Chapter Text
There is a time, before the end of the world, where everything is still.
The cacophonous noises, the rumbling quakes of stress fractures in the foundation, the howling, screaming wind—it pauses, for a moment, to observe.
The Archivist (the Antichrist, the Archive, to a select few, perhaps even Jon) is limp in his other’s arms, eyes dull and unseeing.
His other is sobbing. The knife between them is warm and wet with blood.
A shuddering gasp—an unspooling of tape. And now they are here.
The world is dark around them, illuminated only by the quickly fading glow in the Archivist’s Eyes. It casts strange shadows on his other, foggy glasses slipping off his face and into the evergrowing pool of blood around them.
For a second, all is quiet.
The one holding the knife strangles a cry in his throat. His hands are shaking, gripped tightly around the hilt. The Archivist is in his arms. His hair is matted down with sweat and ink.
The one holding the knife leans into the fading warmth of his other. Silent tears track familiar paths down his face.
The one holding the knife takes a second to mourn.
He looks up at the corpse ahead of him—the Pupil, Jonah or James or Elias—scrawny and pitiful now that he is not suspended above them, a conduit in which pure, unadulterated terror could spill through.
He exhales quietly. This is just a man.
For all that horror, all that fear—
In the end, this is just a man.
And the universe thinks he’s had enough, and the echo chamber is once again drenched in a symphony of discord and dischordant notes that bleeds the ears that rends that chokes that frees that Sees—
An unwinding, then.
Black tendrils of tape snap themselves around the Archivist, metallic and sharp and silver like lifeblood itself. They’re squeezing, dragging through a hole the size of a quarter, and a question of camels and needles emerges, and is forgotten in the Knowing that is quickly now sucking away like air through a vacuum.
The knife is forgotten, dropped in a frenzy of what is this? What is this? And that is the question, isn’t it, as the tapestrings pull at their Archivist, whip themselves like bruises on the Archivist’s skin.
A whimper, from someone, and a peripheral glance as a corpse is discarded. Why this one? He asks, screams into the biting wind.
The universe tugs, and Martin thinks, no.
The tendrils pull the Archivist away, and Martin thinks, you’re not taking him, too.
He lunges, which shouldn’t be possible, as the weightless feeling of what is no longer Vast overtakes him as the floor loses hold under him. A sucking vacuum, Martin pulls at the strings that have tied his other for so long and he entangles himself in the mess, claws at a piece of exposed piping, drags himself with all the force his weak and weary limbs can muster—
The Archivist is little more than spools of tape and paper in Martin’s hands. Martin doesn’t care—he pushes his fingers into the strings, hugging them close to his chest.
His grip is loosening. Wet with sweat and adrenaline, his fingers cannot readjust for fear of falling, of being pulled away—
A body slam, quite literally.
A breath on his neck.
An expensive tailored suit, dragging him out into shock and his hand opens for protection—
The wind is loud. The Archivist’s voice filters through the air, through every grainy recording, through every speaker in what used to be a world.
And Martin thinks, please.
The universe, typically, does not take requests. The reason for this is disputed—perhaps it’s too much paperwork, or perhaps the universe is simply a little bit rude.
But the universe knows itself, and it knows that this is not how things ought to be. Something very visceral, tied into the thread of the cosmos is losing itself for the last time, and this is not correct.
So Martin pleads for mercy, and the universe says, this is not how it goes.
And something clicks.
And something loosens.
The tape does not unspool, but it does remake—a form, somewhat human, green glowing eyes and sharp-edge hair and hands—Martin almost sobs in relief as something solid presses against his body.
For a second, things are going as planned.
And then something slams into Martin’s side, and everything goes white.
.
Jon wakes up.
The first thing he notices is the absence at his side—warmth, a strong hold, a name at the tip of his tongue—
Martin.
The first thing he notices is that Martin is gone.
Something seizes in his chest, and a strangled cry drags its way out of his throat. His mouth is dry, voice scratchy, but Martin’s voice still echoes in his ears, and he calls him, yells for his love—
“What’s a Mahtin?”
Jon’s Eyes snap open.
The second thing he notices is that there is a child staring at him—no, two children, twins, by the looks of it. Jon blinks—one of them is wearing a bright sweater, and the other a touristy hat.
a flash—a water tower, a gnome statue, a journal with a six-fingered hand emblazoned on the front—
“Woah, look at all his eyes!” one of them gushes, poking his skin experimentally. Jon flinches back, scrambling for—
Where is he?
