Chapter Text
As he lay there, dying, bleeding out, Jon couldn't help but imagine how many people might benefit from his death. How many people he might have saved by dying.
No, he thinks, that's a selfish last thought to have.
Now he'll never be able to stop the Unknowing. Now somebody will discover his body. Now somebody will have to break the news. Maybe Nikola will win. Maybe the world will end, all because he was too weak to save himself.
What was it that killed him? Surely not an Avatar, or at least not somebody who knows they are one. This person hadn't addressed him as "Archivist," or told him to stop asking things, or even given him a Statement. He hadn't tried to Compel them, though, he'd been too frightened. Somebody covered in blood had him cornered in Old Fishmarket Close, and he'd frozen up. He was just looking for... what, the Angler Fish? To do what? It wouldn't have been any help anyway. What a waste of last moments. The person that had stabbed him, though, that had caught sight of a witness to the blood and viscera clinging to them, had been odd.
Jon had hoped to never meet a Slaughter Avatar. But maybe he should've taken it as a sign to run when the pounding in his head had started. He'd thought those war drums were a headache.
I'm such an idiot.
He'd hate for that to be his last thought. It's taking much longer than he thought for him to bleed out. Apparently, the killer hadn't hit him anywhere too vital (at least, that's what it seemed like), but there was no chance of him surviving this. They'd taken his phone. Nobody seems to come out here at this time, save for drunks stumbling home from the pub. If he had the energy, Jon would laugh at the irony. He's dying in the place of the first Statement he ever read. He wants a more pleasant last thought than that. And what comes to him is Martin.
Oh god.
He'd fallen for him.
He'd fallen for Martin.
Martin had fallen for him.
He's crying now. He knows that. The moisture soaking into his hair isn't drying into flakes of blood.
I hate this. I hate that I'm dying here. I hate that I have to force myself to hate that.
He'd been getting better, before the Archives. Well, he was a dick, but he was getting better. He was on medication, for ADHD and depression. He started wanting to live again. And then... and then Elias... he...
Jon runs out of energy to finish that particular thought. And, as the darkness finally, finally consumes him, the last thing that grips his mind is I hope they'll be okay.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــﮩ٨ـ
Elsewhere, in his opulent office, Elias feels something wrong. A sudden disconnect from his Archivist. A sense of distress from his Patron.
Fuck.
"Rosie," Elias calls, audibly on-edge, forgetting for a moment that he has an intercom. He raises his voice. "Rosie!"
The receptionist hurries in, visibly concerned by Elias's tone. He was always so calm, so in control, even when... well, when things were going wrong. But now... "Yes, Mr. Bouchard?"
"Call the Archives staff in here. Now."
Not wanting to incur the wrath of the now furious-sounding man, she nods curtly. "Right away."
Once the aforementioned staff are gathered -- Tim, pissed off as always; Martin, looking worried; Melanie, who'd apparently been sharpening a letter opener; and Basira, who'd taken her sweet time finding a bookmark -- Elias glares at each of them in turn.
"Where," he begins softly, too composed, "is the Archivist."
Tim shrugs, but Martin begins to reply; "H-Has something happened? I-I don't know where he went last, but--"
"Shut up. I don't care. Tim?"
He just shrugs again. It's Melanie who answers this time. "Can't you just reach into our heads to find out?"
Elias's scowl could wither crops. It probably has. But Melanie has a point; he can reach into their feeble minds, find out what they know, figure out what they're hiding from him, what they've done with his Archivist--
Nothing. Not a single one of the idiotic mortals around him has any idea what's happened. He practically chases them out of his office, but it's not like they need telling twice. Although, Melanie does visibly restrain the urge to stab him.
Ceaseless Watcher, he thinks once he's alone, practically begging his Patron for a clue. Tell me what has become of m-- of your Archivist.
The image is rammed into his mind with such force he nearly doubles over.
Jon. Stabbed by a servant of the Slaughter. Left to bleed out in an alleyway. His final thoughts are muddled, a miserable tangle of relief, guilt, fear, sickening care, and Jonah Magnus can feel it all.
The rage that overtakes him could rival that of the Slaughter itself, but it is nothing compared to what the Beholding has already done to that pathetic mortal who's stabbed Its favorite.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــﮩ٨ـ
Word had gotten out quickly. How couldn't it? Jonathan Sims was dead. There was no denying that, no concealing it. But it didn't make Martin feel any better. Curled up in the spare room, cryinginto his poetry book, utterly alone.
He'd thought it was just a silly crush. And of course it hurts when someone close to you dies, and of course Martin would consider Jon "close" after the trauma they'd shared, but the hollow feeling in his chest was dangerously close to a deep, visceral heartbreak. He doesn't even know if Jon loved him back, and now he'll never know, because he was too much of a coward to ask, too useless to help Jon when he was struggling, running all over the world, coming back with a new scar every time Martin sees him, too pathetic to do anything when the love of his life was killed!
He's standing now. When did he stand up? His notebook is on the ground now, tearstained pages creased and ripped. He kicks it across the room. What's the point? No amount of poetry can help him now. And he can't even leave. He's not going to survive this, he knows it. He was already struggling to keep it together, but this kind of grief? He's not going to come back from this. He's never going to come back from this. He might as well join Jon, wherever he is now. He might as well--
A chill runs down his spine. No, no no no, he can't do that. Even thinking about it is selfish. Who'd care for his mum? Who'd record the Statements (why does that matter)? Who would discover his body? No, he can't hurt himself like that. He can't think about it, because thinking about it could lead to ideation, lead to a plan, he never wants to feel that way again, he doesn't want to hurt anyone by killing himself--
There it is. The words he's been avoiding.
A sob slips out before he can stop it. Then another. And suddenly he's crying again, and then he's sitting on the floor, tearing page after page out of his stupid poetry book until he finally finds a blank one. Still smeared with tears, the ink smudging every line, he begins to write again. And soon enough, he's surrounded by it, his poetry, trying and failing to capture his grief, the depth of his suffering, because every page about his feelings ignores how scared Jon must have been, stabbed, alone. bleeding out so slowly...
Nobody told him that part. Why does he know that part? Why can he feel it?
Elias jolts up from where he's been slumped over his desk. He blinks several times. Looks into Martin's mind, then Looks again. It's quite soon after the last one, but...
He's found his new Archivist.