Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Time fades quietly by, and with it, him.

He travels, now. He never had before. Not for himself, anyway. The furthest his grandmother had taken him as a child was Liverpool; she had wanted to visit a sick friend in hospital and he was dragged along. It was a time before GPS and she paused at every petrol station she decided looked clean enough to consult her map and grow increasingly annoyed with Jon, who had to abandon his books after motion sickness set in and was trying to survive by bouncing his legs anxiously and staring out the window into other people's cars. Every few minutes she asked him if he needed to use the bathroom, and with each time she asked, he only grew more frustrated and restless.

Even when they arrived, their time was split between hospital and dingy hotel- his grandmother had rented a single room with two beds, though it seemed as much torture for her to be trapped all day and night with him as it was for him to endure her chilly, steadfast obligation. In the hospital, at least, they had a break from each other. While she sat with her friend, he claimed a sticky vinyl-covered sofa in the visitor's rest area down the hall and read through a series of tattered secondhand books in relative peace.

When he'd gone to London for uni, it was the furthest he'd ever been from Bournemouth on his own. He suspected it was a relief for both of them. He didn't have a car, and his grandmother didn't drive much anymore, so it was easy for them to justify the lack of visits.

And yes, he'd gone to America, he'd gone to Beijing, he'd nearly gone to the north fucking pole- but those had been for the Institute, not for himself. He had been running on rails, then, pushed and shoved by the forces that be whether he liked it or not, just an overpowered pawn in a game he’d never agreed to play.

Perhaps it was just one force, though. Ever since he'd dealt with Jonah, the Eye simultaneously feels more remote and more intimately a part of himself. It doesn't tell him where to go or what to do, and it makes no comment or judgment that he can tell on his choice of destinations, but it is ever-present- the Ceaseless Watcher, indeed.

So, because there are no objections, and because staying feels too much like being Seen, he goes. His Understanding of Helen is still too recent to think of calling for her, but he Knows that the Tundra is still docked in Plymouth without a captain and heads that way.

The crew don't say anything when he eventually arrives with only a single small briefcase in hand and invites himself aboard. It's not that they don't notice him; yes, he's gotten good at pulling the shroud of the Lonely around him now he’s seen how Peter did it, and he's had plenty of practice slipping onto buses and trains between here and London without paying fare- just one gift of many bought with his blood. But these sailors are used to seeing through the fog that clings to the ship's gray hull. No... they simply don't socialize. Not until the sacrifice has been made.

That does not mean they are ambivalent to his presence.

He insinuates to the first mate that he’s here in Peter’s stead and that perhaps it's time to leave port, and he leaves it at that. Afterwards he is as silent as the rest of them. As they work, patrolling the shipping containers he knows to be empty and maintaining the engines and helming the ship, he simply... watches. He does not claim a bunk among them; he does not sleep. He does not join them for their meals; he does not eat. Most of his time is spent sitting in Peter Lukas' old quarters, picking idly through the few personal belongings left behind with vague disinterest, and opening his inner eyes to observe the activity on the ship. The rest of the time, he climbs to the helm and lingers beside whichever poor soul is manning it, staring out at the horizon and trying to find the division between mist and spray. He never does; it's as though the sky melts directly into the sea, endless gray on gray.

He picks and scratches at the bloodstains on his arms, still bared to the Atlantic chill, and exposes new texts. He glances down to reread them sometimes, wondering if they are chosen for the moment, or revealed at random.

The crew hate it. They hate when he inserts himself as an unwelcome presence there, and they hate it more when he's down below. They can feel the weight of his attention raising goosebumps on their arms, making the hair on their necks stand on end. He exists in conflict with everything they know; his energy buzzes in the haze and burns through it, digging channels of clarity directly into their minds, and they hate it.

He can't find it in himself to care. They're minor actors in this great tragedy, but they've made their beds. He's watching the Lonely play out, neutered and rudderless but persistent, and it scratches an itch. If they have nightmares when he closes his eyes and looks out, well- they all know that they leave with one more than will return, and complicity has consequences.

After two weeks at sea, they make port in Halifax and he disembarks as quietly as he boarded. He can feel the crew's confusion. They had all survived the journey. They still don't speak to each other as they drop anchor and moor up the ship, only share bewildered and alarmed glances at how Wrong this all is, and how it is the wrong flavor of Wrong.

Wrong, and wrong. Both. There is nuance, now, or perhaps there always was, but he Sees it.

Jon doesn't look back at the freshly docked Tundra . He has an entirely new continent of fresh horror to digest, far away from fresh sins and sour memories.

He is, for lack of a better term, a wandering eye.

(And you may capitalize where you see fit, because where the words he mutters etch dark into his peeling onion skin they shift and change with every glance. Wandering is wandering. Eyes are eyes. There is room for both to be true, and in him, on him, all things are.)

(He understands. He Understands.)

Halifax reeks of the Lonely. Most of it is old; a faint perfume of ambergris and rancid whale fat. Over the top is the sharper salt-sting that the Tundra brings with her everywhere. She has clearly docked here before, and it’s easy for Jon to understand why. The Lonely wafts all around him as he takes his briefcase and leaves the docks, following in the footsteps of countless seafarers before. There are other people around, but all move in isolation- their faces are blurred and lost in the mist. An old whaling city, this far north… It’s a natural safe harbor for a Lukas.

Beneath the Lonely, though, there are other fears. The ghost of the Lightless Flame clings to the waterfront like oil. Old, old blood in the dirt whispers of the Slaughter. Their stories are gone; any survivors are long since dead. After so long away from the overwhelming stimuli of London, even these faint traces put him on edge.

And all at once, after a lifetime spent on the periphery of society, Jon finally understands the fear of missing out. It eats at him, knowing the stories were there but he is too late to hear them, by decades and centuries.

This is not a place for a watcher. 

He finds his way to a bus station, where he boards a shuttle bus south to Yarmouth. The driver’s eyes glaze over as he boards and settles in the very back without paying fare. It’s a Tuesday, and not peak hours, so in the end only five other people climb aboard for the four hour ride. One of them is a middle aged man who looks about twenty years older than he is, with wild gray hair and a beard down to his collarbones. His clothes are clean, but mussed, and about an hour into the ride he gives in to the burning weight of Jon’s attention and sidles back to share a row with the Londoner, and tell him about the black dog that’s been following him, and the death left in its wake.

Jon listens without a word. When the man is done, he blinks and quickly relocates to the seat just behind the driver. In another couple hours, they arrive in Yarmouth, where Jon takes the ferry to Maine.

There’s nothing wrong with Canada. He just thinks he’d like to see New York.

In Maine, there is a snarled knot in the warp and weave of reality. It is invisible, but it bulges , and screams to any who will listen of turf wars and power struggles beyond human comprehension. The Stranger, lurking in the filth below. In the trees, behind walls of thorns, the End calls and waits. A pocket of Desolation lures the unwitting into a gloomy thrift store. A being torn between Flesh and Eye creeps amongst homes and graves alike. These, and more- layers on layers on layers, each outdoing the one before.

The wrongness of it hits Jon like a wave of nausea miles before he’s even entered it, and when he leans his head to the cool glass of the bus window he can see the wreckage of the battles shimmering like heat waves over the treeline.

He gets off the bus miles from anywhere and begins the long walk around. He has no interest in whatever game they are playing here and he will not involve himself.

Perhaps he’ll visit when the dust settles.

New York City, when he reaches it, is every bit as filthy and loud as London is, but the feel of it is entirely different. Something about the air- it was damp and cool when he left England and brisk when he reached Canada, but New York’s air is like the hot breath of a living beast, rattling through the strangled windpipes of its streets. Trash, heaped on the curb, clogs sidewalks like arteries. It is an urban heart attack waiting to happen.

It is a welcome change.

He stumbles upon a Hunter before he even sniffs out his first American statement. He’s no cop, not like Daisy, and he doesn’t seem to be homeless. He doesn’t stand out at all, perhaps intentionally- he wears the same grays and blacks that every other pedestrian does, and emanates a blind ambivalence that suggests he doesn’t even see them around him. Still, he stands at the bus stop with an alert stiffness that Jon recognizes instantly, like a bird dog about to point.

He must feel Jon watching, because he looks over and matches his stare, letting the Archivist see the cold bloodlust that sits just below the calm surface.

A bus pulls up to the stop, and the others there board in a flurry of shuffling feet and metrocards. The Hunter does not. He turns away from the bus stop to face Jon head on, and doesn’t blink as the bus pulls away without him. There is a purity in the stillness; a mutual recognition.

The man returns his metrocard to his pocket, where his hand lingers.

Jon reaches into a pocket, too. Instead of a concealed knife, he pulls out a small tape recorder that hadn’t been there before.

“What was your first kill?” Jon asks quietly when they meet each other halfway, his tape recorder clicking to life. The Hunter can only grimace as he abandons the knife in Jon’s side and opens his mouth to tell all.

He leaves the Hunter, spent, on the bus stop bench. As he walks away, he rewinds and replays the tape compulsively, drinking in the words like tea steeped from reused leaves, over and over again until it is so flavorless and spent that he throws the tape recorder and the ink-stained knife into a gutter and moves on.

He’s not proud, but it feels almost victimless. One monster consuming another is a net win for mankind.

His briefcase is light in his hands. It doesn’t carry much: just a change of clothes, a human rib, and a few books. One has its cover wrapped in old statements and sellotape to hide its title. The one beneath is a dingy cream color. Its title, set in gold along the rounded spine, is fading away, though the embossed flame set into the leather is still clearly visible. At the bottom of the briefcase is a manila envelope, and nestled safely inside it is a small yellowing pamphlet, spattered dark with old blood.

He has no plans of expanding his little traveling library. Still, it expands. England had been well and truly scoured by the time he took up the mantle of Archivist, but America seems to be an unplumbed depth. The books sing to him from their hiding places.

The first addition to his collection comes from a tiny used book store that catches his attention as he wanders by. It’s an old copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in the original French, though it’s hard to tell- the paper is wrinkled and ink blurred by extensive water damage. The whole book, in fact, looks like it had been dredged up from the bottom of the ocean, and perhaps it had - running his hand over its ruined cover and ruffled pages, he can feel the cold darkness running off it like water on his skin. He does not open it. He does not read it.

He could walk out of the store with it unnoticed- he’s becoming an expert at being an unseen observer- but morbid curiosity makes him bring it to the man perched on a stool behind the register, nose buried in a dog-eared book of poetry.

“I’d like to buy this,” he tells the cashier, who barely looks up from his reading as he grabs the old Jules Verne novel from the counter. He does set his book down with a frown when he realizes how damaged the book is.

“Why would we even sell this?” the man asks himself in abject confusion, scrubbing at the pilled paper with his thumb before paging through the novel. “It’s not even readable. Are you sure you want to buy this? I'm sure we have a copy in better shape.”

“I’m sure,” Jon confirms quietly, his eyes never leaving the cashier’s face as the man continues to page through the book. His pace is gradually slowing, and he is squinting strangely at the blurred blobs of ink that were once sentences like he’s a moment away from making sense of them.

“I suppose it is an antique,” the man murmurs, staring at the page he’s stopped on. “Might make a nice decoration, if that’s your thing. It wouldn’t be good for much else.” At last, he closes the book and looks up at Jon, who still stares. The man blinks blearily back, and continues blinking- then paws at one eye like there’s something in it.

“How much do I owe?” the Archivist asks. He has the Hunter’s wallet in his pocket, and he Knows there’s enough there to cover a ruined book.

The cashier continues to blink, and the distracted concern on his face is clearly visible.

“Sorry,” the man says, swiping his eyes with the back of his wrist. “Must have gotten dust in my eyes or something.” He blindly shoves the book off the counter into a plastic bag with a grocery store’s name printed on it, and shoves it at Jon. “The book’s worthless, just take it.”

He hardly waits for Jon to take the bag and step out of the store before locking the door behind him and turning the sign to “CLOSED,” still mopping frantically at his eyes. Jon lingers on the doorstep to take in the atmosphere and listen to the man’s rising panic as he realizes the black spots in his vision, shaped like the blotted ink in the water-logged book, aren’t going away.

