Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jon was having a bit of a crisis at the moment, while not as large as most of his life's crises, it did still count, at least to Jon. He had finally gotten the archives to a point where he could start putting the organized files on their own shelves, but he realized he didn’t know how to organize the shelves themselves. He knew they needed to be organized by entity, but what about the Statements with multiple entities? The solution was simple: they would of course go to the shelf that has the most prominent entity, but now he needed a way for someone just glancing at the Statement to know that it held more than just the shelf it was on.

Jon let out a sigh as he let his head fall to his desk. 

“I’ve been at this problem for an unreasonable amount of time.” 

He turned to the tape recorder on his desk that had clicked on when he spoke. 

“I don’t suppose you have any bright ideas? Hmm?” 

He got no response. 

“Figures.”  

He goes to sit up in his seat when the image of his bottom left desk drawer comes to mind with the same static feeling he gets when he has any interaction with his patron. His hand goes to open the drawer without any real thought, it’s only after he has it open most of the way does he consciously realizes he’s done it. That small action a few months ago would have concerned him with how easily he gave into The Eye, but after meeting Jude, and MIke, and everything that happened with Nikola, and the uncertainty of the Unknowing, it’s become much easier to just give into The Eye. He’s learned that if he stops fighting it so much and reads an appropriate amount of Statements then it’s much more forthcoming with information and leads to way less headaches as well. Looking in the drawer leads to Jon seeing something he’d forgotten about. Some years ago when Georgie and Jon were still together she’d gotten him quite a few different sticky tabs in a wide variety of colors as a gag gift, he’d brought them to the office when he first got the job as the archivist just in case, but with everything going on he’d forgotten about them. Now it seems he finally found a use for them. Now the biggest question Jon had to ask was what color to give each entity. It should be a non-issue to just grab a random color for each and go on to the daunting task of marking each Statement, but something in him rebelled at the idea of picking just any old color for each classification. It felt more important than that for some reason like the decision would have consequences. 

“What now?” Jon exclaimed, turning back to the tape recorder, “What could be so important about the colors of the sticky tabs I use?” 

He was given an image of the archives storage room where he plans to put the newly filed Statements and he sees them all nicely filed and he sees the tabs and could feel that they weren’t right. It seems to make the room feel stale and oppressive. The Statements themselves felt oppressed and dim in a way he’d never felt before like they’d been trapped in a too small box and were being crushed. Nothing objectively wrong with the room or the Statements, but it reminded him of how the archives felt when he first came down here. How it felt when Gertrude was still The Archivist. That concerned him; he never wanted the archives to ever feel the way they did when she was The Archivist. This was his archives now and he ran them his way and it showed in the way the archives feel now. The image changed to the same room, but with the tabs being the right colors. He couldn’t make out what those colors were, but he just Knew that they were the correct ones. He could feel the difference in the room instantly. It felt more open, inviting, and calm, not like something was just itching to escape, but like things were almost peaceful. He didn’t really get why but for some reason it became clear to him that if he wanted to label the Statements with sticky tabs then he had to do it correctly. It might have something to do with making sure the Statements were being treated with respect or not being put with, or next, to something they didn’t agree with. The Statements could be testy like that, putting a Dark Statement next to a Desolation Statement is just asking for a headache. He could feel in the back of his head how upset the Statements were, he’d never know how Gertrude just ignored it, maybe that’s why she was such an awful person she was just always in a bad mood because of the feeling of the archive. Nonetheless, Jon could deal with the question of why they needed to be color-coded in a specific way later. For now, Jon had to figure out what colors were the right ones so he could get onto the task of organizing the Statements.  

The first entity should hopefully be easy enough, his own. The Eye, The Ceaseless Watcher, the thing that he unwillingly serves. Jon reaches into the drawer with all of the tabs and starts to dump them onto his desk. He spreads them out in a somewhat orderly way, he organizes them into colors and then by shade of color to better get a look at what he’s working with. 

“Well, got any opinions?” Jon looks back to the tape recorder that was still recording. “Because I've got no idea what color you’d like”.  

