Chapter Text
“Jon!”
Martin? His gut felt like it was trying to become acquainted with his esophagus. He saw streaks of purple slowly growing thinner as he continued his journey down. Right, he was falling. He’d been so focused on Martin, dangling high above the chasm, that he must not have been watching where he was putting his own feet. The strange thing was that it wasn’t like when he’d fallen— did it count as falling if he technically never left his chair?— before, back with Mike. There wasn’t the sound of wind in his ears or his hair whipping around. He could breathe, and his heart wasn’t beating nearly as fast. The chasm was like a vacuum, sucking up everything around it and leaving the world blank. Except it wasn’t quite blank, was it? He could hear his own voice reverberating around him like an echo in a cave, their downward pursuit relentless, like a dog who’d caught the scent of blood.
“Statement of Ivo Lensik…”
“Statement of Lesare Saraki…”
“Statement of Darren Harlow…”
“Statement of Annabelle Cane…”
He was able to pick out a couple of sentences when it was only a handful of tapes, but soon, they were all clamoring in an incomprehensible, overlapping mess that entered his mind in a crashing wave of words as if begging for the Archive’s attention. To be catalogued. To be Known. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force his mind to silence itself, to restrict the flow of information that he already knew. But he knew the Eye wouldn’t let him. Even if it was the same regurgitated and stale information it’d already consumed, it still demanded knowledge from him. It could see the whole world and all its glorious, terrible suffering, all the domains of monsters and avatars reaping the fear of their unwitting victims, yet it still wanted more.
His eyes slowly cracked open, allowing what meager light there was to illuminate the stone ceiling above him. He wasn’t falling anymore; he was laying on something solid, but he wasn’t sure if that meant that he’d simply healed from the fall or something else. To be honest, he wasn’t sure if it was even possible for him to die, what with the current state of the world… which was fine. What?
He reached out, Looking for the domains that had been close by to the house. There was nothing. He sat up, scanning the surrounding area. It was dark, leaving him temporarily squinting to see through the pitch dark, but it was nothing like the Black Sun he’d seen in Ny-Ålesund. After something like that, he wasn’t sure there was anywhere that would ever come close to the utter pitch black he’d witnessed. He was sitting on a maintenance ledge above a river of green sewage water. The walls were damp with mold, and there was a thin layer of slime coating the whole area. It reeked of old trash, decay, and a general musk that made his nose wrinkle while suppressing a gag. Sure, he may have smelled worse than a simple sewer, but that didn’t make him immune to other bad smells.
As Jon stood up, he could hear the gentle lapping of water against the ledge to his left. Further along, the furious, high-pitched squeaking of rats echoed through the tunnel. They were fighting over a piece of moldy bread. He shuddered, envisioning their beady, cruel eyes as they scrabbled with each other. He dusted himself off, not that it would rid his clothes of the grime. The familiar whirring sound of the tape recorder met his ears, prompting him to look down. There it was, in his coat pocket.
“Oh, hello. You’re here too, are you?” he sighed. He wasn’t sure how to feel about the device now that he knew who it belonged to. Even so, he felt an odd sort of comfort in having the thing with him. It made him feel less alone. “Well, there’s nothing interesting going on right now. But then, something always happens when you show up. Better be prepared.” That last part was addressing himself more than whoever was listening on the other end of the tape.
He looked around again, but there weren’t any signs of life aside from the rats. One of them had managed to shove the other into the water, where it floundered as it was tugged away with the current, screeching loudly in terror and anger as the victorious rat took its prize and fled into a small pipe. He shivered at the sight, but given everything that he’d experienced over the past few years, it hardly sent him fleeing for his life.
“I don’t like it down here.” His voice came out in a soft mutter. He shoved his hands into his coat pockets, his right hand grazing the surface of the recorder, and started walking. His footsteps bounced weakly off the walls, mingling with the sound of objects hitting each other as the sewage waste flowed past him. It smelled rancid down in the tunnels, and Jon found himself wishing that he would find a ladder leading upward soon.
“It’s too… quiet. It all feels so strange. Compared to the world after the Change, I almost find myself becoming paranoid. Like something’s supposed to happen, and I can’t have a moment of peace unless someone around me is suffering.” He wasn’t sure why he felt the need to explain his emotions to a piece of whirring junk, especially one that he now knew wasn’t even aligned with his own Entity. Habit, he supposed.
His hand reached into his pocket, rubbing his thumb idly over the spiderweb design on the lighter. “Is it bad that I almost wish someone were suffering?” He barely spared a moment before he answered himself. “Of course it is. That’s just… the Eye talking.”
