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Sometime in the past few hours while he hadn’t been paying attention, a headache has blossomed inside of Jon’s skull. Like a vine plant, it’s spread from the back of his skull to his temples, somehow throbbing in his eye sockets. It’s like it’s trying to crowd out everything else already in his cranium, squeezing things tight and painful, not enough space for everything that’s supposed to be there and the pain both.
He glares at the papers spread out on the desk in front of him, and keeps working. There’s nothing for it but to ignore it as best as he can. His headaches always like to linger when they arrive, clinging onto him for the rest of the day and well into the night. They’re persistent, stubborn, grating things.
There’s a tentative knocking at his office door. He grits his teeth at the noise.
“Come in,” he says, clipped, not looking up from his papers.
A moment of hesitation, and then the door cautiously creaks open.
“Hi, Jon,” Martin says. There’s a note to his voice that says that he has, perhaps, noticed something in Jon’s tone. As if he maybe doesn’t want to be interrupted. But here he is, interrupting him anyways.
“What is it,” he says, impatient and tired and unwilling to listen to Martin beat about the bush. He’d prefer he get straight to the point, so that he could leave all the quicker. His head throbs.
“I just wanted to bring you some tea. I was, um, I was making some for everyone anyway-- you missed lunch, by the way? I don’t know if you noticed?”
Jon hasn’t looked at a clock for some time now. There had used to be an analogue one mounted on the wall, but he’d had it removed. He’d claimed that it was because the ticking got on the recordings, but that wasn’t really it. The noise was too faint for the tape recorder to pick it up. The noise had, quite simply, made him want to tear his hair out with frustration. But he still has his phone and his laptop if he wants to check on the time. He hasn’t thought to do so since this morning.
It gets very hard, keeping track of time in an isolated office with no deskmates or windows.
“Of course I noticed,” he snaps. “I’ll eat later.”
“Right, right,” Martin hurries to say. “Of course.”
He sounds more like he’s humoring Jon than anything else. It makes annoyance prickle across his skin.
“Was that all?” he asks pointedly, impatiently.
There’s a beat.
“Did you… not go home last night?”
This makes Jon finally look up from his desk, at Martin. Surprise makes him forget his headache for all of two seconds. He’d thought that he was keeping the cot a very well kept secret from his assistants.
“What?” he asks, and stupidly, “How did you know?”
“Well,” Martin says, before sheepishly gesturing at his head. “Your hair is a bit… and you’re still wearing the same clothes from yesterday, and they’re a bit rumpled, and you’re looking even more tired than normal, and--”
“It is completely irrelevant to you whether or not I went home last night,” Jon cuts him off, embarrassment burning hot in his cheeks at the litany of clues from Martin’s mouth. He doesn’t need to hear any more of them.
“Okay,” Martin says. “But--”
“Was that all, Martin?”
“... Yeah. Sorry for bothering you.” Almost apologetically, Martin sets the tea down on a corner of Jon’s desk. He turns to leave-- hesitates. Jon grits his teeth. His headache is large and pounding and oppressive, making the inside of his skull feel tight and too small for its contents, like his brain is swelling like a pulsing heart, straining against its confines. He wants to be alone.
“If you turned on all of the lights in your office, then you wouldn’t have to squint and strain so much to read everything,” Martin says.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” he says acidly. “I’ll take it into consideration.”
He won’t. The ceiling lights are the sort of fluorescent bars that buzz, setting his teeth on edge and driving him to distraction, in the same way the ticking clock had. It’s better to just use the desk side lamp, which is quiet and yellow, forgettable and harmless.
Martin winces slightly. Jon doesn’t feel bad. His head hurts.
“Right,” he says. “Okay. Sorry.”
Finally, Martin leaves, the door quietly clicking closed behind him. Jon inhales deeply through his nose, removing his glasses to press the heels of his wrists against his closed eyes for a moment. The pressure is a fleeting relief from the throbbing. After a long moment, he puts his glasses back on and reaches for the tea-- which is when he notices that it isn’t just tea.
On a small plate by the tea, five chocolate covered biscuits have been thoughtfully included. Jon’s stomach, empty and easily forgotten until now, pangs at the sight of them.
Jon scowls. Martin, he thinks sourly, is fussy and considerate in the most overbearing, grating, obnoxious way possible. He’d much rather the man gave the entire thing up in favor of focusing on his actual duties. Jon doesn’t need his annoying hovering, his pointed concerned questions, his unasked for helpful gestures. He has half a mind to leave the biscuits uneaten just to make a point.
… He doesn’t, though. It’s been a long time since he last ate.
“Jon’s been in a real pissy mood lately,” Tim observes, fiddling with a pen while looking at Jon’s closed office door. “Like, more than usual.”
Sasha makes an agreeing noise from her own desk. “I told him that the Freeman statement wasn’t recording digitally, and he looked like he was very close to just breaking the tape recorder.”
“He’s had a headache two days in a row,” Martin explains.
As if Jon needs to be defended. He is being pissy. The excuse is out of his mouth before he thinks better of it, though.
“Did he tell you?” Sasha asks.
“No,” he admits. “It’s just-- he gets this furrow between his brows when--”
“He’s almost always furrowing his brow.”
“Yeah, but it’s different when he’s--”
“Excuse me?”
All three of them startle, turning to see Rosie stood in the narrow doorway leading into the Archives. She gives them a polite smile, walking further into a room. A small, mousy woman follows after her heels.
“Ms. Keene here wanted to give her statement, but, um-- there seems to be some failure with my equipment,” Rosie says. Again, she doesn’t say. “She’d like to give it verbally, so I thought perhaps…”
Martin automatically makes eye contact with Tim and Sasha, and he knows that they all share the exact same thought in that moment, by the way Sasha almost imperceptibly winces, and Tim very briefly grimaces.
Jon having to deal with a statement giver, when he’s already in this bad of a mood? No way it doesn’t end in-- Ms. Keene, Rosie had said, storming out of here. Probably filing a complaint against him as well.
“I’ll go and check if he’s busy,” Tim volunteers, and Martin wilts a bit in relief. At least he doesn’t have to be the messenger this time. Jon’s annoyed enough with him as it is.
Plus, being around Jon when he’s like this makes him prickle with frustration. The way he forgets to eat, to drink, to take breaks, to turn on the lights-- and won’t even let Martin help with any of it. It’s so, so frustrating. There’s a problem, and he knows how to fix it, how to make it better, and Jon just won’t let him. Why? Spite? Stubbornness? It’s infuriating.
But you’re not supposed to shout at your boss. You’re definitely not supposed to shout at your boss for not taking care of himself. So, Martin grits his teeth and does his best to avoid Jon, to not hover.
He’s bad at it.
“--some crackpot,” Jon’s voice comes through the cracked open office door that Tim’s now standing in, impatient and surly.
“I don’t think asking her if she’s crazy or not is an option, Jon,” Tim whispers, glancing back over his shoulder at Ms. Keene, shooting her a wide, charming smile. Ms. Keene just looks at him, her face blank. Martin wonders if she can hear the conversation. Considering that he can hear it…
“Fine. Show her in. I’m already wasting my time, clearly,” Jon snaps, not nearly quiet enough to be tactful.
“The Head Archivist’s available after all,” Tim says, raising his boisterous voice to be heard across the room. Not that they couldn’t hear him before; Tim’s awful at being quiet. “He can see you now.”
“She’s already--?” he hears Jon say, sounding caught out and alarmed, before quickly cutting himself off. He continues, waspish and defensive, embarrassed. “You should have told me that the statement giver was already down here, Tim.”
“I didn’t think it’d be necessary, boss,” Tim responds in an aside between grit, smiling teeth.
At her desk, Sasha’s clearly biting back laughter, ducking her head to hide a smile. Martin would share the feeling, if the second hand embarrassment wasn’t killing him. He can feel his face slowly flushing, his shoulders hiking upwards with social discomfort.
“I’ll just… leave you all to it, then,” Rosie says dubiously, before beating a hasty retreat out of the Archives, abandoning Ms. Keen to her fate.
Ms. Keen, for her part, doesn’t look like she particularly cares. There’s an almost bored edge to her expression, actually. Maybe she really hadn’t heard Jon implying that she’s crazy? She walks towards Jon’s office, and Tim gets out of her way. Martin hears Jon getting out of his chair, the legs scraping slightly against the floorboards.
“Ah, it’s a pleasure to meet you…?”
“Keene,” Ms. Keene says. Martin can just see Jon’s hand reach out to clasp hers in a professional handshake.
“Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Wait a moment, let me just find the tape recorder--”
Casually, Ms. Keene reaches out and closes the door behind her.
“Well, she seems nice,” Tim says. A beat passes. “So… who wants to bet that she’s going to physically attack Jon?”
