Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jon does not know a lot of things, even at the end.

He does not know, for example, that the eyes of Elias Bouchard were the dusky colour of an overcast evening, originally. Elias, who Jon had never really met  – a youngest child of three, the Eye informs its Archive, who saw the high bar set and decided it was easier to disappoint than to compete, who collected DIY band t-shirts and friends and feckless mellow-hazy memories; who went into his last performance review with James Wright, hands wringing and dry-mouthed, peaking anxious, convinced of immanent unemployment for a hundred imagined failings. Elias Bouchard, who Jonah had marionetted as a prize, a youthful spoil, a sacrifice to his god given unwillingly. Who had had about as much a say in his fate as any of them had.

Jon did not know that, as he rends the statement of Jonah Magnus from his bloody throat  – his hunger a twisting, a triumph – he would be able to watch the sputter-spark flicker of stolen light that was the only thing left of Elias Bouchard, staring out of a body someone else had helped themselves to.

The body flops to the floor, lifeless as meat.

Jon hadn't known that this crown-less king would die as easily as any other under his Eyes. But he had hoped.

He huffs out a surprised and anticlimactic breath.

Martin limps to standing from his buckling crouch. The blood from his nose crusting around his nostrils, above his top lip, blood vessels blooming starbursts in his left eye from where Jonah had snarled and lashed and bludgeoned him with his last-ditch defence.

Martin had screamed until his lungs had suffocated, his mouth voiceless, sucking in wretched, aborted breathes as Jonah shoved every flayed and crawling truth into his head already so raw-bitten from the Lonely.

The Eye and its Archive had gorged itself on you weren't there when she died and enough of her was left to hate you for it; he hasn't thought about you, not once in all these years, he has a new family and gives them the love he never quite stored up when you were his child, the failed try of a firstborn; you are an unworthy shackle around the limbs of my Archivist and you will never be at peace with that – but the parts that were still Jon had flourished in a fury to see Martin’s eyes roll back at the onslaught. The gaze of the Panopticon indulgently observed his metamorphosing form as he shucked off the straggling tatters of an ill-borne humanity. 

Jon was witnessed, became, was vengeful in the ways that he could still comprehend vengeance, oh so terribly human in his rage, as he wrung sound and blood and tale from Jonah's throat, shedding him raw.

And Martin, the Eye's gaze on him weakened, holding his knife like a victory flag, had not hesitated.

“Is it over?” he asks, panting, adrenaline-shocked. “Did – did we do it?”

Jon, his face still furnished with a mouth, his Sight gazing out of every flexing, whorling opening in his split skin, attempts to answer.

And then the world begins to end again.

He did not know that, once the ritual began, it would hurt quite so much. The sky suddenly isn't, and there is a snapping in him like fractured bone, like cleaved stone, like storm splitting sky. The eyes in his skin clench and tighten and melt and fuse closed as he drops heavily to the blood-freckled ground. Martin cries out his name in a sharp panic that has not lost its edges with his exhaustion, and Jon's hand grabs his sleeve and yanks him down following, kneeling upon the slick tilework of the dais at the Panopticon’s centre. Around them both, the foundations of the world are torn up, every horizon they could turn to demolished.

Martin has hold of his hand as the world engorges itself anew. Jon knows the shape and weight of it in his own if nothing else.

He screams, although maybe it is not him but the sky, the shuddering earth, and there is nothing beyond the decimating agony of his own body as things are unmade both inside and out. The pain is enveloping,  like the vice crush of burial earth, takes the place of every thought he has ever claimed as his own. He did not know he could survive this much. The sound of the dying world roars and warps architectural, ravelling taloned and ribboning like the trail of something on fire.

The ground below them writhes and pops, and the motion has Martin falling against him. Jon's throat still performs a mockery of noise as his body judders, run aground on the tattered rocks of this landscape in ruin, as he retches up the words he needs to speak, to drag closed the crevasses that Jonah had him split into the weave and weft of a world Jon had never meant to betray. The Panopticon, the sprawled body of Elias Bouchard, the dust and ashes of Jonah Magnus; all is eviscerated as the kingdom Jon has dominion over seizes up in an uncanny rictus of death, and he had not, he could not have known he had such capacity for suffering, the pain that blooms like burst capillaries up his spine, lancing through his head, the remaining eyes in his skin blinded sightless.

Martin has hold of his hand. A damp and slippery hold, blood-wet, but he has folded the horizon of his body around the two of them, enclosed them both so that all their edges press into each other. Martin is the only skyline left for Jon to look upon, and he does so with his own desperate and human sight. 

