not hold dominion over the world - he was the world. 

Jonah Magnus had made him. Everything about him that was important, that made up Jon, had been stuffed inside the man known as Jonathan Sims. Jonah had reached in with his prying fingers, stretched Jonathan Sims’ mouth open, and pushed inside a monstrous emptiness, so thoroughly and disgustingly that Jonathan had been hollowed out. And all that left was an Archive. 

If something happened to the others, it would be a loss so deep it was unforgivable. They were not kind but they were good, and they were real. Jon had never been real, not really: the desperate dream of a dead man, the weapon and tool of a monster. A spoiled child, who existed to feed and service others. If there had ever been something real to Jon, something substantial, he had destroyed it three years ago. He made the decision to keep it destroyed every day. 

If something happened to those humans it would be the loss of a past, present, and future.  If anything happened to Jon, who lived perpetually in an endless and purposeless present...well, no real loss. 

Slowly, then all at once, a yellow door twisted into existence next to the door out of the recording studio. Jon spared one last glance down at the peacefully sleeping Sasha before he walked over to the door. He stood in front of it, hands in his trench coat pockets, waiting. 

She never kept him waiting very long. The door tore open, and Helen poked her head out from within its depths. She was smiling at him, as always, but there was something almost gleeful in the spin of her eyes as they whirled in an endless carousel inside their sockets. 

“You always know just how to summon a girl,” Helen hissed delightedly. “Need a lift, Archive? I can’t take you very far, but I can get you where you need to go.”

“Helen,” Jon breathed. Some part of his soul was soothed to see her. She, at least, had always understood. “It’s been a while.”

“I know how to keep out of the hair of a great deal of hunters who aren’t very fond of me.” Helen swung the door open, beckoning Jon inside into its infinite depths. “One way train to the Panopticon, no stops. Everybody aboard!”

No time for hesitation. There was so much to gain, and so little to lose. Jon stepped forward, over the threshold of the door that lead to nowhere and everywhere. 

But, like Lot’s wife, he looked back. Just to see them one last time. And, in the midst of the small group sleeping peacefully, Gerry was curled up on the pull-out couch with one eye wide open. 

In the next second, the door swung shut, and Jon was lost. 

In the swirling everything of the hallway, Jon saw -

A bright green sky, with an Eye stretched across it that still shined brightly with youth. 

Soft, soggy ground at Jon’s back. Long, plush grass waved in Jon’s vision, brushing against his cheek, staining his pilfered clothing. His feet were bare, having forgotten to steal shoes, and his toes dug into the marshy moor. 

Something voracious tore at his stomach, preyed upon his mind. Jon was dizzy, his vision swimming, and something deep in his bones was so tired that he felt as if his bones would fossilize and sink into the soft marshland before he could ever rise. 

Then a shadow blotted out the sun. A woman, who seemed so tall in that moment, with straw-blonde hair that shined yellow in the sun. Something about her had been beautiful. Everything about her had been unrecognizable. 

Jon squinted up at her, fresh and unafraid of strangers. “Who are you?”

“I don’t know,” the woman said, and she bent down slightly to reach out a hand. “But I know you, I think.”

Jon took the hand, the small pale hand disappearing in his large and mud-stained one, and the only similarity was in their scars. 

He had never been alone again, after that. 

Maybe that was the problem. 

“I don’t know,” Jon said, “a detective agency?”

“Private investigation,” Daisy said, “and it’ll be perfect. Just watch, Jon. Just watch.”

A library. Familiar, but foreign. Wrong, in every way. 

“Please,” Jon said, “you have to help her, she’s all I have. You’re the Jonah Magnus, you have to be able to do something. I tried, I did everything I could, but I’m - I’m too useless, I couldn’t do it. If anybody can do it, if it’s possible, you have to. Please.”

But the man in the three piece suit, with a fox’s grin and eye sockets that had been cut into his face with a knife, exposing nerves and viscera and the soft pulsating undulations of a gently lurching brain, only smiled. 

“My dear Archive,” Jonah Magnus had said, “I do so enjoy my tamed dogs.”

The Tower was the same as ever. 

He had never been - but, of course, he had never left. Jon walked its swirling steps every night in his dreams, wandering its stone halls like a ghost. The first few floors were the familiar Panopticon, the endless oversight familiar and comforting to Jon in its own menacing way, but as he climbed upwards the tower began to take on different and strange dimensions. 

Helen had dropped him off on the first floor, before wishing him luck and disappearing. Jon, who both expected this from her and had absolutely no doubt she was watching with popcorn, didn’t need the luck. There was nothing in the Tower that could harm him. 

It was, after all, himself. 

Thick chains wrapped the walls, making the stone bulge and strain in the pattern of flesh. On some floors, the stones dripped blood. On others, they pulsated with a soft gristling of meat and flesh. 

The tower wasn’t so large on the inside. Jon walked in tight circles, mindful of the lack of guardrail and the slippery stone steps, climbing higher, and higher, and higher…

In one of Gerry’s arcade games, this would be the final boss. There would be...danger, and traps. But there was only Jon, as there had only ever been, and there was nothing that could hurt him. 

On some floors, the tower seemed to stretch upwards until it brushed the heaven, the stairs angling and threatening to slide Jon into the endless abyss. On others, the tower walls constricted, crushing Jon and promising an endless arching tomb. 

What could they do to him, that they hadn’t already done? What scar on his body or soul could they make, that they hadn’t already? Jon wasn’t afraid of fear. 

Jon was a coward. He was scared of everything, really: scary men who gutted his soul, kind short men with a smile like the dawn. He was scared of a woman with a mane of curly hair, of both having her and losing her, and he was scared of a short woman with an undercut and a weak smile, of the depths to which she knew him. He was scared of hurting people and of waking up in the morning. He was scared to hurt feelings and to embarrass himself at a party and of the glow of the flames as they lit up Jude Perry’s face. He was scared of the truth, and of himself. 

But fear - fear was like breathing, to him. Jon could never be afraid of something he had never lived without. 

Jon climbed, and climbed, and climbed…

Maybe that was what made this easy. He would talk to Jonah. Make him see sense. Convince him not to hurt his friends, to spare them, not to grind them into dust and nightmares. He had to listen to Jon, they were two sides of the same coin. And, when that failed…

Well. Jon couldn’t kill Jonah Magnus. But he was reasonably certain he could sink this tower into the ground, blinding Jonah - and himself - forever. It seemed like an awful lonely way to spend eternity, but maybe it would cure the world. You never knew until you tried. 

Really, is it even death if you were never alive in the first place -

“Shit!”

Jon cursed a few more times, muttering as he rubbed his aching scalp. He had bumped his head on a trapdoor, rotting wood and a rusty metal latch. He scowled, forcing his mangled hand to open the latch and using both hands to push against the heavy wood. 

With an aching groan, the trapdoor creaked open. As Jon climbed up, his trenchcoat got caught in one of the jagged wood edges, and Jon cursed as it was forcibly pulled off him as he scrambled onto stone floors. He watched his trenchcoat flutter down into the dark abyss mournfully. An ignoble end for a noble friend. 

Jon stood up, carefully forcing his knees to stop shaking, and took in the peak of the tower. 

The first thing he noticed were the windows, stretching completely around the small circular room. They were gorgeous, almost wall to wall, overlooking all of London. He could see the Institute, almost directly underneath, and all of Chelsea stretched out around it. No, all of London, curving and sloping and rising and crying. It was the dead of night, but to Jon’s eyes it was clear and beautiful. Everything was so clear, from up here. 