“Tim,” Martin protests automatically. After a moment, he adds, “She’ll probably just shout at him. That’s all that ever happens. Maybe file a complaint.”
“Oh, but Jon’s in rare form today, remember! He’ll outdo himself, I bet.”
“I bet that she storms out halfway through,” Sasha cuts in. “Slammed doors and everything.”
“How much?” Tim asks keenly.
“How about next lunch? Loser pays for it.”
“You’re on. But I warn you, James, I’m on a purely caviar and truffles diet. It’s the new thing. How ‘bout you, Martin? You in?”
“Er,” he says. He wants to play along, but… he remembers his bank account balance, and has to suppress a wince. Smiling sheepishly, he says, “I’ve actually already got a packed lunch ready.”
“Shame,” Tim sighs. “Looks like it’s just you and me, Sash.”
From inside of Jon’s office, there’s a sudden thud. Like something’s been knocked off the desk. All three of them go still for a moment, but no other noises follow.
“Everything alright in there?” Tim calls out after a minute.
“Yes,” Ms. Keene calls back, her voice muffled through the door. “Clumsy me.”
They all exchange grim, knowing eye contact. If there’s one thing Jon doesn’t like, it’s clumsy people. Martin knows that very well from personal experience.
“You’d better get your wallet ready, Stoker,” Sasha warns.
Playfully, Tim grimaces.
Surprisingly, Ms. Keene does not come storming out of the room after ten minutes. Or twenty minutes. There isn’t even any sign of raised voices, sharp tones. There’s… not much noise at all. Martin strains his ears from his desk, trying to overhear anything, but he hears nothing. There’s usually at least the soft murmur of noises through the closed door, but-- they must be speaking quietly.
After thirty minutes, Sasha sighs and concedes the victory to Tim, who crows over it.
After forty minutes Martin starts to have trouble focusing on his work, his eyes straying over and over again back to Jon’s office door. Shouldn’t they be done by now? Long since done? What’s keeping them? What could they possibly be talking about? Should he-- could he bring them some tea, maybe?
Jon would probably get mad. He doesn’t like being interrupted when he has statement givers in his office. Martin shouldn’t. They’re probably just getting bogged down in some details together, going over some little minutia.
“... D’you think she really killed him?” Tim asks.
“I’d hope there would’ve been some noises of struggle,” Sasha says dryly.
“Well, there was that bang earlier,” Tim says, smiling like he’s joking.
There’s a moment of silence as no one laughs.
“I’ll go and ask them if they want some tea,” Martin says, standing up a bit too quickly from his desk.
“Oh, yes, good idea!” Sasha agrees immediately.
“They’ve been in there for a long time,” Tim says. “Can’t hurt, can it?”
Martin’s halfway to the door when it opens on its own. Ms. Keene steps outside, spots Martin, and raises her eyebrows at him. Martin freezes guiltily for a moment, before giving her a flustered smile.
“Ms. Keene! I, I just wanted to ask you if you’d like something to drink--”
“No thanks,” she says simply. “I’m done.”
“Oh,” he says. Ms. Keene, some part of him distantly notices, is not covered in blood. Her hair and clothes don’t look messy or ruffled either. She doesn’t look like a woman who’s committed murder. Of course she doesn’t. They were just being silly. “Well, I’ll just ask J--”
“Could you follow me out?” Ms. Keene asks, closing the door behind her. “I don’t think I remember the route.”
“Oh! Yes, sure! Here, follow me.”
“Thank you.”
The route out of the Archives isn’t that complicated, but Martin supposes it might be to an outsider. There aren’t any helpful little signs, and the hallways and stairs down in the basement all look a bit nondescript. As he holds the door to the stairs up out of the Archives open, he notices a glint on Ms. Keene’s left hand.
“It’s so pretty,” pops out of his mouth before he can stop it. Ms. Keene stops and blinks at him with incomprehension. Flushing a bit, he points at the ring on her finger. “That-- you’re engaged?”
“Ah,” Ms. Keene says, glancing down at the ring on her hand, as if remembering its existence. For the first time, a smile flashes across her face, there and gone again as quick as it came, but genuine for all that. “Yes. I’m going to be Mrs. Fairchild soon.”
“Congratulations,” he says warmly. The name sounds vaguely familiar in a way he can’t place, but he shrugs the feeling off. Lots of people have the same name. He’s probably just seen it in the credits of some movie, heard it on the news, seen it on a tombstone.
Without any incident, he leads Ms. Keene out of the Institute. She walks down the steps and out onto the street, and Martin thinks that her statement must have gone very smoothly, or maybe just the brief mention of her engagement cheered her up.
There’s a spring in her step that hadn’t been there when she first came.
“... Charles and I have so much in common,” the tape cassette murmurs dreamily in the quiet voice of Mary Keene. She’d wound the tape back and set it to play before she’d left. Or-- she must have. Jon had been unconscious towards the end, but he recognizes that faint scratchiness underneath her voice. It’s just a recording. She isn’t here any longer. She’s gone. “I’ve never met someone so-- we’re perfect together. And I love his family. That’s why I’m here, actually. My soon to be father in law, he made a joke about how me getting my own statement here would be a fine little ‘induction into the family.’ Half of the family has at least one, apparently. He probably wasn’t serious, but I want to make a good impression. I think he’ll like this, what I’ve done to you. He has that sort of sense of humor.”
On the tape, there’s the organic sound of bones moving in ways they shouldn’t. A breathless exhalation of pain. He’d kept trying to inhale, to scream, to make a noise, but it was as if the air had been evading him.
“Yes. I think he’ll find it very funny. Not looking your nose down on me now, are you?”
The recording of Ms. Keene gives a gentle little laugh, and then ends in the middle of another wet bone crackle noise.
Jon shivers in the cold of his office. His bones, flesh, and skin have all settled in place, and yet he can’t bring himself to move. The ghost of pain lingers, like ringing in his ears after a loud noise, or spots dancing in his eyes after a bright flash of light. It’s technically gone, but he still feels stunned from just how overwhelming it had been.
He feels so weak. He hasn’t felt this weak since--
There’s a knock at the door, the sound of it so loud and jarring that he instinctively flinches into a tighter, smaller ball.
“Jon?” Martin asks. He sounds like he’s almost shouting, and at the same time he doesn’t. Like someone recorded him while speaking at regular volume, and then increased the volume by several orders of magnitude.
It makes some part of his hindbrain light up with the kneejerk instinct to hide, that loud voice. He doesn’t have the time to unfreeze before the door is opening--the groaning creak of it suddenly so very loud--and Martin’s voice sounds again, unmuffled this time.
“You’ve been in here for a while, d’you need…”
There’s a beat of silence.
“Um, hey? Guys? Did you-- have you seen Jon leaving the office?”
“What? No.”
“Is he not there?”
“I don’t see him…”
Taking a deep breath, Jon finally forces himself to move. He sits up, blinks-- and just like last time, dizzying nausea sweeps through him as he takes in just how terrifyingly large everything is. His desk towers over him like a skyscraper. The filing cabinet looms like a mountain-- the floorspace of his cramped little office like a yawning football field--
He closes his eyes so he won’t curl back up on the floor again, breathless with terror. This can’t be happening, it can’t, it can’t--
But it is.
“Ma--” He stops, clears his throat, breathes. “Martin? I’m here.”
“He can’t have left without us… did you guys just hear something?”
“I’m here!” he repeats himself, louder, more desperate. If Martin closes the door--
Martin steps into the room. The squeaky floorboards groan and complain underneath his weight, an unobtrusive background noise amplified into something intense. The ceiling light turns on with a click, and it buzzes like a furious wasp's nest, something dangerous instead of merely grating. Jon makes himself open his eyes just in time to see Martin duck his head to peer underneath the desk. His shadow spills across Jon like a cloud blotting out the sun. His expression remains confused for several seconds, his eyes--his unfathomably large eyes-- darting around, searching the darkness--
And then they go round and incredulous, his mouth falling open into a shocked O.
Jon, just barely over five inches tall, huddled into a ball on the floor in front of a giant, tries not to let his voice waver with barely restrained panic as he speaks. He fails.
“Tell me that she’s still here, Martin.”
It’s with a faint sense of unreality that Martin sits in his chair, listening to that awful tape play. Jon barely makes a noise on the recording-- but the noises he does make are chilling, heartbreaking. All of that had been happening on the other side of that door, while he and Tim and Sasha had been cracking jokes and working. Martin had led her out of the Institute himself. He’d congratulated her on her engagement. He’d literally held the door open for her.
He feels sick. But mostly, the entire situation feels surreal. Because, well--
Jon is sitting on his desk. Not perched on the edge, but sat right on the middle of it. He has a tissue wrapped around himself like an overly large towel, crumpled and stiff and awkward. His clothes hadn’t shrunk with him, and it had been the best they’d been able to manage with the resources at their disposal.