Jon let out a sigh. “You really couldn’t be that easy could you”?

‘ Let’s try something else then’ he thinks as he brings his hand over the different shades of pink pile. He goes to reach any of them when he gets NO directly planted into his head. Static full and slightly violent. 

“Alright, alright, not that one I get it. No need to be so harsh” he brings his hand to the red’s next and gets the same result just a bit less violent. 

“Thank you” Jon nods his head towards the recorder. 

After a few more tries he gets to the greens and gets a YES instead. This time the static lacks any sort of harshness and instead is a soft buzz that he’s come to recognize as The Eye being pleased, or as pleased as it could get at the very least. He’s still not quite sure how much emotion the entities really feel. Getting out of his inner musings Jon repeats the process over the different shades of green until he lands on a darker earther green. The Eye so helpfully supplies that it’s called the British Racing Green. The name makes Jon snort. He looks around his office for a Statement that has The Eye as its primary and luckily finds one. He stares at it for a moment memorizing what it felt like, like it’s beckoning to him, and almost like home. He tries not to think about what that means. He puts the tab on the top left-hand corner, just where I’d be sticking out slightly if placed on a shelf. The Statement itself doesn’t feel all that different, just a little happier, and more content at being labeled correctly. There’s none of that oppressive feeling from before in the image that The Eye showed him. The Eye itself also gave a soft buzzy static feeling in the back of his head in appreciation.

“Well it would seem as if you’re satisfied at the very least” Jon exclaimed to The Eye. 

“Now just to figure out what colors go to the other entities” He was not looking forward to that.

Chapter Text

In theory, finding out the colors each entity wants should have been a relatively easy thing to do. All Jonathan Sims had to do was ask The Eye and it could guide him like it did for its own sticky tab. Except apparently, it could not. The Eye was as useless as it normally is when Jon had a real problem. It apparently couldn’t speak on behalf of the other entities, or maybe it just didn’t want to, Jon wasn’t sure, and he’d hit his quota for trying to understand The Eye for this month. That is what led to his current dilemma, figuring out how to ask a bunch of Avatars what color they think best represents their entity. While on paper that doesn't sound too hard in reality most Avatars he had interacted with before have in some way tried to kill him, and all seem to hate him asking questions. ‘This is starting to seem like a real hazard to my health’ Jon thought to himself as he stared at the sticky tabs still laid out on his desk. He really wasn’t quite sure where to go from here. He tried asking Melanie and Daisy for their opinions on the Slaughter and Hunt respectively. That just led to Melanie threatening to stab him, and Daisy growling at him with a lecture from Basira. In retrospect that went about as well as he expected. Not one of his most well-thought-out plans, but it did leave him stuck trying to figure out who to ask next, and how to not get killed in the process. 

“How has my life gotten to the point where I have to debate how not to get killed for asking what color someone wants to represent them in filing?” Jon exclaimed exasperated to no one but himself, and most likely The Eye watching him. 

His first thought would be to call Mike Crew and ask him, but the last time he talked to the man Daisy almost killed him. She would have to if he had not lied to her and told her he was human. He felt bad at almost getting him killed, and figured Mike would want nothing to do with him and might even try and kill Jon himself. So, Mike was out, the next that came to mind would be Julia Montaku and Trevor Herbert. They however had most likely figured out that he had taken Gerry’s page though and would probably want to kill him more than answer an office supply question. This left him stuck back at square one as the only other Avatars he knew were Jude Perry, Michael, and Nikola Orsinov all of whom have left a permanent reminder on his body of their interactions.  

“I need a break” Jon let out a sigh and ran his hand down his face. He stood from his desk and headed to the break lounge to make himself a cup of tea. With everything happening Martin has been distancing himself from Jon and the others and hasn’t been around to make much tea nowadays. Jon tried not to think of him too much about how it was his fault that Martin was pulling away from the archives. It seems to always be his fault when things go wrong. Jon, lost in thought, hadn't even realized he’d made it all the way to the break room until he almost walked into the door. He always seems to get so distracted when thinking about Martin. Jon was glad that the archives were empty today as he really didn’t want to get into another altercation with someone. It feels as if every time he leaves his office now someone is waiting to start a fight or threaten him. Its tiring being around so many hostile people, but it’s not their fault that they're stuck here, he can understand them being frustrated. He just wished they didn’t take said frustrations out on him. Jon managed to get his tea ready and mostly drinkable while lost in thought about the state of the interpersonal relations in the archives. While he seems to be doing a lot of thinking about his friendship problems he’s still at a loss as to what to do with his filing problems. 

