Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"Jon."

Tim bursts into Jon's office, without even bothering to knock. There are bags under his eyes, and the hand that isn't holding the door open has a slight tremor to it. He's wearing the same shirt he was yesterday, Jon can tell from the tea stain on the sleeve, but he's not sure if it's because Tim couldn't be bothered to do his laundry or if it's purely because he didn't sleep the night before. It could easily be both, in all honesty.

"Tim." Jon replies, because he doesn't know what Tim wants or why he's here and the best way to sort that out is by reflecting what Tim is doing.

"Why won't it stop?" There's no aggression in Tim's voice, unlike the way it has been for the past few weeks. Instead, there's only desperation, tinged with defeat. Jon doesn't know what he's on about, what exactly "won't stop," but if he questions it in the wrong way, then Tim's just going to take it as starting another fight and he won't get any answers or anything resembling an explanation.

"Why won't... what stop, exactly?" Jon asks in a delicate tone, making sure he can't be misconstrued as any kind of hostile, or else uncaring, or else haughty and pretentious, or else a thousand other negative things that Tim has accused him of being. He doesn't mean to be horrid, and some part of him recognizes that it's not entirely his own fault, but he's still trying to keep things as civil as he can, and that means cooperating with Tim's moods as well as he possibly can.

"God, the fucking- the- you know goddamn well what I'm talking about!" Tim tries to explain, and then when he can't find the words, reverts to his usual pattern of frustration and lashing out at the most readily available somewhat-guilty party. Jon really doesn't have any clue what Tim is talking about, but he supposes that that doesn't matter much right now, considering how much the tremor in Tim's hand has grown in only the past moment or two, and how strained Tim's voice is, as though he's just spent the last while screaming, or crying, or both.

"I can promise you that I don't." Jon replies, again in that delicate tone, because Tim might not be acting civil right now but that doesn't mean that Jon has to escalate it. Besides, something is clearly very wrong- he shouldn't start something that either of them will hold against the other without good reason for it.

Tim makes a guttural sound in the back of his throat, almost like a frustrated growl, and tilts his head up so that he's staring at the ceiling. He tips his head back down after taking a long, slow breath, which does very little to calm the tremor that has traveled up Tim's arm by this point.

"The- the everything, damn it. The knowing things I never wanted to know and never needed to know, never even thought about in passing before it's being shoved into my fucking head!" Tim's voice cracks and goes higher with every other word, so he sounds like he's on the verge of tears by the end. He looks and sounds like a man at the end of his rope, a man about to do something very reckless with that rope.

... Jon hadn't known that it was happening to Tim, too. Is it everyone else in the Archives, or is it just Tim and himself? Is it the same mechanism that's causing it, the same positioning within the maw of the Institute? Does it need an Archivist and an assistant? Why Tim, of all people? Basira would likely be a better option if the Beholding was looking for people willing to go out of their way to learn new things, instead of wallowing in the situation that it's put them all in.

He's getting sidetracked. At the moment, he needs to worry about Tim, to think about what all of this is doing to him, has done to him, and how he can help to stop it.

"I'm... I'm still trying to figure that out myself. Meditation helps sometimes, but not often- the best thing is to direct it as well as you can." Jon gives the best advice that he has to offer, which really isn't much. Meditation had been a suggestion from Basira, and as he'd expected, it was the solution to someone else's problem, not his own. It helped slightly, in that after a while, his head would quiet down for a moment, only for Beholding to resume its usual screaming the second he needed to do anything. It was good for a last-resort sanity check, and not much else, which he supposes is something that Hunters need a lot more than he does.

Tim doesn't verbally respond. Instead, he lets go of the heavy office door, letting it slam shut behind him. Nobody else is around to hear it, nobody else was around to listen in on the conversation that Jon supposes Tim would prefer to be private, so the door slamming was clearly just for Jon's benefit.

Tim stalks forward, reaching into the back of his waistband for what Jon already Knows is one of Melanie's knives, stolen in a moment of her distraction, when Tim Knew she'd been thinking of something else, even when he was in her direct line of sight- so at least he's picked up on how to make it useful. Jon had taken much longer, wallowing in paranoia for quite a while before he figured out how to do something with it, so at least Tim is better off than he was.

He probably shouldn't tell Tim that.

Tim digs the knife into Jon's desk, hardly a handful of centimeters away from his hand. He leans down and stares at Jon, unblinking, without any expression on his face. One of his hands has the knife in a death grip, while the other is planted firmly on the desk space just beside the tape recorder. Idly, Jon notices that it's running, but doesn't do a thing about it. Tim looks like he has something to say, and if Jon interrupts him either with words or by turning the tape recorder off himself, he might do something violent.

Not that Jon really cares. What's he going to do? Kill him before he gets answers? They're cut from the same cloth. Tim won't do that.

"You did this to me, so you fix it. Make it fucking stop." Tim growls low, looking like he's been consumed by something that isn't quite madness, isn't quite desperation, but something that's somewhere in between the two.

"I can't," Here, this next moment, is where Jon thinks he might be just a bit too impulsive, just a bit too honest with someone who's clearly in distress and has clearly been backed into some kind of corner, "because I didn't make the Beholding choose you any more than I made you pick it. All that I did was bring you here, unknowingly, and let you do the rest. In case you hadn't noticed, you're the one who's been obsessively researching the significance of Smirke's archi- " He cuts himself off.

Jon is not supposed to know that.

Tim stands up straighter, balking away at Jon's invasive near-remark, while still clinging desperately to the knife like it's his last tether to the idea of having control of the situation. Jon wonders if Tim could do the same thing to him, now or in the future, strip his mind bare with only a word or two, not even intentionally, if he could just say "Mister Spider" in a context outside of his own horror and evoke the same stunned silence from him.

"... You son of a bitch." Tim croaks, and every word feels like he's forcing it out, like his hatred is shoving its way past his shock and betrayal. "How long have you known about that? Have you- this whole time, have you just not said a fucking word?"

There's a very sudden shift in Jon's mind, where all at once, he knows that he could keep arguing impulsively, or he could wait and see what Tim can do, what Tim will dig up on his own in his coming rant, how much Beholding will aid him versus how it did with Jon. He's disgusted to know that he wants to just sit here and wait, to watch and listen like Tim is nothing more than a particularly interesting insect. Is this how Elias feels? He bets it is.

"No, Tim, I have not known the whole time. Like you just said, you're not the only one who's getting things shoved into their brains. I'm not exactly the expert on controlling it, either, so unless you're going to go running to Elias for help, I suggest you get your head out of your arse for ten goddamned seconds." Jon lets himself snap, brings himself back into the moment, becomes spiteful and petty for the sake of keeping himself from becoming something much worse.

He becomes so invested in his own argument, in fact, that he doesn't notice that he's risen out of his chair and began to mirror Tim's position of leaning over the desk until his bad leg starts to cramp from the unexpected and unbalanced weight placed upon it. Jon sits back down in a huff, subtly stretching the leg under his desk, and glares up at Tim.