He’d only been walking for five minutes when he picked up on the sound of a second pair of footsteps. They were coming from around the corner a couple yards ahead of him. Jon froze, instinctively bracing himself, the tape serving as a reminder that whatever or whoever he was about to meet interested the listeners on the other end enough to continue to spy on him. He’d tried Knowing how they always seemed to know when something would happen, but to no avail. It only ever gave him a headache, so he’d given up. However, the recorder was never wrong, so he supposed that it wasn’t totally without its uses. At best, it was a sort of danger alert.
But the person who rounded the corner was the last person he expected to meet in these sewers. He had long, shoddily dyed black hair and wore ripped, worn clothes, all varying shades of black and dark grey. His eyes locked onto Jon’s, confusion etched on every fiber of his face, as he stopped. Jon’s gaze was drawn to the man’s knuckles, where small individual tattoos of an eye were visible on each one. Another tattoo, larger than the others, peeked out from the hem of his shirt at his throat.
“Gerry?" He heard his voice raise an octave as he stared disbelievingly at the person who simply could not be in front of him right now.
“Jon…” he said, trailing off. Then, in a way Jon was intimately familiar with thanks to Melanie, he watched Gerry’s face shift through a rapid series of emotions before he finally landed on anger. They might have gotten on great. Which was not the point right now. “You told me you’d burn it!” he shouted, taking a couple of threatening steps closer and jabbing his finger at Jon.
“I— what?” Jon stumbled out, wincing.
“You said you’d burn my page,” Gerry repeated. “You said you’d let me rest!” His fingers clenched tightly in fists, falling to his sides. Jon didn’t have to use the Eye’s powers to know that Gerry was about ten seconds away from socking him in the face. Jon backed up a step. He remembered Leitner telling him about his encounter with Gerry and felt an ounce of pity for him at that moment. A very small ounce of pity.
“W- wait a minute, Gerry! I did destroy your page. Here, I burned it with…” He delved into his pockets, coming up with the golden lighter he’d been using as a fidget earlier. “This! I swear.” He added as much sincerity as he could to his words, trying to appease the younger man. Thankfully, it seemed to work, as Gerry’s temper was no longer directed at Jon. His fingers loosened, and his voice lost the edge of fury that had crept into it. “Alright, then do you mind explaining how I’m here? This isn’t the same as when I was manifested with the book. This body’s real.”
“I don’t… I don’t know,” Jon admitted hesitantly. That knowledge made him a tiny bit glad. “Are you alright, though?”
Gerry looked at him quizzically while dusting his hands off on his faded jeans. “Yeah, why?”
“Oh! I meant the pain from the burns, I—” He cut himself off, recognizing the information as something that Gerry hadn’t shared with him. “Sorry, sorry! It’s the Eye. I can, well, Know things now, I suppose. Better than before.” He let out a dismal sigh. “Sorry, I’ll try not to do that.”
Gerry, for one, didn’t appear bothered by Jon’s accidental Knowing. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing, but at least he wasn’t being threatened or stonewalled for it, unlike previous reactions. Maybe he should be... “Ah, got it. I think I got so used to pain between the cancer and the burns when I was alive that I almost didn’t realize it was there anymore,” Gerry replied, far too casually, though Jon could relate to the lack of care. “And don’t worry about the Knowing thing. I mean, I’ve already given you my statement, and you’ve likely read plenty of others about me, so there’s nothing that you could Know that you wouldn’t already know about. Aside from the burn pain, of course.” Jon chuckled awkwardly at that but nodded.
“Still, it’s not something I like to do,” he told him, but there was a tension in his tone, like he was trying to convince himself of that just as much as he was trying to reassure Gerry. He didn’t like it. He wasn’t like Jonah. He took no perverse joy in watching others’ suffering; he didn’t relish the fear that crept into his very soul to feed his eldritch patron. He forced himself to refocus on Gerry.
“Fair enough,” Gerry conceded. “Now, putting aside the mystery of how I’m alive for a second, where are we?”
“We’re in the sewers beneath Park Row, known locally as Crime Alley, in the middle of Gotham City, New Jersey,” Jon said automatically. Gerry blinked but took it in stride. “Right. So, we’re in America. That’s strange though, I’ve never heard of a Gotham City.”
“That’s because we’re in another world.” Jon took a shaky breath as he began to remember what had happened. Hilltop Road. Martin. The crack in reality.
“Another world? Do you mean that figuratively?” Gerry kicked a rock and watched it clatter across the concrete and into the water as if testing the validity of their surroundings. Or maybe he was just bored.