Martin had carefully carried him here in his hands, but he could have done it with just the one. He’s… small. Like-- like a sparrow. Or a hamster. Something small and vulnerable, breakable. Every time Martin looks at him the sense of unreality gets stronger, and he pretty much can’t tear his eyes away from him. Jon can’t possibly be that small, he thinks. Jon’s short, sure, yeah, but not-- not like this. And he always manages to fill up a room anyways, all puffed up and bristly. He’s always felt big.
This can’t be real, he thinks dazedly.
He’d felt the weight of Jon in his palms. It had barely been anything, but it had been there. Tangible.
“The phone number she gave us isn’t in use,” Sasha says. She’d started rapidly typing away on her computer even before the recording was over, brow furrowed and serious. “The address isn’t real either. There are dozens of Mary Keenes’ in London, but there’s nothing to say that she even lives in London--”
“Let’s just go ahead and assume that everything she said was a lie,” Tim says. He’d looked mostly baffled when Martin had first shown up with Jon, but after the recording he looks-- grim.
“I’ve never heard of an incident like this before,” Jon says. His voice is small--not high or squeaky, but small, like Martin’s hearing him on a phone not held to his ear and he forgot to turn on the loudspeakers first. He has to pay attention to hear him properly, put in an effort to focus. “Have any of you?”
“Not anything actually legitimate or in any way plausible,” Sasha says. “Just very firmly discredited nonsense.”
Tim echoes the sentiment, and Martin belatedly follows it.
They all sit in silence for a moment, an unpleasant feeling dawning on them. If everything Ms. Keene said--including probably even her name--is all a pack of lies, and they’ve never heard of something like this before, then-- then they don’t have anything to go off of. Do they? No leads, no--
“Wait,” Martin says. “There was-- she said--”
“Yes?” Jon cuts in, sharp and eager.
Martin tells them about the engagement she’d happily talked about. Soon to be Mrs. Fairchild, she’d said.
“Fairchild,” Jon repeats, and there’s something intense in his expression as he asks. “Fairchild? Are you certain that that’s the name she used?”
“I-- yes?”
“That doesn’t sound like you’re--”
“I-- I mean, yes. Yes, I’m really sure, Jon.”
“Does this matter?” Sasha asks. “She was probably just lying, like she did about everything else.”
“I don’t think she was, though,” Martin says. “We were just making smalltalk on our way out-- I’m the one who noticed the ring, who asked, who brought it up. She didn’t hesitate, or-- she just…”
That natural, sincere smile on her face as her mouth shaped the name, fleeting but genuine. That had been real.
“She wasn’t lying about that part,” he says firmly. “I just-- I’ve got a gut feeling.”
Sasha doesn’t seem particularly convinced by this argument, but says, “Well, I guess I could run a search on the name… It’s just a last name, though--”
“Charles,” Tim says. “She said it on the tape. That she and Charles are perfect together.”
“Charles Fairchild,” Sasha says experimentally, and then frowns disapprovingly. “Not a very distinctive, convenient name. Oh well, I guess I’ll make the best of it. Work my magic.”
“--Fairchild,” Jon says, and Martin realizes that he’s been saying something. They’d talked over him without even noticing. “I said, there could be a connection between this and Simon Fairchild-- listen to me!”
“Sorry!” Martin says-- too high, too loud. Jon flinches like someone’s set off an unexpected firecracker next to him, and it feels like someone just stomped on Martin’s chest with a boot made of guilt.
Jon’s so small right now; startling him into flinching feels like insult to injury, grinding his face into the dirt when he’s already down. Cruel.
“Sorry,” he repeats, his voice a much quieter whisper this time, sheepish.
“Simon Fairchild?” Sasha asks. “You mean-- oh! That guy. The plane guy. But-- it’s probably just the same name-- although maybe--”
And with that, Sasha breaks herself off and descends into a frenzy of typing on her computer.
“Are you--” Tim says, and then cuts himself off. When he speaks up again, his voice is lower-- like he’s trying to be quiet, Martin realizes. Tim’s default speaking tone is always kind of loud, in an exuberant sort of way. “Are you okay, Jon?”
There’s real concern in his voice, in the furrow of his brow, in the way he’s leaning forwards in his chair as if to get a better look at Jon’s small face.
“I don’t believe that I would classify current circumstances as okay,” Jon says bitterly.
“No, I mean-- yeah of course this sucks but does it… does it hurt?”
“Hurt?” Confusion visibly breaks through the discomfort and unhappiness in Jon’s expression.
“To be like that. It sounded like the process hurt, but-- does it still hurt? Just to exist like that? Are you in pain?”
An unpleasant jolt goes through Martin’s brain at that, the possibility that Jon might be as stuck in the agony they’d heard on that tape as he is in this size only occurring to him right then. It’s a nasty, awful thing to consider. Martin looks sharply away from Tim back towards Jon, inspecting him for signs, indicators. He knows the way Jon stiffly holds himself when he’s let himself fall asleep at his desk and given himself a backache or neck pain, and he knows the way his jaw clenches when he’s gritting his teeth through a headache, and he knows that stubborn, surly expression he gets when he barely slept at all last night but he’s still going to force himself through a whole work day. He’s known Jon as more than just a face in the same building as him for only a few months now, but he’s already learned to see how Jon wears and carries pain in the lines of his body, the look in his eyes, the inflection of his voice.
But all he sees is frank and open surprise, genuine and unhidden. Relief goes off inside of Martin’s chest before Jon even opens his mouth.
“No,” Jon says honestly. “It-- it isn’t painful. Simply… inconvenient. Very, very inconvenient.”
“Good,” Tim says, his shoulders slumping slightly. Martin hadn’t realized that they’d been tense before. “I mean--”
“I understand,” Jon cuts in. “I suppose it could be worse, yes.”
“Still pretty bad, though,” Tim says. “Like… What the hell are you going to do, like that? How are we going to fix it?”
What if they can’t fix it, he means. What if Jon’s stuck like this, indefinitely, permanently? How is he going to live his life? How is he going to get through the day? How will he take care of himself? The entire situation has been such a shock, so absurd, that practical, logistical questions are only just now beginning to occur to him, but now that they are, they're all coming in at once. How and what is Jon supposed to eat? Drink? Sleep? Go? What is he supposed to wear? Hell, how will he even manage to go to the loo?
Jon opens his mouth, and nothing really comes out. Before he can come up with something, he’s interrupted.
“The Fairchilds donate a lot of money to the Institute, annually,” Sasha says, sounding like she didn’t hear any of the preceding conversation, her eyes still locked onto her screen. “Elias might know something about them, then? He has to see them sometimes, just to rub elbows and be gracious, right?”
“We’re telling Elias about this?” Jon asks, his head whipping around towards her, and he sounds like Sasha just proposed… throwing him into a pit full of hungry tigers, or something else unpleasant like that.
“Why wouldn’t we?” she asks. “Hell, we should probably tell Artefact Storage too, and the research department-- no reason to really keep this from anyone in the Institute. It’s a serious problem, we need all of the help we can get.”
“That’s--” Jon says, and falters, goes quiet. His expression still looks dismayed, though. Unhappy. He doesn’t want to tell Elias, Martin can see. He doesn’t want to tell anyone. But why--
For the same reason why he didn’t tell Elias that Martin had accidentally let a dog into the Archives that disastrous first day, after they’d gotten it back out and cleaned up the mess. He’d been braced for that, holding his breath, but no one ever so much as mentioned it. Slowly, he realized that it had to be because Jon never told anyone outside of the Archives about it, despite clearly being deeply, profoundly annoyed by the incident, by Martin. Jon hadn’t kept it to himself out of kindness or loyalty; when it comes to Martin, he doesn’t really have a whole lot of that in store.
He’d been embarrassed. He’d been scared that it would reflect badly on him, make him look like a joke, make him look… incompetent, or something. Or, that’s what Martin thinks, anyway. He’s pretty sure. There’s no other reason he would’ve kept quiet about it.
He doesn’t want to let anyone else in the Institute know about this because he’s afraid… what, that it’ll make him look bad? Bad at his job, incompetent, unprofessional?
It’s a ridiculous idea. But Jon, as Martin has been slowly learning, is a ridiculous man.
“Maybe… we could hold off for a bit?” Martin suggests tentatively. “Just-- just for a day or two, until after we’ve checked up on all of the most obvious stuff ourselves? If we haven’t figured it out by then, we should of course ask for help.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Martin sees relief flash across Jon’s face, and he knows that he’d been right.
“I think that would be for the best,” Jon says forcefully, possibly the first time he’s ever actually agreed with one of Martin’s ideas. “We wouldn’t want to-- if we told more people about this we’d just have to go through this whole shock and incredulity rigmarole all over again. It’s a waste of time.”