"If you want to be reasonable, fine. If you do the same thing to me as I just did to you, fine. We're in the same boat, so we should offer each other the same courtesies. Neither of us wanted this, and neither of us forced each other into it. Beholding chose us for its own reasons, to the degree that you can call the impulses of a non-sentient entity 'reasons.' If you're just going to sit here and blame me, I'll redirect you to Elias. Otherwise, let's work together to figure this out. Does that sound amenable to you?" Jon can't really keep the irritation out of his voice, which probably just strengthens his argument in the end, since he's fed up with the hypocritical blame and demands for help in dealing with the same thing he's being blamed for.

It was one thing when Tim was just Tim, just a victim in all of this, but he's made choices of his own, choices that led him down the same path as Jon's own choices.

Tim yanks the knife out of the desk, leaving a staple-sized hole in the wood. He glares down at Jon in silence for a moment, before finally sighing petulantly and replying with a simple "Fine."

He then turns around and slams the door back open, stomping out of the office with no other words to offer, still holding the knife in a white-knuckled grip. Jon can hear his footsteps fade away towards the stairs, where he supposes Tim is heading home for the day. Jon is tempted to do the same, already exhausted even though it's barely noon, but the idea of grabbing his cane and limping his way up the stairs right now is even more exhausting than the idea of finishing the day.

Instead, he remembers that the tape recorder is still running, and clicks it off. He wasn't recording anything before, and he always makes sure to replace the tape whenever he's done with anything, so at least he knows that the footage of that whole nightmare of a conversation didn't erase something more important.

Jon lets his mind wander back into questions for a moment before he inevitably drags himself back into his work. How long has Tim been like this? How long has he been keeping it from Jon? Was he even hiding it at all, or was it sudden, causing a massive spiral into whatever the hell that was today? Did Tim even sleep last night, or has he kept himself awake by trying to fight Beholding? Has he tested it out, or just rolled with what it gave him? How much control does he have compared to Jon? How much reach does he have? More? Less? The same?

He doesn't know, and Beholding offers no answers. He suspects that it wouldn't give Tim the same information about him, which is a cold comfort.

Chapter Text

There are trace amounts of salicylic acid in the pill you just swallowed, not enough to cause major side effects but enough to leave a vaguely uncomfortable feeling in the back of your throat.

The thought runs through Jon's head the moment he swallows an aspirin pill, and he sighs in aggravation. He doesn't even know what the hell salicylic acid even is, but he'll be damned if he doesn't know there's apparently some involved in the aspirin manufacturing process.

Beholding's been pounding at the metaphorical door in his head, beating at it with such ardent determination that Jon feels like he's catching splinters in his face. Is this an effect of Tim's power and proximity, like they're two electrical charges making a magnetic field go haywire? Is this just some kind of tidal situation, and Jon's just stuck in high tide for a while until it recedes? Is it something that either of them did? Is this whiplash?

Is it angry? Is this willful? No, it can't be, unless something's been hidden from him quite thoroughly for the past few months. He's been told that the Fears are not sentient, and sentience to the degree of an animal is required for anger or spite. Does it lack that? Jon assumes that it must, considering no sentience and low sentience are two very different things, but that's only to the point where he's being more pedantic about it than Elias or anybody else; Jon can't always tell when he's being pedantic to the point of ridiculousness, so the issue is tabled for later when he doesn't have a headache about it.

The lights in his office are off, which helps in the tiniest possible amount, and Jon closes his eyes and presses the heels of his hands into them. The pressure helps some, though he's not quite sure if it's the pressure on his eyes specifically that's doing some esoteric bullshit, or else just because it's the easiest spot to put a good amount of pressure on. It doesn't matter, so he should stop thinking about it lest he get a barely-related answer.

Just as the roar of his migraine dies down to a quieter pulsating hum, the heavy door to his office is slammed open and sets everything off again.

"What the fuck do you want, Tim?" Jon doesn't growl, per se, but he doesn't do much to police his tone like he normally would. If he didn't say the closest thing to "fuck off," without actually saying it, his tone definitely conveyed the rest of the message.

You were also about 1.3% louder than usual, judging by the average amount of decibels you speak at versus how many you spoke with just now.

There goes Beholding again, battering incessantly at his brain with the most useless information it can throw at him. This is probably why Tim was so erratic two days ago, because of an attack like this, and Jon would be sorry for yelling at him at that point if it weren't for the fact that Tim was the one to barge into his office first.

"Something's wrong." Tim says, very unhelpfully, and Jon glares at him and hopes he's properly conveyed just how stupid and obvious he thinks that sentence is without having to say a word. Clearly something is wrong, if they're both unwilling servants to an unknowable godlike entity of evil that they're unable to leave, but maybe Tim's got some fascinating new insights with that.

"Is it a someone's actively dying wrong, or just a there's a non-urgent situation that I have questions about wrong? Either way I'm useless, but I'd like to know how angry I should be at you." Is it mean to have expected Tim to know, unprompted, that Jon's got a horrible migraine? Yes. Is that going to stop him from being bitchy about it? No, not at all. He's sort of fed up with walking on eggshells for Tim's sake by this point, anyway, and they both know they're in the same boat and there's no way they can get off of it. They've got to put up with each other to a degree that became much more clear two days ago, when Jon finally realized that it's not just one of them at a time that can force each other into their bullshit.

"Don't know if she's dying, exactly, but something isn't right with Melanie."

That's... an interesting observation. Obviously, nobody in the Archives is completely normal or alright, given the information that is now available to them and the things that all of them have gone through, but to pick out a specific person who's got something wrong with them is something to be investigated.

Of course, it's probably something to do with that ghost bullet wound in India, but he doesn't know for sure; for all any of them know, it could be a repeat of Gerard Keay, someone entrenched in all of this and proceeding to die of something entirely mundane. It's not likely, but it's possible.

"I assume you've got reasons for suspecting this." Jon remembers at the last possible second to phrase it as a statement, not as a question. Even Elias can be compelled, so he's certain that Tim hasn't gained a magical immunity to it in the past however-long it's been since he started developing an affinity for Beholding. He thinks he might have asked a question earlier, but he wasn't paying attention and can't be sure, but Tim doesn't seem especially angry at the moment, so he thinks he's in the clear.

"Gut feeling, mostly. Figured you should know if you don't already." Beholding gives us different things, Jon thinks, and of course it's not an inaccurate statement. He'd known it since the moment Elias told him about everything, when Elias seemed like he knew everything already and yet had no idea how to compel anything out of anyone. There are different ecological niches for all of them, different parts of the body of the Institute for each of them to be, and while Jon doesn't even know for certain what his is yet, he knows that Tim is not the same.

"... Thank you for informing me. I'll ask about it more when I don't have a migraine." Jon begrudgingly thanks Tim, who walks out of the office without another word. The door slams shut behind him, and Jon doesn't care to stop himself from flinching at the sound.

He puts his head on the desk- forehead flat to the wood, that's how much of a wreck he is and how badly his head hurts right now- and sighs. Tim is progressing fast, almost immediately getting to a point that it had taken Jon quite a while to get to himself, which implies a number of unpleasant things.

Jon had gotten a gut feeling about Not-Sasha. He hadn't trusted it, and had dismissed it out of hand until he'd relistened to some old tapes and heard his own forgotten suspicions spoken aloud again. Barring any other forgotten suspicions or gut feelings, the first time he'd been able to discern anything was about five months after anything had happened, if he's remembering right, and about a year after assuming the Archivist position. Tim managed it two days after telling Jon about being taken by Beholding, a year and a half after becoming an Archival Assistant.

