Chapter Text
When Jon wakes up, there are hands on him.
His brain stutters at the shock of it, tripping over a dizzying rush of impressions: fabric over his face - in his mouth - he can't move - he can't see. Hands dig in under his arms, grip his bare ankles - people, he realises, are carrying him, with Jon suspended helplessly between them.
He tries to squirm, but he can barely move against whatever’s wrapped tight around his limbs. He tries to shout, and the sound stays trapped inside his throat, muffled by whatever’s been used to gag him. He makes a frantic attempt to struggle and scream anyway and the hands don’t let him go; the sound of footsteps doesn’t even falter.
He’s being kidnapped, Jon realises dazedly. Good lord.
Just the thought of it is enough to make his breathing - stifled already by whatever’s covering his face and stuffed inside his mouth - thin and frantic. How on earth did he fall asleep in his own bed and wake up with strangers’ hands all over him?! He flails for some subtle change in his day-to-day that suggested there was danger waiting for him, but there’s nothing. He draws an utter blank: no explanation, no clues, nothing.
Is he an unlucky victim, picked at random?! Who these… men (??) think they can ransom? (Oh god, who’s going to pay for him?!) Or is someone deliberately trying to hurt him? Jon knows he can irritate people, rub them up the wrong way, but to organise his abduction in the middle of the night? He can’t think of anyone, of any reason —
Unless.
One thing in his life has changed recently, after all. His promotion to Head Archivist at the Magnus Institute. Is that a coincidence? Didn’t his predecessor disappear under mysterious circumstances? Could this be related to his job, of all things, or — or —
Or to the supernatural things in those Statements? Jon knows deep down that some of the Statements are true. He’s read about enough terrible things happening to unwitting people —
No! He’s being ridiculous. Breathe. Jon needs to breathe before he passes out; clearly his captors aren’t going to take pity on him if he has a panic attack in their clutches. There’s nothing remotely paranormal about this, he tells himself firmly. This isn’t creeping dread and… and wrongness, and horror lurking in the dark. There’s a bag over his head, for god’s sake. That can’t be eldritch. This will be a typical, run-of-the-mill kidnapping, carried out by everyday, violent thugs.
… Wonderful.
Suddenly whoever’s been holding the upper half of his body moves down - his legs start rising up - and Jon realises he’s being carried down a staircase. Headfirst, because apparently this experience wasn’t disorientating and horrifying enough. He twists in panic before realising that will only increase his chances of plummeting helplessly down what feels like a very steep set of stairs. Oh god. They’re going to break his neck.
Please, stop, he gasps. What comes out can’t even be classified as speech - not that they’d listen to him, anyway. Jon’s just a helpless passenger here, he can’t do anything, and the knowledge of it burns savagely in his gut: a handful of hot embers refusing to be snuffed out under the flood of terror. They reach the bottom of the stairs and Jon’s unceremoniously dropped, the wind out knocked of him as he hits the ground. He tries to brace himself: because this must be the part where they undo the gag to question him, or they pull the bag off his head and make their demands face to face. He hopes they don’t rough him up while he’s defenceless, but Jon’s been taken aback before by the casual cruelty of everyday bullies. God knows what kind of treatment he should expect from professional kidnappers…
There’s the sound of footsteps, disappearing up the stairs. The distant bang of a door.
Oh.
Jon manages to lift his head up from the ground, listening for any hint of movement. Nothing. They’ve gone. Left him here, on his own.
Right, then. He’ll just… recover, for a moment. Get his breath back. He flops back onto the concrete and tries very hard not to think about all the terrible things that might be about to happen when his captors come back.
He fails quite miserably.
*
Being held prisoner turns out to be surprisingly boring.
Jon can’t help feel but that this is an unreasonable amount of time for his kidnappers to expect him to just sit here. Of course he’s not looking forward to when those men come back to do… whatever it is they’re going to do (oh god). But how much longer can he be expected to wait? He feels half-frozen in his thin t-shirt and pyjama bottoms. He must have been here for hours already.