Jon is the only person Martin knows who sincerely uses words like rigmarole. His logic doesn’t really hold up, but Martin doesn’t say anything.
Jon’s the one who’s been-- changed. If this is what he needs…
“Well-- I guess so,” Sasha says dubiously.
“Good,” Jon says. “For now, we should focus our efforts on following up on all of the most obvious leads. Tim, you should go and ask Rosie if Ms. Keene left her with any details. Martin, you should check up on all of the information she left with us-- it’s likely all fake, but it still has to be scrutinized, just in case. Sasha… follow your instincts. And I’ll-- I’ll…”
Martin watches Jon visibly remember the fact that there is no possible way he could operate his computer, or even get to it. Or hold a phone. Or go and track someone down on foot. Or do any useful research of any kind.
It’s an expression that makes Martin want to wince in sympathy.
“Maybe we should figure out some other stuff first?” he suggests. “Like… where you’re going to sleep, how you’re going to eat and drink? And, er-- clothes?”
That tissue paper does not look warm or comfortable. The Archives are a chilly place at the best of times.
“I can sleep here, in the Archives,” Jon says, and Martin blinks. He opens his mouth to protest, but Jon goes on, cutting across him. “I’ll eat and drink what I normally eat and drink, simply in smaller quantities. As for clothes--”
Jon stalls out at that. There’s a searching, frustrated look on his face, like he’s trying to reach for the simple, obvious answer, and can’t seem to find it.
“Maybe we could order you some doll clothes?” Sasha suggests. “There have to be some toys in your size that have outfits they can be changed into. We should take your measurements.”
Jon sucks in a breath and draws himself up to his full (incredibly diminutive) height at the word ‘doll.’
“The tissue,” he says frostily, “is perfectly adequate.”
Almost on cue, Martin sees Jon’s body shudder slightly, as if he’s been harshly reminded of the cold. His hands are clenched tightly in the material of the tissue, white knuckled and clutched close to his chest. It looks terribly thin.
“You can’t sleep all alone in the Archives, Jon,” Martin cuts in, unable to hold in the protest any longer. “It’s frigid here-- what will you even sleep on? What if something happens? What if Ms. Keene comes back? What if you need help? What if--”
“The building is locked up at night quite well, and I don’t see why Ms. Keene--if that even is her real name-- should see fit to come back. She’s achieved everything she wanted to,” Jon says bitterly. “And what could you do to stop her, exactly?”
“Well--”
“And it’s not that cold, there’s a perfectly usable cot in Document Storage, and I won’t need help.”
You can’t know that, Martin thinks. That’s the point of trouble, of problems. They often don’t come with a helpful little warning before they hit you. But Jon’s chin is sticking out slightly, in that mullish way that means that he isn’t planning on budging a single inch.
“There’s a cot in Document Storage?” Tim asks, brow furrowed.
“Ye--es,” Jon says, awkwardly snapped out of his narrow eyed determination. “There is. It was already there when I found it. It must have been Gertrude’s.”
“... The seventy year old lady slept in a cot in Document Storage?”
“Well, I-- maybe? How should I know? It was just there.” Jon could not more obviously be lying. He’s got his entire face averted from Tim, as if he thinks he can be more convincing so long as Tim doesn’t get to see his facial expression.
He’s got a cot, Martin thinks with exasperation, resignation, indignance. He went out and bought a cot, brought it here, and set it up in a room that the rest of them don’t have any real reason to go into. Martin already suspected that Jon sometimes pulled overnighters at work, or accidentally fell asleep at his desk for a little too long. Bad habits. This, though, shows a level of premeditated, deliberate intention that makes him want to bang his own head against the nearest solid surface. He bought a cot.
“And how are you going to get into that cot?” Martin asks, deciding to just let Jon get away with this terrible lie.
“What?” Jon asks, turning to frown at Martin, as if he’s just asked a stupid question yet again.
“Are you going to walk to it? Do you know how long that’s going to take? How are you going to open the door to Document Storage? How are you going to get into the cot? You’ll have to climb, you know that? When was the last time you climbed anything besides a ladder? Are you sure you can do it?”
“Well--” Jon says in a tone like he wants to argue, but there’s doubt in his eyes now, his shoulders hunched defensively. Martin can see the answers to all of his questions there. I don’t know. I don’t know.
He kind of feels like a bastard for making that look appear on Jon’s face, but he can’t just leave him alone like this, thinking that everything’s going to be fine.
“We could just help him there,” Sasha says. “It’s not that much trouble.”
“That’s my point!” Martin bursts out. “He’s going to need help with everything. If we leave him alone, and it turns out that he needs something that we didn’t think of-- what’s he going to do? God, what if a rat gets him?”
“I haven’t seen a rat for weeks, since we set those traps out,” Sasha reassures him.
“Oh, Christ,” Martin says, feeling himself blanch. “What if Jon gets into one of the rat traps?”
The mental image is horrible and grisly. Martin had wanted for them to just hire an exterminator, have the rats caught harmlessly, released in the wild, somewhere in the countryside. Elias had firmly rejected this solution, pointing out the cost of it when they’d already blown through a fair chunk of their quarterly budget on other things during the first week of the transfer. Instead, they’d been given a mixed assortment of rat traps that had been gathering dust in storage, left over from some other rat infestation years ago. Most of them had been… horrible. Martin’s been checking all of the rat traps every single morning and evening, making sure that if there are any rats stuck in any of them that he can put them out of their suffering first thing, if they’re still alive. Jon is now the perfect size for them. It’s a nauseating thought, imagining finding Jon like he had with that one rat last month, broken and bleeding but still twitching and trembling with pain and wild animal fear--
“He is right here,” Jon snaps. “And I’m not a rat! I know enough to avoid the traps that I helped you set out myself.”
--Right. Right. Jon may be ridiculous, but he isn’t stupid. He’s still a human being, with human intelligence, even if he’s… much smaller, now. He’s not some pet that’s going to eat something poisonous it finds on the floor, and he’s not a child who’ll try and stick hairpins into electrical outlets because it makes pretty sparks happen. He’s not going to die if Martin leaves him alone for one night.
Probably.
Maybe.
Anything could happen, though. Clearly, anything could happen. He hadn’t woken up this morning with the possibility of Jon being shrunk to a twelfth of his size as something that he should in any way reasonably expect, and yet here they are. Here they are.
“Okay,” Martin makes himself say. “Sorry. I-- that was a bit much. But you get my point, right? You’re-- you’re not yourself right now. There are a lot of things that you can’t do, that you might have to. It’s best if someone else is around, just in case you need help with something. It’s safest.”
Jon scowls, clearly immensely dissatisfied with this, but unable to immediately refute it as nonsense. Martin’s the one who’s being reasonable here, and he obviously really, really doesn’t want to admit it.
“You could just spend the night over at Tim’s, or Sasha’s maybe?” he suggests. Jon likes them better. Maybe it will be easier to accept, if it’s them and not Martin that he has to depend on.
“I’ll stay at the Archives tonight,” Jon says, and Martin feels himself sit more upright with frustration even as something inside of him wilts with dismay. He’d really thought that Jon had been about to relent for a moment there-- “But,” Jon says, cutting Martin off before he can do more than open his mouth. “I will keep my phone close by me, and I will call if I truly require your assistance. I doubt I will, though.”
“Can you even use your phone right now?” Tim asks. “Hang on where is-- give me a minute.”
Tim gets out of his chair and darts into Jon’s office. He comes back holding Jon’s phone triumphantly up in the air, grinning. “Found it! It was still in your trouser pocket.”
Tim walks up to Martin’s desk, and deposits Jon’s phone there. They all look at it.
“It’s as big as you are,” Tim observes.
“I think it might be a bit bigger, actually?” Sasha says, leaning forwards.
“You definitely can’t lift it,” Martin says.
“I don’t have to be able to lift it,” Jon says sharply. Walking towards his phone, he kneels down, undoes the magnetic clasp keeping the faux leather phone case shut, and flips it open with a heave of both of his arms and a bitten back grunt of effort, hurriedly reaching back down to keep his tissue from slipping. Martin watches, silent and entranced, as Jon uses his whole hand to swipe at the screen, lighting the phone up. Slowly, laboriously, using broad movements, Jon navigates his way to his contact list, selects Sasha James (coworker), and sends her a text consisting of a single period. Obligingly, Sasha’s phone chimes softly with a received text.
“There,” Jon says, tired and a touch too triumphant. “See? I can reach out for help if I need it. There’s no need for me to be babysat.”
“That’s, uh, great Jon,” Tim says. “Kind of took you a while, though?”
“I can call instead,” Jon says primly.