Going by the hiring timeline, Tim's moving slower than Jon did, which wouldn't be at all surprising if literally anybody else in the Archives was showing the same symptoms, for lack of a better term. However, this isn't the case, and Tim is unique among the other assistants in being picked up by the Beholding. As it stands, since Tim is unique, it wouldn't have started when he became an Archival Assistant, because then it would have started for the rest of the assistants at that point as well.

He'd have believed it of Sasha. She was reckless in her meeting up with Michael, late at night in a cemetery with no witnesses, and though it's one of the few anecdotes of her that he knows for certain is fact, it's enough to tentatively say that she'd be just as likely to be in Tim's current position were she still around. He wouldn't have believed it of Tim, but that's more because of everything that's happened as of late as well as his relatively lackadaisical attitude towards a lot of things in the beginning.

He doesn't see it with Martin. He wouldn't think it with Martin, honestly he'd likely be more surprised if that particular thought had any merit than he was when Tim burst into his office with that revelation of his own. He could be wrong, of course, but it just doesn't ring true.

Which means that Tim is working on a shorter timeline than that. Assuming that two days ago was simply the breaking point rather than the beginning of anything the Beholding had on him- technically, he should be thinking of five days ago as that line, given that Tim had used some kind of rudimentary Sight to steal one of Melanie's knives at that point, not that Jon was supposed to know that- and his Archive transfer date as the absolute earliest that Beholding could have taken an interest in him, Jon has a range of roughly a year and a half to work with in order to try and figure out when the hell Tim's whole thing started.

... On second thought, he should table that for later. The ice pick in his brain agrees.

Tim is getting accustomed to Beholding very, very quickly. This might be cause for concern, or it might be entirely expected, but Jon doesn't want to deal with the headache of dealing with Elias on top of the literal headache he's got going now. At least aspirin is supposed to help with one of those things.

All he knows now is that Tim has some kind of role within the Institute. He doesn't know if it's a new role, or a unique one, but the Institute is a stronghold for Beholding and so everybody within it has some kind of actual purpose beyond "knowing things." Tim can't be an exception to that rule. Considering that Gertrude had, up to now, treated her assistants as disposable, he's assuming that Beholding picking Tim up has exempted him from this kind of treatment, though of course he can't say for sure, because Jon's assistants aren't fucking cannon fodder.

The wood of his desk has ceased to be helpful in any way, and he moves his forehead to a different spot, one that's absorbed less body heat in the past few minutes. The relief is slight, but it doesn't need to be all that dramatic as long as the aspirin kicks in soon.

Almost as if upon hearing that thought, somebody knocks on the door and forces Jon to lift his head and blearily look up. The door's been opened, and Martin is peeking in with a steaming cup of tea in hand.

"Hey, Tim told me you had a headache, so I thought I'd make you some tea?" Martin is quieter than usual and pitches his voice up to make the statement into a question, though there's no real reason to ask. Jon always accepts tea from Martin.

"Thank you. I don't think those were his actual words." Jon, again, remembers at the last possible moment not to phrase it like a question, and Martin awkwardly laughs.

"No, it was more of a... well. There were some names involved. I inferred from context." Martin tries to be polite, and Jon isn't surprised. Tim was probably calling him quite a variety of things behind his back, no matter how tenuously polite he'd been during their actual conversation. Jon knows he wasn't polite at all, so he supposes he's earned at least some of them.

"I figured. Could you leave it on the desk, please?" Jon does not want to get up when he's been sitting in the same position for so long; he's not very keen on falling flat on his face two steps in because his damned leg decided to give out on him. It feels fine right now, but he's learned that that's not a trustworthy indicator.

"Sure." Martin brings the tea over and sets it out of the way of the few scattered papers on the desk here and there, and taps on the 'off' button on the tape recorder Jon didn't even realize was running. Then, he backs away with a half-smile and a whispered, "Feel better!"

Chapter Text

Jon is just barely finished with committing a Statement to tape when there's a knock on his office door.

The tape recorder's stopped, and he's grabbing his notes out of their file folder so that he can read them out for follow-up in a moment, so it's not like anything is actually being interrupted; still, he's tempted not to answer, and let whoever's knocking know through that silence that he's busy.

"Come in," he says instead, because despite the petty temptations he has, he's not going to shove somebody away just for the sake of a Statement. It's not like following up on these things, taking notes and recording and such, actually mean anything anymore. There's no actual research being done, no answers to find, at least none that matter in their current situation. No Statements that have anything to do with the Stranger or the Unknowing have popped up in the past few days, so this is more to kill time for the immediate future and keep the weird side effects away.

Slowly, hesitantly, the door creaks open, and behind it is Martin, holding a mug of tea in one hand. He looks apologetic, at least, so Jon isn't really annoyed by it at all- he'd have been aggravated, at least, if it had been Tim trying to break down the door over some new Beholding-relevant spiral of some sort, because he's sort of sick of that already despite only occurring over the course of the past week or so.

"Sorry- I just didn't want it to get cold, I didn't realize you were recording when I made it," Martin apologizes as he comes in, and Jon sighs as he reaches out for his tea. The tape recorder isn't running, at least, though he swears he can still hear it whirring- at this point, it's become such common background noise that he thinks he can hear it at home, too, so it's not unusual for him to hear it at the edges of his senses when it isn't really happening.

"That's fine, it wasn't anything important anyway." Jon says, sounding a little resigned even to himself, and grabs the tea out of Martin's hand. "I'd paused it already, so you timed it perfectly." He continues, with a tiny smile, and Martin looks more relieved than he did when he came in, so at least there's that.

God, Jon hopes that Martin's not also being dragged into this. It's bad enough that it's himself and Tim being subjected to the whims of a capricious entity made of Fear and Knowledge and whatnot, he really doesn't want to see anyone else being forced into the same.

"That's good," Martin says, like it's just something to fill up the space between them, and starts backing off to leave. He grabs the doorknob as he reaches it, and looks back at Jon for a moment, then looks back out of the office before he or Jon can say anything.

"I'll let you get back to it," Martin says as he shuts the door, and Jon bites his tongue to resist the temptation to tell Martin to wait. Why should he? Why should he ask Martin to spend more time in here, talking about whatever it is that Jon was going to say- it's not like he even knows what he'd wanted to say, after all- when this whole place is a farce trapping everyone in it? At least everybody else has the choice of what they do with their time down here, eight hours a day, he's not going to trap anyone in a conversation that they don't want or need to have, with the person who indirectly trapped them here.

Despite not being the "beating heart" of the Institute- which, however accurate the comparison may or may not be, is egotistical as hell of him, as a thing to say in general- Jon is, at least sort of, responsible for everybody in the Archives' current position.

So, no, despite the childish impulse to make an empty bid for a bit more- what? Attention? Politeness that he can pretend is actual tolerance of his presence, rather than a part of Martin's general temperament? Get a grip, Jon- he doesn't say anything, just nods in acknowledgement.

So Martin leaves, and it's fine. It's fine. Jon goes back to the notes that he had prepared for this Statement, and nothing is wrong at all. Nothing would be wrong, nothing should be wrong, because by all accounts this was an entirely neutral-to-positive interaction between Jon and another real life human being, that didn't end in a screaming match, threats of violence, or some other variety of behavior that he would've once considered alarming and inappropriate to the workplace.