He ponders solutions as he makes his way back to his office with tea in hand. As he goes to close the door behind him, he looks to the corner of the room and is met with a spider staring back at him. The Eye so helpfully informs him it's a Salticus scenicus, more commonly known as the Zebra spider. A kind of jumping spider that’s found primarily across Europe, North America, and North Asia, and is not venomous. That, admittedly, did not really help Jon all that much because venomous or not it is still a spider. He stops in his tracks and instinctually goes to grab Martin and ask him to get the spider and put it outside. He again stops mid-motion remembering Martin isn’t in the archives today and is with Peter Lukas in the upper offices discussing, well something, Jon’s not actually sure what they talk about. So, Martin is out to help him with his spider problem, and after the last time Jon killed a spider in his office, he’s not too keen on trying again. He’d rather not repeat knocking a hole in his wall and releasing a bunch of worms into his archives. That leaves him with two options: going out into the main area and finishing his work for the day or sitting in his office with a spider in it. While it is a slim chance, there is still the chance of one of the other archival staff coming into work today, and Jon really does not want to be sitting at one of their desks working if that were to happen. He can imagine the argument over it now, just as a way to argue with him. That leaves him with the only option to sit in the same room with a spider staring at him while he works. He hopes The Web is getting a good meal out of this because Jonathan Sim is not having a good time. He slowly shuts his door and walks the long way to his desk keeping eye contact with the spider the whole way. It felt a little silly, but Jon didn’t want to be the one to break eye contact first. The spider seemed to get bored of him quickly though because no sooner than he had sat down the spider went back to ignoring him and spinning its web. Jon attempted to get back to work looking over statements and distinguishing the real from fake ones, but he couldn’t get rid of the feel of sider legs crawling across his back. 

After suffering for a solid 30 minutes in silence Jon gave up his attempt to get real work done and turned back to watching the spider apprehensively.

“Well, do you have any preference in color for The Web’s sticky tab?” Jon asked the spider not really expecting an answer, but it would hopefully give his mind something to think about besides fear.

“Are you even connected to the web? Or is that just the spiders the web currently wants?” As he’s talking out loud to himself a tape recorder turns on. Jon barely pays any attention so used to them clicking on whatever he speaks aloud questions, or if The Eye thinks something interesting is going to happen.

Jon coming back to reality after almost getting lost in his head again notices the spider looking back at him now with what could almost be considered confusion and intrigue. Not that Jon is convinced it could feel those emotions. The spider's head is even cocked to the side slightly.

“Huh, I don’t really think I like that.” The spider tilts his head farther to the side, seemingly just to spite Jon and his words.

“Oh. I guess I got your attention. Uhhh what about yellow?” Jon brings his hand over the yellow pile, his hand slightly shaking. He is seriously questioning his decision-making skills at the current moment. 

The spider doesn’t react.

“For the sake of my sanity, I’m going to take your lack of a reaction as a no.” Jon really didn’t know if his psyche could handle him speaking to a normal spider with no connection to The Web and asking its opinion on color.

Jon pushes through the thoughts of his own instantly and goes to the pink pile next. The spider continues to stare at him unmoved. It’s really freaking Jon out now, but he can’t stop, he has to Know. He moves to greens next and feels strangely happy at the no movement from the spider. He feels oddly possessive over green now that The Eye has claimed it as its own. He hopes that isn’t going to come back to bite him later if some of the entities want similar colors, but knowing his luck… At the very least it’s not a problem now. Jon now out of whatever trance he was previously in feels a little silly asking a random spider for its opinion on color. He does still want to know though and figured he’d try one more. What’s the worst that could happen?