Martin doesn’t like this. Sure, Jon can call-- but how long will it take any of them to get to him? What if it’s urgent? He doesn’t like this. But Jon has his arms tightly crossed, radiating with every inch of his body--all five of them--that he isn’t in a mood to surrender or compromise on this. He will be spending the night alone, as if nothing is wrong or different at all, and that’s that.
I could just grab him, a voice almost casually notes in the back of his mind. With one hand. Just pick him up and take him home where he’ll be safe. What could he do about it? Nothing.
Martin vaguely shakes his head, as if he could maybe disperse the idle thought like lingering smoke, wave it away. He’s had thoughts like that before, honestly. Even at his regular size and weight, Jon is very… pick-upable, and it can get tempting sometimes to just hoist him up over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and go and set him down in front of a hot meal, or plunk him down on a break room couch (or a cot, because they apparently have one of those) for a nap. He’s never done it, of course, that would be insane. But he’s definitely thought about it very intently.
It’d be even easier to do now.
“Fine,” Martin reluctantly relents. It is, unfortunately, Jon’s choice. His terrible, terrible choice. Martin has to respect that. “Let me-- we’ll set you up before we go, though.”
Jon watches as the door to Document Storage is finally, finally closed behind his assistants, leaving him alone. It creaks loudly and slowly, as if reluctant, but it does eventually click firmly shut. The room is temperature controlled and very well sealed for the protection of the documents, and thus basically sound proofed, so he can’t listen to their departing footsteps, their muffled words to each other as they leave. But that’s fine, they’re gone now, and that’s all Jon’s been wanting for… some hours, now.
He can’t remember ever prickling with as much painful, mortified self consciousness as he’s done today, with all of their eyes lingering disbelievingly on him. On how small he is, how weak he is, how helpless. It’s been maddening-- almost as maddening as the moments when they weren’t looking at him, when they simply forgot he was there because they overlooked him, as brief as those moments were.
He hates it when he wants directly contradicting things. It makes him feel unreasonable, ridiculous.
But he’s alone now. There’s no one here to stare at him, or to forget him. He can take a deep breath, and try to relax.
… The room looks so very large now. Martin had insisted on leaving a small lamp on in the corner, something that he pilfered from some other room. So you’ll be able to see your phone, he’d said, as if it’s inevitable that Jon’s going to have to call for help. It makes him internally bristle, that casual expectation of failure, and he determines that he will not have to call anyone at all. If problems arise, he will simply solve them himself, like a competent, capable, thinking human being.
And if he does call anyone, it certainly won’t be Martin.
Not that he’s going to call anyone.
He’s been helped up onto the cot itself, and around him several items have been left behind for him. A plate with several biscuits left on it, which is most definitely far too much considering that the total mass outweighs his own body weight by at least three times. A shallow bowl with water in it, as it was judged to be the easiest receptacle that he could drink from himself without assistance. He could probably take a bath in it if he’d like to. His phone, the cover carefully left open for quick and easy access. Martin had insisted on making sure that it was fully charged before they all left.
Jon’s lucky that he wasn’t put in a hamster cage for his own protection, he supposes sourly. Well, at least they’re finally gone now, and he doesn’t have to tolerate any continued fretting. He can survive one night just fine. All he has to do is lie here until his brain finally slows down enough to let him sleep. Admittedly, this is a challenge, considering the day he’s had--
--the way his bones creaked as they curled and bent, like old rotten timber being forced into a new shape, the universe squeezing down on him like a slowly and inexorably closing fist--
--and with how cold it is. The Archives are always just a touch uncomfortably chilly, to protect the documents. They all cope with this in various ways. Sasha’s fond of her cardigans, Martin his jumpers, while Tim’s the sort of heathen who would happily wear shorts in the middle of winter without noticing the cold in the slightest. Jon usually manages himself by swaddling himself in layers. An undershirt, a button up, a vest, and a jacket are his usual defenses, which goes very nicely with his earnest attempt to appear more professional and respectable, like someone who should be the Head Archivist.
He doesn’t have any of those layers now. He’s been able to stop covering himself with that thin, stiff, scratchy tissue now that he’s alone, burrowing down underneath the top of the sheet on the cot. He’s huddled up into a tight ball for warmth, but he still can’t stop himself from intermittently shivering. He knows the Archives are normally a chilly place, that he isn’t wearing any clothes, but the entire world somehow seems colder ever since he was-- changed. Like the chill can seep into his bones more easily like this, more sharply.
It’s very difficult to fall asleep when every single muscle in your body is tense. Whenever he gets distracted, his eyes open back up again. He can’t get over how dizzyingly, terrifyingly large everything is now, can’t stop staring at it. He hates it.
It’s during one of these periods, when he’s blankly staring at everything looming above him, that he sees it. Movement, out of the corner of his eye. As soon as his brain belatedly registers it he does a full body jolt, inhaling sharply through his nose. He sits up to look at it without thinking. He should be alone--
The light the lamp sheds is dim and unobtrusive, casting more shadows than illumination across the room. Jon doesn’t parse what he’s looking at until it moves again-- a twitch, a sudden and heart stoppingly quick burst of skittering movement, stopping and starting with unnatural abruptness. It’s a movement that he knows with skin crawling familiarity and contempt, alarm shooting through him before he even registers what it is.
It’s a spider. At the end of the cot. Perched on the sheets in utter stillness, looking right at him.
Kill it, a decades old ingrained reflex urges in the back of his head, thoughtless and automatic.
But it’s too big. Too big. As big as him-- no, bigger--
Without any warning, the spider lunges forward again--too, too quick for something that large, it shouldn’t be that quick--and he unfreezes with a cry, recoiling, shoving himself away from its approach. The spider goes still again. It’s closer now. He can see the way its legs bend-- the minute twitches of its mandibles-- the way its eyes catch the faint light-- it’s definitely looking at him. Every time it moves, it moves in his direction. He has its attention.
“Go away,” he breathes out, almost unheard. The spider doesn’t react.
It’s just a spider, he tells himself. It’s advice he’s never been able to fully listen to. Just scare it away. Startle it. Make it go away.
“Go away!” he cries out, louder, his voice cracking halfway through.
For a beat, the spider just squats there, motionless. Then another terrifying burst of movement closer to him, and he flinches backwards-- closer, closer, closer--
This time, it stops an even shorter distance away. It looms so large.
He can’t kill it. He can’t leave the room-- the door is closed, he can’t open it, it’s too large, too heavy. His heartbeat is hammering loud and deafening in his ears, drowning out any rational thought he may have. It is larger than him. It wants to eat him. It’s going to bite him and inject him with venom and paralyze him and web him up and drag him back, back to Mr. Spider who he's rudely kept waiting all this time, who is hungry, starving, ravenous, furious--
Jon panics.
“Thanks,” Martin says, thrusting the money at the cab driver before ducking out of the car. He’s not normally one to splurge on a taxi instead of just taking the tube, but the way Jon had sounded on the phone-- he hadn’t wanted to waste a single minute. He runs around to the back of the Institute, letting himself in through the back door with the broken lock that everyone’s been assured will be repaired ‘in just about a week now’ for the last few months. Sasha was the one who took Jon’s keys this afternoon, promising to lock up and look after them.
He runs through the empty building, down the stairs to the Archives, turns on the lights so he doesn’t trip on something and break his neck, and then throws open the door to Document Storage. Clutching onto the doorframe, gulping for air with fresh sweat prickling across his skin, his face hot with exertion, he searches the room wildly for one small thing. Person.
“Jon?” he gasps out. “I’m-- here. Sorry it took me so-- so long. Jon?”
You have to get here right now, Jon had said, and there had been barely restrained terror audibly bleeding in at the edges of his voice as he’d hissed the words into the receiver. Right now, please, I can’t-- it’s going to--
Martin hadn’t heard what ‘it’ was going to do, because Jon had cut himself off with a startled, alarmed cry before he’d finished. Jon hadn’t replied to any of Martin’s questions after that, hadn’t said anything more. Gone from the phone. Needless to say, he’d thrown himself out of the flat so quickly that he’d almost forgotten to put on his shoes first.
“Martin?” he hears, very faintly.
Oh, thank Christ.
“I’m here,” he says again, his thundering heartbeat beginning to slow down. He steps into the room, trying to follow the sound of that small, muffled voice.
He finds Jon, of all places, exactly where he left him. Somehow, he hadn’t expected that. Kneeling by the cot, he sees a lump at the head of the sheets so small that it could just be a wrinkle, nothing more. Carefully tugging it down, he sees Jon. He’s taken aback all over again by just how small he is. He looks even smaller like this, curled up and hiding. As soon as the sheet slides off, Jon tentatively uncurls and looks up at him, around himself. It’s difficult to tell when he’s so small, but his eyes look very wide, white around the edges.
