Work Text:
"Get out."
Tim's statement is guttural, the last word of it sounding like it was dragged up his throat from the bottoms of his lungs, accompanied by the general idea that he would not hesitate to physically snap if he had to continue to insist. He doesn't turn around, instead making eye contact through the mirror, with his knuckles white against the edge of the sink and his hair dripping with water.
Jon stares back at him, accidentally catching a glimpse at himself in the mirror while he's at it. He looks pale, with his old, grey sweater hanging off of him and making him look even worse than he feels.
He hesitates and mentally fumbles for a response for just slightly too long, and that ends with Tim reaching over and grabbing a bottle of hand soap and hurling it at him. Jon ducks out of the door and closes it. He hears- and feels- the soap hit the door exactly where his head had been.
"I told you to leave."
Less guttural. Tim's in a better mood, perhaps, or maybe he's just too tired. Jon opens the door a little more, and he hears the plastic of the little soap bottle scrape on the floor as he pushes it aside.
"I did," Jon sighs, "And now I'm back."
They stare at each other through the mirror for a moment, Jon taking the chance to open the door a little wider. He takes a breath, and then another two, each time nearly about to say something then cutting himself off before he does something stupid. Tim holds still, just watching him through the mirror.
"Not to try to pick a fight or anything, but this is the only toilet in the Archives," Jon tries, at least hoping to diffuse the situation. The room itself is a single stall- not even a stall- with a toilet in the corner and a urinal across from it. It locks from the inside, at least, but evidently Tim either doesn't care about his privacy or just forgot about the lock.
"Go upstairs." Tim's response is short, and it's clear enough that even if he's not quite in the same towering temper as before, he's approaching it.
Jon knows a losing battle when he sees one. He ducks back out of the room, shutting the door behind him.
"How long are you going to camp out in here, exactly?"
Jon feels his own voice go a bit thready, not that he expects it to have any effect on Tim. He's stepped fully into the bathroom now, with the door shut behind him. He thinks about locking it for a moment, then decides against it. He wouldn't want Tim to feel trapped, at least, no more trapped than he already feels with the... everything.
"You only come in here when you're looking for me. Do you even need a toilet anymore? I mean, I doubt you even eat, and what sort of shit comes out of reading a Statement?"
Tim's knuckles aren't so white anymore. His shoulders are slumped, and after a moment of silence- of Jon refusing to rise to the bait- he breaks eye contact and stares down at the sink.
"Are you done?" Jon asks, a bit of his old and well-practiced affect seeping into his voice. He can still do a good reproachful tone, it must be said, despite everything that's changed and how he's changed with it. He crosses his arms for good measure, catching the movement in the mirror as nothing more than a brief blur of green from his cardigan. His focus is still mainly on Tim.
"I don't know, are you done being a fucking prick?" Tim sounds more tired than angry, though the venom is still present in his voice. It's been present for a long time, though, so it's not like Jon takes it personally anymore.
"It's just that there are far better places than a toilet," Jon insists, feeling a bit snarky now, and he receives a fairly universal hand gesture in return.
"Just get out," Tim sighs, as though he might start pleading, and Jon might not always know when to quit but he's not the worst at reading a room. This is enough for now, anyway.
He sighs, and leaves without another word.
"Are you... alright in here?"
He realizes his mistake as soon as he makes it, but Tim just snorts. Glad he's at least managed not to drag answers out of him, which would make a mockery of any progress he's made so far.
"There's no world in which I could possibly be alright. I don't want any of your pity, if that's what you're asking." Tim still faces away, hair still greasy looking from the back, skin still slightly suntanned as though it were August. He looks exactly the same.
Jon pulls on his jumper sleeves- pink this time- and hesitates again. At least this time he's not going to get anything thrown at him, unless Tim decides to rip the empty soap dispenser out of the wall. The plastic bottle he threw at first is still on the ground, the goopy liquid soap long since drained and dried to a crust. He knows full well that Tim's not going to walk over and pick it up just to throw it again.
"I- why here, of all places? I can't imagine you were particularly attached to this bathroom, specifically." Jon nudges the nearby trash bin with his foot, for emphasis, and he jumps a little when a bug comes crawling out from underneath it. He stomps on it before even registering its color- the instincts drilled in by Jane Prentiss are still alive and well- and lifts his shoe to find the corpse of a thoroughly pulverized cockroach.
