Chapter Text
This wasn’t right.
Not in a moral way, but something was deeply, truly, wrong.
Eyes.
So many eyes.
Jonathan Sims was there,
surrounded by eyes,
Where ‘there’ was, he had no idea, but he was awake
So awake, too awake! Like an ocean of knowledge was just pulling back before crashing down and destroying everything
“Good lord” he muttered to himself, pushing the front pieces of his graying hair away from his face.
The band posters of his friend's spare room felt like they glared at him, disapprovingly.
But really, if they disapproved of anything, it was the rubbish mattress he had crashed on the night before.
Jon wasn’t unfamiliar with the mysterious wrongness he now felt. Knowing what was going on internally wasn’t his strong suit, emotionally or physically. He had begrudgingly learned in his younger years that if there wasn’t an identifiable big problem causing the negative feeling (there rarely was), it was probably a collection of smaller, harder to identify issues that had snowballed into what he now felt, and the only way to fix it was by doing a bunch of small, mundane, solutions. This was absolutely rotten, took a tremendous amount of effort, and was not at all satisfying.
Some days just started like that, he had probably just woken up from a nightmare he couldn’t remember and was still physically reeling from whatever frightful narrative his subconscious had created to process the feelings that it would never directly tell him.
How he ended up at Georgie's house in the middle of the night was something of a mystery to him. Almost as perplexing was why Georgie was already awake, and holding a baby? The spiderweb and soot covered, dazed looking, childhood friend that appeared on her doorstep seemed like more of a minor inconvenience than a shock-
OH GOD THE SPIDERWEBS
Okay no its alright. Luckily, in his half awake stumblings he had managed to change into the clothes Georgie had left out for him. The t-shirt printed with a dog in a party hat (why a dog??) was backwards but it was better than the possibly infested attire he had arrived in. Maybe the shirt being backwards was part of the wrongness?
Memory wasn't his area either. Most of his childhood memories were from things people had told him about himself as a youth rather than direct recollections and he had a tendency to forget a night on the town, which was probably what had happened. At least, that’s what he assumed. He’d managed to forget going to Martin’s birthday ice cream and talking at length about emulsifiers, much to Tim’s delight of course…
The adrenaline that had started to subside came back in a rush. There was something about thinking about those two that he couldn’t mentally ‘look’ at directly. It felt like trying to push two magnets with the same polarity together. Despite his best efforts, his mind slipped off of memories he couldn’t grasp and snapped to thoughts of the early days in the archives. Maybe Martin has finally figured out that you can’t ‘occupy’ a closet. There’s less of an edge in his own mind than he would expect when he thinks about his most frustrating coworker. Hm. That’s probably nothing…
Whatever had landed him in this situation was perfectly normal and he would figure it out.
He had already had something… odd happen once in his life, two would simply be a statistical phenomenon. Especially two he could walk away from relatively unscathed. Jon looked down at his pock-marked, heavily scarred, arms. Well, maybe unscathed is a bit generous, even if it’s relative.