When Jon stops to put Twenty Thousand Leagues in his briefcase with the others, he realizes the cashier had accidentally bagged his book of poetry along with it. It’s the Complete Poems of E. E. Cummings; the title is emblazoned in rainbow lettering across the cover.

He takes the book out of the bag it shares with the Verne classic, but lets it rest with the other books in his briefcase all the same, as if it holds the same power as the rest. Perhaps, he bizarrely finds himself thinking, it does.

He is hungry.

He eats a page from the book with the hidden cover. He reads the poetry.

He is nourished.

The next book he acquires is known to him, if only through secondhand recountings. It has no title, and he does not truly know its power, but he knows it when he lays his hands on it.

The context he finds it in helps. He first catches the scent as he’s wandering the Cemetery Belt in Brooklyn, savoring the hints of terror that manage to rise through the concrete and soil to permeate the air there. Something sharper pierces it, though, making him turn his head away from the old graves to focus on the brownstones to the west. Acrid smoke, like burning rubber.

He abandons the cemeteries and begins moving into Bed-Stuy. Night is falling; Jon passes bustling dive bars and taquerias but pays them no mind, and is ignored in return. He follows his nose, his Eyes, down one street after another as the sense of Burning grows until he finds himself outside the burnt out shell of brownstone in a long row of brownstones, all tired and dilapidated themselves.

He can’t help but remember how he’d coaxed the Institute into flames before taking his leave, looking at the scorched stone and lingering soot stains on the sidewalk and above the empty windows. The place was built before proper fire safety protocol was developed, and it was jam-packed with paper, so it had gone up all too easily.

That fire had smelled of old wood, knowledgeable and rich with old secrets. This shell of a house smells like rancid destruction. Heat, without light.

He hesitates at the front stairs for a long minute before he musters the willpower to climb them. His last encounter with the Desolation hadn’t been pleasant; a dark scar still twists up his hand and wrist like wax paper and pulls uncomfortably when he clenches his fingers in a fist. Even the power of the Watcher can’t completely undo what another entity has wrought.

Still, the house is quiet and feels empty when he steps lightly inside, carefully testing the charred floor before trusting it with his weight. Everything inside is burnt and ruined; lumps of melted plastic and unrecognizable constructs of wood are all that are left of an entire life in this building.

He presses on, going upstairs. The steps groan painfully under him, and only the knowledge that he would survive the fall overrides the concern that they’ll give way.

Upstairs, it looks even worse than below.

“Heat rises,” he murmurs to himself, and he dips his hands into the greasy ash that’s heaped on every surface, reveling in the silky wrongness of it. The smell that isn’t a smell is stronger up here, and he follows it into a bedroom.

This room is the worst of them all- the epicenter and the focus of the flames. Everything is black- ash still hangs suspended in the air, and every surface is charred and cracked. When Jon steps through the doorway, more ash is stirred up, and it drifts without dancing- motion without life.

There is a spark in the cinders, a flash of red. He bends to examine it, only to find a small red book buried in the ash, untouched by flame. It is hot when he picks it up.

“You’re lost,” he tells the book, brushing soot from its covers. “You’re supposed to be in evidence lockup.” Because it has to be the same book, he reasons, and he knows it is- the book that had been found on Diego Molina when his house had burned, and that Gerry had failed to find and destroy in the aftermath. “How on earth did you wind up in America?”

But he is here too, with no real reason, and the book can’t answer him, so he only tucks it away and moves on.

A third book makes its way to him on its own. He is sitting on a wood slat bench in Times Square smoking a cigarette and watching his fellow tourists mill past like cattle to the slaughter. The overblown faces of celebrities and characters grin down at him from countless glowing billboards, and it manages to be simultaneously comforting and unsettling. Here he sits, holding a magnifying glass to the crowds, while he himself is under scrutiny.

He imagines an ant farm, and an aphid farm within.

“There’s always a bigger fish,” he says to himself, breathing smoke with each word. The people he shares a bench with ignore him entirely. He isn’t shrouded with Lonely; New York is simply well practiced at Not Noticing the oddities that pepper it.

The group beside him stands up and walks away, chatting happily. A cool draft wafts against Jon’s side, which had grown warm from the insulation of living human bodies. He glances almost mournfully at the empty space they left behind and notices they’ve forgotten some things.

A crinkled plastic water bottle, half empty. A playbill to whatever show was on Broadway at the moment. ( The Ferryman, he knows, even if he’s never heard of it and knows nothing about the play, except he knows the script well enough to perform it. )

There’s also a book, unassumingly bound with green fabric and lying half-under the playbill. Jon brushes the playbill aside to see the title.

A Biography .

The book feels innocent enough when he picks it up, which is a red flag all on its own. Usually he gets a sense of a written work’s contents before he can even crack it open. The Leitners also tend to ooze a bit, their evil unable to be contained by animal hide and iron ink.

This one sings its innocence. Just a regular old book, abandoned here. Nothing strange or concerning about that. Simply bad luck for whoever lost it, and good luck for you.

He doesn’t buy it, but he still opens it out of curiosity, tracing the words with his fingers like a sommelier smelling the wine before tasting it. He gets nothing .

With a sigh, he gives in to his impulse as Archivist, and he reads. He only makes it half a page before firmly closing the book. A biography, indeed. His biography. Is this one of the Beholding’s books, then? Or perhaps it was the End, a cousin to the Book of the Dead . If it is the Eye, it might explain why he can’t feel anything from it- he is uncomfortably aware that he exudes its paranoid perfume himself.

And then there’s the Web. This sort of subtlety is very on brand for the Web. Telling him how his life went and how it will go is a great way to tie him up in puppets’ strings and make him dance.

At any rate, he doesn’t trust it, and he’s suspicious of how it came to him at all. He certainly won’t be reading any more of it. All the same, he tucks it safely away in his briefcase with the others. As with all the books of power, he feels it best be removed from circulation. For safety reasons. Perhaps, too, a small part of him admits, for selfish reasons.

He is the Archivist. Books like these belong in the Archive. He carries them like a woman carries a basket of flowers- she is all the more lovely for them, as he is more formidable, and as she goes she can enjoy their bouquet. So, too, can he. These terrors, they are so foreign to him, but so delectable, like exotic fruits from faraway lands.

The billboards cycle through their advertisements above. One smiling face changes to another, and all eyes are on him as he ponders the nature of fear. All at once he is reminded of his time at the Magnus Institute, and it is easy to imagine Jonah’s face up there with the Star Wars storm troopers and Simon Cowell and- wait, Freddie Mercury? Maybe not Freddie Mercury. But even as he watches, perplexed by the likeness of a British 80s icon in the heart of New York, the LED sign changes and his image is replaced with Thanos glowering down at a gaggle of would-be heroes.

“That’s definitely more fitting,” he breathes witheringly, and he stands up from the bench and walks away.

He is sitting in a Greyhound station. New York has lost its novelty, and is beginning to feel too familiar. He craves new sights.

His seat is uncomfortable by design: a barbaric construction of steel and blue plastic with jutting arms and angles that refuse to accommodate. For a moment he ponders it, but he knows it’s human cruelty that has made them this way, not some cosmic horror bent on torturing the poor and homeless.

Like a nervous tic, he flicks his lighter over and over, mechanically sparking a flame and smothering it. He can see the bus pool through the floor-to-ceiling windows that take up the entire wall in front of him, but his isn’t due to leave for another hour.

He thinks he’ll go south. He’s intrigued by the recollection of a creature in the foothills of Virginia.

Flick. Click. Flick. Click.

“Sir,” a voice cuts sharply into his reverie, snapping him back to the present. “Put your lighter away. You can’t be doing that here.”

A woman is standing in front of him in a blue station uniform. She is stern, and her dark eyes are piercing. Jon glances around, certain that he’s drawn the Lonely up around him, and he has , but she sees through it like it’s nothing.

Interesting.

“What are you?” he asks her mildly. He doesn’t feel bad about putting some force behind it, and it’s clear she feels it, because her dour frown deepens.

“I’m the station manager,” she replies, a little proud, a little confused, and entirely annoyed. “Your lighter, sir.” He still has it in hand. His attention has shifted and sharpened, and the weight of his curiosity sits solely on her shoulders.

“And you see everything.” Flick. Click. “Here in your small kingdom, and everywhere. Even the things you’d rather not see, because it’s ruined every relationship you ever had, seeing too much . They’ve called you a snoop, said you invade their privacy and you think maybe you’re just observant , but you never sought anything out. It just made itself obvious, didn’t it. The things that the others don’t see. And you’ve seen things that shouldn’t be possible. Too much, and too far, and too strange.”

Tense unease grows in the short silence between them.

“Your lighter .”

“What have you seen?”

“You, for starters,” she snaps, and he can’t be certain if she’s compelled or not. “Covered in those tattoos, with that look on your face, talking like that? I seen folks let out from the detention center and drifters off to who knows where, but it’s your type that cause trouble. Even when nobody else pays them any mind, I see them. Monsters and murderers, all of them, walking around like they own this city. Setting fires and leaving muddy footprints behind them and going around with roaches up their sleeves like they think I won’t notice, like they think I’ll let them do whatever they like. Well, this is my station. I keep an eye on them and I’m keeping an eye on you. Now put the lighter awa y.”

Jon finally complies and tucks it away, but he still stares at her like she’s a fascinating new species he’s just discovered, and she stares right back. To be seen - it’s uncomfortable and raw and he hadn’t realized how much he needed it until now. He feels her steely eyes on him even after he’s boarded his bus and left the station.

She feels his even longer.

Jude finds him a few weeks later, and she is as much condensed rage and loathing as he remembers her to be. He’s made it as far as Baltimore, and is exploring the urban wastes there before he carries on south. The faces that look at him from dilapidated porches are tired and wary. His strangeness is not the first or the last they would witness. The air is thick with untold statements. Every street has a story to tell, whispered to him in doorways or in the middle of the cracked sidewalk, all wrenched from their owners with as much delicacy as Jon finds himself capable of.

He follows another mark into a condemned house on a condemned street when she finds him. He only realizes what’s happening when the man he’s stalking is abruptly immolated- his clothes and hair burst suddenly into flame as a hand digs into his throat, and a short, blocky figure emerges from the shadows when he falls, still sizzling, a minute later.

“Hi, Jon ,” she snarls as she walks quickly towards him. “I’ve come for the book you stole.”

“Jude?” Jon asks dumbly, backing into the previous room to put some space between them. “You’re a long way from home.”

“I’m just here to collect .” She’s grinning at him, or maybe she’s baring her teeth, but it stirs up some fear in Jon’s gut that he didn’t know he still had. “We’ve been looking for the book for years, and now a little spider’s told me you’ve got it. No more favors for Elias- It’s time you were dealt with.” She closes the gap and wraps vicelike fingers around his thin arm, immediately burning away cloth and skin alike as he struggles to pull free. Flames lick at his peeling skin, lifting up the dry edges to reveal texts beneath, texts beneath, texts beneath. He feels it, of course he does, and it’s far from pleasant but the scalding heat feels oddly crisp, to be savored and endured like brain freeze.

“I’ll enjoy this,” Jude adds as he stands frozen in shock. “You won’t.”

Jude Perry's fist plows into his cheek, and his skin instantly scorches and flakes at her touch.

Knock.

He staggers aside; when he swipes at his cheek, his hand comes away covered in ash and ink. As he does, he notices that where Jude's grip has burned through his sleeve and the skin of his arm, the Web's Leitner has once again risen to the surface. Mr. Spider's door is there, emerging from under the edges of ruined flesh. A ripple of terror runs through him, and he isn't prepared for the second punch.

KNOCK.

Her knuckles plow into his jaw and he stumbles again as something in him stirs and makes the dark ichor in his veins run cold as his heart skips a beat and trips along faster. He's clutching at his chest, pressing where he feels something in him pressing back, and Jude takes the opportunity to grab him by his thin upper arm and press her other palm to his sternum with a vicious grin.

Her hand burns a hole through his shirt and into his chest, fingers digging deep into the paper and turning it to ash. Scraps of blackened statements drift to the floor; smoke rises from the wound even as the ink pours freely over her waxen arm.

“I told you I could burn your heart out,” she laughs, voice low and intimate.

