Work Text:
Jonathan Sims is not afraid of ghosts. Or demons. Or any other of that delusional nonsense dreamed up by drug trips and mental instability.
He is not afraid of creatures or monsters coming after him and ripping him apart.
(He may have been afraid of Mister Spider, but Mister Spider either wasn’t real- something conjured by his overactive imagination as a child- or is now powerless, due to a thoroughly destroyed book.)
He is not a skeptic or in denial, he just knows the truth of the world- that the creature he was haunted by in his childhood was not real, that the monsters the statement givers speak in soft fear of are just delusions, the mind making up something to cover up a traumatic event, or drugs, or anything that does not include being real.
Because they can’t be real.
(They can't.)
Jonathan Sims is not afraid of losing people.
He knows it will happen eventually- he’s generally rather repulsive, fairly prickly and rude and overall not nice to be around, so it’s really only a matter of time until anyone decides they’ve had enough of him.
It happened with his grandmother, it happened with Georgie, it happened to any friend he thought he had in his school years.
Jonathan Sims is not afraid of people dying either- it’s the natural course of things, and if he distances himself from everyone anyway then there’s nothing to really be sad about.
So what if he gets lonely sometimes? So what if every now and then he sits down on the floor of the Archive’s loo and sobs his eyes out for hours? So what if he absolutely melts when Martin brings him tea, or Tim and Sasha invite him to go for drinks? So what if he's so touch-starved he nearly cries when the barber accidentally touches his neck?
He belittles and talks down to his assistants, because they’re better off not being close to him anyway, so he won’t have to miss them when they inevitably leave.
Because they always leave, in the end.
The one thing Jonathan Sims is afraid of is a lot more abstract.
He’s terrified down to his soul of being forgotten.
Not in a social sense, he’s rather used to being left out at this point.
He’s utterly terrified of dying without anyone knowing.
Becoming a mystery, just like the disappearance of the previous Head Archivist, just like the bully whose name he can’t even remember anymore, just like…
Well, most of the statement givers. Those who come to tell their gruesome stories to someone who is guaranteed to listen, and often end up dead not even a week later.
He wants to be known, not as some strange mystery to investigate, but through hard facts. This is where he lived, this is where he worked, and this is where and how he dies.
He needs people to know what happens to him when he finally dies.
That is why, when Jane Prentiss has him barricaded into Document Storage with Martin, he slots a blank tape into the recorder clutched in white-knuckled hands and presses record.