He scans through what he'd had written- handwritten, specifically, because writing things out by hand is somehow more satisfying to the thing in the back of his mind that loves to eat the Statements and he has to choose his battles wisely- and barely pays enough attention to it to register that these are, in fact, the correct notes that do correlate to the Statement at hand. Otherwise, he absorbs absolutely none of it.

He clicks the tape recorder so that it's recording again, and reads his notes aloud for the cassette. It's not like anybody's listening to these things, anyway; if anyone in Research really was accessing these things, then he's sure that he would've had to deal with the police far more often than he has in recent months, and that's including everything with Daisy and Basira.

So, dry and soulless notes-reading it is. He'll put the paper in the folder, too, just for the sake of keeping things neat- he's still got his pride, after all, and if he can cling onto the fact that he can make these Archives neater than they ever were under Gertrude's leadership, then so be it. Everybody's got their own little buoys in this nightmare of an Institute, and he's not about to start acting like he's not in need of his own.

Martin makes tea, that's what he does, he likes to feel like he's helping somehow even if he's logically aware of the fact that it really doesn't do much of anything. That's Martin's buoy, as it were, and Jon isn't exactly about to say it in so many words, but that's about the gist of it. Tim's is- well, he's fairly sure that it was casual hook-ups and the social activity of a Uni student who chose a useless major, but that has since changed drastically.

Melanie's is sharpening her knives and acting like violence could be the thing that gets them all out of this. Daisy's is the same as he thinks it's been the whole time, well before she ever set foot into the Institute: go on hunts, track people down and bring them to a messy end. Basira's seems to be just reading books and keeping calm about things- not thinking about it, maybe? Jon doesn't know her well enough to tell.

Everybody's got their own sort of buoys, is the point, and Jon is trying not to beat himself up too badly about relying on his own. While he does have every reason to be angry at himself for relying on his particular buoy, considering what his reliance on it has been driven by- namely, that he's fairly sure that his penchant for organizing information neatly is something that feeds the Eye, and doing more of it is only making the monster part of him worse- but he's trying to keep from spiraling again, so he's picking the lesser evil.

He thinks that a hobby, or something, could be better than this; unfortunately, everything that he can think of as a hobby veers too close to becoming another form of feeding Beholding, whether he likes it or not. It's not even just hobbies, anymore, it's most of everything in his life having slowly become attuned to his gradual shift in personality, except part of him thinks it isn't a shift in personality, not really. He always was a curious person, always was the sort who liked to research things and find answers for himself, why should some eldritch thing suddenly be pinned with the blame for why he's like that?

He still isn't quite sure how to take his mind off of his situation without compounding the guilt or the gaping maw that lives in the back of his head. Even at his lowest- reducing himself to mindless scrolling on YouTube, of all things- he still wound up absorbing video essays about various informative topics, because lord forbid Jon just stop trying to learn new things for an hour. It's a little ironic, truly, that he's actively trying to stop himself from pursuing his own curiosity, when most people find themselves with the opposite problem.

Most of the other options available to him- helping Georgie with her podcast (if there's even anything for him to do), learning a new skill, anything of the sort that heavily involves research- it all pulls him into the same problem. Anything numbers-heavy or puzzle-related is out of the question, because of the risk that any answers would just be force fed to him via Beholding. Creative hobbies would be... dubious, at best, because he knows himself well enough to know it's going to be bad from the outset, and he's a perfectionist whose reaction to doing badly is either throwing away the entire pursuit, or diving headfirst into it so intently that he'll lose focus on everything else entirely- neither of which is an outcome that he's very fond of. Physical activities are a bad idea from the start, and something he wouldn't do voluntarily no matter the circumstances. That doesn't leave much else available, in terms of what he could do to fill his time.

Well. At least he has his Archive, which isn't going out and killing people- which is more than he can say for a lot of the other sorts of monsters, and he's got literal pages of evidence to back that claim- so he can concern himself with its upkeep and not feel too horrible about it. What else would he do with it, really? What else would he do to fill his time, or conversely, what else would he do that feeds the Beholding? Out of everything that he can think of, doing his job seems to be the least harmful.

Doing his job is what got him into this mess, though, and he feels that acutely every time he reads a new Statement or has a new nightmare. It's all a rabbit hole whose opening began with signing the contract for the Head Archivist position, and he's not forgetting that anytime soon.

That does raise a question, though, now that he thinks about it- what led Tim here? Not to the Archives, of course, he knows the answer to that one already, but... what led him to being a part of the Beholding, in the same way that Jon is? What led him to this kind of servitude? Furthermore, what is it that Tim does that feeds Beholding? It's not like there's much reading of Statements going on anymore, at least, not by anyone in the bullpen and certainly not by Tim, of all people. Jon would truly be surprised if Tim did anything with his time here every day doing anything more productive than playing games on his laptop.

So, what information can be gathered by playing video games? Nothing, really, at least as far as Jon knows. It's not like Tim was ever much into computers, either, so it's not like he's all that likely to be messing with game files or anything like that. Tim's always been more of a people person, getting a lot of his follow-up information- when he'd still pursued it- from people verbally, instead of from files, records, or books- or anything else of the sort. That's not something that Jon would've mentally pinpointed as very heavily associated with the Beholding; he'd have believed it more if Tim had been less gregarious, or had less of that reputation. Granted, Tim's prior career and experience had been in publishing- something he'd spoken about extensively when they'd both been in Research- but Tim is not currently in publishing, and he didn't get picked up by Beholding when it had been his career.

That's a tangent for another time, though. As of now, Jon still does need to read his notes, and he still does need to do his job.

Chapter Text

Jon is flipping through files when Tim comes up behind him.

It's not purposefully threatening, or anything. It's not even scary, just surprising, but Jon still jumps nearly a foot in the air when he hears footsteps outside of his immediate field of vision. His startle reaction is far too pronounced, nowadays; he feels like a skittish cat.

Tim merely raises an unimpressed eyebrow when Jon is done with his dramatics, which he supposes is fair. He's half out of breath and leaning heavily on his cane, still, but he's composed himself enough to feel the faint rush of embarrassment crawling up his throat and warming his face.

"... Did you need something?" He finally asks, doesn't Ask, he thinks, since he's been trying to learn to bite his tongue. He doesn't know if it works all the time, and he finds that it's easy to slip and use force he doesn't mean. Considering that Tim doesn't answer within half a second, he thinks he managed not to slip this time.

"No." Tim answers, after just a beat too long, and Jon privately thinks he might be lying. He won't say anything about it- too wary of instigating a fight via inadvertently using some Beholding powers, or else just implying that he is- and instead he waits for Tim to either go back on what he just said, or leave.

They stare at each other in an uncomfortable silence for a full six seconds before Tim cracks.

"Does the Beholding tell you when people are lying." Tim grits out, clearly angry about having to ask this question at all- doesn't even bother to add an inflection or anything to it, keeps his voice flat and angry and displeased about all of it- and would rather not be having this conversation. Jon, for his part, empathizes- he would also rather not be having this conversation, but clearly neither of them are getting what they want today. May as well make it easy for both of them to get through- though, for that matter, Jon isn't entirely sure of the answer to that question himself. As far as he's aware, he hasn't gotten a real alert or gut feeling or anything when he's been told a lie, and in fact he thinks that the Compulsion is a way for him to negate that, to force someone to tell the truth, but he hasn't actually gone and scientifically tested it.