The ground is…needled. There’s dirt, rich and thick, and he grabs fistfuls of it (the Eyes on his hands close instinctually, the sensitive skin making them screw up in discontent). Hefts them at the children.
You’re hurting children now too? An all-too familiar voice drawls in his head.
Jon drops the dirt. The wind is at his face, and the particulates accumulate on his clothes.
The children look at him with a familiar mix of trepidation and unbridled curiosity. “Are you alive?” the bright-sweater-one asks, tilting their head.
“OhmygodMabel you can’t just ask if someone’s alive like that!” the touristy hat child hisses. The bright sweater one—Mabel, apparently—bats them away absentmindedly.
Okay.
So they’re American.
Where is he?
America, obviously. Shut up Jon, stop being stupid. Talk to the children. Find Martin.
Jon clears his throat. “I—I suppose I am,” he says, and then gasps. The words are like fishhooks up his throat—every syllable is pushed with a weight like he’s been screaming his throat raw for hours. “Have you—where am I?” he asks, keeping it concise despite the bubbling curiosity in his chest. Conserve energy for the important questions, he decides. He puts his hands under him, but they collapse under his weight.
“Gravity Falls, duh!” The child rolls their eyes good-naturedly. The other one, the one with the hat, fervently flips open a codex of some sort. Jon gives it a cursory glance, but his gaze is…fuzzy. “What, did you fall out of the sky?”
Jon glances quickly at his memories—the dull ache in his lower back, as well as the somewhat-crater he seems to be in at the moment all seemed to correspond with that analysis. “I—yes, I believe I did.” He resists the urge to claw his vocal cords out of his throat with his bare hands.
The sweater child’s eyes grow even rounder, if such a thing were even possible. “Woah,” they breath, brace-filled teeth gleaming in the low light.
Oh.
It’s dark out.
Very dark out, by the looks of it—there are trees, Jon can see, but they’re dark pillars against an otherwise deep grey night. The children are illuminated by a light of some sort, coming from…next to Jon? On top of Jon?
Oh.
Jon looks at his hands and does not scream. His hands—no, his Eyes are glowing a dull green, bright irises illuminating the children’s faces.
He wills the Eyes closed. The ones on his hand—his palm, large and staring and taunting him in a way a hand-eyes shouldn’t be able to—blink languidly.
An old sort of frustration flares through him, bringing an all-encompassing groan in its wake.
“What’s wrong?” The sweater one asks. Her voice drips with concern, and Jon feels another ache in his chest.
“I—” Jon’s throat is dry. Hot fury boils in his chest, but he clamps it down. He exhales sharply. “My Eyes aren’t cooperating,” he manages, before he has to squeeze his (regular) eyes shut and grit his teeth to keep from screaming.
He—he had this under control. He isn’t—no, this is a different universe. Somewhere Else. This isn’t—there shouldn’t be anything, much less these Things on his skin. He can’t—the whole reason for this is so he wouldn’t be a monster anymore, what was the point if he still had these—
“Hey? Oh, heck, I don’t know your name—uh, Guy? Hey, uh, are you okay?” The touristy hat child put a tentative hand out.
Jon’s Eye’s dilate.
Jon grabs the child’s arm, and pulls.
A sharp cry, of shock if nothing else, and then Mason Dipper Pines twelve years old born August 31st doesn’t like lettuce once saw his own reflection and jumped at the sight is in his arms, and he is so warm, and he can smell his fear—
Jon wrenches himself away. His legs, still shuddering under his weight, are forced to stand as Jon staggers to his feet, and the Eyes are blinking very fast indeed, aren’t they, and Jon needs to find Martin—
“Kids! What are you doing out this late?”
Jon’s head whips up at the new sound, and Knows immediately that it’s Dipper and Mabel Pines’s Great Uncle Stanford, and that the flashlight has enough battery to last another eighteen hours and four minutes precisely and his Eyes won’t close.
“Grunkle Stan! We found a homeless guy in the woods! Can we keep him?”
Jon’s feet do their level best to leave the rest of his body in their tracks, but they are firmly rooted to the ground. He can’t—he collapses to the ground again, and it’s cool and welcoming in a way it has no right to be.