Jon is overwhelmed by it- it doesn't even hurt ; nothing has hurt properly in a long time, but he can feel the pieces of what he's become being burnt out of him, and he can feel her fingers burrowing deeper, deeper like the worms had- deeper than the worms had- until his ribs give beneath them and she's wrist deep in his chest cavity. It's a violation not entirely unlike Jared's harvest, but Jared- for all his faults- was in it for the product, not the process. Jude just wants to see him burn. He's gasping from the invasive, stinging fullness of it, clutching Jude's shirt in a white knuckle grip, and then he laughs . He's staring into her eyes as her vindictive grin drops in suspicious confusion.

"What's so funny," she asks, even as she curls her fingers up around his beating heart, making it and him shudder. For as little pain as he feels, his body still spasms and pulls through pure panicked reflex, but there’s something else too. He can see her hand inside him.

see . Not See.

He sees other things moving in there, too, in the narrow bands of light that slip between ragged flesh and waxen wrist. Things that shouldn't be there.

Tears in his eyes, he laughs harder and lets go of her shirt to dig into his own chest wound, charring his hand black where it brushes against her arm. He pries at the ragged edges of himself to widen the wound. His heart isn’t beating anymore; it had entirely seized up as the muscle cooked through. 

"You've burned me before," he pants through the torture of the moment, grinning manically even as desperation tears through him. His lungs crackle against her wax-skin with every inhale. There's a sickening rip of paper and crack of bone as he pulls at the wound with both hands, trying and failing not to know every snapped tendon and shattered bone.

"What are you doing-"

She can't get her hand out fast enough. Her fingers have barely cleared the wound when a different hand bursts out from the ragged hole in his chest in a flood of black ink and pseudoscorpions, and wraps its long, spindly fingers unflinchingly around her wrist. Steam rises, but its grip stays solid.

"You should have tried something different, Jude," Jon whispers, nearly apologetic. "The Eye remembers. Nothing ever works twice."

Jude's eyes are wide with horror; she pulls and claws but the thin black hand only tightens and drags her millimeter by millimeter back into Jon's wound. More fingers poke out from his chest, flanking Jon's own hands, and they effortless crack him open with a horrifying, creaking rip , and at this he does let out a fast-fading cry. It's too much, he's too open and pieces of himself are falling all around him and he SEES TOO MUCH, TOO MUCH

because more and more arms spread his ribs like wings, and he's leaking black and the light pours in

and eyes and eyes and eyes and eyes

and eyes peer from every muscle and bone and organ, every manner of eye, human and insect and keyhole nautilus and monstrosities nonexistent on this earth with too many irises and pupils and eyelids packed densely over every exposed surface and they all watch where they don’t sizzle and cook

and eight long, long arms stretch from inside him to seize Jude in a screaming embrace, and he sees when her dogmatic cruelty finally breaks and she becomes human again and remembers the fear of things beyond her control and ken

and she is dragged forward and pulled in and he feels her boiling tears on his black and shriveled heart, and he can see her sobbing and struggling the entire time and he thinks, this might be pain

and two black hands release Jude to curl almost tenderly around both sides of his ravaged body and pull him gently, gently shut until he's just a trembling, terrified mess on the floor, half drowning in his own pseudoscorpions as they worry at the burns and torn edges and spilled organs and pull him back together with a million tiny pincers

and he weeps, unblinking, because the eyes on the inside see everything that happens until the seam in his chest closes and the last of the light is blocked out.

He lies there for a while.

At some point, long after the stirring inside him has stopped and his heart has regenerated enough to twitch nauseatingly where it is nestled in his scorched body, he opens his mouth, and with ruined lungs he finds the breath to whisper “Helen.”

Soon enough, there is a creak of old hinges and a pair of black pumps manifests in his vision before Helen is crouching down to inspect him. She keeps her knees angled, he notices, so he doesn’t get a view up her skirt. He wonders how much of that is sheer muscle memory left over from the Helen-who-was, and how much is conscious decision by the-thing-that-Helen-has-become. Do the entities understand or appreciate modesty? Or is it an attempt to blend in, and smack the Stranger’s hands away from their hard won fear?

“Archivist,” she greets him warmly. She sounds the same as ever. “It’s been a while.”

“Helen,” he croaks again, “I think- passage inside me, something came through , Helen. Am I-” he freezes, swallowing the question, and rephrasing through gritted teeth. “ Need to know if I’m a door. A door like- like your door.”

“A door like me ,” she corrects him with a smile, giving words to what he can’t. His evident horror at the thought doesn’t seem to offend her.

She holds a hand out to him. He hesitates for only a moment before weakly taking it. It is too large. His fingers wrap easily around it, and her skin is sharp and soft and smooth and lumpy with tumorous bone all at once. If his stomach wasn’t still largely scorched meat and ash, he might vomit.

He has never been so aware of his organs, before, he realizes numbly.

Helen helps him up, her attention focused on the enormous slick of dried black sludge he’d been lying in. The shape of his body is visible in the negative space he left behind; there are smears where his innards had been painstakingly pulled off the floor and back into place by his resident arachnids.

“Making friends, I see.”

Jon shudders, snatching his hand away the moment he’s certain his legs will hold him. He feels as weak as a newborn; his hands are stained nearly as black as the ones that had ended Jude Perry. He is tired. A lot of his insides are wrong.

“Need-,” he chokes haltingly. He wants to get to the wall for the extra support, but the way his legs are shaking, he’s not sure he’ll make it. Instead, Helen takes it upon herself to hold his elbow and place her other hand at his back and help keep him upright. It’s a thoughtless reaction when he leans into her and she is both boneless and too bony; places that shouldn’t give, do. He doesn’t withdraw, though, and lets her guide him to the door.

No- her door. He digs his heels in when he realizes.

“Briefcase,” he says hoarsely, pulling. She lets him go; as he shuffles along the perimeter of the room with one hand trailing along the peeling wallpaper, he refuses to wonder where she had intended to take him.

“I can hear you thinking,” she says, waiting at her door. There’s coy humor in her tone; she’s saying it to gently tease, not to indicate eldritch ability. “I’m not planning anything nefarious, Archivist. Besides,” she adds, a little wry, “I think I would find you hard to digest. You’re… more complicated than most.”

He briefly considers asking if that’s a compliment or an insult, but instead settles on “You’ve thought about it.”

“In hypotheticals.” He doesn’t have to see her shrug to know it happened; whether that is the Beholding’s influence or just familiarity, he doesn’t know. “I’m not very interested in the rivalries you and the others seem to trip into. Maybe it’s a human thing.”

“You’re part human.” Jon reaches the corner where his briefcase is stowed, and gingerly stoops to pick it up. His ribs and sternum crack and bend uncomfortably when he does, held together by cartilage and chitin alone. He keeps his back to her as he opens it a crack and rips a few pages from a book to stuff in his mouth. They taste like dirt.

“I started as something else.” She sounds thoughtful. “I became more like you humans, but we move in opposite trajectories.”

“I’m not human.” When he turns, he sees she is smiling oddly at him.

“Oh, at heart, you’re painfully human,” Helen says. “What we are, is, and always will be, no matter how many layers are piled on top or stripped away. I am Helen, but I was also Michael, and I will always be what I have always been . You are the Archivist, but underneath…”

“What makes me so complicated, then?” Now that he’s using his lungs and trachea, they’re working harder to knit back together. Each breath comes a little easier than the last, but leaves him hungrier. He doesn’t even realize he’s put influence into his question until Helen hisses and the world twists momentarily around him.

“You’re all of us, everything,” she says in a rush, countless teeth gritting and gritting and gritting in infinitely regressive patterns that makes his vision spin. “ Mind yourself, Archivist .”

“I’m sorry, Helen.” He is.

“Some underestimate the Ceaseless Watcher,” Helen says after pausing a moment to prove she is controlling her own words. “They think it’s just a bottom feeder, weak and toothless.” Jon hears echoes of that-which-was rising from the endless tunnels of her throat. “We know better. You aren’t like them. But, at the same time, you are them.” Her smile had faded, but at this, it makes a brief reappearance, only to vanish again in a flash.

“Because I’m an archive,” Jon finishes for her. When he hobbles within a couple meters of her, he pauses to rest with his shoulder leaned against the wall.

“ The Archive.”

“I steal the fear, and I make it mine.”

“You make it you . An avatar on their own is enough of a pain, but an avatar that can adapt is dangerous.”

“...How do you know so much about me? About the Eye?”

Helen nearly rolls her eyes. She masks it by gently taking the briefcase from his still blackened hands, grimacing at the greasy soot left wherever he touched. He lets her take it without a fight. Whatever knee jerk mistrust he has of her never seems to last overlong, even if it should.

“Apart from the experience that comes with time? You could say we’re cousins, of a sort.” She purses her lips and looks at her door as she thinks. “It Is Not What It Is, and It Knows You. For as… antithetical as it may seem, they aren’t really so different, are they? Terror of the knowing, and terror of the uncertainty of knowing.”

“Fears of perception. Hm.” Jon reaches for the squashed pack of cigarettes in his pocket only to find they’re soaked through with his inky blood. With a disappointed sigh, he tosses it to the floor. “Robert Smirke would have killed to have this conversation with you.” And might have done, with other avatars, and other entities.

Something inside him migrates back to where it belongs with the help of scurrying, pinching claws and a fresh wave of nausea rolls over him.

“The doors, though, Helen.” He runs his hand over the scarred, lumpy skin of his chest through what remains of his shirt. There’s a gnarled seam where he’d been split open. Careful to control himself, he asks, “Am I like you now?”

He gets a shrug in reply.

“You’ve walked my corridors. You tell me.”

There’s an amiable quiet between them as Jon gathers his thoughts and Helen watches, patient.

“Helen?”

“Yes, Archivist?”

“...Would you take me home? I’m tired. I want to go home.”

“Of course.”

Her door opens for them. They step through together.

Time remains difficult.

Somewhere in the tunnels (and Jon knows exactly where they are, if not when; he can force the non-Euclidean geometry into something sensible when he bends his mind into a shape that matches) a thought occurs to him.

“The Stranger. That’s like the Eye and the Spiral too, isn’t it? Perception?” There is no force to his words beyond his flat, natural curiosity.

“Yes.”

“...You don’t like them any more than I do.”

“Just because we’re family,” Helen replies, her figure a long and bent shadow where it appears in reflections in the mirrors on the wall, “doesn’t mean we get along.”

“...I think I ate a Lightless Flame cultist.”

“They seem to have put up a fight.”

“ She attacked me. But Mis- something came out of me. And stopped her. A… A spider. From a Leitner I read once.”

Helen laughs, and the sound bounces down the hall and comes back a hundred times until there’s a chorus ringing around them.

“The Mother of Puppets, caught in her own web. Imagine that!”

There is a door at the end of the tunnel, and it opens into the soggy rubble of the Institute. The building may be gone, but the spirit of it lingers. What’s left of the structure stands now like crumbling Roman ruins- just a hollow shell of itself, proclaiming a proud history now lost. Great marble walls, still stained dark from the fires he’d set years ago, tower impassively over the wreckage within. Roof tiles blanket the heaped plaster and charcoal; sunlight pours in gray from above. Jon finds he Knows that the property is held by a shell company within a shell company within a shell company, and that the local government is still struggling to trace back its ownership before anything can be done with the land. With its records burnt, Elias and Peter Lukas both dead, and the remaining Lukas family so… elusive, the property stands abandoned and untouched, just as it had been left by the fire brigade after the last flames had died out.

There is still something smugly knowing about it, though, even reduced to a skeleton as it is. There is no undoing what has been done there, and the marks left by the Eye are etched deeper than the scorch marks. The walls have seen, and remember. They know what Jon did. The kaleidoscope tang of the statements and ruined artefacts are baked into the twisted steel and splintered wood. The dark secrets that live in Jon sing to be returning to the place they called home for so long. It no longer is, of course- but nostalgia is powerful, and the statements and fear he has consumed are more human than even he is, and he finds that the weight of the Institute’s residual biting scrutiny on his blackened hands and blackened heart feels as just as it does cruel.

It feels right, to be back.