One thing Jon does know. Knew when they left the cottage, leaving the latch of the door unlocked, shouldering the faint burden of over-light bags and taking nothing for the return journey. Their foolish pilgrimage, which was always to conclude in a sad but inevitable martyrdom.

Martin is screaming too. Over-close, near-deafening, a peeling evisceration of self from self, sight from sight as the air rewrites itself around them, and then there is a dense burying sense of laden gravity. Martin is collapsed around him, or they are collapsed around each other like the rubble of ruins, and his screaming trails off into a horrendous airless swallowing as the earth eats them.

Jon squirms in the mulchy embrace of the ground, and he pushes out with his elbows, his legs, but the dirt only oozes into the crevices of his form, sucks tighter, pressing down on his remaining ribs. He kicks out and yells but the soil, desirous of one last meal before it is banished, pushes behind his teeth, gags in his throat, and it is close and tight and dark and the only thing of Martin he can sense is the bruise-tight grip of his hand, the rest of him distant, out of his sight now compacting with dirt. Martin is speaking, shouting but it's muffled, clogged and Jon can feel the vibrations through the layer of earth that tamps them down and presses any attempt at noise out of their lungs.

Martin shouts again, and it's plaintive, weaker, spluttering in a cough.

“I'm here! Martin! I'm here!” Jon tries to shout back, but the ground chews it up.

Jon did not think he would be so frightened. To still have such reserves of terror to draw upon. His end would be peaceless and graceless, and he had accepted that. He writhes and struggles and worms and finally he pushes through and past the tunnel wall that had built up around him, is submerged in Martin's space, feeling his chest slotted against him, his frantic in-and-out gasping, and Jon had not expected the cresting loss in him that disguises itself in the trappings of frustrated anger.

Jon cannot breathe and his vision is wavering dizzy, and Martin is panicking, hyperventilating, his free hand scrabbling to dig them out of the earth, and all Jon can think about is that he had wanted so much more than this. That in his most selfish moments, he'd felt they deserved to see the world shuddering back to the way it had been before, looking upon it with their own human eyes.

He had wanted a life beyond his own sacrifices. He had wanted a happy ending. Knowing he is dying by Martin's side as this world ends does not bring him the solace that he thought it might, because he does not want them to die at all.

As Martin's protesting, straining limbs begin to tire, the ground around them fragments from underneath.

They drop. The horizon is yawning, abyssal. Windburn scores raw the skin of his cheeks, and a different kind of breathless steals his voice, as with a tumbling plummet they dive through a fracturing sky. Jon grips Martin against him and feels Martin doing the same, legs locking around legs and arms clenched around their backs so the tumult doesn't separate them, and he does not know how this will end, only that it will.

The clouds around them lean in like branches. Form many-fingered claws that catch them in a cupped palm. Their landing is hard, the air punched out of them, and Martin's taken the brunt of it on his back, Jon barrelling into him, and he shouts with a howl over the rush of the wind still whipping around them.

“Martin!” Jon manages to gasp, collapsed on top of him.

“I-I'm alright,” Martin replies pained, his expression glazed in the shock of having solid ground restored to them.

On the strange glitching island that has caught them, intruding upon the centre of the disintegrating Vast, there is a warping laugh that breaks over them. 

“I think you've outstayed your welcome at this particular party,” scatters a voice, familiar and echoing. “Time for good little Archivists to know when to leave, don't you think?”

The scene in front of Jon's eyes barely coalesces into meaning, but he thinks he sees a fractal smile pushing through the cloud formations, breaking up the sky and tugging it into a twist.

“Off you pop then, Jon. Martin. Be seeing you!”

There is a forceful push against the shape that Jon recognises belatedly as his own body. In the snapshot-flickering, rewriting flesh of the ground that is not ground, a trapdoor forms. A circular porthole, large and heavy seeming, tinted glass ringed in weathered brass, the door of which swings inwards below them.  The bottom of the world falls out from under them again, and still Martin has hold of his hand as they drop.

The architect is not present to see the desecration of his unwanted world as the Powers are forced to leave it. The porthole slams shut, chopping off the wail of the struggling Vast, and the two of them are both falling down the remaining labyrinth of the Distortion.

Down, ever down.

They pinball down corridors, the space turned on the wrong axis, rotating without warning. The hallways disintegrating, the wallpaper peeling charred by some unseen fire, the mirrors shattering outwards, the light fixtures confetti-ing them with smashing glass.