“Mabel, pumpkin, what the ever-loving waffle sauce do you—Oh. Oh.”
A beam of light focuses on Jon’s crumpled form, and Jon squints. His Eyes flicker nervously in the light—and there’s that exposed feeling again, the one he’d thought would leave him when he came here, to this Somewhere Else Place, but no, emotions are getting in the way again, and Jon hates it.
Jon coughs. The sound is pitiful, even to his own ears. He’d cringe, but he’s physically incapable of moving at the moment.
“M—Martin,” he finally gets out, and every word is like rusty nails up his throat. His Eyes are blinking rapidly, he Knows, and the newcomer’s expression of thinly veiled shock (disgust?) is palpable in the air. “I need—where’s—”
“Oh, he’s a British zombie then,” The newcomer drawls, but the edge to his voice is sharp. Calculating. Jon understands, suddenly, that this is the children’s caretaker.
“Grunkle Stan, he’s not a zombie, he’s got too much…skin for that—” Dipper flips through the book in his hands (some sort of Journal? All that’s coming out of the unsolicited direct feeding tube to the eldritch knowledge demon is a starburst of nice handwriting, snippets of what looks to be some sort of schematic or blueprint, and... triangles? Lots of triangles, all uniform at an isosceles point).
Hm. Apparently some knowledge was unknowable after all.
“Even if it’s super weirdo eyeball-covered skin?” Mabel interjects, and Jon wrenches out of his head. He’s being talked about.
Hm.
He’d forgotten how much he’d hated that.
Something itches, under his skin.
“I think it still falls under the technical definition of skin, as we can’t actually see his ribcage!”
Crawling under his fingernails, tracing the lines of his back, tapping out patterns in his ribcage.
“You don’t know that, he could be—”
He can taste the itch, can hear the itching static in his ears as well as he can hear his own erratic breathing.
“Maybe he’s a mermaid, Dip, ever think about that?”
The ground is not tilting below him.
“Mabel, that’s literally impossible—"
He is the one doing the tilting.
“Kids!”
The supposed caretaker of the children pulls them apart, and from Jon’s awkward vantage point he can see Dipper shove the book back into his jacket.
The static is loud, but not so loud that he can’t hear every little sound in his general vicinity. It’s almost like the static is on a slightly overlapped version of this place—doubled, slightly, and entirely different than the nature surrounding him.
And the bickering children, of course.
“Yeah, Grunkle Stan?” Mabel asks brightly, like she hasn’t just come across a random guy in the woods covered in Eyes. “So can we keep him?”
‘Grunkle Stan’ sighs heavily. “Kid, he’s literally a lump on the ground.”
“So? We’ve all been lumps on the ground at one point or another,” Mabel counters, which is a very good point in Jon’s opinion.
“Yeah, fair point,” ‘Grunkle Stanley?’ concedes. “But we’re still not carrying a random stranger back to the Shack—”
The static’s buzzing louder, until it’s not really a buzzing but a roar, and Jon still can’t move and they won’t tell him where Martin is—
He wants Martin.
They won’t give him Martin.
There is only one plausible course of action.
The static is screeching, echoing in Jon’s vision and hearing and dancing on his fingertips, and his Eyes are all open, he Knows. Something is illuminating the ground in front of him, and it takes a minute for him to realize it’s coming from him.
He blinks once.
The static is everywhere now. It bleeds into the world and blots out the trees and the ground and the sky.
Twice.
“Kids, get behind me!” The caretaker calls, and a scamper of child feet and a high voice asking what’s wrong.
His body is moving, and he is standing now, he thinks, and all his thoughts are Martin Martin Martin
He lifts his head, and grins a humorless smile.
“The man introduced himself as John.”
And for a second, there is silence.
Jon Watches the children, studies the young fear that is still so malleable and fresh. The older one’s fear is hardened, long since etched into his face.
The older man’s threat comes off as more of a bark than actual words. “Now, you listen here, you weirdo tea-drinking eyeball, you leave these kids alone or so help me—"
“Hi, Jon,” Mabel interrupts. She brushes her nose with a sweater cuff from behind her…(wait, what is a Grunkle anyway? Jon doesn’t Know yet, but he will) relative. The action is so small, so mundane, and something in Jon’s heart seizes at the sight.
The façade is shattered.
And Jon, for the second time that night, passes right the hell out.