At least he’s managed to establish where ‘here’ is, after working the bag off his head via an inordinate amount of squirming. He’s in a basement. Once his eyes have adjusted to the dim light, he can see that it’s surprisingly domestic. There’s some ancient-looking furniture. A broken ironing board, pale and spindly, that nearly gave him a heart attack when he first noticed it lurking in a corner. The rest is just piles of boxes, conscientiously labelled with things like ‘mum winter clothes’ and ‘kitchen misc’. It's probably also full of spiders, which is why Jon’s avoiding examining the corners and shadows any more than he has to. But, inevitable arachnids aside, the place really doesn’t feel as… nefarious as he expected.
Seeing where he is, along with slowly manoeuvring himself into a sitting position, are where his successes of the last however many hours begin and end. The gag stubbornly refuses to come loose and he’s been tied up thoroughly, leaving him almost literally no wriggle room. He’s clearly not getting free by himself: all he can do is sit and imagine what kind of terrible fate might await him. The mundanity of his surroundings has convinced him it’s just ordinary, vicious people who have snatched him. The lack of paranormal influence should probably be a relief, but the idea makes Jon’s skin crawl all the same. He’s still powerless to stop whoever has done this from hurting him, or just touching him without his permission. He won’t even be able to try to put up a fight…
The door above swings open. Jon briefly forgets how to breathe.
A single bulb flicks on, casting out a pale, sickly light. There’s a ludicrously exaggerated creak from the top stair, like something from a horror film, and then a man appears on the staircase.
He’s… not what Jon expected.
He’s young, is Jon’s first thought. His captor can hardly be out of his twenties, which is frankly an irritatingly young age for someone to take you hostage. And he’s huge; even hunched over as he makes his way down the rickety staircase, Jon’s annoyed to see he’s well over six feet. On the upside, he has to admit that the man doesn’t look remotely supernatural, laying any final traces of that worry to rest. At least Jon’s grisly murder won’t end up on record at his workplace, to no doubt be misfiled and gossiped over…
The man reaches the bottom of the stairs without even looking to check that Jon’s still there. He goes to one of the cardboard boxes. After a few moments, he pauses to sniffle and it dawns on Jon that his kidnapper looks… sad?
That can’t be right. Jon’s never been any good at this, at reading faces and cues and glances, the things that everyone else seems to parse as second nature. The man still hasn’t looked at Jon. Jon can’t take his eyes off him.
Seconds tick by. The man is just… rummaging around, inside the box.
Really?
Jon’s relieved of course, that his captor hasn’t just marched down here brandishing a, a knife or something - but at the same time, he finds he’s almost irritated to be so thoroughly ignored by the person responsible for his presence here in the first place. Like the man’s rubbing it in that Jon is helpless to do anything but wait to be terrorised. He can feel himself getting wound tighter and tighter the longer the man pretends that he’s not there... but all he can do is watch, until the inevitable moment when --
The man turns. His eyes slide briefly over Jon as he moves to examine a scorched pair of oven gloves (oven gloves! Jon notes with a tinge of hysteria, are those meant to be some kind of threat?!) - and -
The man freezes. He looks back again, this time directly at Jon. For a full, agonising three seconds, their eyes are locked together.
Then the man shrieks.
Jon jumps - as much as he can jump, anyway; it’s more of a full-body twitch. The man does one better, almost tripping over the stairs behind him, as if Jon’s presence in his basement is somehow a surprise. Could he have been expecting someone different? Did he accidentally order the abduction of the wrong Jonathan Sims?
“Oh my god,” the man says shrilly, “oh… oh, shit! Are you - Jesus, are you ok?”
Perhaps Jon’s expression conveys what a deeply stupid question that is, because the man is blushing and stuttering almost before he’s finished the sentence. “Sorry! Sorry, of course not. I just meant - if you’re injured…”
He takes a tentative step towards him. Jon presses back against the wall, his own blood suddenly thundering in his ears.
“Oh - no! Hey, it’s - it’s ok,” says the man, but Jon barely hears him. Because he’s cataloguing everything - the distance to the stairs, Jon’s only escape route; the items nearby he could use as a weapon; the sheer size of the man towering over him, too-large hands fluttering in the air - and all of it’s useless, useless, because fight and flight are both off the table, and —
— and the man’s still talking, Jon realises. He shakes himself: he needs to be listening to every clue he can get from whoever this monster is. It could hold the key to him getting out of here alive.