“Hurry up and choose a doorway, there's a dear,” echoes the voice of Helen, her words cutting out like disrupted signal, as the world rights horizontal and they are suddenly subject to gravity again, their bruised bodies rolling along bland hotel carpeting. Martin tries to break their momentum by grabbing the leg of a table that is rocking against the wall, but he only succeeds in up-ending its display, decorative flowers and a faux Chinese vase breaking easily as eggs, the flowers and vase shattering like pottery pieces.

The walls quake and shiver, and suddenly the ground is tipping again, and Jon has barely managed to scrabble onto his hands and knees before the angle makes a tube of their hallway, and Martin's weight slams into him as they drop again.

Jon's hand slips out of Martin's, and he twists and scrabbles desperately mid-drop to grab it again. The corridor they have come from, fallen out of, is simply not there any more, the flowers and the vase and the table and the entire structure wiped into non-existence.

“Shit – Martin, Martin!”

“I-I've got you!” Martin says, snatching Jon's hand back, his nails digging in hard. “Don't let go!”

The corridor turns and they slide down the wall for a few hundred metres, Martin grabbing a gilded light-fixture, only for it to snap off and come away from its moorings.

“A door!” he shouts to Jon. “Try and grab a door!”

It is easier said. When the corridors tilt themselves into a slower loop-the-loop, Jon reaches out to anchor them on a protruding door handle. The first two he misses, the next wrenching out of his feeble grip, and Martin manages to stop their fall for a moment by grabbing a d-pull handle, Jon dangling under him perilously, before he gets hit very squarely by some of the heavier furniture that is collapsing down with them, and his hands still coated in Elias' blood do not have enough grip.

The walls circle around, and for a moment, Jon is almost standing. The carpeted floor is on his right, doors of different colours and shades and handles lining the floor.

Jon chooses one.

“H-here!” he shouts, pulling them both to the floor, his free hand twisting the handle and yanking the door open. “This one, this –”

The corridors upend again. Instead of falling down again, he falls through.

He doesn't know anything more after that.

Jon ascends to alertness pained, gasping, his throat feeling like gravel-burn and aware of his body in a way he hasn't been in a long time.

His hands are empty. Fingertips twitch to close around absence.

There is noise above him, around him, but it cannot penetrate the conflicting wars that are flaring up internally. The battered, aching reminders of his own bones, the scratching at the bottom of his stomach, cramping in a way that makes his spine contort him over, as if compressing himself smaller will squash the hissing snake-rattle hunger smaller too.

His body laid siege to, his head rocks sea-sick, and again, there's a sound near him, repeating like bird call or alarm clock but all equally background. His hands clench through air to form weak fists. There's cool tile under his cheek.

He thinks he might throw up. The sensation sloshes and threatens at the depth of his throat.

“Martin?” he croaks. The syllables feeble, cracking.

His awareness dips back into unconsciousness like a boat prow dipping in and out of water. Minor movements set off a domino chain of flared nerves and stiff limbs. He lies on his side on the chilled tile, eyes crunched closed and huffing inhales and exhales through the nausea, feeling bound in a feverish and finite space.

His lips shape Martin's name again. He'll be lying nearby surely, if they fell through the same door, and Jon wants to check, needs to see he's alright, if he could only move.

“Christ, he looks bloody awful. What if he's dying or something?”

“Well, I'm not getting any closer to check.”

“He's hardly in a position to jump us, jus' look at him.”

“Then you go and have a gawk then.”

“Fuck. Fuck. Where the hell's he come from? What are we going to do? It's – it's Jon, isn't it? It is. From, from before.”

“I – I don't know. But I think so, yeah.”

“Fuck.... Could it, it's not a trap, is it?”

“By who?”

“I dunno! I'm the only one coming up with ideas at the moment!”

“Look, I don't know!”

“Well, he's waking up so you better make your mind up one way or another, boss.”

“I'm thinking, alright?”

“Martin?” Jon calls out weakly again, louder than before. The name sticks in his gullet, and he near gags on the effort of bringing it up.

The babble around him simmers down to a tense silence.

Then:

“Um. Hey there. Are you – can you hear us?”

“'course he can hear us!”

“Excuse me for taking the initiative!”

Jon takes three or four very shaky breathes before he opens his eyes, blinking at the weight of the light. The world sways, but not as viciously as before, giving him a tentative window of opportunity to sit up. He makes a slow catalogue of his body as his surroundings surge before steadying.

Something is missing. The knowledge rises up inside him insistent.

He is alive, and he didn't expect to be so. His pummelled body protesting every motion, and he can see the vicious splotching of bruises on his leg through a tear in the fabric. He is exhausted, blood and dirt matting in his hair, but there are no real revelations in that.