"I'm not sure," He answers, "I think we've got to test it." He doesn't know any other way of answering the question- not like he'll get a straight answer by asking Elias, and it's not like he can pull the information from thin air- and they'll both have to endure the scientific method for the sake of sating Tim's curiosity, which is more than likely based in something other than just a question for the sake of a question.

Tim scoffs, and bites out a sarcastic, "What, primary school icebreaker style? Two truths and a lie?"

Jon shrugs in response. If Tim wants to make a game of it, that's fine with him; either way, it'll get the job done. Tim scoffs again, breaks eye contact, and stares at the shelf above them both in concentration.

Finally, Tim clears his throat, and flatly delivers his three lines: "I have a Gulpin tattoo on my ankle. I went skydiving when I graduated from Uni. I worked at a Claire's when I was a teenager." His voice doesn't change at all between sentences, and Jon truly has nothing to go off of other than that- he has no evidence to dispute any of these things. Tim has only ever mentioned his job in publishing, though Jon wouldn't doubt that he worked retail or some other customer-facing job as a teenager; Tim is absolutely the sort of person to go skydiving; and Tim's favorite Pokemon is Typhlosion.

... Ah. Thank you, Beholding. While not technically ferreting out the lie, it provides context that makes it clear one way or the other.

"You don't have a Gulpin tattoo." Jon replies, equally flatly, and Tim responds with a noncommittal hum. Then, he places his foot on a nearby stool, and raises his pant leg just enough to show that he does, indeed, have a tattoo of a Gulpin on the inside of his left ankle. Jon raises both his eyebrows in surprise, and Tim drops the pantleg.

"That answers that," Tim says, then takes his foot down and puts it on the ground. He hesitates for a second, apparently debating with himself on something, before evidently deciding against it and turning away. He walks off, and Jon blinks exactly once in confusion before walking after him.

"I'd like a bit more context," Jon demands, and doesn't dare to phrase it like a question this time- he's not that confident in his ability to bite his tongue. He's genuinely curious, now, and that doesn't bode well for his ability to keep himself from slipping- so he falls back on his alternative strategy for not Compelling anyone.

Tim pauses, half-turns, and opens his mouth. There's a moment where nothing comes out, and he closes it again; he opens it once more, and finally speaks.

"Do the same to me. Two truths and a lie." Tim says, and there's something in his voice that Jon hasn't heard from him before; it's something like hesitation, something like fear, and something like anger, all at once, all in some weird cocktail that somehow doesn't feel pointed at Jon, despite how it usually is. Jon, slightly unbalanced, now, takes a moment to comply; to indulge a common curiosity, perhaps, or else do some other test for the sake of whatever it is that prompted Tim to come up to him in the first place.

Jon has always been terrible at these sorts of games, considering that he doesn't actively think about what may or may not be interesting about his own life- what others may consider to be a likely falsehood- so after a much longer period of deliberation than Tim had taken, Jon finally gives his own three, much less exciting, statements.

"I failed my physics A-levels, I failed my cursive class in primary school, and I failed my chemistry GCSEs." He keeps his delivery as even as possible, in hopes of throwing Tim off just as he'd been thrown off, himself; he thinks it worked, but he can't be entirely sure, especially given Tim's quick response.

"Chemistry. That's the lie." Tim doesn't hesitate, barely letting Jon finish his sentence before cutting in with his answer. Jon would call it blind confidence, were it not for the fact that Tim is entirely correct.

Jon was always rubbish at physics, and he's not entirely sure why he'd decided to bother with the A-levels when he'd nearly failed in getting the GCSE; when he was in primary school, his hands would cramp terribly whenever he'd tried to write in cursive, resulting in illegible scribbles; and he had actually managed to pass every GCSE he'd attempted, despite what his A-levels would allege soon after. Technically speaking, it was only the one, and he had severely overloaded his schedule by everybody else's metric, and it was only by one point, but he will continue to hold that failure in his heart for the rest of his days.

"That's correct," Jon confirms, nonplussed, but Tim doesn't even seem to need the confirmation- he's already started grumbling to himself, under his breath, inaudible even to Jon but clearly showcasing his frustration of some kind or another. Jon waits, patiently, for the conversation to continue at a regular volume- considering that Tim hasn't started walking away again, he's sure that there is an intention to continue talking like normal people.

Eventually, Tim stops grumbling, and inhales sharply through his nose. He squeezes his eyes shut, pressing the heels of his hands into them, and then pulls his hands away, blinking his brown eyes back open. A muscle in his temple jumps, making it clear that Tim is gritting his teeth, but again- it feels strangely like it isn't aimed at Jon, for once.

"Lies are red." Tim says, and this only baffles Jon further- but he can recognize when someone is going to elaborate, so he keeps his mouth shut. He's sure that Tim will continue on his own time, and Jon has learned that he needs to be patient when it comes to information; he may not be very good at practicing it when it's between himself, the Statements, and Elias, but he can at least bite his tongue when it comes to letting Tim speak.

That, or he's just avoiding another row, but that's not relevant to this current conversation.

"I don't- I never had synesthesia before now. I never had anything like that, but now... whenever someone tells me a lie, it's red. I can't describe it any better than that. I thought... " He clears his throat, and breaks eye contact again.

"I thought you would understand." He's quieter, now- quieter than Jon has heard him be in a long time. His voice cracks in the middle of it, and Jon doesn't know what to do with that observation. He doesn't know what to do with this information. He doesn't know what to do with any of this, he doesn't know why any of this is happening, and he's not sure where to go with it from here.

"... We're still different." Jon says, after a brief hesitation, and as soon as he says it he thinks it's the wrong thing to say. He thinks it's the wrong sentiment to express, he thinks it's all- he thinks he's screwed it up. More. Again. Both more and again.

"We're still- we have different positions, and we don't know what yours is. The best we can do is- is this, I suppose. Little experiments, cataloguing differences until someone has an epiphany. You're not the Archivist, and I'm not in your- your as-of-yet unnamed position. So. I'm sorry I don't have your answers." Jon keeps talking, keeps shoving his foot in his own mouth, but he means it all sincerely- unlike what he said to Tim ages ago, about going up to Elias for answers if he wants help from someone who knows what controlling it is supposed to mean, he does have some vague idea of what's going on, a bit more than Tim does, but he wishes he had more. He wishes he could sit down and give Tim a real description or outline of what's to come, what he will or won't be able to do, but he can't. He can't, and unless Elias has a sudden change of heart and decides to be clear for once, he won't be able to anytime soon.

Tim lets out a breath, in one long and deep sigh. He still isn't making eye contact with Jon, instead staring at a box on the floor a few shelves away. There's nothing interesting in or on the box, Jon already knows, though he's never opened it before. It must be one of the perks of being the Archivist- a studious awareness of his own Archive. He wonders if Tim has anything similar.

"Thanks. For, erm- for trying. I guess." Tim eventually says, sounding tired and defeated, exactly like Jon does. It's the first time that Tim has thanked him for his help in figuring out what this Beholding thing means- the first time that Tim has really acknowledged that this is something they're both in. Something they both have to deal with. Something they both got stuck with, partially out of free will but mostly through rotten circumstances.