“Is it--” Jon says, and has to stop to clear his throat before trying again. “Is it gone?”
“Is what gone?” Martin asks, concerned. “Did a rat get in?”
“No,” Jon says, and shudders, sitting up properly before pulling his knees up to his chest, covering himself. His tissue’s gone; he’s naked, vulnerable. Martin’s first thought is that it must be terribly cold. “Worse. A spider.”
Martin blinks. “A… spider?”
“I felt it,” Jon says, in the same way someone else might say ‘I felt the knife at my throat’ or ‘I felt the bullet graze past me.’ “On top of the sheets, weighing down on me-- it was on top of me.”
Martin stops and takes this in. That’s…
His immediate instinct is to assure Jon that the vast majority of spiders aren’t hunting predators, but waiting ones. He’d have to somehow manage to blunder his way into a web to actually be considered as viable prey, and even then he thinks that Jon’s just a bit too large to really--
Jon’s trembling. Full body, like he’s fallen through ice and only just been fished out of the water, shocked and shivering.
Oh, Martin thinks. He’s known for a long while that Jon hates spiders, that he kills them without stopping to even consider just taking them outside, or leaving them alone. He’d taken this as a prim, sneering dislike of icky, gross things, an intolerance of a misunderstood, undervalued, harmless creature.
He hadn’t realized that Jon was actually scared. There had been a part of him that had been gearing up for a little passive aggressive I told you so, once he’d made sure that Jon wasn’t actually hurt or in active danger. A bit ashamed of himself, he pushes that urge aside. Now really isn’t the time.
“That sounds… really upsetting,” Martin says. He’s always admired spiders in a way, but he doubts even he would enjoy being faced with one approximately his own size. “D’you want to get out of here?”
“Yes,” Jon says, quietly but fiercely.
Martin gathers Jon’s things-- it’s not a lot. Just his phone, really, and the tissue for modesty’s sake. The outfit he’d been wearing when he’d been changed is folded up neatly and waiting on his desk for when he’ll be able to wear it again. It’s as Martin’s putting Jon’s phone into his pocket that it occurs to him why Jon called him, and not anyone else. Jon’s contact list-- it’s sorted alphabetically. Martin Blackwood comes before Tim Stoker or Sasha James. That’s all.
Right. That… makes sense. Okay. That’s fine.
“Ready to go?” he asks. “I… think you might have to, um, go in my jacket pocket… I mean I guess I could maybe find a-- a box? Or--”
“Your pocket is fine,” Jon says.
“Okay,” Martin says, and… that’s that.
They go to Martin’s flat.
Jon doesn’t know how, but by the time the journey is over he’s actually dozing, and he doesn’t properly wake up until Martin gingerly removes him from his pocket. It had been warm in there, he supposes, Martin’s body heat seeping in through the fabric. It had been warm and dark and quiet and soft, and the movement had felt almost like he was on a train or a boat, something soothing and rhythmic. Somehow, that had been enough to lull him despite the sheer terror that had coursed through him earlier in the night.
But now he’s awake, awareness seeping back into his mind, and what he feels more than anything else is shame.
“Sorry,” Martin says, carefully cradling him in his hands, holding him up so they’re more or less on eye level. Jon feels like he’s speaking to a giant. “Did I wake you up?”
“No,” he lies. “I was awake.”
“Okay,” Martin says after a bit. Then he looks helplessly around his own flat. “Um, sorry about the mess. I wasn’t expecting any visitors.”
Thoughtlessly, Jon looks for the mess.
Martin’s flat seems gigantic to him, but using Martin himself for comparison it might actually be smaller than Jon’s own, which is a considerable feat. The ‘mess’ seems to be less of a ‘doesn’t care about cleaning’ kind of mess, and more of a ‘doesn’t have enough space to put everything away’ kind of mess. He can see the kitchen by twisting his head one way, and the living room by twisting it the other. Almost all available surfaces are cluttered with something or other-- books, magazines, salt and pepper shakers, cutting boards, mugs, a stray umbrella, a blanket tossed over the back of the couch, a sweater over the arm of it, slippers left on the floor, something that looks like a craft project in progress strewn across the kitchen table. Martin seems to have a taste for collecting various kitschy little knick knacks that look like they came from a thrift store to decorate a space, something that Jon already knew from the way he keeps his desk. In this cramped, cluttered apartment, it just makes everything feel even more cramped and cluttered. If Jon were his regular size, he would be nervous of accidentally knocking half a dozen random trinkets over with one thoughtless gesture. There are dishes soaking in the sink.
“It’s fine,” Jon says, because it is fine. And also because he doesn’t even vaguely have the right to complain in this situation. Not to Martin, at least.
He’d insisted that he’d be fine on his own for the night. Martin had expressed doubt, had pointed out flaws and potential troubles, had asked him if he was sure, and Jon had simply shut him down. And then he’d forgotten all of his pride and dignity and called him in the middle of the night, babbling and terrified, pulling him out of his bed to come and save him. He would’ve been less of an inconvenience if he’d just listened to Martin in the first place, had let himself be taken home by one of the assistants. He feels like such an ass.
“Let’s… figure out a sleeping situation for you,” Martin says. “Maybe on the couch-- actually, do you think you can shout loudly enough for me to hear you from the bedroom? Maybe something else…”
“I’m sorry,” Jon makes himself say, even as it makes him prickle with hot embarrassment to acknowledge that he’s made a fool of himself. If he doesn’t bring himself to apologize to Martin now, he likely never will. And he does deserve an apology. “For waking you up. I didn’t mean to be this much of an imposition.”
“Oh,” Martin says, his eyes going wide for a moment. “No, that’s-- don’t worry about that, Jon. I wasn’t even asleep, actually. I couldn’t really sleep so I was keeping myself busy instead with-- oh! Hang on, let me show you--”
Making his way over into the kitchen, Martin delicately sets Jon down on the table before picking something up out of the craft project. For a moment, Jon thinks that it’s… a handkerchief? Or something of that size. Martin holds it out in front of him, small in his large hands, and after a beat Jon finally recognizes it for what it is.
“You made me a… dress?” he asks, baffled.
“Er,” Martin says. “Kind of? I was going more for a toga, but it’s difficult making clothes this small. I definitely can’t do trousers, sorry.”
“You made me clothes,” he says blankly.
“I did my best,” Martin says. “Do you want to try it, see if it fits?”
“I… yes. Please.”
Jon puts it on. Martin turns around while he does so, as if he hasn’t already seen Jon naked at least twice by now during this entire catastrophe. The toga-dress fits on him loosely, but it fits, trailing a bit on the floor in a way that makes him think that he’ll have to lift the hem to avoid tripping on it when he walks. The world becomes less frigid. The fabric is soft and gently worn, and he recognizes the scraps lying on the table as a cut up t-shirt. Martin had sacrificed one of his own shirt to make Jon something to wear.
“Does it fit?” Martin asks, his back still turned.
“It does,” he says.
“Oh, good,” Martin says, relieved, turning back around. He looks down at Jon, and a smile of accomplishment flickers across his face for a moment. “Sorry that I couldn’t make you proper trousers. Or pants. Or shoes. Or--”
“It’s fine,” Jon says. “I vastly prefer this to velcro Ken doll trousers. Martin, you… you didn’t have to do this.”
It’s the closest he can bring himself to saying thank you, right now. Martin didn’t have to do this. He shouldn’t have done this. He owes nothing to Jon, no obligation, no duty.
“It’s no trouble, Jon,” Martin says. He starts to tidy up the remains of his little project, and Jon notices two bandaids on his fingers that he’s certain hadn’t been there earlier in the day. “I’ve been using this sewing kit since I was a teenager. It’s really helpful to be able to just sew up split seams on clothes that are otherwise still perfectly fine, you know? It’s such a waste to just throw them out without even trying to fix them. So-- this was a bit outside of what I usually do, but I did my best! You should have something to wear during-- all of this.”
“You didn’t have to do this,” he repeats himself. “You don’t have to-- to help me.”
There’s a rock lodged somewhere in the back of his throat, and it’s difficult and uncomfortable to breathe past, to speak through. He’d been about to say you don’t have to take care of me, and had changed it at the last moment. It had sounded too-- it had been too much. But that is what Martin’s trying to do, what he’s doing, and-- he doesn’t have to. Jon isn’t his burden to bear, his inconvenience to tolerate. Martin is under no obligation to put up with him, to go out of his way to care for him when he doesn’t want to.
For some reason, he remembers his grandmother. He doesn’t know why.
“Well… I kind of do, actually?” Martin says. “You need help right now, Jon. I know you don’t like that, that you don’t want to admit it, but--”
“Just because I need help doesn’t mean that you have to give it,” he cuts in.
Martin looks at him as if he’s said something very strange, and a bit disturbing.