Martin is not with him.

“Martin?”

He glances around frantically, despite the jolting spike it sets off in his head. He's sat on the floor, the atmosphere touched by air-conditioned chill and dust, surrounded by loose paper and upturned boxes knocked from their berths. Behind his back, metal wire shelving cranes up, and in rows before him, it follows the same pattern, basic blocky storage stretching down the room, laden with labelled brown boxes. Those that have been upended around him show off their labels; he reads 1998 (Wilts. And Somer.), The Cult of the Lightless Flame (2000-). It takes him a moment to realise they're written in his handwriting, his own stiff and slanted capitals shown back to him, but he doesn't remember writing them.

Martin, where's Martin?

He's sprawl-limbed, mostly sat upright at the end of a row, bracketed by two long shelving units moving down from his field of vision.

His guests are standing further down the row.

He notices the woman first. She's said something, but he hasn't taken it in. She has dark brown coils scraped back into a thoughtless, slowly-collapsing bun, wearing thick-framed glasses and a mustard jumper, the sleeves of which she has bunched up to her elbows. Kept out of the way of the fire axe she's currently gripping two-handed.

By her side, a more familiar face. Flyaway hair squashed under a cap, a bold chevron-patterned t-shirt paired with artfully ripped jeans, his expression streaked with a stubborn, thrumming anxiety that bears no resemblance to the stony fury Jon remembers more easily. He still has the small burrowed scars by his temple, under his ear and down, that make a neater constellation compared to Jon's markings.

Jon blinks and sways, and then realises with a jolt that no, no, he knows both of them.

“Sasha,” he breathes out. “God – Sasha, you're – you're here.”

And it is her. Her face stolen from him for so long, settling into the groove where the memory of it should have sat. He watches the way her brow crumples in confusion, the port-wine birthmark that travels up her neck to creep onto her cheek. She had had silver rings that overcrowded her earlobes, a purple industrial piercing on her left ear, and he sees the light tracing the edges of them, and Jon can remember, he can remember her.

Tears are snaking sluggish down his face, every detail hitting as both something long known and something never seen.

Jon rocks, uses the metal shelving to hoist himself to standing onto coltish limbs. There's a sweat on his brow from such a minor effort and he has to take another shaking breath.

Sasha looks at him hard and doesn't put the axe down.

The glow in him stutters and chokes starved.

“Sasha?” The sound hitches in his chest. He glances to her left. “Tim?”

Tim seems unsettled to be called by name.

“Knows our names, boss,” he says, in that slightly sing-song way that means he's anxious. He's clutching a steak knife that he must have taken from the staff kitchen, the tip blunted and the cheap plastic of the handle coming off. Jon remembers trying to eat with the useless thing a few times, has no idea why no one ever just threw it away.  “It – it's got to be him, right?”

“Just, just, wait.”

She's looking over at Jon with her eyes beginning to glisten teary, though she hefts the axe tight, sniffs back whatever emotion is brewing in her.

“Jon?” she asks tentatively. “It's really you?”

“Y-yes,” he replies. “Where – How did I get - ? Sasha, it's, God, I thought I'd never see you again, how did you – ?”

He takes an unsteady step forward. She raises the axe.

“Stay right there,” she snaps. Expression conflicted, for all she's painted in all the colours of furtive hope. “Stay. Don't move.”

“Sash, I think it's him,” Tim says. “I mean, it's alright, it's Jon.”

“The other one wore his face for long enough, and we were all convinced,” Sasha retorts. Her eyes don't leave him. “Look at him, Tim. I mean, look, really look. There's.... his hand, his hair. It's – it's not him. Not exactly.”

“I don't get it.”

“Neither do I!”

“I'm – I'm Jon.” he feels the need to say. He doesn't understand; the world around is still rippling strange, a dizziness shot through him. Tim and Sasha are here, looking at him with expressions he doesn't have the histories to read. And where's Martin? The door must have opened here, the boxes and mess of papers evidence of a rude entry, and they went through at the same time so surely he'd be around here, collapsed behind another one of these shelves.

Sasha's reply is harsh and hard.

“Jonathan Sims is dead,” she says. “Something stole his life and rewrote his face, and we killed it. So, who are you?”

“I'm Jonathan Sims,” he says, and then gasps at the fish-hook sensation that pulled the words out of his mouth.

He takes it in for a long and horrible moment. Tim's scars, a familiar pattern down his face. Sasha's own markings that score up from the back of her hand. Her eyes are dark in the over-bright halogen strip lighting, but they are tinted by the first touchings of something More, a glint Jon could have seen in his own if he could have bared to look in a mirror.