"Of- of course. Anytime." Jon replies, feeling woefully inadequate for this entire conversation, and- not for the first time- for the position that he's in. Tim, for his part, bites the inside of his cheek, nods, and then turns back towards where he was heading, back in the direction of his desk.

Then, Tim pauses again, just barely long enough to say, "By the way- I've never been skydiving."

Jon doesn't know what that's supposed to mean, why Tim is just now deciding to continue with the spirit of their experiment being a game- but Tim has already turned away, halfway back to his desk. Is it an olive branch? Maybe. Something of the sort, perhaps, or maybe just an attempt at leveling the playing field- after all, Tim had been correct in his own guess.

Maybe it's a means of saying he's not going to be hostile anymore- that, or maybe Jon's just overthinking it.

Chapter Text

"You're not experiencing any need for Statements? Or anything at all?"

Jon is sitting on one side of Tim's empty desk, a chair borrowed from somewhere else in the bullpen- it's not like anybody else is currently using it- with his good leg pressed up to his chest, knee nearly to his face, while his bad leg dangles in a relatively normal position. Tim, meanwhile, is in his usual seat, leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed, seeming distinctly unimpressed with Jon's line of questioning.

"Not unless we're counting the leash that this place has put on me." Tim replies flatly, and Jon sighs.

It's been about two weeks since their relative breakthrough with two truths and a lie, and it has recently occurred to Jon that, in order for Tim to be benefitting from the Beholding in this way- or in any way, technically speaking, and the flood of information he'd burst into Jon's office to complain about is just as much a benefit as lie-detecting synesthesia- there must be something he's offering in return. Jon offers Statements; Tim very pointedly does not.

"The others have just as much of a restriction, as far as we're aware. Unless we want to test it? Have you and the others go on various trips of various lengths and distances, have you note your symptoms, make a big experiment of it?" Jon tries halfheartedly, but Tim doesn't seem like he's really on board with this train of thought.

"That's too much of a commitment, considering... everything. Put it on your list, I guess." Tim says, and Jon sort of figured that he'd answer something along those lines. Jon dutifully marks down leaving limits on his notes-app list that he has on his phone, specifically for things to test out after the Unknowing.

If they succeed in averting it. If they both survive the process.

"You're not getting something from nothing." Jon insists, for lack of anything else to say. There has to be some price being paid, and the sooner they figure out what it is, the better; Tim can't exactly try to escape all of this if he doesn't even know how he's trapped. He can't stop feeding it if he doesn't know what qualifies as food.

"Yeah, well, the evil fear-gods that live behind the scenes aren't exactly known for obeying the law of equivalent exchange." Tim snipes back, and Jon rolls his eyes. First off, whatever Tim is paying just by virtue of being trapped as an assistant isn't enough to earn what he's getting, and if it was, then every other person in this place would have exactly the same abilities that Tim is getting, and there wouldn't be a mystery at all. Second, despite the ways that the rules of reality and perception are bent and broken when coming up against these things, there are still rules. Something does not come from nothing.

"Fullmetal Alchemist is very good and very applicable to quite a few things, but I think you'll find that its alchemical laws are lacking when it comes to dealing with everything we're up against." Jon says, dryly, and Tim just gives him a flat stare. Jon abruptly recalls a time- a year ago, if that- when Tim's response to that deadpan comment would've been to laugh. Something about that sits weird in Jon's chest, but so do a lot of other things. Jon has many regrets, this just has to get in line.

"You know what I mean." Tim argues, not even bothering to address the way his reference was just called out. "We're not going off of direct logic here. One and one doesn't mean two anymore. You love the Beholding, so it picks you up. I hate the Beholding, so it picks me up. That's about the best I've got. If you have any better explanations, you're welcome to share them, but I can't imagine that you have more information about what I've been doing differently than I do."

Tim has a point, there- Jon's got nothing on why Tim, of all people, was picked up by the Beholding, nor does he know what about Tim is feeding it. There's nothing that Tim offers that Jon doesn't, too; no Statement he has access to, no extraneous vantage point, nothing aside from spending more time in the bullpen with the others and hating everything the Beholding offers (more information, more conclusions, more hints and more everything), in contrast with Jon's semi-consistent solitude and constant, small hope that the Beholding will give him more.

He wants it to give him more. He thinks Tim would like nothing more than for it to stop giving him anything at all.

"... Maybe that is what you're giving it." Jon murmurs to himself as the thought occurs to him. It's possible for a Fear to feed on its own practitioner, right? Especially at the beginning? It feeds on the fear coming from its- victim? Future perpetrator?- until its appetite gets too large for that one person to fulfill, at which point they go on to terrorize others. Feed more, on some other outside source. Lose the guilt and humanity while they go. Eventually become practically indistinguishable from the thing that initially terrorized them.

Sounds about right, if a bit auto-cannibalistic. Like a snake choking on its own tail. It doesn't sound particularly sustainable, especially in the long term, but if the Fear ends up starving itself out then... what? He doubts that Tim would die, since he's not dependent upon it to that level and he doubts that Tim would ever let himself get to that point, but it clearly wouldn't be comfortable. Something like a withdrawal, if Jon were to imagine it; horribly uncomfortable, for a time, until it passes and everything returns to mostly-normal, if somewhat damaged by the whole experience.

"What?" Tim presses, because he wasn't part of Jon's internal thoughts on the matter and isn't to the point where he can go ahead and poke in Jon's head. Jon honestly doesn't think Tim's going to get that far, since that seems like the kind of thing that you'd need to give more than your own fear to be able to do.

Jon takes a breath, fully ready to share his thoughts on the matter, but before he gets a word out it occurs to him that maybe he shouldn't. Tim doesn't seem afraid of the Beholding these days, only angry. If Jon suggests that all the rage is covering up for such a large amount of terror at this thing, enough to feed it- more than that, feed it to the point of reciprocating something to Tim- well. They've done so well in not starting fights so far, he'd hate to ruin it now.

So, he snaps his mouth shut again, and chews on what he should say instead. He can't think of anything good, aside from a quiet "Never mind." He shifts uncomfortably where he sits, and puts his leg down. He rotates his ankle a few times- he'd accidentally cut off circulation with the odd sitting position, and he's not a stranger to the feeling of coaxing blood back into his extremities- and altogether tries not to look too guilty over biting his tongue.

Tim simply raises an eyebrow, visibly unimpressed, but Jon doesn't fold. As far as Tim is concerned, it was just a theory he thought of and immediately dismissed; he didn't lie when he said not to mind it. He'd really rather not get into the weeds of what he thinks is the source of what the Beholding is feeding on from Tim, and why it's giving him power in return.

"Okay, well, if I've got nothing and you don't feel like sharing, I guess we're done with this interrogation." Tim says flatly, and Jon shrivels up a bit more inside at the phrasing. On the outside, he doesn't react (or, at least, he tries not to react), just starts standing up. He leans heavily on Tim's desk and his cane, since his bad leg is still bad and his good leg is still getting used to having blood circulation again.

