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1.
It is snowing, the first night Jon dreams of other worlds.
The first thing that strikes him as odd that night is the simple ordinariness of the scene: an office building, far richer in sun and space than any he’s ever worked in, its dark oak desks sturdy and shining beneath piles of esoteric books. There are tablets laid out beside those books, most of them attended by what he presumes to be the employees of the institution – one looks like Sasha, another Martin, another – is that Georgie? Huh. Apparently it is. She’s typing away at what looks like a digital copy of something she’s reading. Her Bluetooth keyboard is almost silent. It all feels quite calm, actually, though a tiny thread of tension seems to hang invisibly over the room.
Jon is at a desk, too, sat beside Martin and typing up – oh, dear. This is a statement, it seems. “Statement of Eliza Elliot, regarding a power outage in her neighborhood over the Christmas holiday. Original statement given January 27th, 2026.” Twenty twenty-six? Well. That’s certainly odd.
Martin leans over his shoulder, then, peering at the text. “Oh, a recent one,” he says, perking up.
“Yes, yes, there have been a few Dark-related incidents around this same time frame,” Jon hears himself saying. “Might be worth looking into.”
“And you think Angie will be all right handling those on her own?” Martin, seemingly without any regard for the fact that they’re in the middle of an open-concept office space with half a dozen coworkers, scoots a little closer and rests his chin on Jon’s shoulder, picking up the page and skimming it.
“Maybe,” Jon murmurs, resting his head against Martin’s for a moment. He’s surprised to find that he doesn’t feel embarrassed at the gesture, even here. It feels nice. “Maybe we see if we can get someone to tag along with her if she has any fieldwork.”
“Seems reasonable.” Martin yawns.
Jon takes the statement from Martin and then sets it aside, for some reason, realizing with no small amount of surprise that it isn’t difficult to do so. “Ella,” he calls across the room, “can you take this to Angie? Dark, looks like.”
A tiny brunette woman hums something indistinctly at him, holding up a “just-a-sec” index finger, then marks her place in a book and strides over.
Three things occur to him in rapid succession.
One: he does not recognize this woman’s face. One of the more useful lingering effects of Jon’s time as the Ceaseless Watcher’s special little boy is that he never, ever forgets a face, not anymore. If he had met this woman at any point, he’s certain he’d remember her.
Two: he’d been able to read the words written on that statement. Even at his most lucid, he’s never been able to do that in a dream. Even as he wandered through the night terrors of his victims in the world Before, text and numbers alike had been gibberish to him.
Three: Jon is completely and utterly lucid. He’d been prone to lucid dreaming even before the Eye sunk its claws into his life, and became only more so afterward. And yet, he feels as though he’s a passenger in this body, unable to move or speak of his own volition. He knows that this Jon, the one he isn’t, is only allowed to read statements having to do with the Eye and the End, just as Martin is only allowed to read statements having to do with the Corruption and the Vast, and Angie is only allowed to read statements having to do with the Dark and the Hunt, and so on and so forth – so as to guarantee as much as possible that none of them interacts with all of the Fears. He knows that he and Martin were already engaged when this Sasha encountered them from the first time. For that matter – he realizes with sudden awe – he knows that this is the real Sasha. What is this place? Martin squeezes his shoulders, kisses his temple lightly, and stands, saying something about getting one more email done before they break for lunch. Jon sits bolt upright in bed.
“Jon?” His Martin, the one he woke up with in a nasty London alleyway three years ago, rolls groggily onto his back to look up at Jon. “Y’okay?”
Jon’s eyes rove around the room, searching for evidence of the life he remembers building here. His book is on the bedside table. Martin’s hoodie is draped carelessly over the doorknob the way Jon always fusses at him for. There’s a disturbingly realistic drawing of Mothman on his bulletin board (courtesy of Thomas Green, the neighbor kid). The blinds are still crooked. He collapses back onto the mattress. “Yes,” he says. “It’s – it’s nothing.”
He feels Martin’s raised eyebrow.
Jon heaves a sigh and forces his body to relax. “Just – an odd dream. Not bad! Shockingly not bad, actually.”
