Chapter Text
Jonathan Sims loved mysteries and hated not finding out the answers. He loved books and hated reading the same thing twice. It had seemed a reasonable solution, then, to become a mystery writer, creating puzzles for himself, which were always unique and always challenging, in the way that he would have to fight for an answer which made sense, within the world he had created.
He didn’t know which he enjoyed more - that deep satisfaction, as the pieces slotted neatly into place, or the tingle of excitement which surrounded the start of a brand new fresh scenario, pulling at him to solve it. And then there was the sheer joy of learning new things as he plunged himself into deep and thorough research (little mortified Jon more than finding himself inaccurate) for whatever scenarios he was currently working on.
There were other benefits to being a writer, though Georgie would have called them - did call them - disadvantages. He had no co-workers to chafe at his, far too easily irritated, edges, and no workplace to drag himself to every day, through all the squeeze and bustle of the streets and trains.
Jon didn’t even need to leave the house, except for meetings with his editor and occasional shopping trips.
Which must be why Georgie had stayed in touch with him after the break-up: for the sole, and malicious, purpose of dragging him out for a tea break, just when he was engaged in some intense plotting or plunging into a rabbit hole of knowledge which just kept getting ever more fascinating as he wound deeper and deeper through the branching warren of facts.
Or, on occasion, she would invite him over to see the Admiral, which was completely unfair, as he obviously couldn’t refuse the siren call of cat. Not even when he had his regular meeting with his editor and would therefore be forced to endure two social encounters in one day.
“Simple solution to that, Jon. Bring Tim to dinner here. I’ve been wanting to meet him for ages, anyway. He sounds like a really good guy.”
“It’s hardly a very professional meeting, Georgie, if I take him to meet my ex. I don’t want to make him uncomfortable.”
“From what you’ve told me, Tim’s the sort of person who’ll take it in his stride. But, sure, maybe you’ve got a point. So, how about you use the wonders of modern technology to call and ask him? If he’s okay with it, great. If not, then you’ll just have to suffer through two whole separate sessions of talking to humans, and then stagger home for a lie down on your fainting couch.”
Jon nobly refused to engage with this base slander.
“Or, I could just come to your house another day.”
Gerogie sighed, somehow far more emotionally eloquent with an exhalation of air, than Jon could general manage with actual words.
“Yes, of course you can, if you really want to. It’s just … look, I know it’s hard, but it’s been a while since … everything. And I just think it wouldn’t hurt to reach out to people a little more. You go days without talking to anyone, Jon, and that’s just not healthy.”
“You mean, that it wouldn’t suit you, so it can’t possibly suit anyone else.”
Georgie didn’t reply straight away and Jon was sure, both that he wasn’t entirely wrong, but neither was he completely correct; and he felt a familiar punch of guilt.
“Sorry, that’s not fair. I know that you actually care about me, for some reason, and … well, maybe you’re right. I’ll ask him.”
“Good. Make sure to check if he likes Hungarian.”
“Oh, you are not doing …”
But she’d already hung up.
~~~
Tim was an excellent editor, with a large number of clients, and few gave him less trouble than Jon Sims. The man hated being caught out in a typo or grammatical error - like some mere human - and was consequently ruthless in his own proofreading, before Tim ever got near it. As for narrative waffle, that was even less common. Jon was observant and descriptive, but rarely redundant.
Despite this, Tim had ended up scheduling meetings with Jon every two weeks to ‘keep abreast of things’ and even he hadn’t realised, at first, that it was mostly because he really liked the guy.
Not so much because he was attractive - though he was, in his own, idiosyncratic, way - but because there was something under his stiff formality which showed through just enough for Tim to want to see more. It helped that Tim loved the books and had resolved immediately not to cave in to the pressure from the publisher to persuade Jon to write an actual series, with a recurring protaganist, instead of the one-shots, each very distinct from each other, which left his readership nothing to cling onto, as a familiar comfort blanket, in each strange new world.
Jon, for his part, had never seemed to question the meetings, even when they got the writing talk out of the way in the first five minutes and proceeded to just plain talking. They covered a lot of topics, from Tim’s latest escapades - skipping the raunchy parts, because Jon evidently didn’t enjoy them - to books, television, and whatever recent obsession Jon had become sucked into, through his research.
It was odd. Jon was so unlike Tim’s brother Danny in almost every way - unsociable, prickly and stay-at-home, as opposed to Danny’s charismatic, charming, adventurousness; not to mention that Danny was tall and unequivocally gorgeous, while Jon was short and quirkily cute - but, when he talked on a subject he was enthusiastic about, they could almost be twins. There was the same fervour, the same clear delight in their voice, the same sense that they could just continue happily for hours, barely pausing for breath.
Maybe that was another reason that Tim liked him.
