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Jon did not see it coming, which is enough of a novelty that at first, the collapsed building doesn’t seem that big an issue. It is a rather big issue, of course, considering that the whole Institute has now decided to act as a massive weighted blanket on top of him.
Jon is not a fan of weighted blankets.
You would think he would be, considering how everywhere he is at all times, and that a weighted blanket is supposed to keep one in the present, centred, all that New Age mumbo-jumbo… the thing is, Jon is always present. Jon is everywhere at all times because no one can hide from the Beholder, and there is no way of finding where Beholder ends and Archivist begins.
I digress; Jon, the Archivist, is buried under a collapsed building, and he did not see it coming. Now that the novelty has lost its shine, however, the dust is starting to settle in – and Jon can feel the Buried creeping closer.
He is very good at doing what he is, a Marked Avatar of all the Entities, and while he strongly doubts he can actually die – not anymore, not like Jonah-Elias did, not when he’s the embodiment of them all – he is, in the end, not very strong. Limber, absolutely, and a unique voice (even before the scratch of the Archivist settled he had been told his voice was… special), but not strong.
For a brief moment, he wishes that he had the Boneturner’s Tale with him, thinks that the Leitner-book could have given him something of an edge in the battle between building and gravity – a battle in which Jon now was an unwilling combatant, caught (quite literally) between a rock and a hard place.
The Spiral does not have room enough to open a door, and Jon is quietly thankful; he could not deal with Michael on top of this, even if he had somehow become something like a friend. The Buried creeps closer, and Jon knows he will have that way out if no other presents itself.
Listen, Jon had not exactly planned to go back in time and simultaneously collapse the Institute on top of himself. He only hoped he’d managed to bring Elias-Jonah with it, because otherwise, everyone was in for, as Tim might have said once or twice (off the record, obviously), a bitch of a time.
Jon paused in his ruminations and study of the pieces of building above him – was that the economy wing’s floor he had taken shelter under? – to remember that Tim was still alive – Daisy, Basira, Georgie, Melanie… Sasha. All the people he had lost weren’t… they weren’t lost anymore.
Jon might be lost soon, actually, even if he did think he probably couldn’t die. He hadn’t noticed, at first, which was an incredible novelty he basked in for a while, before returning to the matter at hand – he was beneath the collapsed Magnus Institute, he was bleeding heavily from where he had been fairly skewered by what seemed like it had been a load-bearing beam, and Martin wouldn’t know him.
As the Institute creaked and settled, weighing down even harder on him, Jon thought it might not be such a bad way to go anyway – if he could. Around him, he heard the buzz of the Lonely start to settle, fighting against the Buried’s embrace that he had almost accepted already.
If Martin didn’t know him, didn’t love him, what did Jon really have to live for? He had fought his way through an apocalypse simply because of Martin – Jon was a bad liar in most cases, and he certainly couldn’t lie to himself. Had it not been for Martin, Jon would have embraced it. He could have – could still, in fact – but he would not. He owed that much to Martin’s memory.
Jon spared a brief thought to figure out how many people he had pulled down with the Institute, the knowledge coming as easy to him as the alphabet – one was the grand total, in the end. The Beholder Archivist meeting the Beholder Avatar… in the end, the Archivist would come out of that battle as the only one standing.
The rest of the people in the building had been – evacuated? Jon couldn’t make sense of it, Martin had tripped the fire alarm and everyone had escaped… except Jonah-Elias, who knew it wasn’t actually a fire and thus didn’t care. He should have because down down down the Institute went and with it the Panopticon.
Martin had randomly tripped the fire alarm…
Jon blinked, releasing some of the Beholder from himself – once Elias-Jonah had died because he had, all of the Beholder was Jon’s – and so was Martin, because he had said good luck Jon before running out of the Archives.
Well, looks like Jon had to pull off the impossible and get out of this scrape alive as well then. What’s a collapsed building to an apocalypse, really?