"I haven't tried to leave." Guttural again, like it was dragged out of him, but this time Jon doesn't feel any imminent danger. Maybe because it's quieter this time. Defeated, almost. Jon doesn't blame him.
He looks at the mirror, at Tim's reflection, and sees nothing out of the ordinary. It would be an entirely normal reflection of Tim, a mirror image of exactly what he remembers seeing in August of 2017, moments before walking into the House of Wax. He wonders what he would see if Tim turned around.
He wonders if he really wants to find out.
"Can the others see you?" He doubts that anybody's been in here in a while- it certainly hasn't been cleaned recently, if the roach is any indication. It was rarely used even when he'd just started as the Archivist, with most people preferring to use the poor state of it as an excuse to get some fresh air upstairs, himself occasionally included.
"I think you already know the answer to that," Tim says instead of a simple nobody's been in here. Even if that hypothesis were true- again, Jon wouldn't doubt it- they're both aware of the unique position that Jon holds. The unique positions they both hold.
"Thought I'd ask anyway. I already knew that asking questions force people to answer me, for example, and yet..." Jon trails off, giving the mirror a significant look. Tim doesn't react in any meaningful way, doesn't even meet his eyes, and Jon decides it was a long shot anyway.
"Yeah, well, you're a freak for several reasons now. Seeing ghosts, Jon? Maybe you should talk to a psychiatrist instead of me." Tim tries, and despite the venom in his voice and the bite in his words, something about it feels more forced than anything. It reeks of defensiveness, like Tim is just trying to get Jon to go away without resorting to asking him again. Maybe that would feel too much like begging.
"According to you, I think I'd just end up terrorizing them," Jon replies dryly, and this does earn a snort from Tim. It's quiet, but there is some real humor in it. Possibly. Unless Jon's really, well and truly fully hallucinating.
In that case, though, he's probably hallucinating a lot more than a snort.
"Fair enough," Tim says, and no more. They're quiet for a long moment after that, Jon trying to work up the nerve to say something else, try to bridge the gap one twig at a time, before Tim eventually speaks again.
"I'm tired," And these two words have an odd sort of echoing quality, like they've been pitched at exactly the right angle against the mirror for it to reflect sound as well as light, "I'm done."
Jon wonders if that means for today, or forever. He thinks if Tim had a choice in the matter, they never would have spoken in here at all.
"I hope I don't see you again," Jon wishes, and it's the kindest thing he can offer. It's the only thing he can offer. He pulls the door open and leaves, resolving not to come back for a while.
"I found out that I can leave," Comes Tim's voice from a rolling chair in the middle of Jon's office.
It's dark- the light in here automatically turns off after long enough without motion, and given that Jon is stretching awake after an unexpected nap at his desk, it's been a while since anything in here moved- and he can't see anything but a shadow in the vague shape of Tim sitting in a rolling chair.
Jon sits up fully, and the lights go up on cue. He squints, still groggy, glasses askew on his face (he never did get out of the habit of wearing them, and after so long of constantly having them on, his face feels naked without them, despite how they're technically unnecessary now) and looks away from the Tim-shaped blur sitting in front of him.
He doesn't know how Tim didn't set off the motion detector. He has his own thoughts on the matter- hallucination or the closest thing he's ever seen to a real ghost, the jury's still out on which- but either way, the lights only react to Jon's presence. Not Tim's.
"Look at me, Jon," Tim's quieter now, closer, closer than he has been since Jon woke up from the coma. Closer than he was even before he was thrown into it. He's nearly whispering on Jon's ear, close enough that Jon can feel his phantom breath wisping over his earlobe- this, he knows is a hallucination, because Tim hasn't breathed in front of him in a very long time.
"You know you want to," Tim continues to prod, and he does and he doesn't and he wants Tim to go back to being confined to the bathroom, thanks. He doesn't know what he's going to see, but judging by the faint smell of blood and burnt flesh, he sincerely doubts that it'll be the same sight he's been seeing in that mirror for the past several weeks.
"Look at what you did to me. Listen to your god," Tim goads, and Jon can feel the Eye tugging his head upright, begging him to drink in whatever sight Tim is making, but it's not the Beholding that brings his head up. It's the guilt that's making its sticky, heavy way between his chest and his gut.
