Chapter Text
The snow is deep and thick and soft outside, and the man who once called himself Jonah Magnus is sitting alone by a fire. What he calls himself now doesn’t matter—it is as immaterial and unimportant as the color of the tie he put on this morning, as pointless as the passing of another year. He remembers when he was afraid of each passing day, and then after that, how each turn of the year still brought with it the liquid ache of dread. He has always been afraid of time, and of the silence at the end of it.
That was years ago, he thinks, decades, a century, two—Jonah has lived so long that the only reason he bothers to keep track of the days is to count, miser-like and constant, the piles of statements that fill his Institute. They are like coins, shiny and golden, and yet the spare man in the square-shouldered grey suit sits haunted in the small dim parlor, in the only chair he has not had re-upholstered since the days when he called himself by the name he chose. He knows the way the worn striped fabric will feel, knows how to sit to avoid the spring that has been threatening to escape since day-glo colors and hairspray fumes filled his institute. Jonah knows everything about this chair, and he knows to the exact degree how far his head will need to turn to look into the sullen flames, and how far he needs to keep it turned to avoid looking at the thing that wears Barnabas Bennett’s honey-colored eyes in its grim white sockets.
Those eyes are the color of coins, Jonah thinks, as he thinks every year, with dark liquor trembling in the glass he holds in one hand. They’re the coins Barnabas must not have had to pay the boatman, what he must have lacked and stood on the shore, cold, for how long? How long had Jonah left him, when all was said and done, once he had made his decision? And how long had Mordechai held the bones before he surrendered them, for them to be so cold? They were still cold now. And it didn’t matter how many times Jonah threw them out in a fit of pique, they always returned to the drawer, to the dark velvet bed where their owner slept. Every time, they arranged themselves with the same delicacy and military precision, like a march.
Until the final night of the year.
Jonah empties his glass into his mouth, swallows the mossy fire of Scotch inside and lets it settle into his belly. He smooths his thumbs up the sides of the familiar glassware and sets it down on the table beside him with a soft and final thump. He will have to face it, he thinks, and the idea always brings with it the cold rush of fear. He hates it, the shrinking ache of his borrowed testicles shriveling up like peach-pits, the wash of it like cold water in his belly, the way it dries his tongue to a sticky map of clumsy uselessness glued to the roof of his mouth: the End is here, and Jonah faces it each year as the carriage-clock above the mantle ticks—or did he forget to wind it this year?
There are so many things he must remember, and though he prides himself on keeping every iron hot in the fire, more and more recently he has fumbled one, left it cold too long to pick it back up. Age has been much-delayed and much-ignored, but even in himself he can feel the long-protracted inevitable, as the ceaseless drag of years both whets his edge and thins it, like a fine blade on a water stone: the passage of time is grey and slick with the steel it has stolen from Jonah’s spine. He is tired , he thinks. He has been running for a very long time, hasn’t he? Running away, or running towards, or just running, feet moving in place as if he’s afraid to lose momentum—
And yet always, Barnabas is there, quiet, cold, unjudging. He watches, and he waits, with the round merry brightness of golden eyes beneath the curls of his hair, with the easy gap-toothed smile, with the bloodless white of skin—or perhaps bone?—beaming out all around. He sits on the sofa across from Jonah in a dark and sober suit with a froth of immaculate white for a cravat at his fine jaw, and he watches. He stopped trying to speak years ago, but he tips his head, and raises his brow, and he smiles like the sun. Barnabas is beautiful, like the everlasting icy white of a snowed-in morning. He shines like the firelight could not touch him, and Jonah feels tears on his cheeks as he looks.
“My first friend,” he says, and his voice sounds old and unlovely and husky around the lump of tears still unshed in his throat. “My Barnabas. Mister Bennett, in the flesh, or something like it.” There is no grace or evanescence in Jonah’s voice, only the heavy weariness of the years sitting poorly on his stolen body. His joints ache with the creeping twist of arthritis even in the radiant heat of a good fire, the plumbing has become untrustworthy like an old house, and yet his eyes are the same they have always been. Better, perhaps, as if each successive shape has been only a battery and vehicle for those bottle-green things. He slips them in, and then assumes the role, and in this way Jonah has always considered he might last for something like forever.
Tonight, however, that seems like a bleak and miserable trudge into uncertainty, a self-inflicted forced march of years without end. Barnabas doesn’t answer, and Jonah tries to swallow the cold lump of tears in his throat, and he wants to sob. He finds he cannot hold it back, too: the tears come, and he is helpless to resist as they roll down his cheeks in burning torrents. No matter how many times he throws the cold bones out, come midnight at the turn of the year they will always be here, sitting across from him and waiting.
Tomorrow, Jonah—or whatever name he is calling himself by now—could pick himself up by the scruff of his own neck, he thinks. He could run the long blade of his awareness against the stone of the world and leave another dark wet smear of the stuff that makes up the structure of him. He could tear another ounce of knowledge from the world. But tonight, when Barnabas reaches out with those cold white hands, Jonah lets himself be drawn in, and he feels the bittersweet cold of sunshine on snow fill him to the core, and he cannot find it himself to fear the End.