He chooses not to know when Helen takes her leave. He is simply aware of her presence as he shifts enough damp rubble to create a hollow for himself in the wreckage, and then he is not. Still, he doesn’t quite feel alone as he settles into the new empty space, one worthless piece of debris among many in the corpse of the Eye’s domain.

The unseen Eye remains open as his close, and he escapes to the prison of sleep.

Chapter Text

Dreams are changed things for him. He can recall a time before when they were just the residual sparks of a resting mind, abstract and meaningless, but those days feel distant enough to belong to someone else. And yet, when he dreams now, he dreams their dreams, and they are real.

His eyes open in all of them, all at the same time. It’s just a matter of prioritizing: he focuses his attention like light through a lens, and carefully ignores the rest. He has gotten good at this. There are faces he does not want to see.

He spends a great deal of time watching the avatars- at least, the ones who still humor their instinct for sleep. He can’t feed on them like he can the mundane victims of the Fears, but they can’t keep him from watching any more than he can keep them from manipulating and consuming and destroying.

He looks in on Annabelle from time to time, still wary of her, and when she notices his active presence she looks away from smashing grad students’ heads in and exploring abandoned chip shops to meet his gaze, as cautious and curious as he is.

He wonders if she heard Jude Perry knocking. He can’t be sure if he wonders aloud- in a dream, thought and speech are so nebulous- but he thinks he notices her squint minutely as he wonders, head just barely cocked. To anyone but the Eye, it would go unnoticed. He files it away as he presses “STOP” on the tape recorder in her dream and wanders again.

Simon Fairchild still dreams, too, though Jon never enjoys dropping in on him. In large part, this is because the dropping never stops: the old man’s sleeping thoughts are lodged in cloudless skies and roaring winds. It makes Jon uncomfortable. There is no love lost between the Ceaseless Watcher and the Forever Blind, but Jon is first and foremost an Archivist - he craves a dark corner to settle into and observe.

Here, in the Vast, there is nothing but merciless light and endless blue and Fairchild’s nasty, toothless grin.

He never stays long.

In the end, he usually finds himself most at ease in the mind of Jared Hopworth. Jared is… uncomplicated. Jared makes no plans beyond twisting the flesh at his fingertips. He has no schemes or aspirations and for as awful as the blood and warped bone in his dreams can be, they carry none of the unease that a visit to most of the others would bring. He bears the knowledge and power of a single Leitner and is satisfied.

That’s not to say Jared enjoys the audience. It isn’t that he’s shy about his work- no, he’s proud , he positively glows when he wrings his father’s body into something hideous and serpentine, but his smile sours as soon as he notices the pinprick of red light from the shadows betraying the tape recorder there, poaching on his land.

These are private triumphs, Jon supposes as Jared glowers and goes through the motions, unable to enjoy them but equally unable to stop. Private, personal delights. For all his monstrosity, it’s really very human the way he feels so much, and maybe that’s why Jon always comes back- there is something satisfying in watching Jared that isn’t there when he looks in on the others.

Helen had told him that he was still human at his core, too. Helen doesn’t sleep, doesn’t dream, so Jon has no data to compare, but as he impassively meets Jared’s eyes and runs his fingertips delicately along the edges of his tape recorder, he hypothesizes that perhaps it is simply that Jared has remained closer to his own humanity than any of the others, and that’s why Jon always slinks back like a stray dog to the butcher shop doors.

Maybe he’s nostalgic. Maybe he’s jealous. Maybe he’s just hungry.

He could open eyes into other dormant minds and expand his dataset, peering into human memory and dissecting everything he finds. He can rewind the tapes and play them again, again to pick at every detail and analyze every expression.

He doesn’t.

Except sometimes, he stirs restlessly in his bed of stone and dust, and the weight of the Eye blanketing him isn’t enough to stave off the hollow chill that billows in, and he can’t help himself.

And every time he looks, he immediately regrets. There is none of the existential acceptance he knows from his peers, here. His cassettes hum to the tune of phantom gunfire and thick numbing fog and the howls of rage and pain as quarry is brought down. Sometimes he glimpses a familiar silhouette in a fog, and his heart inexplicably leaps even as his stomach falls and he is torn between watching the despair shadow a face that should only shine or abandoning this bittersweet agony to his memories, to wither and die with everything else that still finds a way to make him hurt. It’s only when Georgie frowns disapprovingly at him in the midst of her own gray memory that he flinches and retreats, tail between legs.

He sleeps for seasons, near motionless under the gloom of rain and fog, slowly gathering dust that only solidifies his belonging here, in the ruins of his own making. It’s only when he Knows the perimeter fence has been pried back enough to allow entry that he surfaces, bleary but prepared to face his visitor.

Truly, he half expects it to be Georgie there, ready to tell him off for invading her life yet again with his monstrosity, inserting himself where he isn’t wanted. It is novel to learn that, instead, it’s Jared Hopworth who comes trudging along. His too-broad shoulders slope like a great bear’s, and he stomps awkwardly across the uneven ground as he looks around with those blank, beady eyes for the one he’s come to see.

“Hello Jared,” Jon greets, and his voice is all grave dust and cobwebs. When the Flesh’s avatar blinks in his direction, he stirs, grimacing when entire layers of his water-logged skin peel away to line his resting place like the discarded molt of an insect.

Even Jared seems put off by the sight. His nose is wrinkled with distaste. He has no qualms about mutilation of flesh, of course, but Jon is made of different stuff, and even the Archivist feels his stomach flop at the sight of his sloughed liturgy and the bright, blank skin underneath.

“Leave me alone,” Jared rumbles, cutting to the chase. He makes no move to get closer to Jon, who gingerly climbs to his feet and stands for the first time in a long time. There’s no fear, but there is wariness, and Jon wonders if rumors were spreading about him and Jude or if Jared is simply more cunning than most give him credit for.

“You came to me,” Jon points out, patting his pockets for a cigarette before remembering that he’d lost his last pack, and that even if he hadn’t they’d be ruined by the elements at this point. He’s got a craving for something, and he’s not sure what, but in his experience nicotine fills some of the gaps and dulls the rest.

“You’re in my dreams. Stop.” And Jared fishes in his circus tent of a jacket for something that shines matte white when he finally holds it up. Jon suspects, then knows, that he’s just pulled it free from his own flesh. “Take your bone back. Stay out of my things.”

Jon blinks, out of habit more than necessity, and furrows his brow.

“I can’t stop the dreams, you know.” It’s the Ceaseless Watcher, not the 9-to-5-with-weekends-off Watcher.

This doesn’t please Jared. His whole face twists with reigned in frustration, and the rib vanishes in his tightly clenched fist.

“You ruin it,” the hulking man says. “Can’t enjoy nothing with you there. Watching. ” He says this with a sneer. “No one invited you.”

“Do people invite you to reorganize their bones?” Jon asks rhetorically, but either he’s thoughtless or Jared’s accommodating because he gets an answer.

“Sometimes. You did. My mates at the gym did.”

“That’s fair, I suppose,” Jon acquiesces, and in the next breath, “Do you have a cigarette?”

“No,” is the befuddled reply. “Don’t smoke.”

The Archivist hums, dissatisfied, and begins picking across the settled brick and plaster towards the hole Jared has torn in the chain link fence. Jared follows at a careful distance, radiating puzzlement and uncertainty. Jon imagines he hasn’t thought this far ahead, or considered that things might be more complicated than just making his demands and having them met.

Jon looks every bit a monster as he crosses the street towards the corner shop there. He’s still sooty and torn in patches from his encounter with Jude, and where his old skin hasn’t swollen and peeled away to bare the warm brown parchment beneath, it is grimy and gray like corpseflesh after months exposed to the elements. He has the presence of mind to draw the haze of the Lonely around him, though, enough that he can steal a pack of Marlboros off the shop counter as a customer is paying for them without being noticed at all. He is already shoving a cigarette between his lips and trying to get a flame out of his lighter by the time the shopkeeper notices the pack is missing and assumes he’s just forgotten to get them for his equally confused customer.

“Leave me alone,” Jared grumbles again, raising his voice to span the fifteen feet between him and the ragged Archivist. He trails after Jon like an attack dog waiting for a command.

“ You’re following me ,” Jon points out, hand cupped around the cherry of his cigarette until he’s confident it will survive the elements.

“Stop or I’ll take more bones.”

He doesn’t look back, but Jon does shrug.

“You’d probably get more use out of them than me.”

“Your mates’ bones.” He’s halfway across the street on his way back to the Institute’s remains when he gradually slows, then stops. “Your Institute pals. That copper, and the skinny bitch. And that fat wimpy one that ran away. I’ll take their bones.”

Jon turns and marvels at how his heart has taken up old habits again, because it’s hammering in his chest and his stomach flutters uneasily as he digests the threat. Or maybe, a part of him considers, it’s a rising tide of pseudoscorpions, riled by the sudden surge of adrenaline that rushes over him.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he says, and not just because he’s sure they can all handle themselves, even Martin, but- well, they aren’t his people anymore, not really. They’re better off without him, and he hasn’t seen any of them since the Archive burned. That doesn’t mean he’s ready to throw them to the Boneturner, though. He holds his ground as Jared lumbers closer. He’s beaten Jude Perry; he can handle Jared Hopworth, even if he isn’t sure how yet.

But then there’s a sickening crack of steel smashing into meat and more bones than are plausible crunching under the pressure, and it’s decided for Jon. The truck that smashed into Jared screeches to a halt further down the street, having dragged his bulbous shape along the asphalt beneath it, leaving a trail of gore in its wake. A low, wheezing groan comes from the seeping flesh, pained and angry, before weakening and trailing off. Limbs twitch, stirring the mist of the Lonely that still lingers. Jon blinks in genuine surprise.

Oh. Oops. He hadn’t seen that coming, any more than the truck driver had seen them through their localized fog.

Jon stands and stares for a minute, unnoticed by the driver who leaps out to see what he’s hit, or the pedestrians who trot over to help. His cigarette hangs in his lips, all but forgotten, and his gaze shifts to the engraved silver lighter he still holds in his hand.

“Sorry, Jared,” he tells the air. “Not sure if that one was on me or not, but…” He shrugs, and steps backwards onto the pavement to observe the resulting mayhem.

He catches the elbow of one of the pedestrians afterward, when the police and paramedics have arrived to cordon off the area, and pulling the fresh statement from her is nearly as bittersweet as having witnessed it himself. It goes down like arsenic wine and leaves him punch-drunk and ashamed.

Nobody pays him any mind as he crosses the police line and picks through the abundance of Jared’s spilled flesh, eventually fishing a thick paperback from the offal and shaking the worst of the gore from its soiled pages. A meter or two down, he pries something small and white from the bulk of the corpse. He tucks it delicately in his jacket before unceremoniously turning away from the whole mess with a grimace of distaste, and nothing more.

He will miss the guilelessness of the Boneturner’s dreams, but he never did like Jared.

He takes his time contemplating if he should return to sleep or not. He runs through the pros and cons in his head as he perches motionless on what used to be a restroom wall and is now just a truncated heap of brick and plaster. His briefcase, as dusty as he is, rests in his lap.

Pros: he doesn’t need to think when he sleeps beyond ignoring certain dreamers as best he could, with his eyes always watching. There are no decisions to make, no hints of a story to chase like a bloodhound on a scent trail. He doesn’t inflict himself on the world anew.

Cons: Jared is dead, which limits the options of dreams he is comfortable settling in. At best he can hope for the dark halls and giggles of kidnapped Callum Brodie, who seems to be growing comfortably into his role as an avatar of the Dark, or the leering grin of Simon Fairchild in freefall. At worst, he may find himself caught up in Annabelle’s webs, or slip into more human dreams and dredge up old nightmares for people who’ve tried to put their fear behind them. He reopens wounds that still fester.

Another con: he now has seven Leitners in his briefcase. It was foolish enough of him to sleep so long when he only had six. If Jared Hopworth can find him here, anyone can. The Institute isn’t exactly obscure . It’s not much of a leap to say that they’re better off in his larder than in the hands of a less conflicted avatar.