“You don’t owe me anything,” he goes on, willing him to understand, to stop. “It isn’t your job to take care of me. You don’t have to.”
I don’t want to be a burden.
Frowning, Martin sets down what he was holding. Slowly, he pulls out one of the kitchen chairs and sinks down into it.
“You know,” Martin says slowly, “you can always return the favour by helping me back. That’s how it’s supposed to go, I think. Two people helping each other back and forth.”
“I can’t help anyone like this,” he says. “I’m too small.”
“When you’re back to normal, I mean,” Martin says. “You could help me find things when I’ve lost them-- I’m awful at finding things. You could make me-- okay no, I actually enjoy making the tea myself. But something else. Like… lending me your umbrella if I forget mine and you’re feeling generous? Holding the door open for me if I’ve got my hands full? Small stuff like that. Maybe bigger stuff, if I’m in bigger trouble. You’re not obligated to, though, in the same way that I’m not obligated. The only person making me help you right now is me.”
All of those things are something that Martin has offered or tried to do for Jon in the past. Jon’s always prickled with offense at the offers, the held open doors and lent umbrellas and offers of help. He’d snapped at Martin that he could walk through doors without assistance just fine, that he didn’t need his umbrella, that he didn’t want his help. He’d felt condescended to, almost insulted.
He feels… ridiculous for that, suddenly. Martin’s asking to be treated in just the same way.
“I… perhaps,” is the only thing he can think to say, inadequate and not good enough. Martin looks at him for a moment, as if trying to decipher him, before he simply nods.
“Let me just clean this up, and we can figure out your sleeping situation,” Martin says. “It’s so late, but I don’t feel tired at all.”
Jon agrees, and watches Martin put his sewing kit back into order from where it’s been allowed to sprawl out across the surface of his kitchen table, collecting scraps from his sacrificed shirt as if he might find some use for them as well. He can’t reach out to help him. That fact itches at him.
Later, he tells himself. Later, he’ll make it up to Martin. When he’s capable.
Martin’s still in the middle of packing up his sewing kit when he makes a small noise of excited discovery. Jon blinks, snapping out of his thoughts.
“What is it?” he asks.
“I-- oh hang on, I just got an idea. I’m going to make some tea.”
“... Alright?”
He watches, bemused, as Martin bustles around his kitchen, setting about the process of tea-making with movements so practiced and efficient that Jon becomes convinced that this is something Martin could do with his eyes closed if he wanted to. While the tea boils he finishes packing up his sewing kit-- mostly. One part he sets aside on the counter for some reason, he can’t see it clearly. Martin gets halfway through washing the dishes in his sink before the kettle starts building up a shriek. He hurries to pull it off the stove, and Jon remembers that they’re in a flat building and it’s the middle of the night. Right, Martin’s neighbours likely wouldn’t appreciate that. As he watches, Martin pours tea water out into one mug, sets a bag in to begin steeping.
Jon remembers how he’s had to drink until now, ever since his change. From bowls, dipping his hands into the water to cup it in his hands and drink directly from them. He grimaces.
“I don’t think…” he says.
“No, no, wait, wait, this is going to work,” Martin says. As Jon watches, Martin includes two lumps of sugar and a dash of milk, mixes it in gently with a small spoon, and blows on it. It is, Jon knows, the way he prefers to take his tea. But that mug is bigger than he is. Martin can’t seriously think--
Martin then picks up the item that he’d removed from his sewing kit, and Jon sees it for what it is for the first time. It’s a thimble. One of those small metal caps that he’s vaguely aware have something to do with sewing, but has never bothered learning the specific purpose of. Carefully, his tongue sticking slightly out of his mouth with concentration, Martin uses a small teaspoon to transfer a portion of the tea from the mug into the thimble. When it’s done, he beams with satisfaction, before oh so carefully stepping towards Jon where he’s still sitting on the kitchen table, and holding it down and out for him to grab.
Jon stares at it dumbly for a moment, even though he watched the minutes-long process of Martin preparing it. Then he reaches out and takes it. It’s not like a mug. It’s made out of metal instead of ceramic, there’s no handle, and he has to hold it at the edges at the top to avoid the parts that are too hot to comfortably touch. But it is… almost the right size. He can hold it himself.
“I think it’s going to cool off faster than a normal mug of tea, since it’s a smaller amount,” Martin says.
“That sounds… correct, I think,” Jon says. He brings the thimble up to his face and just takes a moment to inhale the steam, the scent. His eyes fall shut as he does so. There is one thing he’s always had to concede to Martin, if only in his mind: he makes some damned good tea. After a moment, he gently blows on it and takes a sip. He sighs with satisfaction afterwards, muscles in his back that he hadn’t even realized were tense relaxing at once.
It’s so strangely cathartic, to be able to drink something like a regular human being. Such a comfort.
“Good?” Martin asks, even though it must be obvious.
“Yes, it-- it’s very good, Martin.”
Martin beams. He has, Jon realizes, quite a lovely smile. Warm and bright and open. It’s the first time he’s noticed it-- Martin’s smiles usually look different. Anxious and brittle, or fake and polite, sometimes even a bit stilted or forced--
Jon realizes why he’s never noticed how lovely Martin’s smiles can be before now, and he has to suppress a wince at himself.
“Great,” Martin says warmly. He takes the giant mug of tea from which he’d poured out a small thimble full for Jon, and starts drinking it himself. They sit together in a companionable silence for a while, and Jon savors the way the warmth from the tea seeps into his hands from the thimble, and outwards from his stomach into the rest of his body. The world really does seem colder in general-- he thinks he’s read somewhere that smaller creatures have to work harder to stay warm, and are more vulnerable to the cold. The clothes and the tea help very much.
Halfway through, Martin reaches out and plucks a clementine out of a fruit bowl and starts peeling it. He wordlessly sets one wedge down besides Jon, and starts eating the rest himself. Jon eyes the wedge warily-- it’s quite large-- but he supposes that he should eat something today besides just biscuits, even if it was a considerable quantity of biscuits, compared to his current size.
He eats the clementine wedge, and he does his best to stay clean--he truly does--but it turns out that it is a challenge to avoid a mess when you’re eating something that’s bursting full of juice and is also larger than your head. By the end of it he feels like a messy child, and he furtively makes sure that Martin isn’t looking at him before he licks his fingers clean. Martin’s thankfully looking in the direct opposite direction, seemingly entranced by one of his walls. His cheeks are faintly flushed-- from the tea?
“So,” Martin says, before clearing his throat. “D’you want to go to sleep now? It was non caffeinated tea, so-- so that won’t be an issue.”
“I suppose it is rather late,” Jon says. He feels full and warm from his meal, and tiredness is finally beginning to touch him, the adrenaline and terrifying helplessness from that awful spider fading from his system. He is rapidly beginning to feel very sleepy.
“Great,” says Martin. “Okay, so, I was thinking maybe I could set up a pillow on my nightstand and you could sleep on that-- get you something to use as a sheet-- maybe these scraps from the shirt I used for your clothes? That way I’ll be able to hear you if you need any help, but I won’t roll over and accidentally, er, squash you in the night.”
“That sounds fine, Martin,” he says, breaking out into a yawn at the tail end of the sentence, his hand coming up to cover his mouth. He appreciates Martin’s dedication to practical logistics. Is that something that he always does? He hadn’t noticed. “I think I’m quite-- I’m very ready to go to bed now.”
“Okay,” Martin says. And then again, softer, “Okay. Come here?”
Martin holds his hands out, cupped in front of Jon, and Jon understands what he means straight away. He steps onto Martin’s hands, sitting down in his palms. Martin’s picked him up and carried him at least three times by now, and he’s learned by now that it will be far less precarious and nerve wracking if he just sits instead of stands. Not that Martin’s hands are unsteady or clumsy with him. He’s seen Martin accidentally knock over or drop things on a fairly regular basis, but he’s painfully careful when it comes to carrying Jon. He holds him like he’s something fragile and precious, like spun glass.
Perhaps that should make him feel indignant, annoyed, but right now it is mostly just reassuring, because he does feel very fragile at the moment. Painfully, terrifyingly vulnerable. Martin’s hands are broad and warm, steady and careful, and the way they cradle him makes him feel… safe, despite everything else.
Martin has wonderful hands, some distant part of Jon’s mind notes.
He drifts to sleep before they even make it to the bedroom.
Martin definitely shouldn’t think that Jon is unbearably cute like this. He was changed like this against his will, he’s helpless, it’s upsetting, and probably humiliating too, and Jon would be mortally offended if he knew that Martin had wanted nothing more than to reach for his phone and take a picture of him drinking from a thimble, like a mouse in a fairy tale having a tea party. Or how he’d wanted to coo when he’d struggled to eat just one little clementine wedge, or how his heart had ached with affection when he’d held Jon in his hands and felt how light he was, how small. He’d actually clutched at his chest after he’d carefully tucked Jon’s sleeping form in as best as he could, and Jon had made the smallest, sleepy, content noise before nuzzling further into the pillow acting as his entire bed.