Martin stretches and rolls over to face him. A sleep-warm hand lands gently on Jon’s chest, thumb mindlessly stroking over the gap in his ribcage. “Are you – ” he yawns dramatically – “weirded out by normal, non-threatening dreams now?”
It’s an easy out, and Jon decides he doesn’t want to talk about this until he’s had time to think it through. “Mm,” he says noncommittally. “Something like that.” He shivers involuntarily. How did it get so cold?
Martin is already drifting back to sleep. “You sure you’re alright,” he mumbles, eyes already falling closed. His thumb stills on Jon’s ribs.
“Just freezing,” he grumbles, and paws at his husband’s shoulder. “Snuggle me before I die?”
Martin snorts, but obliges, hauling Jon into his arms and heaving the duvet up over the both of them. He settles them so he’s got Jon on top of him, hips between Martin’s knees and head pillowed against his sternum, and he buries his nose in Jon’s hair with a contented sigh. Jon’s entire neck and back shiver with electric pleasure in response.
“Love you,” Martin says into his hair.
Jon kisses his collarbone, and waits for sleep to come again.
2.
The next time it happens, he’s a little more prepared. He’s done some thinking in the interim, and has a few things he wants to make note of. First – he wants to check to see if he can read again. That seems like a good indicator that something strange is going on. Second – he wants to confirm that Martin is there, and that they’re together, somehow. This, if he's being quite honest with himself, is for largely selfish reasons, though it's not irrelevant to what he's trying to figure out either. Third – he wants to confirm that the Fears are there, and that he and – well, whoever he happens to be with – are trying to deal with them. He’s got a baby theory rolling around in his head that he wants to share with Martin once he’s got a little more evidence.
This dream takes a moment longer to recognize. He’s in a coffee shop, frothing milk and humming along with an old crooner love song on the radio. He’s dressed more casually than he has ever dressed for work in his entire life, wearing old faded jeans, cuffed over bloody Converse sneakers, for crying out loud, and some unmemorable graphic sweatshirt with the sleeves shoved up. There’s flour of some kind on his light blue apron, and he’s got the strings doubled over around his scrawny middle.
He realizes something is off when he looks out at a room full of people he’s absolutely never seen in his life, and knows immediately and with great certainty that they’re all quite dear to him. “Anne-Marie,” he calls out, glancing up between writing a sloppy “e” and a crooked smiley face – right, so he can read, and write as well – and a tall redheaded woman in a denim work shirt hurries over to the pickup counter. He knows immediately that she’s here hiding from some entity calling itself “Tara,” which quite thoroughly swept her off her feet for several months before trapping Anne-Marie in her own apartment by transforming it into a swirling labyrinth of foggy corridors. Turning away from her to tend to another order, Jon notices anew the battered old radio on the shelf on the back wall, the way he can’t quite make out the shape of it, and knows that it has something to do with the solace his customers find here.
His heart jumps a little in delight when he hears Martin’s voice behind him. “Hey, Jon,” he says, sounding so familiar and so right it makes Jon’s chest ache a little. “I’m headed upstairs for a moment to see if we’ve got any more of those guided journal things. I know you hate them, but I think this lady might do well with one.”
“I don’t hate them,” Jon scoffs. “I just think they’re patronizing and absurd.”
“Oh, pardon me,” Martin shoots back, but his voice is fond. “You’ll be all right on your own for ten minutes or so?”
“Go on, I’ll be fine.”
Martin squeezes his shoulder and plants a decisive kiss on his head, which Jon automatically leans in to accept. “Text me if you burn the place down.”
“You’ll be the first to know.”
Jon makes coffee. He pulls out pastries from a little glass case. He says hello to the customers he knows he knows, and tells them Martin will be back in a few minutes if they need to talk. Some do, some don’t. He knows as soon as he sees them that they’re here looking for a little security, a little comfort. He also knows that this is the one place they’re sure to find it.
He wakes with a look of vague awe already on his face, feeling for perhaps the first time in years as though he’s been a part of something good and kind and unselfish. The tears he cries into the back of Martin’s hoodie that night aren’t sadness, though in some small quiet corner of his brain he thinks they might be grief. He makes coffee for the two of them the next morning instead of tea, feeling wistful, and wishes that this were one of the worlds where he could make people feel safe.