“- hurt you. I’m going to… to take the gag off, so you can talk. Yeah?”
The man is edging forwards slowly, as if Jon’s a startled cat who might dart away at any second. Only Jon can’t run: he has to sit here, maddeningly helpless, as his captor makes his way towards him...
The man kneels down at his side, smiling nervously. Jon, for lack of any other, better option, glares at him. “Ok, then. Just, uh - hold still…”
He wants to scream at the sensation of fingers brushing past his throat, fumbling at the nape of his neck. But he doesn’t, he won’t - he bites back the sound trying to burst out, determined to have control over himself if nothing else. All the same, he can’t stop wrenching away from those hands the second the gag is out of his mouth. The stranger shuffles back blessedly quickly.
“Sorry, sorry!” says the man. “Oh god… are you hurt? Let me get you some water -”
Jon has a horrifying image of the man forcing a glass to his lips, filled with drugs or poison or something. “No!” he rasps out, and then winces at the hoarse scrape of his own voice. “No… no water.”
“Oh… er, ok? That’s… ok -”
“Who are you??” demands Jon.
“I - I’m Martin?”
“Martin,” he repeats blankly. Is that supposed to mean something to him?
“Yes?” The man doesn’t sound very sure. “Sorry, but I really think you should tell me if you’re injured in any way? I know some first aid, and -”
“Shut up!” snaps Jon desperately, too keyed up to stop himself. “Just - just tell me what you want with me!”
“What I…?” The man’s confusion shifts into utter panic. “Oh my god! Nothing!”
“Then why am I here?!”
“I don’t know! I told you, I swear, I have nothing to do with whatever this is!” The man who claims to be Martin reaches out a tentative hand. “Look, why don’t I -“
“Don’t touch me!”
“Ok! Sorry! No touching.” The man holds up his hands as if to underline his point, “I’m not touching you, that’s… that’s fine.” Jon can’t stop his eyes darting back to his hands anyway. Anxiety is spinning frantically in his gut, making it hard to think: because why is this alleged ‘Martin’ pretending to care what Jon says? “How about you just… tell me your name?”
There were two of them, Jon remembers suddenly. Is it possible this man is some kind of… kidnapper’s assistant, rather than the kidnapper-in-chief? “You brought me here,” he points out, unable to keep the scathing edge from his voice. “Forcibly. Against my will. Given the effort, I’d assumed you at least knew who I was.”
“Right,” says the man soothingly. “Right. Only, I didn’t? I’m guessing you didn’t see who brought you here, and I get that you aren’t massively inclined to believe me right now, but - I honestly didn’t. I’m not going to hurt you. I… I’d never do something like that.”
Jon stares at him.
“I’m sorry,” says the man, after another minute. It sounds like he genuinely means it. “I just… I found you? You’re actually in my house, so. Yeah. That’s sort of the situation.”
It’s a trick. In what universe would someone organise an abduction, only to dump their hostage in a random person’s basement? It’s ridiculous. This is some sort of ploy; a game to string Jon along, an inventive new layer of cruelty…
But the man - Martin - doesn’t look cruel, Jon can’t help observing. He looks… worried. Really quite upset, actually.
“Maybe I could just - untie you?” Martin suggests hopefully. His hands flutter closer before he remembers himself and pulls them back again. “Would… would that be ok with you?”
Something hot and dizzying sweeps over Jon, squeezing his chest and clogging his throat, because this… this isn’t fair. He’s been waiting here for hours, marinating in terror, and now - now, there’s Martin. Asking for his permission about things - like he might actually be concerned for him - like Jon might not be about to die some awful, grisly death —
“Oh no… hey!” says Martin anxiously. “Please - please don’t get upset! Oh god... look, I know you might not want to talk about this but, should I be calling an ambulance? Because I don’t have my phone down here - I don’t think I could even get signal down here, actually - but I can just run and get it. I won’t leave you, I promise, but I could just - I could get you some help?”
Jon swallows and waits until he’s sure his voice isn’t going to do anything mortifying. “You… you haven’t kidnapped me?”
Martin gives Jon a tentative, relieved smile. “I really, really haven’t.”