“No, in the literal sense. There was a woman- uh, Annabelle Cane; she’s with the Web. She used Martin to— Martin’s my- no, never mind that— she lured me to a place called Hilltop Road. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of it? There was this chasm, she called it a crack or- or a tear in reality. She said that it led to other worlds, billions of them. I think that this is one of those ‘other worlds’.”
Gerry gave him a look that said okay, and? “Alright, but how did we end up here?”
Jon became a little sheepish and offered him a weak smile. “I, um… well, I fell into the tear.”
The goth stood there for a moment, simply staring at him. If Jon didn’t know any better, he’d assume Gerry was trying to determine whether or not he was lying. But they both knew Jon wasn’t. It was more likely that Gerry was trying to decide if he should reconsider his choice not to wallop the other man. “You… fell. Into a giant tear in reality.” His voice dripped with unspoken judgement. Jon got a bit indignant at that; he got enough judgement from the others as it was.
“I got… distracted.”
“And you fell into a giant tear in reality.” The dryness in his voice could start a small forest fire.
Jon huffed. “Yes, you made your point. I’ll watch where I step next time. Regardless, we’re in another world.”
Gerry’s head turned as he observed their environment. “Right. Where’s your reality tear?” That drew Jon’s attention to the fact that the other man was right. Nothing around them looked remotely like the gaping, abyssal hole that he’d seen during his encounter with Annabelle.
“I… don’t know. Um- let me try Looking for it.”
“Looking with a capital ‘L’?”
“Yes.” He thought about the hole again, willing the door that connected him to the Eye to open just a crack. There are approximately two to three million rats within the sewers of Gotham City. However, despite urban legends of sewer rats, they rarely live permanently in wastewater systems— Jon cut off the unwanted flow of rat-related information and focused on the mental blueprint of the sewers that appeared in his head. As it turned out, he needn’t have bothered.
Jon… A whispery voice drew his attention to a dead-end tunnel six blocks northeast. The tear. Annabelle had been right. His connection to the Eye served as a tether. She had planned to lure the Entities into another world— this world— using their connections to the tapes and the information within them. That same concept worked just as soundly in reverse, it seemed. “I’ve found it. Come on.”
Walking in the sewers suddenly didn’t feel as lonely with a companion. He wondered if Gerry felt the same, or if he was so used to being alone that it didn’t bother him. Though, Jon thought, he had Gertrude toward the end. Then he reconsidered. Gertrude, however well prepared and in control she always seemed to be, didn’t seem the type to engage in much casual conversation. Jon began to miss all of his… assistants? Colleagues? Friends? These days, it wasn’t very clear where he stood when it came to the others. Being the cause of a world-ending (kind of) apocalypse tended to do that.
Sturdy thuds of footfalls accompanied by tapping metal zippers prodded him from his introspection. Gerry’s boots, naturally.
“So. What happened to those hunters?” Gerry asked conversationally, but his tone suggested that he was paying rapt attention to Jon’s answer, even as his eyes remained watching the tunnel ahead of them. Jon could see his gaze occasionally flicking toward different things that caught his notice. He didn't comment on the hypervigilance; it comforted him, really, knowing he had someone to watch his back. It reminded him of Basira. And Daisy. He shooed the tiny traitorous voice in his head away.
“Wh— oh, do you mean Trevor and Julia? They’re dead.”
“Oh, really?” Jon pretended not to notice the barely concealed approval in his voice. It wasn’t like he was in any position to be taking the moral high ground. “How did they die?”
Jon’s mind flashed back to when the pair invaded the institute, and Trevor’s subsequent appearance after the Change. “They were killed by some colleagues of mine. Both Hunters. Trevor was shot and Julia… had her throat torn out.”
Gerry hummed. “Ironic, killed by fellow Hunters. But they probably wanted to go out like that anyway. Hunters don’t like peace and quiet, and I doubt they like the idea of dying in their sleep.” A bitter note entered his voice at the end. Jon nodded along sagely, remembering the cause of Gerry’s first death. “Probably not,” he agreed.
They made a right turn, then Gerry stopped. “That wouldn’t be your tear in reality, would it?” He pointed toward the wall at the end of the tunnel, though he really didn’t need to. There was a gaping black hole along the seam of the wall and floor, with cracks that spread out from the center like shattered glass. Or a spider’s web. The cracks extended up the wall like inky vines, reaching up toward the curved ceiling, like they wanted to swallow the world above it. Jon felt the whispering growing louder, his own voice speaking morbidly in his ears as the statements began.
“Okay. There’s our tear in reality!” Geery said with faux cheerfulness. “Let’s jump back in and head back to our world.” He started to walk toward it, but Jon’s hand shot out and grabbed onto his wrist. Annabelle’s monologue came back to him in pieces, suddenly far more relevant now that they were standing in front of it. “Now, wait a second! There are countless worlds out there; what makes you think that it’s only connected to ours? If we go charging into a tear in reality, who’s to say that it won’t spit us out somewhere else? Or potentially kill us?”