Tim watches him, for a moment, before standing halfway up and leaning towards Jon, almost as if to reach towards him, and Jon nearly jumps backwards at the motion; Tim looks stricken, for just about half a second, before schooling his features and sitting back down. Jon, for his part, grips the desk behind him, the one he crashed backwards into- thankfully it's one of the unoccupied ones that have never been used, or at least never been used by someone that Jon has personally been the boss of- and doesn't meet Tim's eye.

That entire interaction takes less than a moment, but embarrassment still crawls up Jon's neck at the dramatics of the whole thing. He doesn't mean to act like this, he knows full well that Tim wasn't about to hurt him, but telling that to his reflexes isn't exactly what he'd call easy. He's expecting anyone reaching towards him to be doing so for malicious reasons, nowadays, and most of the time that jumping-away reflex isn't a bad call. He prefers being alive, in general, so all in all, it's not the worst reflex to have.

The times that it is a bad call tend to be embarrassing and overly dramatic, though. He can live without that.

"I'm- I'll be back in my office. In case anything else occurs to you." Jon says, unsteadily, and then sets off towards his office with an unsteady gait. His leg is still shooting pins and needles up at him, but he'd rather deal with that than keep studiously avoiding looking at Tim for the next two minutes while he waits for the sensation to pass.

"Yeah." Tim replies, a bit quieter than before, and Jon can hear typing coming from behind him. It's Tim, probably, typing at his laptop and likely avoiding eye contact with Jon just as much as he's avoiding eye contact with Tim. Even odds that the typing is some kind of video game, Jon thinks to himself, but doesn't bring himself to actually care one way or the other. Tim's got every right to slack off on company time.

Jon opens the door to his office, switches the light back on, and leaves the door open as he circles behind his desk towards his chair. He balances his cane in its usual spot, leaning against the shelf behind him and somewhat to the left, since that's the hand that it's usually in. He takes out his own laptop, flips it open, and sinks down in his chair just enough to hide his face from anyone in the bullpen looking in.

He goes to Google and searches, for just about the billionth time, the website for any odd taxidermy shops or wax museums or anything else he can think of that feel particularly Stranger-y. As expected, there's nothing new; he'd hoped that the occasional poor review would offer hints that Statements do not, offhanded mentions of creepy mannequins in circus costumes that aren't enough to send somebody here, but are too much to be left alone without note. Directly searching through the reviews for keywords does nothing, even on the pages for businesses which he knows are controlled by the Circus of the Other, so directly scrolling through them is his best and only option.

Losing himself in vague searching is easy. He finds a few, all for the Trophy Room in Barnet, which tells him nothing except that reviews vaguely mentioning Nikola and the rest of her crew aren't being scrubbed from the Internet entirely. Small mercies.

He barely notices his heartbeat slowing down from the way it was racing before- an adrenaline spike born of a reflex like the one he just had will tend to do that- until his hands gain a mild tremor from the adrenaline crash. This feeling is only marginally better than the shame from the bad reaction, and only because he's used to it.

He's several pages deep into a review page for the House of Wax in Yarmouth- nothing significant yet, but that doesn't mean someone didn't notice anything at all- when there's a soft knock on his open office door. He glances up, feeling a twinge in his back as he shifts positions- slouching does him no favors anymore- to see Martin putting a mug of tea in its usual place on his desk.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt," Martin says, just above a whisper, as he grimaces. Jon's back pops aggravatingly as he sits up properly so that he can reach for the mug of tea, and he's thankful that its heat calms the nerves in his hand. He'd rather not continue shaking and risk spilling tea all over his computer.

"No, it's fine. Just scrolling more wax museum reviews." Jon sighs as he sips his tea. It's nearly hot enough to burn his tongue, so he doesn't drink much, and puts it back rather quickly. The review he's currently looking at is complaining about the price hike for tickets, and he briefly and painfully remembers that he went to Oxford for this.

"Really scraping the bottom of the barrel." Martin says, and Jon snorts. It's not like they have any better leads, especially since none of the Statements in here can reliably give them current information about the current Circus strongholds. They move around a lot, as a major part of the whole 'circus' thing, so Statements from 1900 is likely to be outdated; a one-star review from Karen on a website that hasn't even existed for as long as the Circus of the Other has been in the country is, despite the drudgery of it all, more likely to have good data.

"It gets kind of relaxing once you get into the rhythm of it. It's like knockoff meditation. Just look for something you recognize, and zone out for the rest entirely." Jon says dryly, and now it's Martin's turn to muffle a laugh.

"Well. I'm sure you'll tell me all about the therapeutic properties of wading through Yelp reviews later." Martin says with no small amount of humor, and Jon raises his eyebrows and lets a tiny smirk play across his face.

"It's Google. Actually." Jon corrects dryly, and Martin responds with a comically exaggerated roll of the eyes, along with crossing his arms in a fake show of mild affront.

"Google reviews, then. I'm sure that Susan has plenty to say about all of it."

"Susan, and Karen, and several other middle-aged women with nothing better to do than complain, yes. Loads of opinions, very little information about anything recognizable to me."

Martin sighs, and then starts backing out of Jon's office. "Doesn't seem very therapeutic, then." He says on his way out, and Jon can't help but roll his eyes.

"Quite. If you find anything useful out in the stacks, please do let me know."

Chapter Text

"Nobody's done anything about Melanie."

Tim meanders into Jon's office, only technically evading any of Jon's mental accusations of him bursting in there on account of the fact that the door is propped open, and sits sideways in one of the chairs in front of his desk. He props one foot on the chair he isn't using, and crosses his other leg over it. All in all, it takes only a few seconds for Tim to make himself almost entirely comfortable in Jon's office.

Jon, after looking up from his notes, blinks at Tim a few times as he processes exactly what Tim just said. His pen is still in the air, like he's about to start writing again, while he tries to figure out what, exactly, Tim is referring to.

"And... what is there to be done about her, exactly?" Jon, taken off-guard by the interruption and the question out of almost complete left field, forgets about the rule about questions until after he's already said it. He winces as soon as he's done talking, but that doesn't negate the effect it's already had.

"I told you that something was wrong with her a few weeks ago, when this whole thing with the Beholding picking me up started. She's been acting different, and it's a very subtle difference- I can't quite put my finger on what is changing about her, all I know is that she is. She's a different person than she was the first time I met her, and that's not just because her career's gone down the drain."

Tim snarls as soon as he's done talking, and Jon deliberately and studiously looks down at the wood of his desk instead of at Tim. There are a few awkward moments of silence, in which Jon expects Tim to go storming off, and Tim remains in his seat, glaring so intently at Jon that he can practically physically feel it.

"... Sorry." Jon says, eventually, and winces again as soon as he says it- he's fully aware he just opened the door to get his head bitten off about it. He's also fully aware that there's not really any other way to continue the conversation while minimizing the amount of time spent getting his head bitten off.

"The only reason I haven't stormed out yet is out of actual concern for another person." Tim says, shortly, and Jon sighs. At least Tim cares enough about the Institute to be aware of the people around him, and feel and express concern for their general situations. He'd thought, before this whole Beholding thing started with him, that Tim had checked out from everything going on in the Archives almost entirely, with a sole exception of the investigations of the Circus.

"Duly noted." Jon replies, finally daring to look up at Tim's face again. He sees roughly what he expected to see, which is poorly-disguised anger; not even disguised, really, more simply held back as Tim actively bites his tongue. Neither of them wants to start a row- this has held true since the beginning of Tim's affliction, as well.

