Chapter Text
The room was dimly lit, just enough light from a lamp in the corner of the room for Martin to read by. It was something that he always enjoyed doing, something about the low light made the poetry seem more personable in a sense. It was something that gave his time at home a little more meaning. Something about the quiet of the home, the warm tea on the table and the book gave him some sense of comfort. Until there was a heavy knocking on the door.
With a heavy sigh Martin got up from the chair he was sitting in, placing his book on the arm of it, and made his way to the door. He didn’t ask who it was, not thinking about it at the moment so he just pulled it open. What greeted him was a sight that he knew would haunt him. A figure that was just smaller than he was stood on his doorstep. That alone would not have been an issue, the fact that their grey jumper was torn and dirty with blood coating it. Martin’s eyes followed the trail of the blood, the stain having made its way almost to the bottom of the fabric, seemed to have started at their neck.
Martin wanted to scream, he tried to. But something felt wrong, like he couldn’t push through enough to open his mouth. He did manage to take a few stumbling steps back, his eyes locked on the figure. They raised their hands and stepped forward, but that didn’t register to Martin as much as what was revealed when they opened their mouth. Sharp teeth that seemed to almost glint in the light he was just enjoying. Then a scream was finally allowed to come from him.
Martin jolted awake, groaning slightly as he pulled a hand down his face. It was the same nightmare again. No matter how many times he had it, nothing about it changed. It was something that he didn’t really understand, but that wasn’t entirely anything new. He did understand that he would be unable to fall back asleep after having the nightmare. So Martin grabbed his glasses from the bedside table and sat up. A glance at his alarm let him know it wasn’t too long until he needed to be up anyway.
So Martin got ready for work, humming a soft tune as he did. He was actually pretty nervous since he had been abruptly transferred to the Archives. He hadn’t really been looking to transfer to any of the other departments, but from what he could gather the team was pretty small. He hoped that maybe he could make friends with his coworkers for once, well if they were nice.
Martin’s first day in the Archives was already proving to be interesting for a lack of any other way to describe it. He had been coming in with his hands full and a rather adorable dog had taken that as an invitation into the Archives. So he had spent a bit trying to locate the animal before he poked his head into an office to ask if the person had seen the dog.
Martin was still cringing from the realization that the person in the office had been Jonathan Sims, his boss. It had to be one of the top worst first impressions out there. So he went through the offices looking for the dog everywhere. Once he got the dog out of the building he finally let himself take a breath. With that he decided to see if the breakroom had the materials to make some tea. That would help him calm down.
As Martin was brewing the tea he heard someone come into the room behind him. He turned to look at the person who came in and froze when he noticed it was his boss.
" Oh, hi." Of course that was the best he could come up with to say. "I'm making some tea if you would like some." Jon seemed frozen at the doorway, staring at him in what almost seemed to be shock. Martin wasn’t sure exactly what was going on since he had spoken to the man earlier in the day.
“Are you okay?” Martin asked which seemed to finally break the man out of his almost trance like state.
“Oh, er yes. I’m just fine.” Jon stated in clipped words before continuing, “I need to go do something.” Martin knew a flimsy excuse when he heard one and wondered exactly what had caught his boss so off guard as to immediately leave when he hadn’t even grabbed whatever it was he had come to the breakroom for in the first place. Had he really mucked up his first impression that horrendously?
Jon stood in his office with the door shut tightly behind him. He knew that rushing off from the breakroom was a bad idea, but he couldn’t very well stand there while Martin was watching him. When the man had originally come into his office to ask about a dog he hadn’t really looked away from the statements he had already decided to take a look at to see if he could make some sort of organization system that they could easily use.
Then when he had looked up his eyes couldn’t focus on him from where Jon had been looking so closely at the small print on the papers. That alone was going to be a much more migraine inducing thing to deal with. He wasn’t sure who had the idea of printing the statements with such small type, it was almost impossible to comfortably read and he had already noticed several instances where statement givers had misread or misunderstood what was asked on the papers.
Those statements would require more follow-up than most of the others since they didn’t even properly have all of the details for them. That was going to need to be a category that he sorted things into, at least before everything was put into the system. Jon loathed the idea of putting in incomplete statements.
The man made his way back to his desk, looking over the papers that were already creating a mess on his desk. A sigh came from him as he sat down. He also recognized that with the issue of how the Archives were currently that there could likely be statements that were split up in different places.
It was only his first day as Head Archivist and Jon was already exhausted of the work that was in for him with the position. He was unaware of the extent of the disorganization of everything when he had taken the position. It was also something he wasn’t entirely qualified for, he already knew that. And this was causing more stress for him in addition to that. But he wasn’t going to let his lack of expertise in the field slow him down. If there was one thing that Jon was able to do it was throw himself into something and learn as he went. Not without some research of course, but that would come when he wasn’t actively sorting the mountains of paper.
The rest of the day went fairly uneventfully for Martin. He had no further run-ins with Jon, and he had gotten introduced to his coworkers. Tim and Sasha seemed to be very nice people. They were fairly close to each other already so Martin wasn’t too sure on his whole becoming friends with his coworkers thing working out too well.
He was also unsure about getting too close to them in case they questioned about his college times. There were a lot of things that Martin could decently lie about, but that would be too much. There were too many things to keep straight and knowing him he would forget something and quickly be found out. No, it was better that he kept a bit of distance.
The bus right to Martin’s flat wasn’t too long and he soon found himself back in his flat. He knew he should go ahead and fix something to eat but honestly the day had drained him so much that he decided to lay down for a bit and possibly eat later. He honestly hoped that the next day would be a lot better than his first. There was only so much that could happen before Jon decided to fire him, and he really did not want to try to find another job.