If he focused, he realized that he could see even further. Anywhere in the world: the moor in Scotland where Daisy had found him, the desolate and dinghy cabin where Jon had woken up. The long stretch of highway where Daisy had mauled at least three shadowy monsters, and that delightful little botanical garden that had smelled so bad. If he looked further, he could see the sea - see the Continent, see all of Europe, see the world -

The second thing he noticed was the throne in the center of the room. It was simple stone, and at its feet lay the pieces of a shattered circlet, split evenly in two. Sitting on the throne was…

Just a corpse. 

Oh, it was Jonah Magnus. The fine suit was familiar, as were the disgustingly deep eye sockets. But there was no pulsating brain visible through the empty sockets, and his skin was leathery and mummified. His fine hair had fallen out, and his yellow teeth shined through pale lips. It was nothing more than a mummified corpse: staring out at nothing, seeing nothing, doing nothing, being nothing. 

There was nothing holding up the world, and Jon’s world collapsed. 

The third thing he noticed was this: a figure stepping out from a dark corner of the circular room, dressed in a fluffy and frilly Lolita dress, smiling mysteriously at him as cobwebs breathed gently as they stretched across the gap in her skull. 

“Goodness,” Annabelle said, “this is a surprise.”

Jon...felt too much to even feel. Was too shocked to feel shock. He was thrown, ejected into the atmosphere, left to fall a hundred kilometers to the ground. All he could do was nod dumbly, forcing himself to direct his attention from the corpse to Annabelle, leaning casually on the back of the chair, heedless of the decayed flesh. 

“Yes,” Jon said, dazed, “this wasn’t how I expected this night to end.” Jon forced himself into alertness, struggling to make sense of all of this. “I saw him only a few years ago. He was...he was fine - how did he -”

“Die?” Annabelle tilted her head at him, beetle-black eyes blinking slowly. “It’s possible to die in this world, Jon. It’s quite tricky, I do admit, but it is possible. Everyone has their breaking point. When the soul is stretched too thin, when the nightmares become too much, it snaps. It dies.” She glanced down at the corpse. “Jonah Magnus was fine, when you saw him. He was enjoying his power. He was ruler of his kingdom, and it was good. He walked, he talked, he perused his Institute and his Archives. But his sight was greatest when he was in this throne. He could See all, Know all, finally gain that glimmer of insight that his pupil had attained so easily and took for granted. He stayed for days in that chair, sometimes. Forgetting to eat. Forgetting to defecate. Forgetting to think.” She reached down, tracing one finger along the leathery scalp. “Until he forgot to breathe. But he had been dead long before his body stopped breathing. You’d know all about that - wouldn’t you, Archive?”

Jon’s mouth was dry. He wondered if this shock and terror was grief. “How did you know I would be here?”

Annabelle laughed, white teeth flashing in exuberance, and it sounded just like a bright and real laugh. “Because I had you chase down Sasha James, of course!”

Jon stared blankly at her. 

His confusion must have been apparent, because Annabelle stepped to the side of the throne. She leaned against it, crossing her arms, smiling gently at him. “Do you really want me to detail all of it? I don’t exactly want to give a gloating monologue, you know.” Jon stared at her, even more blankly. “Ah, who am I kidding, of course I do. We’ve been friends for so long, Archive, just indulge me on this one.”

And, because Jon trusted her, because she was Annabelle, he nodded. Jon had always done what Annabelle wanted. It was easier than having to decide for himself.

She held up a finger with each step, counting them off her hands. “Step one: realize that Jonah Magnus is not long for this world, because the old idiot lost any shred of common sense he had in the last two hundred years. Step two: realize that leaves one other Big Man on Campus: the Archivist, blissfully unaware that he probably could have stomped on Jonah Magnus with his big old boot anytime he wanted. Step three: wait for the Archivist and his emotional support pig to step foot inside London. Step four: become very best friends with him. Become his ally, his friend, his sponsor. I’ll need everyone on my side I can get, right? It’s a dangerous world out there - a world ripe for the taking.”

Jon nodded along with this. Yes, this fit in exactly with what he knew of Annabelle. “Good job on that, by the way. You’re a good friend.”

She beamed at him. “Aren’t I? Thanks for saying so, Jon! I always felt as if you were one of the few people who really understood me, you know. See, we don’t treat each other like people. Humans, even other Avatars - you know, they’re so touchy. Oh, why did you betray me, why were you manipulating me, whatever. I just don’t get it. Every time you smile at someone, you want them to smile back, right? That’s a manipulation. Every friendship, every romance, every relationship - it’s just us all trying to pull each other’s strings. It’s not personal . It’s like getting mad at you for asking invasive questions.”

Jon nodded along with this too. “It’s just our nature.”

“Right! You get me.” Annabelle held up a fifth finger. “Step five is to wait for the right moment and assign him a little task: grab Sasha James. Sasha, you know, she’s real special - she’s every ounce of nostalgia, you know? Every memory of better days. Sasha wasn’t around to see things get bad. She still cared for you, without any of those messy complications of life. Sasha will make you care about her. Love her, maybe.” Annabelle’s beetle-black eyes glittered. “Some part of you finds her so safe and soft and nonthreatening that you won’t hurt her, no matter what kind of uncomfortable questions she asks. That’s a rare thing to find! Most people are smart enough not to get too close to you, Archive. Nobody ever knows when your good favor will turn bad. Nobody’s survived that .”

Jon’s mouth was dry. “I have friends.”

“The two teenagers who don’t know any better and a suicidally depressed wolf who doesn’t care if she lives or dies?” Annabelle shrugged, a ‘what can you do?’ movement. “That’s step seven. Step eight...turn him into a human lover. To be honest, I kind of expected you to fall in love with her - you were always the kind to give it up for the first person to smile at you - but your wholesome little found family worked just as well. Step nine, connect him with all those little Scooby Gang friends of his on their revenge cruise. Add his soft heart and human lover tendencies. Shake, don’t stir, and...step ten.” She smiled beatifically at him. “This.”

Just to be a good friend, Jon clapped. Anabelle bowed theatrically, four extra arms spouting to add a flourish to her bow. 

“You could have just asked, you know,” Jon pointed out, just to be annoying. 

But Annabelle just giggled. “Don’t think that just because I explained my plan that means you understand. Shouldn’t you, of all people, know that knowing isn’t understanding?” She spread her eight arms wide, her upturned palms cupping the world. “This is my design, Archive. What do you see out there, beyond these windows?”

Jon looked, just to be polite, but he already knew. “A suffering world.”

“A world of nightmares and daydreams,” Annabelle said, almost seriously. “It’s in chaos. Whatever we all thought this apocalypse would look like, this wasn’t it. We were expecting...well, a great earth-shattering kaboom. Instead we get this...whimper. It’s disorganized. It’s because it’s lacking a leader.” With one arm, she reached out and drummed her fingers on the back of the stone throne. “You’re the only one who can do it. The world is depending on you, Jon.”

With a dry mouth, with a spinning mind, Jon asked, “Why me? Don’t you want to do it?”

“Absolutely! But I can’t.” Annabelle winked mischievously. “There are domains in this world, Jon. The Entities hacked it to bits and split it up, pillaging and stripping every centimeter. You could call it the Scramble for Earth. But there’s one Entity that doesn’t just harvest fear from a patch of the world. It harvests fear from the entire world. Every centimeter, every person, every monster - all under its domain.” Her voice gentled, unexpectedly. “Your domain is it all, Archive. Everything there is, or was, or ever will be. And you love it, don’t you?”

