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Jon expected dying to hurt. He came to terms with that fact, prepared himself for it as best as any person could. It felt right, in its own way. Pain had become a reliable constant in his life these past few years, and in the world made new, it was the only left to subsidise the fear. He Knew terror, and he Knew the agony suffered by others so intimately that the knowledge of it became a fresh pain unto itself. Even walking the fault lines between domains took its toll, untouched by the horrors he’d unleashed upon the world, but nonetheless scarred by what he couldn’t help but See.
There would be a price to pay to bring about an End to the suffering, and not just the toll that Terminus demanded. He'd learned that lesson time and time again, along every step of his long arduous road. The price of progress wasn’t free. After years of hacking off pieces of himself for slivers of knowledge and misguided rescue attempts, he thought he understood what that would entail.
When the knife plunged into his sternum, he realised he didn’t have a damn clue.
Tears splashed across his skin, though his own unblinking eyes could no longer form them. Blood soaked through his worn and mud-streaked shirt, hot against his skin. Human enough to bleed, he thought as he sucked in a gasp through his teeth. Not in pain, not yet, but in anticipation of the pain he knew would follow. Half-remembered monologues from The Merchant of Venice flitted through his head, but instead he chose for his final words to be I Love You. He smiled, even as Martin sobbed, his grip never faltering as the static reached its crescendo.
The ground-air-sky shifted as the things that shaped and bound themselves to their unmade reality withdrew. For a panic-stricken moment before they began to release their noose-like hold, he thought they might somehow drag the world they'd transformed into a living hell with them. He Saw the world they had become move. In a way, he was the world. He could still be the world. Release his feeble grip and allow himself to be swept up in the tidal wave of fear channelling through him. They rose in his throat and the unspoken words left a film of static on his tongue, begging to be voiced aloud.
He swallowed them back, refusing to let the Entity that had stolen so much from him taint his dying words. Instead, he chose to turn his gaze away from the unending suffering, funnelling his branching consciousness back into the confines of a body. His body. He looked at Martin, not through Eyes that were many-that-were-one-that-were-hidden-that-were-seen, but through his eyes.
He looked without Looking, and he knew him without Knowing him. He hungered for more, but this time he recognised the hunger as human.
Jonathan Sims smiled, and he waited for the pain.
It didn’t come.
The static rose impossibly louder, thickening in the air until he choked on it. His eyes remained open, but he could not See, and that terrified him above all else.
He never let go of Martin, but sensation ebbed and rotted until he could no longer tell if he still had hands to hold.
Jon drifted, desperate and afraid, but for the first time in an eternity, there was no pain.
That alone was enough to know something was very, very wrong.
He reached out for pathways forged in his Becoming, when for a few brief and blissful moments that desperate hunger clawing at his insides, that need to know, was well and truly sated. When the world unfolded under his great and sprawling gaze, ripe for the taking, and it took every desperate shred of willpower he possessed not to feast his Eyes upon the sprawling buffet of unfathomable terror.
Now, when he tried to Look, he met a wall. The fear still existed, the scent of it igniting that desperate craving with renewed intensity, but when he Looked he saw only darkness.
No, not quite. He Knew what Darkness was, and this could not compare. This was not the impenetrable black of an eye blinded and without light, it was the haze of Beholding something which could not be seen. Unfathomable, incomprehensible, impossible. It writhed and twisted out of his attempts to pin it down, so infuriating and intriguing that he almost let himself forget.
The impossibilities didn’t matter. What mattered was Martin. So, opposing every newly knitted fibre in his being, he turned his gaze away and tried to remember how to reach out with more limited senses.
He didn’t Know how to be human, but nonetheless he knew it, and he thrust himself back into that constricted form of blood and bone and eyes that saw only a fraction of what there was to See.
Jon retreated back into the chrysalis of his Becoming, yet still he felt no pain.
He reached out (with hands this time, not Eyes and Sight and Knowing) and his fingers closed around something smooth and silken.
Sheets. They were sheets.
He blinked at the empty space in the bed, the flash of darkness making his skin crawl. When did blinking become such an unnatural thing to him? More importantly, when did he let go?
“Martin?” he whispered to the room, afraid of shattering this fragile dream.
It was supposed to End. They were supposed to be together, but his hands closed around cold sheets, and nothing dared break the silence of the empty room.
Panic.
It lanced through him, sharp as any pain. His heart pounded as he scrambled out of a bed that looked only passingly familiar, hitting the floor with a dull thud when the blankets entangled his legs. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he was supposed to know—
The knowledge came to him in a dizzying rush, struggling to worm its way inside through neural pathways that hadn’t yet been formed. Not in this brain, not in this world.
At once, he Knew where Martin was.