3.
The university, while a little less cozy, makes a bit more sense.
He’d thought it rather unsettling to hear – feel? – himself having brief, informed conversations in unfamiliar worlds, but it was nothing in comparison with inhabiting his body as it gave a lecture in a university classroom. At the same time, though, this is Jon as he once imagined himself: all tweed jacket and creased slacks and elbow patches, wandering about at the front of a lecture hall with a mug of lukewarm coffee, being paid to talk uninterrupted about something he’s interested in. Hilarious, in a strange and bittersweet sort of way, that it took an apocalypse and a relocation to another universe for him to make it happen.
The lecture he’s giving is mildly informative. He gathers from the syllabus he sees in the corner of his eye that this is a folklore course – “Geography and Mythology.” Today he’s apparently lecturing on the ways folk horror tales have been known to change based on their environment in the United States. Most of it is stuff Jon knows already, either from having found it useful – as much as anything could be – in his research back at the Institute, or from having read it during his many long unattended hours in Bournemouth Library.
There are moments, though, when he catches snippets of something deeper. He offhandedly mentions something about the Mandela effect, and how it applies to some of the stories, going off on a tangent about the theoretical possibility of parallel universes before apologizing for the rabbit trail and getting back on target. Jon, the one who is dreaming, considers the concept anew, wondering whether it’s possible that all these multiple versions of himself and Martin are real and, if so, what it means that he can peer between the worlds? – and – wait, where’s Martin? He’s never seen the students’ faces before, and he’s pretty sure this Jon is subtly mentioning the possibility of proof behind these folk talks for a reason, and he can read the lecture notes. Now he’s just missing his husband.
He waits and worries impatiently through the rest of the lecture, weirdly relieved that this Jon is doing enough pacing back and forth for the both of them.
Martin is, as it turns out, waiting for him in his office with lunch in hand. It’s not a bad spot, the office – toward the end of the hall, so it’s quiet, and with a copy room on one side so he’s got fewer neighbors. There’s an old map of the U.K. taped over the little window. That makes sense. Who wants to feel watched at work?
Jon walks in, finds Martin sitting slouched in his desk chair playing on his phone, and raises a serious eyebrow at him as he closes the door quietly behind him. He locks it. “And who might you be?”
“Oh, hi, sorry,” Martin intones, not looking up from his block puzzle. “I just had a quick question. I know I’ve not done any of the assignments for the entire semester and I’ve only been to class the one time, but I’m really worried about my grades. Do you think I could do some extra credit work?”
Jon snorts. “I’m afraid my office hours don’t begin until two,” he says, sounding utterly unamused.
Martin clicks the screen off, tosses his phone onto the table, and holds up the reusable grocery sack he’s brought. “What if I told you,” he says, raising his eyebrows and leaning in towards him, “that I brought you the rest of the pad thai?”
“Oh, well,” Jon says, dropping his jacket over the back of the chair nearest the door, “In that case, I’m sure we can work something out.”
His life, Jon thinks, as he finds himself sat across Martin's lap in the rolling chair with a warm, strong arm securely around his waist, the his life might have gone rather differently if he’d discovered earlier on just how much he enjoyed being made out with in his office.
4.
This time he’s young, apparently. He wasn’t expecting that.
Not early-days at the Institute, or university, even. No, he’s properly a child here, nine or ten at best, all elbows and ribs and scraped knees and glasses that won’t stay on his nose.
He gathers early on, from little comments by his teacher and the boy she fusses at for bullying Jon – it doesn’t help, of course, but at least she tries – that he is living with a great-aunt in Manchester. A vague recollection springs to mind of a dour-faced old woman visiting, once, whom he’d been told was his grandfather’s older sister. She’d stared daggers at little Jon while speaking to his grandmother about him as though he wasn’t there. Something small and cold and achy knots itself up in his stomach, and he hopes – childishly – that he’ll wake up before it’s time to go home.
Jon has visited worlds in which he walks in unfamiliar shoes, but there is nothing that feels unusual or unexpected to him as he makes his way to an empty corner of the lunch room and pulls out a book.
