Chapter Text
When Jon was finally released from the hospital – when his wounds had healed (nothing short of miraculous, the doctors said, given the state they’d found him in), when the doctors and the police were finished asking him questions he couldn’t answer, and he’d grown to accept that he would get no satisfactory answers to the questions he put to them, when weeks went by with no sign of Martin, alive or dead, and the fear grew into a panic grew into a certainty that he had come to this doomed world alone – he didn’t know where to go.
The first thing he did was simply wander around this London, cataloging all the ways it differed from his own. The differences were subtle – the National Portrait Gallery was on St. Martin’s Place rather than Great George Street, Everton Street was now called Sydney Street, and the old Gothic cathedral on that road was now called St. Luke’s rather than St. Michael’s. The most important difference, of course, was that the Magnus Institute never seemed to have existed in this universe. The stretch of road where it should have been located now housed an unassuming row of shops and restaurants and drab office buildings. The area around it was the same, though. Jon passed the cafe where he and Martin used to get lunch once a week, and as he walked by, he could hear the voice of their usual waiter drifting through the window, asking another pair of customers for their order. The sound was like a punch to the gut, and it was enough to convince him that he couldn’t stay in London.
He bought his train ticket in a haze, and spent the entire journey numb and thoughtless. He hardly realized where he’d been going until he was already stepping across the threshold of the safehouse. When he recognized where his feet had taken him, all he could think was that it felt right, somehow. Of course instinct had led him here. Where else could he possibly go?
He wasn’t sure how those first few weeks passed. He was aware that he must have left his bed. He must even have left the house, wandered into town to buy food and toiletries and all the things he needed to keep himself alive, now that he couldn’t be sustained on statements alone. But he didn’t remember it. In his memory, those weeks were a bleak, empty blur, entirely spent lying alone in the bed he used to share with Martin, waiting for the pain to recede into something he could bear.
It hadn’t, yet, but there was still time.
Jon stared at his hand where it sat curled in the empty space that Martin ought to have filled. The burn had faded to a scar that looked much older than it was, but sometimes he imagined he could still feel the blinding heat of Jude Perry’s hand gripping it tight, pressing hot wax into all the lines and furrows of his palm.
He’d only been able to feel the edges of the burn. The pain in his palm had flared intensely but briefly, and then the nerve endings had all gone dead and he’d been left with nothing but an absence. He could feel the outline of his injury, a white-hot corona of pain, but where the burn had been most severe, he’d been numb.
This latest wound was similar. Not physically, not by a long shot – he had very much felt the blade in his chest, followed by the sharp absence of a blade in his chest. But he found that he could only feel the edges of his grief. He missed the taste of Martin’s tea, missed the warmth of him in the bed, missed the smell of that awful, cheap shampoo he always used, but any time he tried to think about Martin, as a full person who he had known and then lost, he’d be overcome with a pain so all-encompassing that he’d swing back around to feeling numb.
He pushed himself out of bed. He’d been meaning to go to the store for ages, and he couldn’t put it off any longer.
He and Martin had visited this shop together once. They’d been so hesitant then, fresh from the Lonely and scared out of their wits, clinging to each other even as they each worried that the other would push them away again at any moment. Martin had kept shooting nervous glances at their joined hands, and Jon had kept opening his mouth to just say something, anything, to clear the air, but he couldn’t.
Unscented soap, do you think? he’d asked instead, because it felt safer than saying anything else, Or lemon?
L-Lemon sounds nice, Martin had said, and Jon had squeezed his hand.
It had looked a little different in their world – the baked goods had been up front by the produce rather than tucked away beside the frozen section, and the lights had been pleasantly warm-tinted compared to the harsh white fluorescents currently flickering over Jon’s head – but it was familiar enough to sting.
Jon grabbed a bottle of unscented dish soap from the shelf. He wasn’t sure how he’d run out already – it seemed impossible that he’d been here long enough to use an entire bottle – but somehow he had. He tossed it into the basket alongside the box of pasta and the protein bars he’d taken to eating on days when he couldn’t get out of bed to cook.
He brought his items to the front and handed them to the bored woman behind the counter to scan.
“I hope you found everything you were looking for today,” she said in the blandly friendly customer-service voice of someone who could not possibly care less if you had or hadn’t found everything you were looking for.
“Yes, thank you,” Jon replied in much the same tone.
The woman glanced up and blinked at him. “Do I know you?” she asked.
“I doubt it,” Jon said. “I’m new in town.”
But the woman’s eyes widened as he spoke, and her jaw dropped.
“You’re Jonathan Sims!”
Jon’s blood ran cold.
“I– I-I don’t know what you–” he started to say, gathering up his groceries as quickly as he could, but when she spoke again, he stopped in his tracks.
“I found one of your tapes.”