It never occurred to him to Know the location of his keys.
xxx
Jon couldn’t tell if this London differed greatly from the one he used to live in, or if his memories of the city had simply been tainted by the Eye’s vision of it. His head swam under the bombardment of more knowledge than the human brain could possibly hold, and he knew eventually he would need to filter through it all, but for now he pushed it all aside.
He stared, uncomprehending, at a map of the London Underground. Reading it would have been second nature to him a few years ago (except, was it a few years? Could the time spent under the Watcher’s Eye really be measured in that way? Could it be categorised under a system so simplistic and crude?), but without the Eye’s guidance, he found it all too easy to lose track of the winding diagrams. Spiralling diagrams, painting patterns not intended to be followed. Twisting round and round and round, shifting imperceptibly until he grew so hopelessly entangled in the cascading fractals he—
“You alright?”
He blinked and shuddered again at the fleeting brush of darkness.
“I’m sorry?”
“You look lost,” the woman explained with an awkward gesture to the board. “I know the feeling. I’ve been living here a few years now, and I still manage to get turned around sometimes. You need directions to someplace in particular?”
He stared at her open, easy smile. No flashes of sharpened canines, or sawdust padding a flimsy mask of skin. Just a person in the middle of their daily commute offering up some small act of kindness to a passing stranger. An offer she looked like she might be regretting while he longer he stood there without answering.
“Stockwell,” he said at last. “I need to get to Stockwell.”
“Ah, you’ll be wanting the Northern Line, then. This one here, you see? Looks like the next one should be arriving in a couple of minutes.”
He followed the path she cut across the board with her finger, forcing his scrambled brain to separate the coloured lines.
“Thank you.”
“No problem. You take care out there.”
Almost nauseatingly mundane. He wondered if this woman existed in his world. If she still existed in the world remade-unmade. Something primal and hungry wondered what fear tormented her in her own personal hellscape, and an even larger part of him feared he might Know it.
She disappeared up the station stairs without so much as a backwards glance, leaving him to wait on the platform alone. It took far too long for his train to arrive as time slowed to an agonising crawl, and in the same beat it breezed through so quick he almost missed it. Once aboard, he collapsed into the first empty seat he saw and tried not to lose track of his thoughts as he waited, trying to keep a grip on the slippery passage of time. Words trickled through the flood, fragments from a statement archived a lifetime ago, but he recalled the migraine-inducing tone with perfect clarity. Time is hard, Archivist. Though the idea of time being twisted seemed complex at the time, but now it sounded like a gross oversimplification.
His leg bounced as he waited, channelling all of his focus to track the stops. Some passengers noticed him still dressed in the sweats and a faded band t-shirt someone else had fallen asleep in, their oily gazes sliding over his skin. Others remained oblivious and he ignored them all equally. They didn’t matter. None of it mattered.
Nothing except Martin.
When he got off the train, he broke into a sprint. He’d never been much of a runner, and he was hardly in the best physical condition, but he pushed his burning lungs to their limit and ignored the ache in his muscles. Several pedestrians gave him startled looks, but he ignored them all as he pelted down the streets. Narrowing down his focus, homing in on that sole pinprick of light.
He punched in a door code he couldn't know without pause for doubt, slipping inside and beelining past the empty apartments until he reached the right one. It was locked, of course, and he Knew that inside a security chain bolted it shut. He knocked and tried not to fidget, already impatient with anticipation.
He Knew Martin was inside. Not a stranger with his face, but his Martin. He knocked again, more urgent this time, then gave up all pretence and started pounding on the door.
Every passing second brought with it a new, roiling wave of panic, but he was relentless. He hammered against it for what might have been a minute or an hour, when at last it swung open and—
It was Martin. His Martin still dressed in pyjamas and looking like he’d just rolled out of bed.
“Is that really you?” he whispered, hope blossoming through the look of panic Jon was sure would be mirrored on his own face.
“It’s me.”
Martin needed no more encouragement.
They stood in the hall for a time, locked in their embrace by relief and terror that the other might slip through their grip again. Jon had half expected to be met with screaming accusations for that stunt he pulled with Elias, but for now, at least, they let it lie.
“I woke up and you weren’t there,” Martin murmured into his hair. “I— I didn’t know what to think, I just—”
“I’m not leaving you again. Not ever.”
I promise, he added silently. One day, he’d prove his promises meant something again.
“Do you, um, do you want to come in?”
Jon cracked a smile. "Please?"
He realised as he followed Martin inside, their hands still tightly interwound, that he’d never actually been inside his flat before. Small enough that the second-hand furniture made the room look cluttered, one bedroom, one cupboard-sized kitchen. The idea of him holing up in there for two weeks while Prentiss hammered on the door outside was enough to make him sick.
“Not that I’m not relieved, but how are we here, Jon?”
“It’s like I said. We got swept up when the entities fled our world. We’re someplace…new.”