“Hey.” His eyes snap up. There’s another boy in front of him, several inches taller with round red cheeks and a mop of curly hair. He’s biting his lip and staring at his scuffed-up trainers and holding a sandwich from home. “Can I sit here again?”
Jon looks between him and his book for a moment, feeling torn. He’s just started a new chapter.
“You can tell me about your book, if you’d like. Or about birds again. I really liked hearing about the birds.” The boy looks hopeful. He meets Jon’s eyes.
Jon knows that this boy has been friendly to him. He’s odd, too, like Jon, and they get picked on by the same kids, which at least means they’re not starting off as enemies. He carried a spider outside for him last week, and didn’t say anything when he saw Jon crying a little about it. Jon, having read several books recently in which the main characters had friends who sounded quite nice to be around, has decided that maybe it’s not such a bad idea to try to make one of his own. So he’s trying very hard to be friendly back, even though it’s difficult. He holds his gaze. That’s polite, right?
“Erm, sorry. I didn’t mean to bother you. I just thought – ”
Jon belatedly remembers that you’re supposed to talk, too, when you’re looking at someone, and feels a burst of frustration at how hard it is to do both. “You can sit here,” he snaps.
“I’ll just – what?”
“I said you can sit here,” Jon says, feeling a little impatient and a little anxious now that he can see other kids watching their conversation.
“Oh – oh! Okay. Thanks!” The boy brightens considerably, becoming somehow even pinker than before. “I don’t like being alone.”
Jon tells him a little more about birds. He repeats some things. The boy doesn’t seem to mind.
He wakes from that dream more softly than the rest. It’s summer, now, and he and Martin have drifted to their own sides of the bed over the course of the muggy night. Above them the rickety ceiling fan spins lazy ovals as his eyes adjust to the darkness. He turns onto his side and threads his scarred fingers into Martin’s curls. Of course he knows he’d more likely struggle to forget his childhood face than to remember it – once he’s seen a person, the memory just stays – but still he reaches across and turns his husband’s face ever so slowly towards his own to marvel by moonlight at the shape the years have taken.
“I’m glad I’ve got you,” Jon whispers. He knows Martin doesn’t hear him, but he does stretch a little and press his face into Jon’s palm, which is quite nice anyway.
He crawls gingerly out of bed and puts the fan on high, then presses up to Martin’s back.
5.
The walls are an ugly yellow-brown.
They are stained in that particular way that Jon remembers from his uncle’s house, the one that smelled of smoke and unwashed sheets.
It doesn’t matter.
The walls are an ugly yellow-brown but they are hidden behind the screens, which are of greater importance in any case. The web of tunnels, with its twists and turns and wefts and weaves and dead ends and echoes, can do nothing to the one who watches here. The corridors have nothing to hide from him.
He does not know how long he has been sitting here, contorted in the metal folding chair, but he knows he has no plans to stop. His gaze is relaxed so as to clarify his peripheral vision.
The air is dry the sort of way that scratches your throat as you swallow.
The Archivist blinks one eye, then another, then another, but these are eyes that blink not out of necessity but to confirm to you that they are, in fact, quite real.
There is a man on one of the cameras.
He has run in pointless laps around and around the circling web for some time now. He does not know how long. The Archivist does.
He stands confused at an intersection, now, trying to figure a way that will lead him out. He has not yet realized that there no such way.
This man has hurt people, the Archivist knows. He’s tracked them and tortured them and made them feel small, all smiles and eyes and sharp teeth and promises of pain – no longer because of what he wants, though that might have been how it started, but because of what he is.
The hallway is dark, so very dark. He does not see the camera in the corner.
The archivist blinks one eye, cat-slow and purposeful. The camera lens chirrups.
The man runs.
Around him the web is tightening now, hallways pulling themselves shut like so much clay. The ground is sticky and his steps are slowing. The Archivist Knows that this is what he’s feared since childhood – the chase, with him as target, and the slowing of his steps. There is no one who enjoys being “It” so much as the child who fears being caught.