Jon, still keeping eye contact with the spider, put his hand over the pile of purples. Something strange happened with the spider, its head moved back to normal, but something about the way it moved was off somehow like it was being pulled by some unseen force and not a fluid movement that moving one's body should be. Jon wants to leave all of a sudden, he goes to stand up and finds he can’t. His legs didn’t even twitch in response, he couldn't get his head to look away from the spider, he couldn't even get his hand to move away from the pile of purple tabs. He sat frozen, his body not responding; it felt like his strings were pulled tight. What has he done?

His phone rings.

He goes to answer it, but it’s not him telling his body to move. He looks at the caller ID and he doesn’t recognize the number; under normal circumstances he’d not answer unknown calls on his personal phone. This is anything but normal though and it seems as if he doesn't get a choice on whether to answer it or not as his body moves again without his will and he picks up the call.

“Hello?” Jon’s voice is shaking. It's the first thing that this strange presence is letting him choose. His body is still completely under its control though whatever is happening someone wants to talk to him it would seem.     

“Why hello to you as well Jonathan Sims I don’t believe we’ve gotten to speak before! It would seem as if Bethany over in the corner of your office has many positive things to say about you though!” The voice on the other line is a female cheery, but polite. Jon doesn’t recognize the voice, but there's something about it he feels like he should know. Something about this woman inches at his brain. 

“Bethany? As in the spider?” Jon's voice is still shaking; he's terrified, but now he’s also curious.

“Yes! As in the spider, she's lovely, isn’t she?” The voice sounds so pleased and proud of Bethany.

“Who are you?” Jon comes off more harsh sounding than he means to, but he is terrified and is starting to suspect he knows who is on the other line and he doesn't think this call is going to go well for him. 

“Oh, where are my managers? It would seem as if I hadn't introduced myself yet. I do apologize I am usually better than that. I’m Annabelle Cain.”

Jon really should have just left things alone.

Chapter Text

Jonathan Sims has made a lot of mistakes in his life, an alarming number of them have nearly gotten him killed. He had not however considered that color-coding his paperwork would lead to one such situation. Jonathan Sims is often wrong.

“I would say it is a pleasure meeting you, Ms. Cane, but then I would be lying," Jon really should quit talking, but his fear is quickly turning into anger at her for compelling his body the way she is and for apparently stalking him with a spider named Bethany. Who names a spider Bethany anyway?

“Now, Jon, no need to get so hostile. I just have a few questions for you, you can understand, can’t you?” Her voice is smug, and Jon hates how she’s not wrong. 

“If questions are your only goal, then is body compulsion necessary?” It takes everything in Jon to not let his voice shake.

“Oh, dear me I do apologize I hadn’t realized I was still controlling you.” For what it’s worth she does sound apologetic, but Jon still doesn’t believe a word of her fake sincerity. 

Jon’s body is so suddenly his own again he almost doesn't catch himself as he starts to fall forward in his chair. He takes a sharp intake of breath and pulls himself right way up. He can hear a slight muffled giggle on the other side of the phone. He gives Bethany a dirty look. Bethany does not react.  

Jon takes a deep breath centering himself.

“What questions do you have for me, Ms. Cane?”

“Oh, nothing much. I was having an evening tea when I felt a strange tug from one of my spiders. She had noticed something quite interesting, and so I just had to peek in! Imagine my surprise when I see Jonathan Sims talking to a spider in his office about sticky tabs of all things. I will admit I had a bit of a laugh. Then I realized just what you were doing and well my laughter quickly stopped. Tell me Watcher, are you even aware of what you started, what this truly means?”

Jon was getting more annoyed and confused the longer this conversation went on. What is with all of these Avatars and being so cryptic.

“Look, Ms. Cane, all I wanted to do was find a better organization system. This was just the one that made the most sense. I’m sorry if I bothered your pet spider with it.” He knew leaving that spider in his office was a bad idea. 