It’s enough for him to decide. He opens the briefcase and lingers only briefly on the poetry that rests on top before digging under it and pulling out The Seven Lamps of Architecture. He barely has to glance at the words on the page to feel the ghosts of the rooms around him and the press of walls that are no longer there. All it takes is contact- paperlike skin on skinlike paper, and power osmosing easily between them.

He shifts the tunnels that were once here back to being, dragging them in from where they no longer are. He descends down the trapdoor into dark tunnels and closes the hatch behind him. He holds the book shut on one finger, marking his page and maintaining his connection, and carries his briefcase in the other hand. His eyes aren’t much use in dark this supernatural, but he knows his way, and he doesn’t take a single wrong turn on the journey to the Panopticon. He pauses only briefly once he’s in the tower, standing where Jonah’s decrepit body had once sat.

He’d said it would hurt the others if he was hurt. That killing Jonah would kill them. The words were like the vicious hiss of sand in an hourglass, passing through his corpselike lips.

He’d lied. Jon himself had felt nothing at the old man’s death but a freeing sense of relief.

Now Jon stands in his place, the Watcher in the tower, and he opens The Seven Lamps again to rest his palm on the page. He stares out into the darkness and wonders what Jonah saw in it even as he refolds reality and shifts the entire Millbank Prison complex to a new location. He snaps the book shut with finality as the structure settles into existence again without a single mote of dust disturbed.

It’s a whim that sees him on the stony north bank of the Thames, alone under the shelter of the too-new buildings that look over the ruin of a city that has burned again and again. The water laps against the old pilings that jut up from the silt, outlining a dock that’s long since rotted away. Old glass worn smooth with time glimmers from the shallows.

He is sitting with his back to the foundation of the Thames Path. His briefcase sits at his side, and he has the Boneturner’s Tale open in his lap. A page has been torn from its binding, leaving only its ragged roots behind. His hand is buried wrist deep in his own chest cavity, feeling blindly around the muscle attachments and slick organs. Pseudoscorpions move in sheets over his skin as he presses bone into long-empty socket and arranges the tissue over it again. It’s with a sobbing sigh of relief that he withdraws his hand to lean, shuddering, against the concrete.

He takes a moment to recover, then repeats the action. It’s hardly better than Jared or Jude’s invasive touch, but when he’s done, he strangely does feel more whole.

When he’s done, he’s so weary that he slips into a dream, and when he wanders nightmare to nightmare he regurgitates E.E. Cummings onto his flesh, mouthlessly whispering that all nearness pauses, while a star can grow and that history immeasurably is wealthier by a single sweet day’s death and how times a strange fellow; more he gives than takes

(and he takes all)¹

The manila envelope sits, still untouched, at the bottom of Jon’s briefcase. As he wanders London anew, his thoughts return to it again and again.

A Disappearance . It is potentially the most dangerous for him of his whole collection. The way he leeches intent, now- well, DIG may give him the urge to hang around the Underground more than usual, and he can certainly feel the dangerous intent in the red book and Twenty Thousand Leagues, but they still rely on being read .

The first and only time he’d touched A Disappearance , he’d been entirely invisible to the people around him for hours. After that he’d put on a pair of gloves and slipped it into an envelope for a rainy day.

He can see the storm clouds building on the horizon, now. He isn’t an idiot ; he can draw the connections between the Mother of Puppets and so many of the things that had happened to him since he’d truly accepted he was the Archive. The Leitner in Times Square, for one, and Jude Perry turning up when that didn’t work, mentioning spiders… And there was the way she’d looked at him in her dreams after the incident with Mr. Spider. And Jared. He still can’t be certain that Jared’s fate can be chalked up to the Web’s interference or if he was even the intended target, but it seems awfully convenient.

He just can’t bring himself to believe in serendipity anymore. He’s seen too much.

So, he sits on a bench in the Tube, chewing on yet another page of DIG he’s blindly torn loose ( he’s been so hungry , why is he so hungry), and he contemplates the envelope. If it had kept Leitner himself hidden from Jonah Magnus, surely it would obscure him from Annabelle’s scrutiny.

And yet, Leitner only read a few words to stay hidden. With Jon’s heightened sensitivity, even reading a single word might remove him from the story completely.

He doesn’t want to disappear, he realizes with some mild surprise. He isn’t enthusiastic about his current state of existence, but he doesn’t want to stop existing. All he wants is to know that his actions are his own, and not the machinations of some shadowy monster. He fidgets at the brass split pin that sealed the envelope, but doesn’t open it.

“Hello, Jon.”

The man who takes a seat beside him on the bench is a stranger, though he gives a small, kind smile and there is something deeply familiar in his lined eyes.

“I know you,” the Archivist says almost dreamily, closing the briefcase. “I know you, Oliver Banks.”

Oliver smiles a little wider, and nods almost sheepishly.

“We’ve spoken before. Or, well- I’ve spoken. You seemed to listen, though.”

“I’m good at listening,” Jon replies flatly, and as if to mock him, a tape recorder has appeared on the corner of his briefcase, hissing gently as it records. Jon sighs his exasperation and jams his finger down on the “STOP” button. It pops back up as soon as he lets go and continues recording. Not at all in the mood, Jon picks it up and throws the whole thing down onto the tracks to get crushed, or whatever happens to all the recorders he tosses away.

Through it all, Oliver watches with faint amusement. Jon gets the sense it’s not at his expense. Oliver, after all, can no more control his own abilities than Jon can control his. He remembers this. He knows it.

“Did the Web send you again?” The Archivist meets Oliver’s warmth with cautious irritation. Historically, though the End’s avatar has never been openly antagonistic, no ally of the Web can be trusted.

“Maybe,” Oliver admits easily, folding his hands in his lap. “It’s hard to tell, sometimes. Wouldn’t you agree?” Jon doesn’t answer, so Oliver continues. “I saw the vines on Jared Hopworth. I couldn’t say if it was because of the Spider or chance that I was looking towards the Institute, but I saw him there, and it made me curious. I haven’t seen you since you made your decision.”

“My decision.” A train rumbles past, stirring the air for a few seconds before everything is still again. “I didn’t choose this any more than you did.” Jon picks nervously at his skin. He’s peeled off as much of the old, gray death as he could and is back to what is almost a blank canvas, but his skin is peeling again with every statement and page consumed. Under his nails, ink resolves into the words “ DIG DIG DIG ” and he quickly looks away even as his fingers reflexively harrow his arm.

“There’s always a decision to be made. Not always a nice decision, and sometimes there’s only one answer that makes sense, but it’s always a decision. You chose not to die, but that required becoming what you are. That’s the decision you made.”

“What was your decision?” He doesn’t compel Oliver. He doesn’t think he needs to. The man leans back slightly on the bench, brushing his chin thoughtfully with his fingertips as he gazes at the wall opposite the tracks.

“Dying,” he eventually answers. “And embracing death.”

“That seems unfair,” grumbles Jon, blotting at his arm to cover the newly exposed text with flat black. “Here we are, and neither of us gets what we want.” Never mind that he doesn’t know what he wants in the first place. His mind, strangely, flits towards poetry.

“Different masters, different demands,” Oliver says, and his smile is tight when he turns it towards Jon again. “We can’t always win.”

There is a nearly comfortable minute of quiet between them, and together they watch the public move unaware around them, boarding and exiting trains and never knowing how close they are to a terrible fate.

“Do you want to know what I see down here?” Oliver asks without prelude, as if he’s thinking the same thing.

“If I wanted to know, I would know.”

“Mm, I suppose so.” His voice is a little wistful, a little sad. “Did you know I don’t have a heartbeat anymore? Cut me, and I don’t bleed. I don’t eat, I don’t sleep, I’m cold all the way through. Just a walking corpse, really. I did die, after all.”

“So did I,” Jon reminds him, but he is quickly corrected.

“No. No you didn’t. You almost died, and you chose not to. I chose to die and I was brought back. It’s an important distinction, Jon. You still bleed .” And he puts his heart into it, leaning slightly towards the Archivist with one fist balled over his sternum, and it feels important, but Jon doesn’t quite follow and he’s too afraid to ask. Here, between knowledge and death, there is too much that should remain unsaid.

Another train barrels by. There is another silence, but this time it is strained and they both stare uncertainly at each other, unsure of how to proceed. Eventually Oliver’s expression softens again.

“I just wanted to see how you were doing,” he says, and with a furrowed brow adds “You don’t look well.”

Jon knows it. He is more drawn than ever, borderline skeletal , and there’s a glint of something awful in his eye that he doesn’t want to acknowledge. A sardonic “thanks” is all he can muster. Oliver doesn’t let his attitude get to him.

“I’m not your enemy, Jon. The End is patient; it always gets what it wants eventually. I have no interest in interfering or speeding things along. But you really don’t look well.”

“...I know,” Jon says quietly. “But I don’t know why.”

“Would you know, if you wanted to?”

Jon glances at him and says nothing, just twists his hands over the briefcase. Oliver smiles sadly, then stands. He is startlingly tall; something in his demure air makes him seem smaller than he is, but now he towers over Jon, backlit by the fluorescents on the ceiling. Whether he means to be or not, he is suddenly intimidating, and truly feels like the avatar of Death that he is.

“Do you want to know what I see?” Oliver asks one more time. His voice is soft, and he’s staring straight at the Archivist. Jon shudders.

“ No. ”

The avatar of the End nods and gazes into middle distance, down the darkness of the tunnel.

“There’s always another decision to make,” he says. “Every second of every day, to the very End, we have the chance to make a new decision. To change our minds, and grow, and adapt. They can’t take that from us. Not even the Spider- she has her tricks, but she’s only as strong as you worry she is. You always have agency. It’s beautiful, Jon. Even in all the terror that we see, or maybe because of it- it’s beautiful.” His smile returns, and he looks down on the Archivist one more time. The light at his back shines beatifically in his tight curls like the halo of a stained glass saint. “Take care, Jon.”

Oliver climbs the stairs to the surface. Jon stays at his bench and vacantly rips a page from the Complete Poems instead of DIG and tries not to think too much about Oliver Banks’ dead, empty eyes roving over his flesh, and the things that he might see there.

In the darkness of the tunnels, alone and far from anyone who might hear, he can admit he’s rattled. He half sleepwalks in the darkness, both seeing and unseeing, and he begins to understand the appeal of the Dark and of knowledge lost and forgotten. There are things he should not know. There are things he does not want to know. There are things he wishes he could unknow.

He is sorry. He is sorry that he isn’t. He is sorry that he is.

So he does the best he can and he scatters himself to the wind, so divided that his omniscience is rendered ignorance. He is only barely aware of the book in his hands, barely hears the words he mutters like a prayer as an offering to these unhallowed halls.

A leaf falls. A leaf falls. A leaf. Falls. Leaf. Falls. Falls. Falls.²

It is almost midnight on a Thursday, and Jon is standing in the dark outside a very dubious kebab truck, far enough back that the light doesn’t hit his face and highlight how angular it has become. He murmurs his thanks when a hand reaches out the window to push a foil-wrapped package at him.

If he’s hungry, he’s decided, it only makes sense that he eats . If statements and Leitners don’t cut it anymore, maybe it’s time to reintroduce actual food to his diet. And what better than a doner kebab, the hangover food of champions?

He can’t remember the last time he’s gotten street food in the middle of the night like this. He knows it’s been years- Georgie was there, and some acquaintances from the humanities department who’d wandered out from the same party. He hadn’t quite been part of the group, even then, but it had been nice to feel them around him all the same.

He waits until he’s halfway down the street to peel back the foil and inspect his sandwich. No immediate sign of rot or roaches, and he isn’t certain if it’s his time as a Consumer of Questionable Foods or as a Purveyor of Terror that even has him checking. He peels up the pita to look over the slightly wilted lettuce, the soggy tomato, and the steaming hot shreds of meat. Standard enough, even if the thought of real food in the stomach suddenly has him questioning if the grease will leave stains or if he can still digest proteins, or if maybe the pseudoscorpions would handle it for him-

He stops with a sigh and takes a bite of the kebab before he talks himself out of it. It tastes like absolutely nothing, but when he swallows, it sits warm in his stomach the way paper never does.

“Cheers,” he dryly toasts himself, lifting his dinner into the air, and he forces the rest down.