He did. Jon nodded, unable to speak. He did. He loved the world more than anything, loved the people in it and loved its voracious tenacity. He had always thought that love was a selfless, open thing. An appreciation for beauty. 

But it had been the love of a child for his favorite toy. Of an owner for his possessions. Selfish, uncaring, and apathetic. Cruel in its kindness.  A world under Jon’s thumb, as Jon played innocent citizen, idiot detective, little brother and friend. A pleasant story that he told to himself: that he could be happy, just a person, instead of the god of the world. 

So long as Jonah Magnus was the bad guy - terrifying, cruel, all-powerful - it wouldn’t have to be Jon. 

Maybe she could read his mind, or she just knew him so well, because Annabelle smiled as if she knew what Jon was thinking. “You wanted to improve the world, Archive? You want to keep your friends safe? You have to take responsibility. You have to step up. You’ve been running for too long.”

The flesh on the palm of Annabelle’s hand bubbled and warped, tearing open a large flap of skin, and a tarantula skittered out. Then another, and another, and suddenly there was a small river of tarantulas crawling along the desiccated body of Jonah Magnus. They worked quickly, clearing it away with well-placed bites and carrying the larger bits on their back. In the work of improbable seconds, in the rustle and crush of hundreds of spindly limbs, the old king was cleared away and the throne was clear. 

It was simple. As simple as the spiders. 

“One question,” Jon said, “what do you get out of this?”

Annabelle smiled at him again, reaching out one of her many fingers to stroke the head of a tarantula. “I know the direction the supernatural community is heading. You were at that party. The leaders of man and woman, the highest echelon of eldritch beings...they’re idiots, Archive. They don’t know what they’re doing. All they do is squabble. There’s no focus, no drive. They’re the old, and it’s the job of the young to usher in the new. Oliver and I talk about it plenty: that the world, as it is, is headed towards inevitable destruction. We will eat everything there is to eat, strip this world of its resources, and when it’s done we will cannibalize each other. Then even our gods and mothers will die.” She smiled sadly at the tarantula, letting it scurry around her fingers, as if it was a warm hand in hers. “I like living. I like putting on dresses and drinking champagne and seeing the wicked ways in which the world turns. The old white men like Jonah Magnus were the ones who ground our lives into the dirt. Who turned us into monsters. It’s the job of people like you and me to make this world we made into the best it can be. It needs a strong leader. It needs you.”

And when she put it like that, it made perfect sense. 

Jon stepped forward, feeling strange and airy. It was as if he was watching himself walk forward, numbly seeing his limbs walk forward towards the inevitable future. 

Annabelle stepped back behind the throne, spreading her hands and inviting him in. Annabelle was his friend. He trusted her. She hadn’t always been honest with him, but she was always predictable. Annabelle was someone who he understood, whose nature was the other side of his own. 

The world was wrong. The world was Jon’s . If it was wrong, then he had been the one who made it wrong. He had to step up, take responsibility for his decisions. This was his mess to fix, and he had to fix it. That way, maybe, he could make everything right. Put everything back in its place. File and archive the world away, into how it was meant to be. 

A world, in perfect order. Sounded good to Jon. 

He sat down in the throne, his tattered slacks and singed shirt relaxing against the dust. He bent down, picking up the gold circlet, and gently ran his fingers along the rim until it fused back into one smooth whole. 

It would be a sacrifice. Once Jon sat down, he wouldn’t be able to rise again. 

But he had never been human. He was the world given shape, a network of knowledge pretending it was a person. This would just be a return into the fabric of the world that he had been born from. It wouldn’t hurt. He knew what lay beyond: the world he lived in before he awoke, that vast nothing. 

This way, he could protect everyone. They had each other, now. They would be okay. When Jon wound himself into the fabric of the world, then he could stop everything from hurting them. It could be a world without pain - or, at the very least, a world where pain never went to waste. A world where pain had meaning. Where it was used, good for something after all, and everything had a purpose. Where parents didn’t die from rotten luck, and grandmothers lived long enough to see you grow up, and people stayed. Where Jon’s pain could have a happy ending. 

Maybe, Jon thought, as he lifted the circlet to his temple and let it drop, he wouldn’t be scared anymore. 

That sounded nice. 

In France, nine crows held a funeral.

They circled around the body of their brother in a cement lot, crumpled and limp with a wind outstretched to the East. They cawed, calling long and harsh into the wind, letting the gusts blow their voices away. 

The crow had died meaninglessly, strangely and obscurely, but his brothers sought meaning in the loss. If they memorialized him, if they cried their grief to the sky, then they would remember. That this lot was forsaken, that this scenery was perilous and fraught. There was nothing of value here, nothing worth honoring: only death, and the call of crows.

The crows did not hold a funeral to mourn. They grieved to remember. 

A sad man in scuffed trainers leaned against a wall, taking a drag from a cigarette. 

The nicotine coursed through his lungs, toxins slipping into his bloodstream, coating his alveoli in a thin film. It would kill him, eventually. 

The man would not live long enough for the slow death that the cigarettes promised. His girlfriend wanted him to quit, and he was afraid she would leave, and so he would quit. 

He dropped the cigarette, grinding it down into the cement with the heel of his trainer. 

“Last one,” Jonathan Sims promised. “Last one.”

Jon wandered through a foggy expanse. 

It smelled of the sea. Strong and cloying, overwhelming every other sense. He could not see very far in it, barely able to wave his hand in front of his face. Thick as pea soup, as an old woman with a weathered face and tired hands once said.

 He was aware, distantly, that he was not truly here. That he was sitting on a throne, at the top of a very tall tower. He was aware, distantly, that he was everywhere: that he saw everything, was everything, manipulated the world with the spark of a neuron. 

But if Jon was everywhere, then he was here too. So far as here was anywhere. It was real, the way nightmares were real: as real as anything else. 

Jon wandered through the fog: not lost, just aimless. It was cold, and brought to mind empty beds and long nights, but he felt no fear. He had been right: there was no fear, not anymore. 

He didn’t know how long he walked. Time was about as real as nightmares: that is, not very real at all. 

Eventually, a figure emerged from the fog. A woman, short and thin, arms that once held ropy muscles now emancipated and bony. She was screaming, the sound swallowed up by the fog, lost to the faint sounds of the sea lapping against a distant shore. 

As Jon grew closer, he could almost hear the words she was saying. He saw that her hair, washed out and almost translucent in the fog, was a brilliant gold. Like straw in the sun. 

“Jon,” the woman was yelling, “Jon, Jon, Jon.”

Jon was Jon, and he stepped closer. It wasn’t until he was standing almost directly in front of her that she noticed him, too lost in her own pain. She gasped, taking an unsteady step backwards, and Jon instinctively reached out to place a hand on her elbow and steady her. 

It was a familiar motion. She had been weak a lot, at the end. Thin, with gaunt and hollow cheeks as she refused the Hunt. The world was powerful with fear, but she had never been able to survive on table scraps. She had been always strong, always the protector, until Jon had to let her hold onto him for balance to walk. 

And then she was gone. 

“Daisy,” Jon said, voice cracking, and he didn’t let go. “I’m here. I’m sorry I left. I’m here.”

Daisy’s expression crumpled, her blue eyes tired and creased with thick purple bags accentuating her gaunt cheeks, and she reached out to cup his face. She rubbed a thumb against his cheekbone, the familiar motions soothing him. 