“Well, you said that Annabelle is an avatar of the Web, right? I don’t know about you, but I don’t make a habit of trusting the word of spiders,” Gerry retorted, the sharp edge returning to his voice, though he maintained that patient air, as if he was explaining things to a five-year-old. Jon clenched his teeth. He wasn’t as ignorant now as he was when they’d first met.
“She’s already correct about the tear leading to another world, isn’t she? Why would she tell the truth about that but lie about there being multiple worlds?” Jon argued back.
Gerry pulled himself free from Jon’s grip and crossed his arms. “Because she’s a Web avatar? What further evidence do you need, Jon? She lies because she gets a kick out of being the one in control, and right now, you’re letting her win. Did you stop to consider that this is what she wants? What if she wants you to stay trapped here by telling you some elaborate lie about there being multiple worlds because she knows you’ll think yourself to death rather than act?”
Jon’s nails dug into his palms. Why did Gerry have to choose now to be stubborn? Annabelle wouldn’t lie about something like this; she needed him for her plan. It was the whole reason he discovered all of this in the first place. “She’s not.” He said firmly. “To put a long explanation short, her plan involved me being in our world. Why would she go and chuck me into another world in the first place? And let’s say she’s not lying. Are you really going to risk your life charging off headfirst into something completely unknown?” Jon demanded.
Hypocritical of him, sure; he’d risked his life for far less of a good reason, but to be honest, Gerry was one of the only people he’d call a friend who didn’t start to dislike his presence following (and before) the Change. Maybe he was being selfish, clinging to someone who wasn’t likely to give him the cold shoulder or think he deserved to sacrifice himself to fix the mess he’d started.
Gerry opened his mouth, probably to rebuke Jon’s statement, but whatever he was going to say was swallowed by a resounding rumbling. The walls around them shook, shedding loose tiny clumps of dirt from the ceiling, showering them with rivets of dust. It barely qualified as a tremor at first. Then it came again, this time stronger, causing the ground to shudder beneath them. “What’s going on?” Gerry’s words were followed instantly by the sound of a more audible boom from above them.
“I- I don’t know! Give me a second, I can—”
“Jon, look out!” Gerry lunged for him, grabbing his coat sleeve and yanking him none too gently out of the way. Jon heard something hit the ground where he’d been standing only a moment before. He turned to check and saw that a chunk of the sewer wall above him had completely dislodged itself. Another boom. The entire ceiling of the sewer was cracking and looked like it was going to collapse.
“The tear!” The cry forced Jon’s attention over to the endless black pit. He immediately grabbed onto Gerry again, sensing that the man was going to try to make a mad dash for it. “It’s too dangerous!” His point was punctuated by another chunk of falling bricks and mortar. What was even happening? Oh. The Joker had set off bombs. Bombs? Who was the Joker? Jon had to force Gerry backward to avoid getting crushed by the falling bricks. Dust began to linger in the air, reminding Jon uncomfortably of the dust storm he’d read about as it sought to find refuge in his lungs. He coughed instinctively, bringing his free arm up over his mouth. They both watched helplessly as the tear was covered by a mountain of rubble, but soon they had to retreat further into the sewers as more and more rubble tried to crush them.
Through their wheezing and hacking, Gerry grabbed his sleeve again and tugged him toward the wall of the sewer. How would— a ladder! Gerry must have seen it before the sewer started to collapse. They began to climb immediately, Gerry’s boots clanking on the metal rungs above him. The noise was promptly absorbed into the din of the explosions. They paused when Gerry reached the manhole cover, but soon (with some instruction from Jon), they were poking their heads cautiously out onto the street above.
It was chaos, but more noticeably… there was fear everywhere. He could See a woman trapped beneath a burning car, desperately trying to free herself as she screamed for help. He felt her bone-deep dread and panic, the tears that streamed down her face at both the pain of her crushed legs and the undeniable fact that no one was going to stop to save her. She would die, burned to a crisp or blown up once the blaze reached the fuel tanks of what was soon to be her metal coffin. Everyone was too busy trying to save themselves, letting out their own noises of agony as they trampled over one another in their efforts to escape. Anyone but me, they all thought. She had a baby boy, Andrew. She’d left him with her mother while she went shopping down the street at the minimart. She was only supposed to be gone for a few minutes. Now, she’d never see him again. She’d never see her baby boy again—
“Jon!” Gerry’s sharp voice snapped him out of the trance like a slap. He was standing on the street above him, holding out a hand. Jon suddenly felt rather silly, still clinging to the ladder, hands turning white by the force of his grip. He accepted Gerry’s hand and let him haul him up onto the street. The area around them looked like a warzone, or like some joint sort of scheme between the Stranger and the Desolation, as ridiculous of an idea as it sounded. Jon almost chuckled. Almost. He still had a bone to pick with the Stranger.