As for why Jon liked Tim, that was harder to say. Most people liked Tim - not a boast, just a fact - but Jon wasn’t most people and he had definitely found Tim’s company a little overwhelming at first. But they’d managed to find a balance somewhere, a place where their respective senses of humour and underlying sympathies met and, somewhere in their five years of acquaintance, they’d become actual friends.
Yet, somehow, while Jon knew almost everything about Tim’s life, from family to friends, hopes and dreams, most embarrassing moments, and whoever he currently had his eye on, Jon’s own personal life was a complete mystery. There was no way Tim was turning down the opportunity to unearth even a little of it.
Now he just needed to find a good wine to go with something Hungarian.
~~~
There had been a time when someone like Tim - affable, confident, almost certainly from a family which either skiied, or could have skiied, if they’d wanted to - would have triggered a certain insecurity in Georgie. An instant defensiveness, as she waited for him to notice the way she dressed, the way she talked; the things she didn’t know and didn’t understand, having not been born in the correct circles.
Not everyone she had met at university was a wanker, of course, but there had been enough to make an impression, with their outright sneering, sowing of non-specific discomfort, or even that sincere effort to make her feel that it didn’t matter, which did precisely the opposite.
Nowadays, Georgie was a lot more comfortable in her own skin; whether despite, or because of, the whole … incident, it was hard to say. And Tim Stoker turned out to be absolutely delightful, full of life and fun, but without any of that reckless cruelty of those who didn’t care if their own fun came at the expense of anybody else’s. He was just the sort of friend Jon needed; someone who would tease him out of his shell a bit, but not yank too hard and tear at his carefully guarded vulnerabilities.
“So, Jon says you like kayaking? I’ve done a little myself.”
Georgie had gone through a brief thrill-seeker phase after the incident, finding that nothing really terrified her any more. Once you’d looked death in the face and walked away, everything else was just … a little tame. Almost meaningless.
And, though she’d calmed down, after a little bit, and begun to feel things properly again (around the time she’d met Jon, and realised, pretty quickly, that he’d been through something of his own) she was still a little bolder in her activities than before. It was probably why she’d ended up starting a ghost-hunting podcast. Not, of course, for fear of the ghosts - that was just a bit of spooky fun and she’d be more delighted than unsettled to find a real one - but for the thrill of putting herself out there, unapologetic and real.
Tim was eloquent on the subject of kayaking, including the story of his very ignominious first time, when he’d spent more time in the water, than in the kayak. They ended up continuing the conversation after the meal, settling on the sofa, while Jon vanished to her bedroom to commune with the Admiral, who was a little grumpy about having an extra visitor without being consulted and had slunk off to sulk.
“You know, I’m surprised that Jon’s told you so much about me. He’s never been very forthcoming about … well, anything, really. Except the last documentary he watched or a frankly staggering amount of detail about ice cream.”
Georgie nodded. “Yeah, he’s kind of closed off with most people. He’s got his reasons, but … I worry about him sometimes. Glad he’s got you, though. This is pretty momentous, him letting me invite you over. Especially when there’s a risk of you seeing him with the Admiral. Honestly, it’s like clicking a little button that switches on ‘Adorable Mode’.”
Which naturally led to them sneaking up to the bedroom door, like conspiratorial school children, to peek in. Jon was sitting against the headboard, legs crossed and very full of cat; both of them clearly quite besotted with each other. Neither one noticed the intruders, who snuck stealthily away, grinning at each other.
Georgie would have exchanged numbers, then, and said her goodbyes, but it turned out that Tim had no evening plans and was absolutely delighted to be invited to help with editing Georgie’s next podcast recording. She could do this part alone, of course, had done so for most of its existence, but Melanie helped out more and more often these days and working on her own left a small, but nagging, absence.
It was funny how quickly she had fallen for Melanie King. Tough, scrappy, down on her luck, even spikier than Jon. Georgie thought there was a better balance between them, though, something that felt right. With Jon, they had needed and helped and genuinely loved each other, but they weren’t either of them in the right place for romance. With Melanie, there was something visceral, something with sparks.
Tim grinned at her. “Sounds like a firecracker.”
“In so many ways.”
Uh oh, she was at the oversharing stage; and far too early in the evening.
“How about you? Any hot prospects?”
“Dozens. But I’m not really the settling down type. Besides, I have a friend and … we have a thing. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but it seems to work.”
Georgie had honestly meant to let Tim do most of the talking while she worked, but then he told her about three manuscripts at once coming in, which were barely fictionalised versions of the Devil’s Fourteen, and she couldn’t hide her reaction.
“Shit, sorry. Did you know someon … you know what, never mind, it’s none of my business.”
“No, no, it’s okay. It was a few years ago. A friend of mine, Alex. She … he killed her right next to me. While I watched.”