“Why are you here?” she asked, voice creaky and hoarse. “Did you get lost too? I’ve been lost for so long, Jon, I’m so cold -”

“No, Daisy, no.” Jon shook his head frantically. “We lost you to the Hunt. I couldn’t get you back, I’m sorry. I couldn’t get you back, no matter how hard I tried.”

But she just stared at him incredulously, as if what he was saying didn’t make any sense. “I haven’t been lost in the Hunt,” she said, “I’ve been lost here . In this - in this fog. This awful, cold, creeping -” 

“Daisy, what -”

She wrenched her elbow away from him, stumbling back, almost curling in on herself. “I deserve it. I deserve it. I’m such a piece of shit, Jon, I’m so awful. It doesn’t even matter. I can’t make up for what I did. I’m burning in Hell - I thought Hell was Choke, but it’s just cold, it’s so cold -”

“Stop it. Stop this, now, Daisy!” Jon stepped forward, grabbing her by the shoulder and shaking her. “You aren’t a bad person. I love you, you aren’t bad. Please, wake up. The kids need you, Sasha needs you, they all need you to wake up.” Something occurred to Jon, and he gasped. “I’m powerful now, maybe I can heal you, I can help -”

“I don’t want you to fix me!” Daisy screamed, and Jon instinctively curled up even as he refused to let her go. “I want to die! I should be dead! Basira hates me, she wants me dead , the world is dead , all I have left is you and you don’t even know, I couldn’t tell you -”

“Tell me what? Daisy, please -”

“You were so gentle,” Daisy sobbed, in flights of passion and fury that Jon had never seen.  “A blank slate. My blank slate.  I told you to eat something and you did, I told you to do something and you did it. You weren’t Jon, but you were so close, and you didn’t know what I had done to you. You needed me, and - and nobody needed me anymore, and I liked it. I liked how you needed me. Basira hated me but you didn’t, you didn’t remember. I wanted you to want me, and you did , and you were running but I was running too, and -”

Did she know that she was breaking his heart? Did she care? It’s like Jon wasn’t even there, as if she was screaming to herself through the empty fog. Maybe, in her eyes, she was. 

“I’m a bad person,” Daisy said, rich blue eyes thin and unfocused, “but so long as I was with you...you, who had no idea, who didn’t even understand good or evil or right or wrong...I could be good. I could be good, if someone thought of me as good. I could be a hero in this story, if I could just be your hero.”

Jon was silent. 

“Of course I couldn’t tell you,” Daisy said, voice cracking in pain almost too intense to be felt. “Then you’d know .”

Maybe they really were perfect for each other after all. Unwilling to remember, unable to face the scope of their actions. How could they be expected to face the consequences of their actions, when those consequences were so severe, so terrifying, so awful? They were too bad to fix. 

There was no reuniting with Basira. It was never even an option. Because Basira had known, and Basira could not be fooled, and Basira was the woman who had fallen in love with the monster. Basira was the woman the monster had hurt. Jonathan Sims, as he was, had been the human who Daisy had hurt. 

But in Jon - in Jon, there was goodness. In Jon, there was somebody simple, who could love and be loved without reservation or guilt. She wouldn’t have to redeem herself at all, because Jon had never known that there was something about Daisy that needed redeeming.

There was nothing redeemable about Jon and Daisy. 

Daisy screamed, in pain that couldn’t be fixed, and fur began to sprout from her arms. Her nose and mouth elongated into a muzzle, teeth sharpening into fangs, and Daisy howled as she was overcome by the burden of her mistakes. 

As easily as if the information had always been there, Jon knew. He knew all of it, every step. The hot bite of rage, the flash of the muzzle of a gun, a cold scream. The feeling of Jon’s throat underneath her fingers. 

The monster in front of him panted and salivated, red eyes spinning and glistening, foaming at the mouth. It was terrible, deeply revulsive and evil, not a wolf or a woman or Jon’s sister or anybody at all. Only a monster, as meaningless as an Archive. 

Jon stepped forward once, then twice. Then he dove forward, and without stopping to think he wrapped his arms against the monster’s torso. It roared, snarling and gnashing its teeth, ripping at Jon with its wicked claws, but Jon didn’t even feel its scores down his back as he clutched onto the thick and bristly fur. He didn’t let go. 

The monster roared, twisting and writhing flesh underneath and pelt of fur, and it shaped itself into another demon. Jon didn’t look at it, screwing his eyes shut tightly and holding on for dear life. Even as the flesh rippled and bubbled under his arms, he didn’t let go. 

Claws raked against his back. The skin bubbled against his fingertips. The monster twisted into a different shape, a shape Jon knew to be the wolf he knew and understood for so long, rabid with yellow teeth and sharp canines that sunk into his arms. Jon didn’t let go, clutching tighter, arms slippery with blood. 

Shift and change, screaming and roaring and snarling and crying and sobbing and screaming and roaring. Jon rode through it, fisting his hands in fur, not letting go. He held on, and waited. She would come back. She wouldn’t leave. 

After what felt like an eternity, Jon felt the fur melt away. Bristly hairs turned into soft skin, snarls turned into sobs, and the figure he hugged became small and thin. 

Jon opened his eyes. 

It was Daisy, sobbing. Jon’s blood was smeared on her arm, staining her tank top and jeans. Jon folded her into a hug, letting himself squeeze her tight. 

After a second, she squeezed back. 

“I’m not here to tell you what kind of person you are,” Jon whispered. “Maybe you are a bad person. You’ve done bad things. But dying or running away or - wiping your own memories - it doesn’t fix anything, Daisy. It doesn’t do anything but make yourself feel better. You don’t have to be good. You just have to be better than you were yesterday. Daisy, you have to change . You’ve been stuck, and - and the way you are isn’t good for anyone. You - you left me, and I missed you.” Jon paused, forcing his own tears down. “You can run, Daisy. Maybe you can even run forever. But can’t make up for what you’ve done if you don’t stop running. Basira needs you. She loves you, even if you can’t bear it. Sasha needs you. The kids need you. Please. Come back.”

Daisy clutched at him, holding him tightly, but after a long minute she finally released Jon and leaned back. At some point, they had both fallen to their knees, both drenched in Jon’s blood from wounds that were already closing, clasping hands. 

Blue eyes, rich and tumultuous, like a storm on the horizon. Not translucent and pale like ice. Daisy was there, solid and present, for the first time in a very long time. 

“Come with me,” Daisy whispered. “Don’t you still need me?”

But Jon just smiled and shook his head. “I don’t need anyone anymore.”

“Oh, there you two are.”

Both of them startled, because a figure had just walked out of the mist. Short, with thick glasses and a jacket pulled over a jumper, Martin Blackwood smiled tiredly at both of them. 

“Is this where you two went?” Martin asked. He glanced at Daisy, human formed and bloody, with a raised eyebrow, but didn’t comment on it. He looked around, frowning slightly at their surroundings. “I thought I felt someone new in the Lonely, so I came to check. Sometimes people drop in, and I have some minor influence over this crummy place, so I try to help people leave when I can. I guess it’s within the power of the Archivist to drop in whenever he feels like, huh? Although that doesn’t explain Daisy…” He glanced back down at Jon, suddenly troubled. “Jon, Gerry said that you disappeared into Helen’s door. None of us can find you. What’s going on? Are you okay? Do you need help?”

But Jon just shook his head, throat dry. He reminded himself that this wasn’t the last time he would ever see Martin. He could see Martin whenever he wanted, now. Forever, if he wanted. He stood up carefully, helping Daisy stand up too, and gently extricated his hands from hers. 