“Oh, what an interesting response. You know webs are such intricate things with so many twists and turns to make beautiful, but deadly, patterns. I find that people are oh so similar in their decisions never really knowing what they are going to decide until they do, and then having to face the consequences. Hoping their decisions have led to a sturdy web that will weather any storm and catch any bug but, more than not, they unravel.” 

“What does any of that have to do with my organization systems in The Archives?” Jon was beginning to wonder if Annabelle was just messing with him. It wouldn’t be the first time an Avatar had had a laugh at Jon’s expense.

“You really do ask so many questions.” Jon felt a shiver run down his spine, but before he could respond, Annabelle continued speaking.

“Let me ask you another. Why go through all the trouble of finding out which color represents each entity for your organization? Wouldn’t it have been easier just to choose a color and put the entity to it?” Annabelle's voice had a sort of intensity in it that it hadn’t before. Jon wasn’t quite sure why this question seemed to matter so much to her, but he understood that this question out of this entire conversation was why she called. This is what she wanted, and Jon had no idea why.

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything, however, I will answer to the best of my abilities. To answer your question I have to explain some things about The Archives. When I first became head archivist the, well I guess the best way to say it, the feel of the place was oppressive and dark. I could feel the place calling out to me. I of course didn’t realize that’s what was happening at the time. I had naturally assumed the dark feeling I had was just my own annoyance at the utter mess the archives were in. Later after I learned about the entities and The Eye I realized it was more than just my own feelings about the situation. I could feel The Archives, it's like they're alive somehow. The Statements are the same, but different. Where The Archives are mine and solely mine the statements aren't. That’s not to say they aren't still mine because they are, but a part of them is still connected to the entities and avatars they’re about. I could feel how angry and hurt the archives and the statements were at being in such disarray. The more I learn about Gertude Robinson the more I know she did it on purpose, as a way to hurt not just The Eye, but the other entities as well. I may not like the situation I’m in or whatever I’m Becoming, but I know that I never want my Archives to feel the way hers did. When I realized I wanted to organize The Archives by entity I decided color was the best way to go. When I imagined them just shoved on the shelves with whatever color tab was convenient the room felt the same way it did when I first came down here. The Eye was surprisingly helpful in that matter actually. I did a test with The Eye by choosing its color and The Statement felt right in a way it hadn't before.” Jon didn’t mean to talk as long as he did, but everything he said was the truth. He just hopes it’s what Annabell was looking for. 

She takes a second to respond. 

“I see. You Jonathan Sims are full of surprises. It would seem as if The Eye and The Mother are changing plans.” Annabelle let out a laugh before continuing. “I think we are going to be friends, Jon I really do. As to the question you posed Bethany, the third purple in the first row you have there will do nicely.” 

Jon looked down at the one Annabelle had said and noticed it was Russian Violet . Jon still wasn’t sure what this entire conversation was about, but he was glad that it seemed as if Annabelle was pleased with the outcome. Hopefully, that meant she wouldn’t be attempting to join the surprisingly long list of people trying to kidnap and harm him. He wasn't getting his hopes up though, she wanted to be friends she said, and that had somehow never gone particularly well for Jon.  

“Thank you, Ms. Cane, I will adjust my files according to the color you picked out.”

“Oh, it’s no problem at all Jon, no problem at all.” Something about the way she said that made Jon shiver. “Also, you can call me Annabelle, we are friends now are we not?”

Jon really did not want to call her Annabelle, but his desire to not anger the spider lady won out more. 

“Alright, Annabelle.”

“Well I must be going now Jon, it has been lovely talking to you. Such an insightful conversation. Oh! Before I forget I don’t think you’ll have to worry about figuring out the next color. That should be sorted out soon. Have a good day.” And with those final terrifying words, Annabelle Cane hangs up the phone. 

That had to have been the strangest phone call Jon had ever had. He wasn’t really sure what to make of most of it, and the ending felt strangely ominous. He didn’t know what she meant by “sorted”, but he was honestly quite afraid to find out. At least he got his second color tab out of it. Jon goes to put the tabs away and heads home for the day when he notices that Bethany is gone. He packs up much quicker at that realization.