His stomach aches and he’s not sure if it’s the food or the anxiety, because he’s back in the tower peering out into the unseen spiraling cells that fill the space beyond but don’t, defining emptiness with their existence. He blinks and he focuses, palms ground into the stone like he can absorb the essence of the structure and read it like a book and make the power his own.

“Let me see,” he all but begs the black, staring and Staring and staring in every way he knows how, but he already Knows- this wasn’t built for him, and he isn’t Jonah Magnus. It’s something to celebrate, but he doesn’t feel the relief the knowledge should bring, because Jonah’s way of seeing is cleaner than his. He is obtrusive; his watching hurts.

He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He just needs to know.

“Let me see.”

A suppressed sob builds like pressure in his chest and he almost hopes it will shatter him and bare those inner eyes and let him see all the better. See nothing, though, nothing at all, because the dark stays dark.

“Hey, Helen?”

He is leaning against the low wall of the Thames Path, looking out over the river and admiring the moonlight on the water. It’s only a moment before he hears a door creak behind him, and Helen joins him. Her heels clack convincingly on the concrete, when the clublike limbs of her shadow seem to insist her footsteps should be heavier. He’s impressed once again, in spite of himself.

“Hello, Archivist.”

“Do you have to make an effort to seem human, or does it just happen?”

“You invited me here to ask about that? ” She’s amused, and a smile plays at her lips.

“Well, no,” Jon admits, leaning his chin on his palm. “I just wondered.”

“Do you have to make an effort to seem human?” she asks in return, and her face splits with a smile that cuts a hole in reality and recedes through it forever.

“Yes, always ,” he blurts, and a lifetime of pained frustration pours out. “I’ve always been a shite human, I think. I never did fit in.”

“...Helen worked very hard to fit in.” Her reply is thoughtful, shelving the humor. “Michael did too, once. Perhaps that’s why I am the way I am. They wanted so much just to be a part of things, and now we are me, together.” She smiles sharply at Jon again, and he looks carefully over her shoulder so he doesn’t focus too hard on the impossibility of her features. “To answer your question, no. I never have to try to seem human. There simply was a time that I was not human and when I was human, and now I am both not human and human, so I simply seem like me.”

“I don’t know what I expected,” Jon mumbles, returning his attention to the water.

“You seem troubled.”

He grunts in response, and looks up to the sky. It’s a fairly clear night, and he can see stars behind the thin cloud cover.

“Why did you ask me here? I do enjoy your company, but you have a habit of only calling me when you need me.” If she’s at all bitter, she doesn’t show it. Jon winces either way.

“Sorry Helen. Still getting the hang of, well. All this , I guess.” He contemplates the heavens. “I guess I wanted to ask… if you ever talked to the, uh. The others.”

“Others?” she purrs, and he knows she’s just being difficult. She wants him to say names, as if she knows he’s trying not to.

“Um. Yes, I mean- you and, uh, Melanie. Were friendly.”

“We were. ” She is still smiling.

“So do you still… talk to her?”

“I didn’t know you two were so friendly,” she says slyly. “I never would have guessed, the way she talks about you.”

“Okay, listen- I just want to know everyone’s okay, alright? After Jude, and Jared, I just- I just want to know they’re okay.”

“You burned down the Archive, Jonathan.” The use of his name startles him, and he turns to look at her properly. She fixes him with an unfocused, mazelike gaze. “You sent them all away and told them to leave you alone. Suppose they’ve moved on with their lives and forgotten these nightmares? Is that a hornet’s nest you want to kick?”

“I. I.” Decisions. Every day, every minute. “I- no , I don’t want to kick a hornet’s nest, but I need to know, Helen.”

“Ask me,” she says simply, and he sees the danger in her curling claws, in her bottomless pupils, in her bony, bony hands.

“I- No. I won’t.”

“ Ask me , Archivist. If you care, you’ll ask.”

“ No .”

“ Ask .”

“No, Helen! No. No, I’m not going to compel you. I’m not- it’s not right , okay? You hate it, everyone hates it. I hate it.” He wraps his arms around himself as if the chill actually bothers him, and maybe it does, a little. “I don’t like being jerked around by things I can’t control. I don’t want to do it to other people. Beings. Whatever we are. I don’t want to be like that anymore.” His hands are shaking as he reaches into his pocket for his lighter and a cigarette, and it takes several tries to strike up a flame. Before he can light the cigarette, though, he notices that Helen’s still smiling.

“Very interesting,” she says. “You always manage to surprise me, Archivist.”

“Wait,” Jon says dumbly, forgetting his cigarette. “Was this a test? What- why-”

“I’m, hmm, fond of Melanie. She’s a breath of fresh air compared to most humans. Delightfully sharp. And she cares a good deal for the other humans in your little group, so I find myself… indirectly invested.”

“I cannot fucking believe you,” says Jon, remembering his cigarette again. “You’re more human than I am.”

“Hm,” Helen intones, clearly unconvinced, and then her eyes rest on the lighter still in his hand. “Should you have that?”

“Well, Helen, considering my lungs survived a close encounter with Jude Perry with no problem, I don’t think-”

“You know what I mean.”

“Ah.” He looks at the lighter. The moon glints off the surface, and the engraved web pattern is cast in pitch black relief. “Well, I keep meaning to throw it out, but-”

“Do you trust me, Archivist?”

He is wary when he looks at her, uncertain what to expect.

“I, uh. Sure. Why-”

“Close your eyes.”

He doesn’t. Instead, he continues to stare at her, increasingly alarmed. She makes a face at him that has his brain shrieking as it tries to parse it.

“ Trust me. Close your eyes.” Reluctantly, he does, and flinches when she says “ All of your eyes. No peeking.”

“I can’t just not Know things, Helen, it’s kind of my whole thing .”

“Well, do try .”

“Ugh, fine. Uh…” He wracks his brain for something, anything to distract himself. “Um. ‘A total stranger one black day knocked living the hell³-’”

“Take a big step back, and turn left.”

“‘ Knocked living the hell out of me-’” he continues, raising his voice over hers to drown it out in his head, soles catching on the pavement.

“Keep turning- good, stop.”

“‘-who found forgiveness hard because-’”

“Take a step to your right.”

“‘-my (as it happened) self he was-’”

“Turn right- stop. Now put both your arms out in front of you.”

“‘-but now that fiend and I are such-’”

“And let go. ”

He does, before he can think it through, and the lighter leaves his hand. A moment later, there is a plunk as it plunges into the Thames. He opens his eyes in wonder.

“‘Immortal friends the other's each,’” he finishes, stepping back up to the wall to peer over at the black water below. “By E. E. Cummings.”

“Well, that’s that,” Helen says smugly, clapping her hands together to brush off the imaginary dust of work well done. A moment later, with cocked head, “ You read poetry ?”

“I, uh,” Jon stammers, still staring at the water that swallowed the Web’s lighter. “Not really, I… read more nonfiction than… did I just drop the lighter into the river?”

“You did. You’re welcome.”

“...Thank you.”

“That’s better.”

And despite himself, Jon laughs. He pulls the cigarettes from his pocket and throws the whole pack into the water to join the lighter. His smile is small and tired, but it’s there when he looks at Helen and again says “thank you.” She hrms once more in return, and lets her fingers drum pensive on the concrete.

“...Really though, Archivist, you should make up your mind. Reconnecting with the humans- are you sure this is a door you want to open?” He has rarely seen her so solemn, and it makes him nervous. It feels too much like Oliver’s worried smile.

“...I don’t need to be in their lives,” he replies quietly, turning his back on the river and looking instead at the yellow door set in the wall across from him. “But… I do still care. And I, I. I just.”

“Suppose they don’t care about you?”

He sucks in a sharp breath before he can stop himself, but then he shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he says, standing resolute. “All that matters is that they’re alright. I didn’t- I didn’t get to say goodbye , Helen, I didn’t even get to see Martin before-” He cuts himself off short. His shoulders are tense, drawn defensively up, and he’s staring at his shoes.

“Martin, the poet?” Helen asks, too innocent.

“I- Oh, shut it .”

She laughs, a horrible echoing thing, but it’s not unkind. When the last echoes trail off, she answers his question.

“I left them when you did, you know, but to my knowledge-" and he remembers abruptly, at the sight of her twisting cheshire grin, she is Lies, "-they’re fine, all of them. Scarred, but alive. They’ll never forget what they’ve seen, Archivist, and you don't need to know that to know. For better or worse, whether they want to or not.” She seems ambivalent about the fact, and it strikes him suddenly how alien she really is. She may smile and play friends but she truly is a monster in a way he doesn’t think he’s capable. At her very center, in the core of her being.

She is a monster, no matter how human she has become. He is, and always has been, painfully human .

“If that’s all,” Helen says, moving delicately toward her door, “I have a few tourists in my hallways that could use my attention.”

“...Sure. Right. Thank you again, Helen.”

“Any time.” She pauses with her hand on the doorknob, and looks back. “You really do need to commit, Archivist. It’s not healthy to straddle lines like these. You never know when you’ll be sliced down the middle. I did rather hope you’d turned a new page, but… perhaps not.”

This doesn’t seem to trouble her any more than the unhappiness of her human acquaintances. She is still smiling faintly as she vanishes through her door. Her monstrous shadow still splashes across the pavement as the door swings shut on it, and she is gone.

He leans over the sink in a public toilet and lets his fingertips trace light, dancing paths across his skin, following the path of verses over muscle and tendon and stark adam’s apple. Rather than the formal serif he’d consumed them as, the words trip and stumble in his own hand, a chicken scratch he never outgrew.

“Me, who found forgiveness hard,” he says softly, reading the borrowed sentiment in reverse, as though he can speak it into being. But his pages don’t lie, do they, because the lies don’t stick, only truth, so it must mean, and he concludes in awe, “That fiend and I, immortal friends.³”

“Cool tats,” a voice interrupts, startling him, and he stares open-mouthed at the sleepy-eyed twenty-something at the sink next to him until he’s dried his hands and left, shocked that he’d been seen at all.

He buys a salad with what little moldering money he has left in his wallet, and he garnishes it with a shredded page from DIG . He’s not sure if the dirty flavor it gives ruins the salad, or the lettuce’s wetness ruins the text, but he chokes it down all the same.

It’s not clear if the food is really helping. The Leitner had served as an adequate substitute to statements before now, so he isn’t sure why nothing really fills that hollowness in his chest anymore. Still, his sharp corners are gradually rounding out, and his skin looks a little richer and less ragged for his efforts, so he keeps at it.

And he reads. He’s never been a huge poetry fan, and certainly not a follower of Cummings’ works, but that’s what he has so he reads it. He hardly notices as the disjointed lines develop like sepia photos across his being, brown on brown and speaking of empty parks and rainrainrain⁴, and maybe, he thinks, he should give poetry another chance.

He gets hungry, and he gets tired. This is new. He wonders if avatars can get sick.

He creeps back to the safety of his tunnels for rest. He doesn’t trust in the Lonely anymore, or maybe he just doesn’t trust his ability to wrangle it. He was seen far too easily, and the flavor was wrong.

‘Nice tats.’ More poetry than prose lives on his skin, now, scrawled in loose columns or left to drift in organic waves and whorls. Just one more thing he can’t explain.

When he curls up in the Panopticon, he feels every cold stone against his points, but he dreams, and he dreams of a sweet man lost in fog, his face criminally dulled by the gray around him.

Somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond⁵, Jon thinks, or maybe he says, or maybe he wears it on his sleeve. In your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which I cannot touch because they are too near.

Cannot touch, and cannot leave alone. He worries at his wounds and eagerly swallows his own tail, because it keeps his fangs occupied and turns their venom safely, poisonously inward.

And when those silent, pleading eyes cut through the mist to meet with his he rips the tape from the recorder and shreds it. The celluloid dissolves as it flutters down in pieces.

It can’t have this. He won’t let it.

The hunger is never far, and it takes him noticing the missing page in Complete Poems to reconsider his diet once again. This time, it’s the perfume of roses that flavor his supper, and he can feel the warmth of substance and spirit all at once, and it clicks in him- this is right. This is right.