“Go with Martin,” Jon said, summoning a smile for her. “He’ll guide you out of here. I have to leave, Daisy. I love you.”

But Daisy and Martin didn’t look reassured - they just looked alarmed instead. “Leave where?” Martin asked, almost afraid. “Jon, where are you going?”

“What do you mean you don’t need me,” Daisy whispered, eyes searching. “You always -” She blanched. “Jon, you didn’t.”

“I’m keeping you safe,” Jon said, “you’re all safe, now. Things will be okay. I’m fixing the world. No Jonah Magnus necessary.”

The fog rolled in, but Jon had never truly been here anyway. He let himself fade out, letting Martin cry out in panic, letting Daisy snarl and jump forward, trying to snag her fingers in his shirt and make him stay, but her fingers passed right through him, and he vanished. 

Statement of Hazel Rutter, regarding -

Statement of Hazel Rutter, regarding -

Statement of Jonathan Sims, regarding -

A persistent and bone deep loneliness, that stole away any warmth and left behind only a pervasive emptiness. An addiction, stretching deep into his bones, pulling him inexorably towards a conclusion he couldn’t stand. Never quite knowing if you’re you, if who you are is meaningful or important or real, an imposter in your school and your own skin. Suffocated by expectations and ill-suited jobs and the pressures of disapproving faces, and the consuming fear of the rest of his life stretched out ahead of him with no end or meaning in sight, a black box of a future without light. Exclusion, turned backs and cold stares, and the ruthless way life dove for his throat and tore it out. Parcelling himself off, signing away his heart and his lungs and his mind, just to make them stop looking . Never knowing what it meant to belong, to fit in a crowd, only knowing that he was the rot that poisoned himself. And knowing that, at the very root of it, life was hard and painful and barely worth it, and then you died.

All Jon had ever known was fear. All fear was, all it had ever been, was Jon. 

“Jon, wake up! Jon!”

“What’s he doing in there? Why did he -”

“Does it matter? Help him!”

O, Ceaseless Watcher, why have you forsaken me? 

“I’ll tear him out, he’ll heal from it -”

“We just got your body back, you aren’t doing anything. Martin, you try -”

“Try what, exactly? Look at him, he can’t see me - Agnes, no, stay outside, you shouldn’t see this -”

“Um, grey. Your turn.”

Martin huffed a laugh, and Jon snuggled deeper into Martin’s chest. Jon was taller and lankier than Martin was, but Martin was much more comfortable to lie on and put his head on and touch. He was soft, in a way that Jon wasn’t. 

“Your favorite color cannot honestly be grey. That’s so boring.”

“What if I am boring?” Jon asked, faux-primly, sticking his nose up in the air. He ruined the effect by giggling, and when Martin pressed a kiss to his temple giggling again. Like he was a freaking schoolgirl. This love thing was humiliating. “Haven’t you heard, Martin? All I eat are dry scones and all I drink is PG Tips.”

“Microwaved PG Tips,” Martin added wryly. “A crime against god, if I might add.”

“I’ve committed far greater crimes than that,” Jon said gravely, ruining the effect with another smile. “Didn’t Tim once tell me to smoke some marijuana and ‘loosen up’?”

Martin grinned broadly at the memory. Jon had to suppose it was pretty funny - in retrospect, the complete rage he had flown into was a bit of an overreaction. He had been very stressed. “Maybe he said that because you call it marijuana.”

“Oh, honestly, Martin. Please. I went to uni, once.” Jon lay back down on Martin’s chest, snuggling into his shoulder. “Of course I’ve done cocaine.”

Martin choked on his spit. “You’re joking.”

“I have an addictive personality,” Jon said, straight faced. 

“I - god.” Martin huffed a laugh, rubbing a hand over his face before reaching down and interlacing it with Jon’s. “Sasha would be ecstatic. She had some serious cash in the pot that you’d done hard drugs.” He paused a beat. “Oh, right, that’s why Tim asked you that weed thing. I think my money was on you being a teetotaler.”

“Yes, that sounds like our Sasha.” Jon tried to smile, but it came out a little weak. Outside their Scottish cabin, cicadas hummed and chirped. They would have to go down to town, tomorrow. They were out of milk. “I miss her.”

“Yeah,” Martin whispered, “me too.”

“Jon, please - please, if you love me, wake up. This isn’t right, you’re an idiot, please wake up.” A voice cracked, hoarse from pain and loss. A voice that couldn’t lose any more. “I need you. Get up, wake up, I need you, please.”

But he didn’t. 

Martin had never needed him, not really. He had loved him, but that was the beautiful thing about Martin: when the chips were down, he stood on his own two feet. Martin would save the world if he had to, by himself. Jon wasn’t that brave. 

Would love save this? It felt like it should. But it didn’t, or maybe it couldn’t, and Jon couldn’t find it within himself to move. He felt - rooted, rooted and strange, as if something tied him down. Whether it was in his mind, or if he was chained to the throne - this stone chair, old and dusty - he didn’t know. 

“He was saying that he didn’t need me anymore,” another voice was saying, taut and frustrated. “I think this is some kind of - you know, Jon’s weird martyr thing.”

“I thought he was over -”

“He doesn’t even remember saving me from that coffin, Melanie, how do you expect him to be over that kind of - kids, come on, we told you to wait outside.”

“I don’t care, Miss Daisy!” A thin, imperious, bossy and princessy voice rang out. He could practically see it - could he see it? - Agnes stomping her foot, crossing her arms. Wild horses wouldn’t move her. “He doesn’t need us? Well, good for him! This is bullshit!”

“Honey, please,” a smooth and comforting voice said, Sasha James in all her improbability, sounding impossibly stressed, “we just need to focus on getting Jon out of that chair. Go wait with your brother.”

“He doesn’t need us?” Agnes yelled, “Well, what if I need him? What about that? He’s the first adult I ever really trusted , he can’t just go! He said he was going to help us fix things!”

A cool, smooth pressure, on a hand. Jon’s hand. It was Jon’s hand. A small, slight hand was squeezing it. 

“Jon,” a high, scratchy voice said, “I found it. I found out everything I need to know about my family. I was looking for so long, and I found it. Do you want to know?”

Somewhere, far above, an eye looked at a boy. 

“It’s a really annoying guy,” Gerry said, “who’s always telling me to be careful of monsters under the bed, but he’s scarier than any of them. He buys me hot dogs, but only the vegetarian kind. He was the first adult I ever trusted, too. He gave me and Agnes a place to stay, and - and that we want to keep staying. Until we go away to monster college and come home on holidays for monster dinner. See you and Aunt Sasha and Miss Daisy.” He faltered for a second, just a second. “I know it doesn’t mean much from me. I’m - I’m just me. But Agnes and I love you. And we - we aren’t ready to be alone, you know? I know everybody leaves, I know that better than anyone, and so do you - but I don’t want you to go. I don’t need an Archivist, or an Archive, or a savior of whatever. I need Jon. What only you can give. I need you.”

“So get out of that dumb chair,” Agnes said, “or I’ll never forgive you.”

Jon opened his eyes. All one hundred fifty six of them. He saw - he saw -

Roots dug into his arms. They didn’t wrap around him, but were pulled through his arms like thread through a needle. Or they were growing from him, erupting from seeds buried deep inside him. He knew, without having to count, that there were fourteen roots. Fourteen chains. 

Or maybe just one chain, affected and shaped by Jon’s own perception. It was all the same chain: the one trapping humanity in endless nightmares, withholding the release of death from them, the joy of birth. The chains strangled the world, rendering it stagnant and still and cold. 