She held up her hand to prevent more apologies.
“It’s okay. Really. There was no way you could have known and I’ve had a lot of therapy. It’s … I’m not saying I’m completely over it, but it doesn’t dictate my life anymore. But, just a warning? Maybe don’t bring that story up with Jon either.”
Tim opened his mouth to ask and then closed it and nodded. She smiled at him and tapped the computer.
“So, do I go for the playful reading, or the ‘Dark and Dreadful Things Have Happened Here’ reading?”
On careful consideration, they both voted Dark and Dreadful Things; and shook hands on it afterwards.
~~~
Tim had left long before Jon woke up, groggy and disoriented from his slumped position on Georgie’s bed; the Admiral purring against him and spread over far more of his body than a cat should surely be able to cover; more meat for his theory that cats had their own personal physics, which they refused to share with the class.
He hadn’t meant to fall asleep: just to have a little quiet time with the Admiral, soothing his never-quite-absent worries and tensions with soft fur and softer purrs and uncomplicated affection, and then go back and be sociable for an hour. But he’d hit a wave of inspiration, recently, and sleep had sort of been held back and further back, in the queue of necessary things, until it had evidently become impatient and barged right to the front.
“I hope you haven’t drooled on my covers, Jon, I just changed them. Come on, you can take the couch.”
Jon checked his watch and raised his eyebrows.
“Oh, good lord! I’m so sorry, Georgie, I’ll just leave —”
“My room, yes, to sleep on the couch. You’re not going home this late.”
Jon checked his watch again. It hadn’t suddenly leapt back to any sensible hour.
“Right. I suppose not. Thank you, Georgie.”
Jon settled down on the couch, with a heavy blanket and a mind which felt just as heavy, but was now suddenly refusing to give in to peer pressure. The earlier sleep had been just enough to prevent him from succumbing again, but not enough to make him significantly less tired.
And, as usual, when constructive thought was impossible, fear and troubled memory raised their hands and volunteered to take charge.
Jon had wandered often as a child. It was never anything intentionally done to annoy, as he supposed his grandmother must have thought, but simply the result of following some train of thought or curious thing and losing himself to it.
He had wandered often, that is, until just after his eighth birthday. His grandmother had gotten him the usual mismash of books, hoping that one or two of them, at least, would be novel enough to keep him still and quiet for a little while.
He had taken one to the park to read, promising to be back in an hour and meaning it. It was a cold afternoon, but those were the best times - when the sky was dull and the chill was settled over everything like spite - because he was rarely interrupted; and when Jon was reading he never felt the cold. It wasn’t until afterwards, when he had emerged from his word-drunk haze, that it would bite into his thin arms and clutch him tight all the short walk home.
No one was at the park but Jon, when he started reading. He wasn’t sure what noise it was that had distracted him. A muffled groan or plea, something terrified but muffled, the sense of wrongness rippling through the air and distorting it.
He should have run away immediately. The thought did cross his mind, as an option, a thing he could choose. He really should have run.
But fear warred inside him with a need to know and a desire to help and he’d moved before he had consciously come to a decision. Towards the noise, not away.
Jon had turned a corner and froze.
He saw a shape on the ground and a shape curving over it, moving, darting, weaving patterns on their skin. He saw the layers underneath the surface, the parts that didn’t want to be visible and fought against the blade forcing them to give up their secrets, to open them, wrenched and bare, to the baleful, judging sun.
And there were those choked and stifled noises, all the while, so Jon knew for sure that the person was still alive when he jumped forward: desperate to do something, anything, to get it to stop. He didn’t think it was bravery, or even stupidity. Only the knowledge that they were hurting so much, he literally couldn’t bear it and even death was preferable.
And death he should have got. Jon had startled the carver of skin and caused him to pause in his work for a moment, but whatever words he was using were childish and babbled and nothing that could turn him from his purpose.
Instead, he made one last, and final, movement of the knife - silencing those noises at last, though not in Jon’s mind, where they lived even now - and then picked Jon up, like some curious object he’d found; stared at him with honest bewilderment; then reached into his pocket and tapped at his arm with something sharp.
The world went wobbly, then grey, then vanished completely.
Jon jerked upright and tried, and failed, to wrap the blanket tight enough to keep him from memory.
It would linger here now, he knew it, and gnaw him down to the bone. So, he left a note for Georgie; and walked the long way home, through the last cold traces of night.
~~~
Martin wasn’t a natural morning person, but he’d trained himself to be so, over years of looking after his mum - of needing to be there for her whenever she was in pain or wanted someone to take out her anger on - so that it wasn’t much of an adjustment to take the early shift and brave the sullen, snappish customers who were just finishing work, or just starting, and who needed their coffee or tea or lemon poppy seed muffin, to claw themselves back to the status of human.
