Work Text:
Peter often dreams of the sea.
In his dreams he stands alone on ghostly shores, looking onward past the grim line of the horizon. The scene is cast in the muted blues and greys of night as the fog rolls over the waves and blankets even the stars in blessed silence.
This is not a dream.
Peter opens his eyes with a choked gasp, flat on his back and soaked through with seawater. The unforgiving sun pierces him with pinprick needles, bleaching sea and shore alike in fiery white. No fog is here to shield him from its blinding rays.
He feels raw and exposed, picked clean like something vicious has peeled back his layers to peck ravenously at the soft, yielding flesh beneath. His limbs are stiff and heavy as lead, his eyes and nose stinging with salt, and he is so very tired.
Where is he? How long has he been here?
He can feel the burning sand shift beneath his grasping fingers, searching for something solid to anchor him in this unnerving place.
The last thing he remembers is...
Slipping from his mind like the grains of sand that evade his touch. Flashes, only; a glimpse of the Lonely, of the Archivist, of a searing pain that splits his head in two-
Gone as swiftly as they'd come, leaving him alone on an unfamiliar beach, unmoored and unenlightened.
Alone.
Or not, as it seems.
The sibilant crunch of sand starts faint, staying rhythmic in its pace as it builds, slow but sure. The sound comes close, then stops completely.
A face blots out the sun, breaking Peter's line of sight to the cloudless sky. Peter blinks up at it, eyes rapidly refocusing in the sudden shadow it casts over him.
It blinks back.
Peter's eyes adjust, and he can make out the expression of faint amusement worn on the features peering at him from above.
The man is pale and auburn-haired, windswept curls shot through with veins of silver. They mirror the motion of the sea as they swirl and shift in a breeze Peter doesn't feel. The figure is silent at first, seemingly content to watch Peter gradually get his bearings. After a beat he speaks with a lilting voice, the accent prim and not-quite-unfamiliar.
"You seem lost."
Peter doesn't know this man, but he knows at the core of himself, the words reverberating through him, that he's right in more ways than one. As though a spell is broken by the realisation Peter finds himself sitting upright, sand clinging possessively to his shirt and the backs of his arms. The sun catches him once again, and he shields his face with a hand to squint up at the stranger who has interrupted the silence.
The rest of him is dressed conservatively - old-fashioned, even - in a high-collared linen shirt that obscures his neck and billows out around his waist, but his trousers are rolled up at the knee, calves bare and toes curling into the sand like a delighted child.
How odd, Peter thinks to himself. Thinking is admittedly a struggle, his head filled with cotton and what few memories he can picture threaded up in a tangled mess. Something in the stranger's mannerisms tugs on those threads when he pulls back to observe Peter, a tilt of the head or a quirk of the lips perhaps. Peter's sure he hasn't seen this face before, has met few enough people that each sticks in his mind like splinters, but those eyes...
Steel grey, and just as sharp.
He knows those eyes.
All at once it comes to him, piercing through the haze of his mind in a flurry of emotions - fury, resentment, longing. A hundred different scenes played out a hundred different ways, each orbiting a single constant from which Peter could never fully pull away. The man he is inextricably entangled with looks at him from behind a different face, but Peter's been through this once before after all. It hadn't taken him long to realise the first time.
He opens his mouth to speak, the vowel on the tip of his tongue dying there prematurely. He's suddenly aware, somehow, that it's an imperfect fit.
"Jonah," he croaks instead. It isn't a question.
The man doesn't say anything for a moment, just keeps looking at him with that knife's-edge smile, a wicked sliver of a thing that Peter knows the taste of intimately. He seems to find what he is searching for, edges softening almost imperceptibly.
"Hello, Peter."
Then he moves to sit beside Peter in the sand, stretching out his legs and dipping his feet in the encroaching water with a small sigh of contentment.
"You've certainly kept me waiting. I was beginning to think you'd never turn up."
The man does not look at him as he speaks, merely watches the ebb and flow of the tide as it foams against his skin.
Peter isn't sure what to make of this exchange. He isn't sure of anything anymore. He wonders if this is really happening, if this place is the Beholding's final victory over him, or simply his own mind playing tricks. He doesn't know which he would prefer it to be.
"Is that," he gestures vaguely, "You?"
He remembers a painting, a long time ago, that he could never quite bring himself to look at, though he felt its eyes on him regardless, always.
Jonah glances down at himself, considering.
"As much of me as is left, I suppose. No more patron, no more plan, just... me."
Peter suspected so, although he can't articulate why or how he noticed. Perhaps it's something in the eyes, or merely that they finally fit the face. Something is different, though. The other man seems... not tired, exactly, but resigned. Peter begins to put the pieces together.
"Where am I?"
"Oh, my Archivist killed you," Jonah says with surprising levity, "Killed us both, as it happens. I think I might have prepped him a little too well."
He chuckles darkly, but the sentiment beneath is more nostalgia than regret.
Peter wonders whether he ought to feel shocked, or scared, or- No, he's never feared the End. That was always Jame- Eli- Jonah's purview. He'd wanted to be alone, he remembers. A shame he didn't manage it, from what Jonah has just told him, but the urge is strangely absent now.
"Hardly what I expected from Terminus," Jonah continues, arms outstretched in gesture at their surroundings.
"I daresay I wouldn't have spent quite so much time and effort outwitting it, if I'd known. Ah, but isn't that the great irony of things?"
He looks pensive now, the sunlight on the waves reflected in his glimmering eyes.
"It came for me anyway, in the end," he admits softly. The unexpected candour makes Peter's chest ache.
"But oh, did I have a good run."
Jonah meets his gaze with a conspiratorial wink, then turns back to the water, running his fingertips along the sand in mindless patterns.
They watch the tide in silence for a while, slowly coming to terms with the inevitable, each in their own way. He doesn't know how long has passed, or whether time even has meaning for him now. There is only the charged presence beside him, and the place where their shoulders barely brush. The contact burns - of course it does, why should here be any different - yet despite it all he stays, leans into it, shifts a little closer to the man he'd spent so long withdrawing from in life.
Peter is thinking about trying to kiss him when Jonah stands up suddenly, brushing sand from his thighs.
"I think that's quite enough of that, don't you?"
He sweeps his fingers through his hair, squinting at the arcing sun, and turns to Peter once again, holding out his hand.
Something catches the light then, glinting like a starburst, and it's only when Peter pulls himself up by the proffered hand that he notices its twin still rests on his own finger. He almost laughs then. They were technically divorced, right at the end, but it seems sentimentality has finally gotten the better of both them. Perhaps this is what's left after the Beholding and the Forsaken have been torn away. Just Peter. Just Jonah. Two old men at the end of their time.
Even in death I'll never truly be rid of you, he thinks, and doesn't let go.
Jonah intertwines their fingers; runs his thumb along the back of Peter's hand; flashes him a grin.
"What happens now?" Peter Lukas asks.
"I don't know," Jonah Magnus answers.
"And I think, for the first time, I really don't need to."
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
'Vain man,' said she, 'that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.'
‘Not so,’ (quod I); ‘let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.’
- Edmund Spenser, Sonnet LXXV (c.1580)