Experimentally, Jon tugged at the chain. He ignored the gasps of the small crowd assembled around his chair, instead stretching his senses to see the ripples the chain left on the world. Could he reverse it? Make the sky blue again, give everybody back everything they had lost?

No. This couldn’t be packaged away, returned to normal. There was no turning back the clock on this one. The world was how it was, in all of its awful beauty. 

Good. Now he could get to work.

“No more running,” Jon whispered. 

With a deep, bone-shaking wrench, Jon cut the chain that bound the world. One chain, fourteen, eight billion - fell away. Like a soft light illuminating the dark, the fear wasn’t so scary anymore. 

Somewhere, a gate closed. 

For the first time in what felt like decades, but could have only been a few hours, Jon felt within his body. He flexed, focusing on the strange roots and thorns, and with exacting slowness he raised a hand and tore one of the roots out from his arm. It ripped open his flesh on the way out, but the pain was bearable, and sealed up easily enough. He did again with his other arm, and then his ankle, and with a few more wrenching yanks Jon was free. 

The memory of the bed faded away. The memory of a cigarette left too, every memory or stray thought that had ever belonged to Jonathan Sims that had seemed so clear in the moment. The hearts and minds of crows, the Eye of god, the strands of DNA that composed the universe - the nature of the Entities, the source of those chains, the last thoughts of Jonah Magnus as he died - slipped from his fingers, so much rain. 

Jon felt very normal. Slightly punctured. No more omniscient than usual.

Before he could even stand up and appreciate his functional legs, he was roughly assaulted by a thin body. Bony arms latched themselves around his neck, and Jon cautiously hugged the figure back without even checking who it was. With a glance down, Jon saw that it was sloppily dyed black hair, and in the next breath another figure rushed at him, fiery red hair flying everywhere as Agnes hugged him just as tightly. 

“Don’t go anywhere,” Gerry cried, sounding just like a little boy a long time ago who had never forgotten the fear of being left behind. 

“Don’t you freaking dare,” Agnes said, as if she trusted him to stay. Jon had never - nobody had ever stayed, not for Jon -

“I promise,” Jon said, as if a promise had the power to make everything alright. 

And maybe, in this bizarre and beautiful world where nightmares and daydreams held hands and danced under the green light of an eye, it did. 

Chapter Text

Epilogue 

“Your missing husband?”

The man nodded, clearly shaken. His eyes nervously flitted from Jon, sitting in the receptionist’s chair, to Daisy, who was sitting on his desk looking very menacing on complete accident. “That’s right. He got trapped in a nightmare a year ago, far out in the country. I just figured him for lost when - well, you know, everyone got out . But he hasn’t found his way home yet, and I’m worried he might still be trapped. Or unable to find his way home. I don’t know.” The man fisted his hands on his jeans, before carefully releasing them. “I heard that you can find anything. Please, can you find him?”

“Almost certainly,” Jon said, and pretended he didn’t see the way the man sagged in relief. He plucked a business card out of its holder and passed it to the shaken man. “We can easily track down your husband, then pass the case over to our partner team that specializes in retrieval and extraction.” Also monster hunting, but that wasn’t strictly relevant right now. “There’s their number, in case you want to get in contact with them.” He attempted a reassuring smile. Maybe all of the practice in the mirror worked, because the man weakly smiled back at him. “We’ll get him back in no time. You did the right thing in coming to us.”

“Thank you,” the man said, clutching the card so tight in his hand he was almost creasing it in two. “I can’t thank you enough, either of you.”

“It’s no problem,” Daisy grunted. Her tan turtleneck did little to conceal her ripcord muscles, and her jeans did little to distract from the fact that her canines were just a little longer and sharper than a human’s should be. “You’ll give payment upon delivery.”

“Right. Right, of course.” The man nodded shakily, standing up. “Of course. Thank you for your time. And for - everything.”

“It’s my job,” Jon said, “helping people like you. I’m glad to do it. I’ll call you once the job is completed.” The door leading from the staircase upstairs busted open, two rattling sets of footsteps thumping down the stairs as fast as possible, and Jon sighed. “If you’ll excuse us.”

After more stammered thanks, the man left shortly, and Daisy hopped off the desk and Jon stood up just as two figures jumped into the room, on the move in a frantic run from their enemy. 

“Gerard Keay, you are either putting on this tie or I am confiscating every book you own!” Another figure followed at a more sedate pace, dressed finely in a long black dress, shawl, and pumps. She was clutching a thin ribbon of fabric, which Gerry stared at with no small amount of animosity and fear. Agnes, who was already wearing a loose black dress, was fighting with her own pair of Mary Janes. “Agnes, do not swap those for your combat boots, I swear to shit.”

“And subjugate myself to your capitalistic, conformist expectations of how a woman controls her own body?” Agnes hissed. “Never.”

“This is biphobia,” Gerry said, eyeing the tie with distaste. “I’m being oppressed.”

“Settle down,” Daisy said, and suddenly they all had two perfect angels on their hands who loved wearing ties and nice shoes. 

But, of course, nobody was safe. Once the kids were tamed and Daisy was rewarding them by showing Agnes how to throw the knife she kept strapped to her thigh, Sasha turned her critical eye to Jon, assessing him and finding him wanting. 

Jon looked down at his outfit. He had already dressed before the client came in at the last minute, in black slacks and a white dress shirt that was perfectly clean . “What? There’s not even any holes in it.”

She pursed her lips. “You’re wearing trainers.”

Jon looked down at his feet. He was, indeed, wearing his usual pair of scuffed trainers. Great for running after suspects. Very formal. “Honestly, Sasha, it’s not as if Tim would care.”

“Go change.” Sasha turned her mighty eye on Daisy. “And you! You’re not wearing anything black.”

“Give me a break,” Daisy said, straight faced, “I only started wearing clothing two months ago.”

Sasha paused. “Yeah, okay.” She whirled back on Jon. “Get those shoes changed, now.”

After the tumultuous Changing of the Shoes, after Agnes almost set her nice new dress on fire, and after Daisy had to spend way too much time trying to figure out their fold-out map of London before Jon snapped and just downloaded the information into his brain, they were finally out the door and on the bus to the cemetery. Jon called the window seat, as usual, settling in next to Daisy as she cracked open a well-worn sword and sorcery novel and leaning against the gently thrumming metal. 

He watched London pass by in an infinite scroll around him. If he focused, listened with something more than his ears, he could hear all the sounds of the city: the thump of shoes on cement sidewalks, the incessant honking and squealing of cars, the busy chatter and clatter and noise of the ceaseless crowd of humans. Open storefronts peddled cheap jewelry and thin scarves, and brightly gleaming mannequins looked out from the spotless window of fine boutiques. It smelled and was crowded and people actually went inside stores - and, more importantly, left stores. Babies cried, children played, funerals carried on in their mighty ways. The world was more than alive - like newly born children, it shrieked . 

At first, Jon had hated it. He was used to a thin trickle of people braving the world, not thick crowds of people relishing it. It almost made him want to shut the whole thing down again. The street parties celebrating the liberation of humanity had lasted a week .   The fear wasn’t gone, as pungent and rich and satisfying as ever, but in equal forces humans swelled up to meet it. The other day, Jon had seen an entire squad of grannies beating out some shades from the Dark away from a gang of children with their purses. 

It was insane, and chaotic, and the least orderly thing Jon had ever seen. After a little bit, he grew to love it. It wasn’t his, but that made it even sweeter. The last thing Jon wanted was a world of his very own. What would he do with it? 