His dreams are the same, and changed. When he looks dolefully in on the man in the mist, all grief and yearning, he is still alone on those cold and barren shores, leaving fading footprints in the gravely sand, and he is not the same as he was before. And when Jon leans in, abandoning the shelter of distance and inserting himself into his observations, he sees a litany of dark ink on pale, freckled skin. It is half shrouded by belligerent fog but he can see it, of course he can, and he cries a laugh because it’s Keats, of course it is.

And think that I may never live to trace, the script says,

Their shadows⁶

And the heart he’s all too aware of now shatters a thousand times over because he knows this poem - really knows it, from his university days and the mandatory coursework on British lit- and he can read outside the lines and understand without Understanding, and Know that he knows.

He steals a copy of Keats’ Complete Poems from the British Library and finds what he’s looking for within.

“When I have fears that I may cease to be...” he breathes, book open in his palm as he stalks down the pavement like a man on a mission.

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink. ⁶

He doesn’t want to presume. He doesn’t. He can’t presume, because, well. He’s been awful, really. Objectively awful. A literal monster, and those closest to him his victims, and this doesn’t mean anything, the man’s always had an enormous weakness for the romanticism of Keats, but.

Well. He’s no Gerry Keay. It’s hard to imagine him getting a tattoo for the aesthetic .

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Sims,” he mumbles, closing the book and thoughtlessly pressing its cover to his mouth as he thinks.

He repeats it to himself, conscious and willful, and he seeks him out on the beach in the fog all alone.

Will you teach a wretch to live, asks his very flesh, straighter than a needle, ask and ask and ask again and, ask a brittle little person fiddling in the rain ⁷

And he speaks silently to the man and the man watches silently in return, and the words constant on his constellation skin ask for patience, because he knows fear, and he fears loss, but he’s here.

It strikes him how strange and funny it is, that he has two copies of Complete Poems and they are so intensely dissimilar, yet together and one in his hand, in his heart.

Another night, and a silent voice finally sings again- yet still stedfast⁸

outlined in navies and pinks and violets, nestled in the heavens of his collarbones and crowned by the evening star

oh

Painfully human. Painfully human, with a beating heart, because what he is, he always will be. Cut him and he bleeds , and this is important.

He understands now, or he thinks he does. Oliver may have met his End, but Jon hasn’t , and he knows his power now, because that emptiness inside flutters with something and he’s not sure it’s pseudoscorpions, because when the words rise up on his skin they are a warm maroon and when his habitual scratching draws blood it is blood .

Decisions, every day, every minute, and he’s done straddling party lines. He is committed, at last. He has agency. He’s changed his answer .

There’s just the matter of loose ends. He shifts the tunnels back to where they started, and seals them behind him. When he emerges into the Institute, there are signs on the fence proclaiming impending demolition and redevelopment, and it’s right.

The books, though. He has concerns about the books… so he calls a friend.

Helen meets him outside the demolition site when he calls her, and they stand an arm’s length apart on the pavement for what they both suspect will be their last conversation.

“I see you’ve made up your mind,” is how she greets him, and there is something rueful about her that catches him off guard. She had called him a friend more than once. He shouldn’t be surprised. But then, she is and always will be something inherently other - he hadn’t quite expected sentimentality. But there they stand, awkward and quiet, overlooking the dark patch on the street where Jared’s body had been scraped up and carted away.

“I would have to stop being me, to be the Archivist,” he tells her, and he knows it’s true even if it doesn’t inscribe itself on his person. “I’m not proud of the things I did.”

“Is pride necessary for survival?” Helen asks rhetorically. He knows halfhearted coaxing when he hears it, and they both know it will never work.

“My humanity is,” is his honest reply. “And I can’t stop being human.”

She smiles, and for once, he isn’t struck with vertigo when she does.

“I much preferred you to the old woman, for what it’s worth,” Helen confides, as though the animosity she has towards the previous Archivist is a secret. “Your naivety has… charm.”

“Not really a compliment, Helen.”

“For a follower of the Eye? I think it is.”

Jon nods, acquiescing, then holds up his briefcase like an offering.

“There’s a lot in this briefcase that needs to be disposed of. Do you think you can help with that?”

She eyes the case, suspect.

“Are you trying to give me indigestion, Jonathan?” But there is warmth in her empty, echoing voice, and Jon finally steps closer to her and her door.

“I was thinking maybe you could open a door over a volcano or an ocean trench or something and I could just sort of chuck it out.”

“...That should be doable. Is there anywhere you’d like to be dropped off afterward? As a final favor between friends.”

Jon glances groundward, then sheepishly back at Helen.

“It would be great if you could take me to Melanie’s place. It’s time we caught up.”

¹Cummings, E. E. “all nearness pauses, while a star can grow.” Poetry, June 1952.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=25957

²Cummings, E E. “l(a.” 95 Poems. 1958.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L(a

³Cummings, E E. “a total stranger one black day” Complete Poems 1904-1962. 1991.
https://allpoetry.com/a-total-stranger-one-black-day

⁴Cummings, E E. “dim.” Complete Poems 1904-1962 . 1991.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=25510

⁵Cummings, E E. “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond” Complete Poems 1904-1962. 1991.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/153877/somewhere-i-have-never-travelledgladly-beyond

⁶Keats, John. “When I have Fears.” The Complete Poems. Penguin UK, 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_I_Have_Fears

⁷Cummings, E E. “(will you teach a.” Complete Poems 1904-1962. 1991.
https://allpoetry.com/(will-you-teach-a...

⁸Keats, John. “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art.” The Complete Poems. Penguin UK, 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_star,_would_I_were_stedfast_as_thou_art

Chapter Text

Melanie punches him, when she sees him. Hard . Worse, Georgie is there to watch, and she does nothing but cross her arms and lean in the doorframe as it happens, leaving Jon to rub at his bruised jaw as he watches Melanie from the corner of his eye.

“Hi, Melanie.” he says, the first to speak. “Georgie.” He’s still just standing there outside Georgie’s flat, awkwardly glancing down the halls like Helen might pop out and help him, but he knows that ship has sailed.

“This is my house,” Melanie growls, mocking, and she points towards the elevator. “Now leave me alone.”

“Technically, it’s Georgie’s-”

He barely dodges the second punch, and silently thanks Jude for teaching him the importance of vigilance and agility.

“Melanie.” Georgie pushes herself off the doorframe as she finally speaks up. Melanie is still glowering as she steps back half beside, half in front of her apparent girlfriend. “Why are you here, Jon?”

“...To apologize,” he says honestly, suddenly feeling foolish for thinking he could just show up like this. Maybe it would have been better to look for Daisy, or even Basira. “Look, I- I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry, I’ll just go.” He’s turning away like a kicked dog to head back for the lift when Georgie stops him.

“No. Come in.”

And maybe she’s not as friendly with her offer as he might hope, but she’s offered, and that’s more than he truly expected. He doesn’t meet her eyes or Melanie’s as he’s ushered past them into a familiar flat and is greeted by the Admiral, his tail high in the air.

“Oh. Hey there.” He bends to scratch the cat’s cheek as the Admiral rubs against his legs, and his freight train purr settles an anxiety that has been clawing up his throat. “I missed you too.”

And oh god, he’s about to cry. No, not going to cry, he’s absolutely not going to cry over a cat.

“I’ll make tea,” Melanie says coldly. He’s pretty sure she just wants out of the room, but it’s okay. He understands.

Her expression still unreadable, Georgie just sinks into an armchair and looks at him. The Admiral quickly abandons him in favor of a newly available lap to lay in, so Jon stands awkwardly by the door for a moment before perching himself on the couch. He sits at the very edge, taking up as little space as possible. He’s not really welcome here. He knows this, and he’s sorry for it.

“So, you and Melanie,” he says, trying to break the silence.

“Yup.”

“That’s, uh. That’s great, Georgie.”

“Mmhmm.”

It’s quiet again, except for the hiss of the kettle and clinking of mugs from the kitchen. Jon clears his throat and sets down the bag he’s been carrying on the coffee table. It’s the same rumpled brown plastic bag he’d originally received from the New York book store, except now Complete Poems and Complete Poems rest cover to cover inside. He hadn’t kept anything else.

“So, how’ve you been?” he tries again.

“We’ve been alright. Just scheduled a few tour dates for What the Ghost? , so that’s good. Birmingham and Sheffield and that.”

“Oh. That’s great.”

“Yeah. And Melanie’s working on a book about her own paranormal experiences.”

“...Oh.”

“How’ve you been, Jon?”

“I, uh,” he starts and stops, eyes fixed on the hands he has clasped between his knees, looking for all the world like a chagrined schoolboy. He can’t tell if Georgie’s needling him or if she actually wants to know.

Before he can speak again, Melanie reappears. She’s grasping two mugs by their handles in one hand, and a third by the rim with her other. The steam kisses her palm as she passes it off to her girlfriend. Transferring one of the remaining mugs to her now free hand, she places it on the coffee table in front of Jon. Then, rather than sit on the couch with him, she goes to lean her hip against the arm of Georgie’s chair, and it suddenly feels very much like an interrogation.

It’s okay. It’s okay.

Crowded, the Admiral jumps down from his human’s lap and comes striding back to Jon. The big tom jumps up onto the sofa to curl at his side and he lets himself run his hand through his silky fur until he’s calmed down enough to look at the women again.

“I. I’m really sorry. Melanie, I- and Georgie. I’m just so sorry.”

“For which part?” Melanie asks, clearly still angry. “For cutting me open like a guinea pig, or for trapping me in your evil cult? Or for using your voodoo on me? Or maybe for haunting my fucking dreams?”

“God, all of it ,” Jon says, lifting his hands to his face to hold his stress in. “It was wrong, Melanie, and I didn’t know everything, but I knew enough to try and keep you out of it, and I failed. I failed and it’s my fault. I probably should have just died in the explosion with Tim. I wouldn’t have turned into a monster, that way, at least.”

“What good would that have been?”

Georgie’s question catches them both by surprise. The Admiral ‘mrrrp’s as Jon’s fingers curl in his fur and go still. Melanie turns on her perch to raise her eyebrows at Georgie, who sits like an impartial judge in her court.

“There was another woman in charge before you, right?” she continues. “And then she dies and you replace her. So you die, and what? Somebody else takes your place? And everything still happens, except you’re dead, and maybe things are even worse.”

Even Melanie seems startled by the train of thought. Her face has twisted into reluctant consternation. Jon just stares, surprised that Georgie isn’t more upset. She notices his expression and heaves a sigh.

“You really fucked up Jon, yeah. But I never wanted you dead .”

“I did,” Melanie says into her tea, unabashed, and Georgie elbows her lightly.

“That’s… fair,” Jon allows weakly. He scratches at the scabs on his arms. That’s a recent development- scabs . “I, um. I…”

“So why are you really here?” Melanie is still blunt as ever.

“I, uh.” He glances at Georgie. Georgie, who has explicitly told him to leave her out of his evil deity talk. At his obvious reticence, she gives a small wave of her hand, and he goes on. “I really did want to apologize, but I. I’m getting out? I think? I’m- I’m trying. And I… I really want to talk to the others. Basira and Daisy. And Martin.” He leaves out the “just in case.” He still doesn’t want to think about the way Oliver looked at him.

“Nobody’s seen Martin for ages,” says Melanie, settling more fully on the arm of the chair and crossing her legs. She balances her mug on her raised knee. “When you- did what you did ,” she spits, “he just never came back.”

“Oh.” He tried not to look as crestfallen as he feels. “And Daisy? Basira?”

“I’ve got Basira’s mobile,” Georgie offers.

“No promises she even texts you,” her girlfriend says, staring blunted daggers. “She was pretty angry too. And for good reason.”

“Yeah,” Jon says. “I know.”

“I’ll send you her number.” Georgie shifts to pull her mobile from her pocket. Jon shakes his head.

“I, uh. Don’t have a phone anymore. Can you write it down for me?”

“Yeah. Sure.” She stands up, and vanishes through the doorway towards her closet studio. Melanie slips down instantly into her place, elbows and knees akimbo to fill the space. Jon glances at her, then focuses on the tea sitting in front of him, quickly getting cold. He picks it up, but just looks at it. A crease forms between his eyebrows.