This is definitely a bad and scary thing that’s happening, and Martin needs to keep that in mind and not be overwhelmed by just how adorable Jon is like this. Too, too adorable.
He goes to sleep in his own bed. He finds himself sleeping lighter than he usually does, slipping intermittently out of sleep just to listen for Jon’s quiet, quiet breathing, before sliding back into sleep after finding it, reassured. It’s not a bad, restless sleep, exactly-- he thinks he’d be sleeping exactly the same way if Jon weren’t here. Anxious, fretting. He just wouldn’t be able to comfort himself as easily.
He’s glad Jon’s here. Which is-- weird. He’s always wanted to get along with Jon, if for no other reason than that it’s really, really stressful to have a boss who obviously thinks you’re the most annoying person on earth. It’s been difficult to tell whether he likes Jon or not, with Jon’s transparent dislike in the way. Being around him usually makes Martin feel stressed, or anxious, or frustrated. He’s tried his best to be polite and nice, though. Because Jon is his boss, and he would like it if Jon didn’t hate his guts, and also just because he tries to be a polite and nice person in general. Whether or not he succeeds at this is debatable, but he tries.
He’s tried to be likeable, to be helpful. Until now, Jon’s wanted none of it. It was almost like it was having the exact opposite effect sometimes, like Martin’s attempts and efforts were only digging his grave deeper. Like Jon felt like he was too good for Martin’s help, like it was an insult that he’d even try. Except when he didn't try, Jon would treat him like he was a lazy slacker, so there really wasn’t any winning with him. It was exhausting, exasperating, dispiriting. He really, really had to bite his tongue to hold himself back from snapping back, sometimes.
But after that strange, raw, too sincere conversation with Jon back in Martin’s kitchen, it’s beginning to dawn on him that… that really might not be it. That Jon thinks it’s beneath him to accept Martin’s help, that he’s too good for it, too intelligent and educated and successful. It seems like he’s got a weird thing about being helped in general. Like he’s not allowed to accept it, like he doesn’t think he should or can. Which is… kind of sad, honestly.
With dismay, Martin realizes that yes, yes he does like Jon. He likes him a lot, and he wants to help him through this not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s Jon specifically who needs it. He wants to help him because Jon doesn’t think he can accept help.
He knows himself well enough to recognize an inadvisable crush when it comes along. Doesn’t mean that he knows how to stop it from happening.
All of these thoughts swirl hazily in his head as he drifts gently in and out of sleep, like currents running deep underneath calm water, barely perceptible, barely noticeable. Eventually, the light shining against his closed eyelids brightens. Not very much, not at all, he doesn’t have to open his eyes yet. His alarm hasn’t rung yet, nor his back up alarm. He can sleep for a little bit longer--
There’s a crash of noise very, very close by, a cry of alarm, and Martin jolts all the way awake, his eyes snapping open. For a long moment there’s nothing but disorientation and confused panic as he blinks his eyes and tries to understand what’s happened. Then--
“Jon,” he says, bewildered and astonished.
On the floor lies Martin’s toppled nightstand, everything that had been lying on top of it, and one full sized and regular Jonathan Sims, just a little bit over five feet tall.
Jon makes a breathless wheezing noise, like he’s been gutpunched. His eyes are very wide as he stares up at the ceiling, stunned. He is, Martin registers, naked again. Almost reflexively, like someone yanking their hand away from a burning stove top, Martin hurriedly tosses his duvet on top of Jon, covering him. It falls in a way that leaves his legs exposed from the knees down, and completely covers his face. Jon doesn’t move to adjust it, or to say anything at all.
Martin, fully awake for less than a minute, only wearing his pants and a sleep shirt, takes a moment to gather his wits. Jon’s back to normal-- that’s wonderful!-- but how-- why isn’t Jon saying anything?
“Jon?” Martin asks hesitantly. He leans down over the edge of the bed to tentatively tug the duvet down enough to expose Jon’s face again. Jon is rapidly blinking his eyes, looking like someone’s gone and slapped him in the face with a fish and he’s still trying to process that. Concern pricks at Martin. “Are you… okay?”
“That--” Jon rasps out, and has to stop for a coughing fit. He rolls over onto his side to hack and cough, his eyes squeezed shut, and Martin watches worriedly, wondering if there’s anything he should be doing to help. “Oh-- good lord. That was… much quicker than the last time.”
“That’s a good thing, right?” Martin asks. What he’d heard on the tapes had not sounded pleasant.
“Yes, I suppose so,” Jon says. “It was just much more-- compressed. Intense.”
“Oh,” Martin says. And then, “How did this happen? You didn’t do anything, did you?”
“No,” Jon says, looking as confused and startled as Martin feels. “I didn’t do anything at all. I was just sleeping.”
Martin looks at Jon, and then out of his bedroom window. Peeking through the half closed blinds, he can see the light of the sunrise weakly bleeding past all of the buildings in the way, coloring the sky as much as it can behind the typical cloud cover and smog. It’s dawn.
“Maybe you just… slept it off?” he suggests, half incredulous of his own words. “Like a cold, or a headache.”
“It was a bit more than a headache,” Jon says, a touch of dryness slipping into his voice.
“I know, I know, just-- I don’t know, you didn’t do anything in particular? Say anything?”
“I was asleep,” Jon repeats.
“Any… weird dreams? How were you feeling?”
Jon furrows his brow in concentration. “I… no, actually. I’ve been-- I haven’t been sleeping very well lately, but tonight there wasn’t any of that. As for any strange feelings, I’m afraid I don’t have anything remarkable to report there either. I just felt--” Jon’s eyes dart towards Martin where they’d previously been unfocused in thought, and then he averts his gaze and clears his throat awkwardly. “I felt… safe?”
Martin blinks. Somehow, it’s the least expected answer. Jon felt safe? In Martin’s flat, sleeping next to his bed? An incredibly pleased, possessive thrill runs up his spine, and he hurries to mentally stomp it down. That’s absolutely nothing to get excited about. Why shouldn’t Jon feel safe while sleeping? It’s something that a lot of people feel when they’re relaxed and comfortable, he’s fairly certain.
He felt relaxed and comfortable here, with me, a persistent voice in the back of his mind points out. Martin does his best to ignore it.
Whatever else, he doubts that Jon feeling safe was the secret solution all along. He probably did just sleep it off.
“Well,” Martin says, “I suppose it’s a good thing that we didn’t make a fuss and alert everyone else at the Institute about this after all? Since it seems to have just taken care of itself.”
“Yes, very much so. We’ll have to make sure that people will know to be wary of Ms. Keene, of course, in the same way they’d have to be wary of a Leitner, or someone like Jane Prentiss-- but yes. I’m relieved that we didn’t make a fuss.”
Martin looks down at Jon, lying on the floor with nothing but a duvet to cover him, the weak light of dawn illuminating him gently. Fully himself again, the way he’s meant to be. The way he’s comfortable being. Martin’s so happy for him, that it all turned out alright after all.
He does kind of wish that he’d gone ahead and taken a picture, though. He’d looked absolutely precious. Oh, well. Jon wouldn’t have liked it.
Swinging his legs over the side of his bed, he stands up and reaches his hand down towards Jon in offer.
“Want to get up?” Martin asks him.
Jon just stares at Martin’s waiting hand-- and for a moment Martin’s convinced with a sinking sort of disappointment that Jon’s going to pointedly ignore it, stand up on his own. But then he reaches out and takes it, his hand slipping into Martin’s. Only yesterday, Martin had been able to hold all of him with just this hand. Smiling, he tightens his grip on Jon’s hand--slender, smaller than his, but with long fingers--and hoists him up with a heave of one arm, Jon clutching the duvet to his chest as he finds his footing.
Once Jon is properly standing, Martin doesn’t let go of his hand. Not right away. He’ll just act like he forgot to. Instead he looks down at Jon-- almost two feet shorter than him, as usual. Martin feels like a big lug taking up more space than he should at the best of times, and that feeling is only ever heightened around Jon, certified manlet.
There’s a warm, pleased glow in his chest, just from Jon letting him help him up from the floor. He had, he realizes, been afraid that Jon wouldn’t accept Martin’s help any longer, now that he doesn’t really need it. That his attitude would revert along with everything else.
But it hadn’t. He hadn’t. Martin smiles helplessly at Jon, like a hopeless idiot.
Craning his neck a bit to look up at Martin from such close range, Jon’s eyebrows are raised as if in surprise.
“Good lord,” Jon says. “You’re so small.”
Martin bursts into the most embarrassing sporfling laughter.