Annabelle had been right, in her own way. At least, she had thought she was right. Jon knew, as he understood people in whatever weak capacity he was capable of, that she had thought that she was doing the right thing for the world. It was why he hadn’t told the others the specifics of what she had done, and why he hadn’t killed her. Although he had made it very clear that if she interfered in his life again, she would experience the sensation of being popped. Like a grape. 

But he didn’t want to kill her. Maybe she could change too. If Jon and Daisy could do it, couldn’t anyone? Was anyone in the world incapable of change, if they really wanted it?

Kensal Green Cemetery was a short bus ride from where Jon lived, in the heart of London. Jon entertained himself on the way over by detailing its fine and lustrous history to the kids, who booed when they learned how much nobility was buried within. Sasha also booed, but she was the one who insisted that they all dress their best to the stupidly fancy cemetery, so she was made out to be the hypocrite in that one. Eventually Daisy found a more exciting topic for them and detailed a very interesting and possibly slightly made up story about that one time she had fought a legion of zombies as Jon quietly utilized his immense and terrifying power to clean out the cemetery from any predators from the End, Buried, or Dark. Didn’t quite feel like dealing with that today. 

When they arrived, the kids - Gerry especially, the little goth - ooh’d and aah’d over the stately mausoleums, the towering columns, and the intricate statues of angels looking heavenward. Gerry made Sasha take pictures of him leaning dramatically against statues, and Daisy amused Agnes by telling her which flowers in the gardens were poisonous. 

Agnes held up a bouquet of foxgloves, snickering slightly. “Why don’t you give these to Martin on your next date, Jon!”

Jon committed the first mistake of somebody responsible for children and flushed in embarrassment. “It’s not dates! We’re just - we’re just hanging out sometimes!”

“At a duck pond,” Daisy panned, “holding hands.”

“We are taking it very slow,” Jon stressed. “I don’t know him, and he doesn’t really know the real me - I mean, the me as I am now, which I guess you could say is constantly changing, and it’s not as if he hasn’t changed, and I’m not sure how I feel about the whole inter-species dating thing anyway, and -”

But Daisy just walked over and clapped him on the shoulder, smiling thinly. “You can change together, if you want. Do what makes you comfortable. You won’t lose him.”

“Aw, Daisy…”

Then her grip tightened on his shoulder. “And if he does make you uncomfortable, you come and tell your big sister so I can rip his spine out from his nose -”

“Ah, Daisy -”

“And make him choke on it -”

“Daisy! Your anger management, remember!”

“Right, right.” Daisy breathed in deeply, something she had learned in therapy. She was thinking of joining an ex-monster support group, in her free time from her public community class where she taught women self-defense. It was really all very wholesome. Relatively. They were still working on it. “Not in a cemetery.”

But, for some strange reason, Jon got the impression that Tim wouldn’t have minded. 

They hiked together past mausoleums and tombs, graves of the wealthy and famous and brilliant and skilled. Statues of beautiful angels and elegant crosses came and went, and their nice shoes scuffed the wet grass. The sky was a cheerful green, and it seemed almost as if the Eye was smiling. Jon could tell these sorts of things. 

Tim’s grave was in a slightly more relatively mundane section, nestled among mostly famous people. Tim’s parents had been Christian, so there was a small cross inscribed on the headstone, but for the most part the headstone was plain. It read TIMOTHY STOKER on the left, his Korean name on the right, and below it read the date he was born and the day that he died. Less than a year before Jon, as he was, was born. The date itself had been yesterday. 

It was a nice, sunny day to come to a cemetery. Weather was always the same, now: general sun, generally decent temperature. Jon tried not to feel too hard as if it should be raining, in case it actually would. 

Martin, Basira, Melanie, and Georgie had already visited the day previously, and the grave was festooned with flowers, little Korean and pride flags in a small vase, and some of his favorite foods. Even a wind-up toy, which Jon understood as being from Helen. Sasha smiled when she saw it, and Jon knew that she was remembering eating those foods with him, stealing the pickled vegetables out from his lunch box. The knowledge that he had been a good chef was downloaded into Jon’s brain, and he forcefully ejected it. It felt like cheating, somehow. 

The others had called Jon last week to let him know that they were going, and to ask if he and Sasha wanted to go. Jon, after awkwardly explaining that Tim was not buried in the last place that they had buried him, don’t ask why, yes it was definitely Jon’s fault, had consulted Sasha on the matter. She had declined, and everybody had understood: everyone else had four years to mourn. Sasha had about six months. And, apparently, they had been best friends. 

She came the day after instead, disappearing into her room for the entire day as Jon left food outside her door, and for some reason encouraged everybody else to come along. That left them here: Sasha and Daisy, who knew him, and Jon and the kids, who didn’t. 

They all stopped a fair distance away from it, awkwardly avoiding looking at Sasha. Her expression was hard to read as she looked at the grave, her first time really seeing it. 

“We’ll wait here,” Jon said, and as Sasha stepped forward to sit in front of the food and stare quietly at the headstone Jon focused on taking Daisy’s hand and squeezing tightly. Daisy let herself lean against him as the kids fidgeted, for once not whispering to each other but looking around the graveyard instead. 

When they saw the headstone next to Tim’s they did a double-take, glancing at Jon with wide eyes, but he just shook his head. Not right now. A crow landed on a tree branch above them, cawing out a cautious warning. 

As Sasha had a whispered conversation with the gravestone, hands folded together, Daisy let herself lean against Jon. Jon extended an arm against her shoulder, squeezing tight, fully aware he was one of two people she’d let do so. 

“He was an idiot, anyway,” Daisy said. 

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Daisy said, and Jon shot her a withering glance. She huffed. “Whatever. It’s not fine. But it’ll get there.”

“Yes,” Jon said, “that’s rather what I like about it.”

Then Gerry was poking him, eyes wide. “Hey, Jon, where am I buried?”

“We threw your body in a cellar,” Daisy said, deadpan. “Some say it’s still there.”

Agnes popped up at his elbow, delighted. “Did you stuff it into a wall?”

“Sure did. He was too loud.”

“Miss Daisy, you know that didn’t happen!” Gerry insisted, voice accidentally creaking too high. He shot a glance at Jon, suddenly uncertain. “That didn’t happen, right?”

“When do I get to be Aunt Daisy?” Daisy asked Gerry, somewhat mulishly. 

“Why is she the only one who gets to be Miss Daisy?” Jon asked, long-suffering. “Do I get no respect around here?”

“Nope.” Agnes turned to Daisy. “It’s your air of danger. Also, you’re the cool one.”

“Why is she the only one who gets to be -”

“You get to be Uncle Jon when you earn it,” Gerry said sternly, as if Jon hadn’t literally single-handedly released humanity from unending nightmares. Or maybe it had been Gerry. 

Alright. It had been Gerry and Agnes. But Jon had helped , goddamnit. 

But before he could protest, Sasha had stood up from the grave and was already walking back to them. Her face was a little ruddier, but she was smiling faintly. Everybody shut up and did their best to look like respectful little angels. 

Sasha, of course, was not fooled, but gently grabbed Jon’s elbow anyway as Daisy straightened. “Everybody come over, I have to introduce you. Come on, don’t be shy.”

They all awkwardly shuffled over, the kids lingering behind Jon and Daisy as Sasha took point. She glanced back, noticing the general discomfort of everybody, and sighed. “Kids, come up here to the front. Honestly, I hate this English way of doing things. If I had my way we’d have a picnic and a party.”