"I didn't talk to her at the beginning. You did. Back me up on this." Tim continues in the same vein as his Beholding-induced answer, this time in much shorter sentences and more along the lines of a demand than an explanation. It's not as if he's wrong, though; he's asking for additional observation on the problem. Jon is inclined to believe his assessment as-is, since Tim interacts with Melanie more often than Jon himself does- he doesn't love being actively avoided by multiple people, and he likes it even less that they make no secret of their distaste for him- but it does seem to be the principle of the thing.

"When I speak to her. If she doesn't keep avoiding me. I assume that you're already aware of her feelings about confrontation." Jon makes quite sure to rephrase his question this time. He can't promise an immediate turnaround on the discussion regarding Melanie, what is apparently wrong with her, or what is to be done about it, especially given the situation at hand.

"What, that she loves it?" Tim snorts. "She keeps trying to kill the double boss. I don't blame her. Main difference between her and me is her grudge against you and her grudge against Bitchard are completely separate. Congratulations, she hates you because you're a bastard all on your own." His delivery is blunt and matter-of-fact, meant to be blunt, possibly meant to get a rise out of Jon. Not that it'll have much of an effect- he's more than used to the little digs at his character by this point.

"I'm aware, thank you." Jon replies dryly, not bothering to entertain it. Is Tim trying to justify blowing up at Jon? Is that what he's trying to instigate, a manufactured excuse for an outlet? He already had his justifiable excuse. He deliberately kept himself from reacting to the Compulsion, so why would he be trying to pick a fight immediately after? Is that just who he is now, or is that just a new effect of Jon's mere existence?

"Point is, she's not going to avoid you forever. When you talk to her again, back me up, because something is different and wrong with her. Beyond her entire career being in shambles and being trapped with a murderous double-boss and a twitchy prick of a regular boss." Tim continues, pressing his point about something being wrong with Melanie, which- Jon hasn't been pressing at her. He's deliberately not doing that. He's self-aware enough to know when he's not wanted.

Though, this all begs a second question; what, exactly, are they going to do about it? What's Jon meant to do about it? It's not as though he has any faith in his own ability to talk it out, if there's anything to talk out. Plus, there's no guarantee that whatever's going on with Melanie really isn't just because of the situation. It's a very all-encompassing situation, after all, and that means it makes people change. It certainly did that for Jon and for Tim.

"I'm... not sure what you propose we do about it." Jon begins, delicately, because the problem should be addressed early on. They can know things- should know things, in his personal opinion, because even though it drives him further into the grave he's dug for himself it's still the better option- but with something like this, there should at least be a discussion about what to do about it. It's about a person, after all. If something is wrong with Melanie, she deserves help, and Jon knows she won't take it from him.

"There's no way she'll listen to me. If you're bringing it to my attention, then in all likelihood, you've already said something and it didn't work. So, if you have an idea, I'd like to hear it. If not, then we should come up with something." Again, he's particularly conscientious about the questions. His thought doesn't appear to be particularly well-received, given the look on Tim's face, but he also doesn't see why Tim would write off that opinion entirely. Trying to set up some kind of intervention would only lead to someone getting stabbed.

"I don't- I don't know. All I know is, you spoke to her more than I did, a while ago, when she started and before that. If something happened, then you'd know. We don't talk much, so if there was something, she wouldn't tell me." Tim begrudgingly explains, and part of that feels like avoidance and the rest of it feels like an excuse. Jon wouldn't know about things that Tim doesn't know- they both know about Sasha, and the thing that wasn't Sasha, and they know Melanie's role in that whole thing. Anything else is freely available on the tapes, and Melanie said nothing about keeping those away from the others.

There's an impulse that Jon aggressively shoves down, an impulse to ask- without directly asking another question, of course- whether that's because Melanie doesn't want to talk to Tim, or if it's the other way around. Tim is sociable, yes, and that's been an enduring personality trait of his for the majority of the time that Jon has known him, but ever since everything with Sasha came out- perhaps even before that- Tim has become less and less open to other people. Jon may not go out into the bullpen quite so often anymore, but the walls aren't thick enough to absorb more and more frequent arguments breaking out between what sounds like Tim and everybody else.

Maybe he's been toning it down. Maybe he hasn't. Jon has other things to worry about. Either way, it wouldn't be conducive to civility if he pulled that accusation out of his pocket, especially considering that he's standing on thin ice as it is. 

"There are a few tapes of hers. In the organized section of the shelves, you might be able to find them; maybe you can listen to those, see if there's something you missed or misremembered. The majority of the things we've said to each other are on those tapes, so you should be able to get a good grasp on what she was like at that point." Jon says instead. He's helpful, even though he doesn't have the resources to directly be able to help solve the problem. He's trying.

"I'm not going behind her back." Tim sits up, takes his feet down from the other chair, and glares over the desk at Jon. He crosses his arms, and he starts picking at one of the worm scars on his forearm, almost unconsciously.

"It's not going behind her back if it was recorded with her full and knowing consent. If she wanted those tapes taken out of circulation, off the shelves, or away from any of you, then she would say so. Since she hasn't said anything, I'm going to assume that she still approves of other people listening to them. Contrary to your belief, I am not a mind-reader, so if she decides that she doesn't want you- or anybody else- listening to them, then she will need to say so." Jon rebuts, because the tapes were explicitly recorded at her request. She came to the Institute knowing full well that her words would be listened to, both by people in this department and in Research. She knew that her words, once recorded, were under the purview of the Institute- she's been in academia long enough to know how this works.

"God, you sound like Elias." Tim grits out as he stands up. His tone is filled with disdain, and his body language is sharp and angry. He shoves his chair back, nearly hard enough to tip it over entirely, and he braces his hands against Jon's desk as he does. The skin around the old scar is an angry red, but looks more irritated than painful.

"I'm... sorry?" Though it's said like a question, it isn't, really; nothing for Tim to answer. This, at least, is safe.

He doesn't hear what Tim hears with that, though. Whatever way he's echoing Elias is in some way that he's not aware of, because as he runs over what he just said in his mind again, nothing in particular sticks out to him. He sincerely doubts that it's because he's respecting Melanie's autonomy as an intelligent human being with the ability to make choices for herself about her own Statements- Elias would never do such a thing- maybe it's the phrasing? The weird, awkward phrasing where he's actively avoiding asking any kind of question? Probably. Talking feels weird with that particular constraint.

"Just- let me know if you see what I see, the next time you talk to her. I'll figure it out then." Tim says sharply as he turns to leave. He doesn't quite turn his back to Jon, keeping half an eye in his direction as he brushes past the doorway, until he turns the corner towards his desk and half his body is hidden by the wall.

He doesn't miss how Tim said 'I.' Not 'we.' Jon supposes he's been demoted again, from tentative ally back down to occasionally-useful annoyance.

That's... fine. That's fine. Tim is his own person, and he doesn't have to go to Jon for things. He doesn't. He can have his own ideas, he can solve his own problems, and he can make his own plans, because he's his own autonomous being. There's no reason for Jon to be all that upset about it, because he's not exactly on Tim's good side on the best of days. He hasn't really been able to call himself a friend for a long time.

He sighs, and goes back to his notes.