Buildings were decimated, likely by the bombs, left crumbled on the ground and spilling their shattered steel walls onto the streets in piles like gutted animals. Craters littered the asphalt, leaking pipes protruding like grey bones, tripping people as they tried to run away. The sky was hidden behind a thick cloud of smoke and ash, covering the pinpricks of stars that dotted the inky midnight sky. The screams of sheer terror called out to him, each one trying to tell him their story, their pain. The Eye wanted them all, urging him toward the nearest fallen victim with the bloodlust of a vampire; only his desire didn’t stem from any carnal wish for the crimson liquid of life. It wanted the man’s memories, the story of his soul, the ocean of fear he was currently drowning in. Jon’s mind was drifting again, unraveling like a spool of thread, trying to loop around all the voices at once. Armed men donning clown masks were busy causing as much destruction as they could while also trying to grab any fleeing passerby that they could. Hostages, he vaguely realized.
Gerry was less affected by the cacophony of fear and dragged Jon into an alleyway, ducking to hide behind a pair of dumpsters. Jon reached out again and Saw that the woman, Janet, was no longer in the burning car. She was being treated by emergency services. He Knew that someone, a vigilante, had saved her. Red Robin. Like the restaurant? A chuckle slipped from his lips, causing Gerry to look at him with mounting concern, perhaps wondering if he should knock him on the head a couple of times and ask who’s home. Jon quickly explained. “Sorry, it’s just- this world has vigilantes. One of them’s called Red Robin.”
“Like the restaurant?” Gerry asked, mimicking his thoughts.
“Probably not named after the restaurant; it’s likely an unfortunate coincidence,” Jon clarified. Gerry still snickered.
Another boom from an exploding bomb dampened the humorous revelation. Jon could See them now: a child being escorted to safety by a woman in black, a man pulled out of the path of a bomb by a guy with a blue bird across his chest, a goon cut down by a child with a very sharp katana. Right. This definitely wasn’t a scene straight out of a comic book. He Knew there were others; they were scattered around helping civilians or trying to take down Joker's goons.
They kept moving, trying to find a safe place to seek refuge from the hellhole that was Gotham. More than once, Gerry had to pull Jon away when they got too close to someone, whether criminal or innocent. Jon felt blood running down his stomach from a wound in his chest, though he knew that was the man lying prone on the ground, propped up against the curb with a bullet hole in his chest. He stumbled as a spike of pain shot through his leg, but that was from the woman across the street. She'd fallen into one of the craters and was rewarded with a gash running along her shin. He couldn't reach them, though; he couldn't Ask what they'd been doing before the attack or what loved ones they'd lost to the carnage. He could feel their fear, but he couldn't reach them. He knew their conditions, but the Eye wanted the first-hand experience from the victims themselves. Gerry didn't ask what was wrong; he simply grabbed Jon's arm and helped lead him someplace safe.
Finally, they found a building that was largely still intact and that had already been passed by Joker's goons. It was a pawn shop. The interior was unkempt and partially destroyed. One may have assumed that the store was in that condition because of the bombing, but you'd only be partially correct. The shelves hung haphazardly from the walls, their previous loads of antiques and junk discarded in piles on the floor. Jon Knew the owner had been close to going bankrupt, so he'd given up on cleaning the building before abandoning the place entirely.
Gerry stooped down behind the abandoned counter, slumping against. Jon joined him on the ground, letting his head droop, trying to catch his breath as he willed his heart to slow down. He’d never been the most athletic, but compared to Gerry, who barely seemed out of breath, he felt a little self-conscious about it now.
“Jon, we have to—”
“Two over here.” A rough hand latched onto Jon’s arm in a vice-like grip. In an instant, he felt the cold metal of a gun press up against the back of his head. “Don’t touch me!” he snapped, his skin crawling where the calloused fingers held onto his arm. He tried to pull away, but his struggling only earned him a fierce strike to the head with the handle of the gun. The wave of pain that flooded his mind made his vision swim, and he was certain that he was about to pass out. There was the same heavy, floating feeling he’d unfortunately spent quite a few times becoming familiar with. He saw Gerry struggling with his own captor until he was met with the same fate. His head slumped over. With all his infinite knowledge, even now, he couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment he passed out.