It wasn’t exactly what he’d envisioned for himself, but he was lucky to have a job at all after the last one, when they’d found out about his creative CV choices - and by such a ridiculous coincidence - and let him go, under a a big sulky cloud. They’d barely listened to his story, the way his academic ambitions had fallen to his mother’s illness and how he’d grown increasingly desperate and trapped. And he’d been very good at that job, damn it; but he’d relaxed a little too much and forgot to be afraid all the time and look where that got him.
Though, there were a few perks. His first customer of the day, for example, a man who came in once or twice a week - though never quite this early before - and whom Martin had sort of, a little bit, adopted as his own personal muse.
It hadn’t been intentional. And there hadn’t been any ‘eyes meeting across a crowded coffee shop’ moment, or anything close. Martin’s muse was polite enough, in the usual distant way, but would probably not even recognise him outside this place. As far as he was concerned, Martin vanished into non-existence, the moment that the tea was handed over and the transaction was done.
But there was something about him that lodged inside Martin and refused to leave. The grey streaks in his rich, dark hair, perhaps, which lent him a certain distinction beyond his years. The way that he stood so straight and rigid, with either a heightened sense of dignity or as some form of protection, around a deeply vulnerable core.
The fact that he had notebooks, not pristine and crisp, but endearingly dog-eared, like Martin’s own; and would be deeply intense as he wrote in them.
The flow of his cheekbones, which stopped him from being merely ‘cute’ and put him into some other category, which Martin couldn’t quite explain, but really, really liked.
And his eyes, of course. That had been the first thing Martin had been hooked in by and he’d never quite got down on paper why. Somehow, he felt that if he did, it might be his first genuinely good poem, as opposed to merely workmanlike.
Right now, taking the usual order, he felt that he was right on the verge of finding the words.
“So, uh, what’s your name?”
Those eyes snapped back from some distant place and sharpened on Martin.
“I’m sorry?”
“Oh, it’s just that I see you in here quite a lot and we’ve never, you know, talked and … well, it’s nice to put a name to the face?”
He was doing that again, the nervous highness to his voice, the turning a statement into a question, as if he had precisely no confidence in any word which came out of his mouth. He’d gotten a little better, working at the library, more confident, more like he was worthy of … well, something. And now it had all come crashing down again.
He almost missed it when the man blinked at him and responded.
“Jon. My name’s Jon.”
“Oh, great! Thank you! My name’s Martin!”
Jon’s eyes flickered to his name badge, but thankfully he kept the ‘well, obviously’, which he was so clearly thinking, in his head. Abruptly, Martin realised how tired he looked. How something soft and sad pressed down on him and made even the air around him feel listless and bruised.
“Thank you for the tea, Martin.”
Jon turned to leave, then hesitated a moment.
“It’s … always made very pleasantly.”
“Thank you!” Oh god, could he sound any more inane? “I always aim to please.”
Yes. Yes, apparently he could.
Jon nodded and half smiled at him anyway, before going to sit at his usual table, cupping the tea like a flame he couldn’t allow to go out; staring into nothing.
Martin stared for a while too, before catching himself and getting on with preparations. More customers would come in soon and it wouldn’t do to make errors. He’d been clumsy a couple of times, forgot some things; they’d let it go, so far, but he needed this job too badly to be careless.
To be moonstruck by a man he didn’t even know.
Just as he was checking the coffee stocks, the door opened and a tall figure came in, shrouded in a heavy coat and hood. They didn’t come to the counter, though; instead walking straight to Jon’s table.
“Jonathan Sims?”
Something about that voice made Martin uneasy, though he couldn’t have pinpointed why. The tone itself was pleasant enough; almost musical.
“Yes? Oh. Oh no.”
It happened too fast for Martin to fully understand, let alone intervene. He thought that Jon tried to run. The chair went over, in any case, clattering to the floor with its legs all startled and stiff. But she moved too fast, snaking out an arm with just the hint of some dark marks showing, horrible little tattoos of holes and squirming things.
Or maybe he only guessed at that later, after he knew more.
In any case, she grabbed at him and he fought for just a moment before going limp in her arms. Jon wasn’t large, in any sense, but she still must have been very strong to have lifted him like she did and carried him away, vanishing through the door as if she’d never been. Martin was left in shock, frozen, wishing he could have moved, have interfered, have done something.
As soon as his legs unlocked - a second, a thousand years later - he ran outside to see nothing but empty streets and no sign of either of them nor any indication of which direction they’d gone.
Then he turned back to the shop, too much in shock to notice he was shaking, until it took him a whole seven tries to successfully dial the police.
Martin turned the cafe sign to ‘Closed’ and stared blankly at his poetry notebook - the words emptied of all meaning - until they arrived.