“That doesn’t explain how I wound up in my flat. Or why you look like that.”
Jon frowned. “Look like what?”
“Have you looked in a mirror since we got here?”
“I was preoccupied.”
Martin snorted and led him by the hand into the bathroom, flipping the switch to illuminate the small rectangular mirror hanging over the bathroom sink.
Jon almost didn’t recognise his own face. He recognised it all too well.
He ran a hand through his hair, wondering how he didn’t notice the length before. It had been years since he’d worn it this short, the first hints of grey already visible but limited to his temples. Gone were the deep, pockmarked notches where Prentiss’s worms carved their tunnels out of his skin, leaving only faint patches of discolouration in their wake.
He looked young.
He looked human.
“We’re early,” he said, trying to twist the impossible knowledge into something comprehensible. “I think it's...2012? Before the archives, before any of it. It’s not…it’s not exactly the same as the world we came from, but it’s close.”
“Christ, Jon,” Martin said faintly. Scrutinising his reflection, Jon could see the differences in him as well. The flush in his complexion where the Lonely left him washed out and grey. Nothing as drastic as the scars, just a touch of brown in his sandy-coloured hair and a brightness in his eyes that the months of isolation leeched out.
Jon squeezed his hand. “We can start fresh here. No contracts, no spiders pulling the strings.”
“No archives?” Martin asked, torn between excitement and disbelief. Jon’s heart seized.
“No employment contracts tying us to them,” he corrected, leaning back against the solid weight of Martin’s shoulder. Concrete proof of their reality, impossible as it seemed.
“But…I thought there weren’t any entities in the other—”
“There weren’t,” Jon said shortly. “But we opened the door for them. Time doesn’t work for them the way it does for us. If they’re here, they’ve always been here. Past, present, and future.”
“So, that means Jonah…”
“Still head of the Institute. Gertrude’s still alive, though.”
“Should we…warn her?”
“If she doesn’t try to kill me first.”
They were close enough for Jon to feel the breath of his words on his skin. When he closed the gap between them, Martin offered no protest.
Time slipped out of his grasp again, but this time Jon had more important things to do than chase it. Martin broke off the kiss first, pulling back just enough to voice another question.
“What about the others? Tim? Sasha?”
“Hmm…Sasha’s not long been transferred to research. Tim’s in…publishing,” he said, frowning as he sifted through the mountains of trivial details for the solid facts. “Danny’s still alive.”
“And he’s going to stay that way, right?”
Jon bit his lip. “I suppose…I still have his statement. I know how things went wrong in our universe. It might be enough to set things right here. I’m the reason the entities are here in the first place, damage control seems like the least I can do.”
“We.”
“What?”
“We are the reason the entities are here. This is on both of us. All of us, really. Me, Melanie, Georgie, Basira, we did take a vote.”
A vote I ignored.
“Together, then.”
Martin’s hand drifted down from his shoulder to rest on his sternum, a crease forming on his forehead.
“I killed you.”
“I asked you to.”
“I killed you.”
Jon Knew that his faded t-shirt hid another faded memento of a wound that never got the chance to scar. A slender line above his heart, right where Martin plunged the knife into his chest.
He kissed him again without hesitation, savouring this quiet lull before they inevitably grew entangled in a new world of monsters. Preventing another apocalypse wouldn’t alleviate the guilt of unleashing that fresh horror upon a thousand unsuspecting worlds, but it would be a start.
Across London, a house sat upon a gaping fracture in reality. The epicentre of a vast and layered web, sprawling out as far as the Eye could see. Its design was far too complex and twisted for him to fully appreciate, but he could See the threads binding this world to another, and another, and another—
In the heart of the Eye’s temple, Gertrude Robinson made plans to sabotage a ritual she didn’t know was already doomed to fail while Gerard Keay slept in the breakroom, his trench coat draped over him as a makeshift blanket. He slept more soundly with the weight of the Watcher’s Eye bearing down on him, joints flexing even in sleep as he dreamed of people with skin that dripped fire like melting candlewax.
Above them, Sasha James arrived early for her shift in research to follow up on a case that had been gnawing at her all night. The details just didn’t quite fit, but she’d find a way to piece it together. If she dug deep enough. If she stuck with it long enough. If she wanted it badly enough.
Jonah Magnus loomed above them all, seated comfortably in his office and reviewing the budget for the coming year. He Watched all yet Saw nothing.
Planning had never been Jon’s strong suit, but already he could see the beginnings of a web waiting to be spun.
“We’ve got all the time in the world to set things right,” he murmured against Martin’s lips, and it was true. All the time in a hundred worlds, in as many as they could stand to help. He doubted the details wouldn’t line up so neatly in every one, but they’d walked this road before. They knew its twists and pitfalls.
Maybe it would be enough.