“You’re the one who insisted on the nice clothing,” Jon complained politely. 

“Yes, because this is a bougie cemetery and I’m not having you all make Tim look bad in front of the other spirits.” Sasha sat down in the grass, delicately maneuvering over the grass, directing the kids to sit next to her. Jon and Daisy sat on the other side, forming a lopsided half-circle. “Right. Gerry, hold my bag.”

Gerry reverently held the bag as Sasha withdrew a candle in a small jar with a faintly familiar man in a robe on it. She passed the candle to Agnes, smiling encouragingly, and with more focus than Jon had ever seen from her Agnes closed her eyes and delicately lit the candle with a small, vibrantly blue flame. At Sasha’s direction, Agnes carefully placed it among the food in front of the headstone. 

“A little bit more me than you, Tim, and I don’t have a freaking photograph, but it’ll have to do,” Sasha muttered to herself, before sitting up straight and clearing her throat. “Right. Well, honey, I have some introductions for you. You’ll love them, I swear.” She put her hands on Agnes and Gerry’s shoulders, who waved inanely. “These are the kids I was telling you about. They’re great kids, so dedicated and smart and hardworking. Did I tell you about how they saved the world, and rescued Jon’s sorry butt? I did, I think. Anyway, you’d like them. Agnes is so passionate, and Gerry is so kind. They’re just like you, I think.” She smiled at them faintly, almost amused by how embarrassed they both looked, before looking at Jon and Daisy. “I know you’d be surprised, but Jon and Daisy are here too. Daisy’s doing so well, Tim. She’s home, she’s living, and she’s moving on. I see so much pain in her, but she’s waking up every day anyway. She said you once told her that...you were afraid she was your future. You were both so consumed by that anger. But she’s getting better, and when I see it...I feel like you’d be rooting for her. That you would have been right there with her, healing too.”

Daisy looked away, clearly hiding her face, and Sasha smiled broader. 

“And Jon, Tim! I’ve never seen him so happy. You’d never believe who Jon really is, underneath all of what happened to him. I’m so happy I get to see the kind of person he really is: so kind and strange and vibrant.” She looked back at the headstone, like it was just them. Maybe it always had been.  “It’s been such a hard road. I never thought we’d all get here. It’s been...god, Tim, it’s been so fucking hard.” She bit down on something, staying silent for a long minute, before speaking again. “I’m happy we found each other. I’m happy I have a family again. I never thought I would. For a long time, I didn’t think I deserved it. But I do, I always did, and you did too, and - I’m trying to live, and it’s so hard, without you. But I’m not alone. They’re here beside me. And...you’re with me, always.”

They were silent for a second, giving Sasha time to compose herself, before she glanced at the kids and summoned a smile. “Do you guys want to say something? You don’t have to.”

“Can he hear us?” Gerry whispered, which was a valid and real concern. 

Sasha smiled at him, fragile but strong. “I think so. Where I come from, a lot of people believe in spirits. That the dead are all around us, giving us strength and passing on love. You don’t have to say anything.”

“I’ll say something,” Agnes said, brave as ever. She faced the headstone, as if she was imagining him right there. “Uncle Tim, we’re taking good care of Aunt Sasha. She’s a great detective and a cool aunt, and you should be really proud of her. I’m sure that you’d be really annoying if you were here.” She paused, flushing. “I mean annoying in the good way.”

“Like Jon,” Gerry volunteered. 

Agnes nodded quickly. “Yeah, like Jon! Good annoying. Uh, Aunt Sasha says that you were really funny, so...I’ll think of you next time Gerry makes a bad joke. I think you’d like Gerry’s jokes, so...if you can hear them...hope you laugh.” She nodded stiffly at Gerry. 

Gerry perked up. “What she said. Uh, I have a great MCR quote for this - ow, Agnes!” He scowled at her, rubbing the spot in his side where she had elbowed him. “What I mean is, I know a lot of people who wanted to live forever. I know a lot of ex-dead people too. I guess me an’ Agnes are one of them. I think death can be...a really wonderful thing, sometimes. So...say hi to my Dad for me, will you? We’re taking care of Aunt Sasha for you and making sure she doesn’t get eaten by monsters. Thanks, Uncle Tim.”

Everybody glanced at Daisy. She grunted. “He knows.”

Everybody looked at Jon, who abruptly started sweating. 

What could he say? He hadn’t known the guy. Sasha spoke of him so rarely, it was difficult to even pick up anything from her. All he knew was that they had loved each other, and Tim had killed himself when she was gone, and now he was dead. What did it mean, to be dead? Jon could never understand - not like Agnes, who understood how she was a stepping stone in the great eternal birth and rebirth of life. Not like Gerry, who understood death intimately as part of himself and as part of everybody he had ever loved, who saw the beauty in it. Not even like Sasha, who held faith in something Jon could never understand, and believed in that elusive thing known as Heaven. 

Any words from him would be hollow. Any sentiments obvious and stumbling. Here, staring at the headstone of the last fragment from Jonathan Sims’ past that was lost forever, what could he say?

Jon had lost every memory of Tim, and in that way had allowed him to experience the ultimate death within his heart. So long as you remembered them and kept their memory alive, they would always live on as part of you, but...when those memories were too painful and awful and scary to be remembered…

Jon breathed in. He breathed out. It offered no relief, but in those seconds he let himself indulge in the little motions that Tim had lived every day, that Jon had once lived. 

He opened an Eye, and let himself remember. 

“One day,” Jon said slowly, knowing his eyes were shining just the faintest green, “Tim decided to play a prank on me in the office. I had snapped at Tim over filing incorrectly, and did he ever want revenge. He spent all of his lunch break plotting with Sasha in the break room, and come the next day, he set his plan in motion…”

Jon told the whole sordid tale: of the way that Tim had tricked Jon into reading out a fake Statement, of how Sasha had contributed by remotely fuzzing out the audio on his computer and shutting down his keyboard. One Sasha realized what he was doing, she added her own memories of the event - how they had all hid the entire thing from Jon, how Martin had officially refused to participate in the hazing but had eventually given in and played distraction as Tim replaced the files. Eventually, gloriously, they had finally managed to get Jon to read out in his booming and theatrical voice, “Four twenty blaze it.”

 It was the most painful memory he could have chosen to remember: stories of people long gone, long changed. Soaked in the pain of better days, happy memories weighed down by painful nostalgia. But, somehow, it tasted sweet instead. Here, in this space, with Daisy leaning against him and the dew from the wet grass soaking the knees of his slacks, a painful memory could hold within it a sublime and sweet joy. 

The kids gasped at the right places, laughed at the punchline. When Jon finished they quickly asked for another one, enthralled by the stories of a time long since gone, faded in the sepia tones of memory. Jon glanced at Daisy, who was smiling slightly.

“Tell them about the knife fight he got into with Melanie.”

And Jon found himself groaning. “Good lord, it’s a miracle they didn’t get themselves killed right then!”

They shared stories, fond memories of a time long since past, until the light began to slowly fade, and soften into twilight. Without nostalgia, without disappointment or bitterness or a deep and profound grief, Jon and Sasha let themselves share memories that were happy, despite everything. 

Next to where they sat, a headstone squatted in the darkness. Unattended, unrecognized, and unimportant, thick words were engraved in the center. 

SASHA JAMES: BELOVED FRIEND. 

Across from him, Sasha laughed, bright and clear like the ringing of a bell, and the crow fluttered away.