He is caught now, though. Around him the dark is making room for a pale fog, which swirls around his ankles and blocks his view. He whirls in stuttering circles, looking for its source, but the Archivist knows he won’t find it.
The Archivist’s multitudinous eyes hone in on the cloud as it folds around the man, gathers him up, tucks him in. It roils and builds and bubbles over, taking him Elsewhere, leaving not-quite-nothing behind. There are footsteps, there – the Archivist sees them more than hears, not a presence but a foot-shaped emptiness in the fog.
They approach a camera, and the Archivist lets an eye fall closed. Yes, please.
The fog floods his vision. The corridors are gone. For as long as it is allowed to last, Jon rests.
+1.
Martin wakes, as he often does, to Jon breathing hard beside him.
He must have been in the throes of it for a while now by the looks of it, poor thing. Whatever he’s dreaming has him all twisted up in the sheets and mumbling nonsense, a thin shimmer of sweat on his forehead despite the brisk October chill.
“Jon,” Martin whispers, backing away. As cuddly as Jon is, and as likely as he is to want closeness when he wakes up, he’s never responded well to unexpected hands mid-nightmare.
Beside him Jon tenses, then lets out a plaintive cry, curling in on himself. Martin sits up, alarmed. This is a bad one.
“Jon. Jon. Wake up, it’s not real.” He won’t resort to touching him yet, just in case it goes badly, but he gets to his feet, padding around to Jon’s side of the bed and half-sitting on the edge. “It’s just a nightmare, love,” he says, raising his voice just a bit.
He’s just about to give in and resort to shaking him when Jon gasps and lurches awake, eyes wide, clawing at the blankets.
“Jon, eyes on me,” Martin says, falling into a familiar and oft-tested script. He keeps his posture open and easy. Jon’s gaze jerks over to him and softens a little. “Look at me. We’re here, yeah? We’re safe.”
Jon looks around the room, confirming Martin’s words, and drops sideways into his arms like a sack of stones. Martin wraps as much of himself around Jon as he can manage, rocking them both slowly and whispering nonsense into his hair.
Eventually Jon’s breathing slows, and he turns his face into Martin’s neck. “Thank you,” he whispers.
“Anytime,” Martin says. “Water?”
“I’m all right.”
“Want to talk?”
Jon takes a moment to think this over, and decides not to answer. “Can you – can we lie down?”
“Sure.”
Jon pulls his knees into his chest to let Martin crawl past him, back to his own side of the bed, then watches, almost shyly, as Martin resituates himself under the covers and lifts them invitingly. Then he’s scrambling under the covers as if Martin might rescind the offer, tucking himself under Martin’s chin with his head pillowed on Martin’s arm. “Just tell me if your arm starts going numb,” he says.
“I’m okay for now.”
A full minute passes in silence. The clock limps along in uneven ticking seconds on the wall. A gust of wind creaks through the house, and the tree branch by their window drums its fingers against the glass.
“I think I’ve been seeing parallel universes at night,” Jon says, as though commenting on the weather. “The other worlds where the fears ended up, maybe. I think we ended up there, too. Or some version of us, at least.”
Martin blinks owlishly. “O – kay?”
Jon apparently doesn’t feel that any of this calls for further clarification.
“Care to elaborate on that at all?” Martin prompts.
Jon wriggles backward some more and pulls Martin’s arm tighter around him. “Tomorrow.”
“Great, guess I’ll just put it out of my mind for now, then.”
A contemplative hum. “They’re not all bad,” Jon says. “Some are quite nice, actually.”
“Sorry, how long has this been going on?”
Jon yawns. “Eight months, maybe? But only off and on.”
“Jon. You didn’t think to mention this? Not even once?”
“Mm. In this one we died again.”
“Oh, how lovely is that. Good to know they’re ‘not all bad,’ then, I guess.”
“This wasn’t one of the nice ones.” Jon brings Martin’s hand up to his lips and kisses his palm. “Makes me more grateful for this one, I suppose. At least we get a do-over.” Then he yawns again. “Sleepy,” he murmurs.
“We are absolutely talking about this in the morning, you know. First thing.”
Jon hums something that might be assent and is out like a light.