Not that looking up was a good decision.
He was right in that Tim's face wouldn't be the same as it was in August. That was what the mirror showed, and maybe there's some truth in that image, but that's not what Jon is seeing now.
What he's seeing is Tim's skull, with pinkish, pockmarked leather pulled taut over it. It's fleshy with its ridges, the map of where the explosion ripped through his face looking nearly reminiscent of claw marks gouging divots into his cheek, across his nose, and eventually down the other side of his face. One of his cheeks is torn open entirely, with flesh hanging from the side of his jaw and providing an unobstructed view of eerily grinning teeth.
There are a few other holes in his face, shaped like cigarette burns through a sheet of paper, but none are quite so violent as the large one. A majority of his nose is missing, as well as one of his eyes. The socket is puffed up, as though his body had enough time for an immune response in the millisecond between when he lost it and when he died, and blood runs from it like tears. The blood splits off into the many valleys of Tim's face, like a river and its tributaries, before eventually mingling with blackened gunk that Jon will imagine as charcoal or soot and dripping onto his desk.
Jon barely refrains from gagging as he pushes himself backwards from his desk, the back of his chair knocking into the shelf behind him. Distantly, he hears the rattle of whatever's sitting on the shelf shifting positions slightly from the impact, but he finds he doesn't much care.
"What's wrong?" Tim pronounces with remarkable clarity for a man with no lips to speak of, and laughs with a throat that's been visibly torn open. It, too, drips blood, faster than the eye, but it soaks into Tim's shirt instead of pooling onto the floor.
"Scared?" Tim leans in, and Jon presses further into his own chair. Tim pauses, tilts his head slightly, and imitates the snort than Jon was proud of eliciting not very long ago.
"Good," Tim growls, eerily reminiscent of Elias. He'd probably hate the comparison. Jon nearly laughs, and he only bites it back with the knowledge that it will only bring worse things upon him.
"Now you know how it feels to be trapped with a monster. Friendless. Defenseless. Sound familiar?" Jon knows that Tim is trying to make a point about how he's reversed the roles, based on how Tim must have seen his own situation back then, but it rings hollow.
"We were... we were friends." Jon tries, weakly, but he knows that's failed even before Tim grabs the empty tape recorder and throws it in Jon's direction. He flinches away, and it only barely misses his shoulder, falling neatly- if heavily- into his lap.
"Sure. We were friends. There was even a bit of a will-they-won't-they going on at some point, right? Back when life was a rom-com and we could all go home. Now what, Jon? Now what? Now we're both dead, that's what, only you've still got a body to drag around while I got the short end of the stick. Now neither of us are even people, especially not you."
Tim's voice is icy, at first, before ripping into the nearly-explosive rage that was Tim, before he went quiet and screamed without screaming that he was about to kill himself.
Jon could have stopped him. Forced him to sit out of the Unknowing. But what would've been the point, really? There came a point where he had to stop trying, and despite how he didn't want to accept it, he did in the end. What did that get him? What did that get either of them?
"I wish things were different," Jon trembles, and licks his lips in a nervous almost-tic. Tim's head drops, so that he's staring down at Jon's desk, and at least some of the fight seems to have drained from him.
"Yeah," Tim sighs, "Don't we all."
It's not a question. Phrased like it, sure, but it's commiseration more than anything else. Commiseration, except Tim would never stoop so low as to commiserate with him. To sympathize, to empathize, even a little. That would be akin to a bird empathizing with a snake.
The handle on Jon's office door turns, and Jon looks over towards it. The door opens- not much, but enough- and Basira leans in just a bit.
"You alright? I heard a noise." She's looking only at him, and when Jon glances back to the space that Tim occupied, he finds it empty. Not even a chair in its place. Just his office, empty as always.
"... Pushed my chair out too far. Sorry." Jon rubs at his sternum, willing calmness into his pounding heart, and hopes his face isn't so pale that he's betraying the lie. Basira's going to be suspicious either way, but she's got enough on her plate that she'll overlook it if he makes it seem insignificant enough.
"Alright," She pulls away, pauses for a moment to think, and then pulls the rest of the way from his doorway, shutting the door on her way.
That leaves Jon alone in his office, with a ghost who might not even be there. Might not even exist.