“Sorry, I forgot you don’t eat .” Still angry. Always angry.

“No, I- it’s just been a long time since anybody’s made me tea,” he admits quietly, and she shuts up immediately. “...Thank you, Melanie.”

It’s her turn to feel awkward. Trying to turn the conversation to anything else, she points at the plastic bag. “So what’s in there?”

“Books. Just, um. Poetry. Nothing… spooky.”

“Poetry.”

He nods, still looking only at his tea, and he takes a gulp of it as an excuse not to speak more on the subject. When Georgie comes back with a scrap of paper in her hand, he immediately gets up, eager to escape. She walks him to the door and presses Basira’s number into his hand with surprising gentleness, though there’s still that queer emptiness in her eyes that he supposes must always have been there.

“Thanks, Georgie. For everything.”

“You could have asked for the number if you wanted. You didn’t,” she says, as if it explains things, and it does.

“Still. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. And Jon-” She points at the folded paper he holds. “My number’s on there too. Stay in touch?”

“...Of course Georgie. I’ll see you.”

He learns his bank account is somehow still open, even though he can’t remember the last time he’s actually used it. Still, there’s no alarm that goes off when he withdraws enough money for a cheap phone. A couple hours later, he’s once again sitting on a bench in Duke of York Square, writing and rewriting a simple text message.

Hi Basira, how are-

Basira, first off, I’m sorry-

You have every right to be angry but-

He groans and presses his palm to his face.

“Trouble in paradise?” He looks up to see a woman in a black fleece jacket with a backpack, smiling coyly at him. She motions to his phone.

“What? No. It’s not like- who are you?”

“You’ve been out here for ages,” she says, and she points a thumb back over her shoulder at one of the shops, where several employees peering through the window at them quickly turn away and act busy. “Just finished my shift. I thought I’d put you out of your misery before they start taking bets on how bad you screw this up.”

“Thanks, but-”

“You’re sitting alone at the mall with a book of poetry, torturing yourself over a text message,” she interrupts him, rolling his eyes.

“Fine. Okay. So what do I text her?”

The woman grins mischievously and points a knowing finger at him.

“You don’t . You call her.” Good deed done, she flashes a thumbs up at her coworkers and heads off towards the Tube. Jon frowns at his phone, takes a deep breath, and hits the dial button.

It rings a few times, and then there’s a click as it’s answered.

“This is Basira." Jon swallows.

“Uh, hi Basira. It’s Jon.”

They meet in a public place the same evening. It’s something Basira insists on, and Jon has no reason to argue it, so he gets a chair at the bistro she picked out, orders the cheapest appetizer on the menu, and waits.

She’s twenty minutes late when she finally shows, and he has to wonder how much of that time was spent watching him from cover, trying to find any sign that he’s up to no good. He doesn’t ask, though; when she slides unceremoniously into the metal chair across from his, he just gives a tense smile and offers some of his nearly untouched hummus plate. She scowls; he takes a hint and pulls the plate back toward himself.

“Hi Bas-”

“Don’t,” she says sharply, and he falls silent. Okay, yeah, she’s definitely still upset. “How’d you get my number.”

“Georgie gave it to me.”

“You asked her for it?”

“Well, yeah,” Jon says, growing frustrated, “but in the- the normal way, I didn’t, you know.” He mimes plucking something from the air. When Basira’s skepticism doesn’t seem to fade, he nervously fusses at his hair, pushing it back, and looks away. He probably should have waited a day or two for this. Back to back with the first big reunion, it’s a bit much. “I’m sorry, Basira. You were right- I was turning into something that… I was changing. And I did some terrible things.” She opens her mouth to interject again, but he holds up a hand to stop her, too tired for a brow-beating he’s already given himself. “I did some good things, too. And I kept changing. It doesn’t excuse the things I did, but… I want you to know that I’m done with it all, and I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

She doesn’t seem convinced. He can see her reading the verses he’s built himself from. Her frown only deepens.

“I saw you,” she finally tells him. “In my sleep. I saw you.”

Ah.

“I saw what you are , Jon. Like some undead papier-mâché nightmare, covered in other people’s fear. I saw you.”

“I’m not like that now,” he tries, but she shakes her head sharply.

“You were there, like that, every night for months . Feeding .”

“I’m sorry,” he repeats again. “And if you know where Daisy or Martin are-”

“Not a chance.”

He blinks. Nods. Fusses with his appetizer just to keep his hands occupied, dipping a wedge of pita in the hummus and shoving it in his mouth. It does nothing to fill the pit in his stomach. Basira watches, hawkish as ever, and says nothing, and he gets the sense she's here to assess a threat, and nothing else. The tension grows until he can’t bear it anymore, and he asks for his bill. Once it’s paid, he gathers up his grocery bag of belongings and leaves.

He’s checked in to a hotel. There’s no hope that his flat is still his; he doesn’t even check. Instead, he settles for the cheapest room he can find that doesn’t seem like it has bugs, plugs his phone in to charge, and flops backward onto the bed to stare blankly at the popcorned ceiling.

Basira’s a dead end. He should have expected it; he doesn’t know why he let this surprise him, or why it stings so much.

He’s also not sure how he’s supposed to find Martin now. If he’s lucky he’ll get the coordinates inked into his forehead next, make it really obvious. He sighs.

Martin, yet still stedfast. Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night and watching, with eternal lids apart, like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite¹-

-he lets out a breathless huff of laughter, Martin picked his poem well-

-yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, pillow'd upon his fair love's ripening breast to feel for ever its soft fall and swell-

Jon blushes and rolls face down into his pillow, mortified. Keats’ gendered romanticisms aside, the sentiment is still a lot , and more than he of all people deserves.

“‘Here is the deepest secret nobody knows²,’” he mocks himself in the voice of E. E. Cummings, muffled by cheap cotton and polyester. With a groan, he drags a second pillow over his head, muting the world so he can wallow. “I’m such an arse. Shouldn't be doing any of this.”

A loud ring makes him freeze, then peel back the pillow to squint at his room. Another ring, and he realizes- his phone . Only Basira and Georgie have his number, so maybe-

He throws the pillows aside and jumps up to yank the phone from the charger. When he answers, he’s breathless, and positively vibrating with anticipation.

“This is Jon.”

“Sims. It’s me.”

He almost drops the phone. He hadn’t expected- but.

“Hi, Daisy,” he greets her weakly. “How are you?”

“Fine.” She’s as steady as he remembers her, voice low and measured. “I talked to Basira.”

“...yeah?”

“She doesn’t know I called.”

“I- well- I’m glad you did?” He sits heavily on the edge of his bed. Last time he saw Daisy, she was right there with Basira trying to kill him. “Listen…”

“It… wasn’t personal.” She catches him off guard yet again. He hears doubt in her voice, or maybe concern… guilt? “Tried to stop, but- I’m a hunter .”

“...I know, Daisy.”

“You got me out of the ground. I like you. But. Mmh .”

“Daisy, I’m not-”

“I know where Martin is. Took it hard. I gave him the key to an old safehouse up in Scotland. To get away from things. Breathe. I’ll text you the address.”

“ Daisy -”

“Bye, Jon.”

Click. And Jon is alone again. He’s only barely caught his balance again when the address comes through.

He sleeps a restless sleep, and he wastes no time in charging to the lonely shores where he knows he’ll find him, trapped again, as always, in the fog.

Anywhere I go you go,my dear,² he cries, wishing he could do anything other than watch, wanting nothing more than to reach out and take his hand and lead him back to earth

and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

And he thinks he sees, in the flatness of those silent eyes, a spark,

and he knows he sees, on that soft hand, a hand that knows no violence, the curling letters that say

I hold it towards you.³

He rents a car, and whispers to the breeze, “I’m coming.”

His leg bounces as he drives, impatient, and he is launched back to the trip to Liverpool with his grandmother. He drives many of the same roads, and he has his books with him- poems and poems that ride shotgun, both navigator and moral support- and he stops at petrol stations to ask the way because his piece of shite mobile doesn’t have GPS on it, and he understands his grandmother a little better for it, because he’s as anxious as he’s ever been and he’s terrible company when he’s anxious. His grandmother did the best she could; she simply wasn’t equipped to raise him.

And then he leaves Liverpool in the rearview mirror, and he understands this, too: his grandmother might have done the best she could, but he still deserved better, and he can be better than her.

He will be better. Martin deserves better.

He floors it.

When he sees signs for the hamlet he’s been looking for, his heart all but leaps from his chest. He presses a palm firmly over his sternum and thinks that if it were to split him apart all over again, he wouldn’t mind.

When he inquires with the old woman at the counter in the only petrol station in town, she nods and says “a well big lad, aye, but meek as a lamb,” and points up the hills to a chimney poking above the green. She flushes beet red when he grabs her hands in his and kisses them, thanking her, thanking her, and she is still fanning her face when he leaps back into the car.

He doesn’t think he’s ever seen a sky so blue, or fields so green, or cows so delightfully brown and shaggy and dumb- and finally, things are slotting correctly into place, because these verdant hills are the perfect scene dressing for a man as bright as sunshine, as soft as clouds. He doesn’t want to imagine him against the dreary streets of London, not now or ever again. Gray is not his color, and may he never see another fog without a chorus of birds and frogs filling it with song.

Or, at the very least- may he never face these things alone.

Jon pulls the rental up to the safehouse and kills the engine, climbs out, and just stands there for a moment.

This is real. He hears cowbells in the distance, and the wind in the barley. The air smells like earth and sweet grass. The sky is blue. The fields are green.

The cabin door opens, and the sun shines.

“Jon,” Martin breathes. The crest of Venus, blue and shining, peeks above the collar of his shirt, and Jon glimpses still-raw writing on his right hand as he grabs the doorframe to support himself. A smile blooms on Jon’s face at the sight of him, and- yes- he’s crying.

“You really got them,” he murmurs, beaming, and Martin jumps down from the doorstep barefoot.

“Jon!” he cries, and then he’s there, wrapping Jon in a warm embrace, his own tears blotted in his salt and pepper hair. “I can’t believe- I can’t-”

“You really got Keats tattooed on your body,” Jon laughs again, stuck on the thought. “Those are permanent , Martin!” And Martin laughs too, and squeezes him tighter.

“It was the only way I could talk to you! I mean, look at you- It’s better than E. E. Cummings!”

“Debatable.” He buries his face shamelessly in Martin’s shoulder.

Martin sniffs, but Jon can hear his smile when he says, “I had to keep driving to Dumfries for them. Cried like a baby every time. They couldn’t understand why I kept coming back.”

The bear hug lasts a few seconds longer, and then they both lean back, still clutching at each other’s arms and sleeves but desperate to take in what’s changed, what’s stayed the same.

Martin looks tired. Jon’s smile fades.

“Martin,” he says, solemn. “Martin, I am so sorry for everything. You were always there, and I-”

“But I shouldn’t have just left you like that,” Martin interrupts, protesting. “You were dead , and I was scared, and, and, alone, and I thought-”

“No, I, I turned into a monster -”

“I don’t care,” Martin says, voice raised over Jon’s, and Jon falls silent. “I love you.”

Jon stares in wonder, speechless, and Martin says it again.

“Jonathan Sims. I love you. You’re an idiot, and sometimes you’re a jerk, and, and, probably a million other things. But I love you. Always have.”

Jon can’t think of anything to say. Instead, he stands on tiptoe and kisses him. It’s chaste, and it’s sweet, and it goes on until they both come up gasping for air.

“Here is the deepest secret nobody knows,” he says softly, lips still ghosting against Martin’s as he smiles.

“The root of the root and the bud of the bud-”

“You know this one.”

“-and the sky of the sky-”

“And this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart,” Jon says, looking into Martin’s eyes. “I carry your heart.”

I carry it in my heart.²

¹Keats, John. “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art.” The Complete Poems. Penguin UK, 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_star,_would_I_were_stedfast_as_thou_art

²Cummings, E E. “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in.” Complete Poems 1904-1962. 1991.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49493/i-carry-your-heart-with-mei-carry-it-in

³Keats, John. “This living hand, now warm and capable.” The Complete Poems. Penguin UK, 2003.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50375/this-living-hand-now-warm-and-capable