Sasha's hands are pocked with worm scars. But that's wrong. She'd been murdered while Jon and Tim were running from Jane Prentiss, were overrun, she'd already been lost to them.

There are boxes by his feet with Jon's handwriting on them, but he didn't write them. This Sasha and Tim, they know a different Jonathan Sims, a dead man they're still mourning.

Sasha asked him a question and it was the easiest thing in the world to answer, words slipping out easily as water.

Where's Martin? he thinks desperately. Did they find him, was he hurt, why is he not here?

“You're the Archivist,” Jon whispers, half to himself. “Oh – oh Sasha, I'm so sorry.”

“What do you mean?” she asks, but he doesn't reply.

This Sasha isn't his Sasha. He'd thought maybe, through some slip in the world, they'd gone back somehow, to before, to where he could fix it all. He knows this room, the groaning, bent-backed shelves, and knows these people, his people, the ones he'd failed to protect, and it is almost like it was.

But it's wrong. Different. Askew and off-kilter and he doesn't understand.

The floor waves in his vision. He puts a hand out to one of the corners of the shelving to steady himself, and his stomach rolls and he has to clench his eyes shut and what is he doing here, covered in the last cloying dirt of the Buried and the blood spatter from a would-be king, why has he come here and where has Martin gone.

This world does not fit him and he doesn't want to be alone.

“Sasha,” he says, short of breath and fighting back the fear trickling down his back. “Where's – where's Martin?”

Her eyebrows dip into a frown.

“Who's Martin?”

“Mart – I came here with him!” Jon stresses – thinking, he must be here, maybe he woke up first, maybe he went to get help – “Martin Blackwood. Martin, I was with him, he was right beside me, he- he was holding my hand a-a-and he should be here – ”

“Jon, or whoever you are,” Sasha says, tightening the grip on her axe. Jon knows he's frightening them, a terrible, raging spectre, but there is no recognition in her eyes, and there has to be, there needs to be. “There's no one else here. There's no other way out of this room and no one came past us.”

“I chose a door,” Jon repeats, because she's not listening, Martin has to be here. “I chose a door, and he was – he was with me, he came through, he must have – di – did you check, have you looked around the - ? ”

“It was only you that came through,” Tim says, sharing a concerned look with Sasha. “That door opened and you fell out like dropped luggage, and then it slammed shut again.”

Jon can't do this. Not now, not after everything.

“He was right there,” he almost shouts, getting desperate, his words falling over themselves, a tension like drowning building up in his chest. “He was – he was – a-and – ”

“Look, I'm sure he's – he's fine,” Tim says. He's lowered his useless knife, bends to drop it the rest of the way with a truncated clatter, and although Sasha hisses at him to stay back, he's raising his hands in a mock surrender, taking a tentative step closer to Jon in the same way someone would circle a spooked animal. “Don't panic, alright, we'll figure this – ”

“Nononono,” Jon says. He was holding his hand, they were together. He'd had nothing else to lose but this. “No, no, he's got to be here, maybe he – he's – he's – Where is he?”

He fixes his demands to Tim. He feels his mouth shape the words, the taut surface tension of them, the push he needs to make people tell him what he wants to know.  The expected rise and click of static does not come.

Instead, he has the very graphic sensation of tearing something, of putting weight on a limb that's broken, and his whole body drops.

“Shit,” is the last thing he hears before he blacks out.

Chapter Text

In an altogether different place, Martin Blackwood is being given a gift.

“Your choice of course.”

Martin snorts derisively. Thumbing the edging of it with fingers still stiff with bruising.

“It's not though, is it?”

“Oh, don't be like that.” A many-edged smile rises in a pleased parabola. “You want to find him again, don't you?”

“I wouldn't really expect you to be so charitable.”

A laugh like a headache, looping, the pitch triplicated in layers. 

“What can I say? I'm in a giving mood.”

“Right.”

A pause.

“Will it hurt?” Martin asks. His voice doesn’t shake. He is too tired, too blindly frightened of might bes and may bes, to change his mind now, not with such a treasure held solid in his palms.

A intricate hm. “Not at first.”

Martin Blackwood nods, repeats a quieter ‘Right. Yeah, I.... Right.’ Takes the answer for as close to honesty as he's going to get.

His mind snarled on the wire of one thought, and the both of them know it.

He steals his shoulders, and does what needs to be done.

Jon resurfaces alone.

Even on the dozy and ragged peripheries of waking, he knows Martin isn't with him. When they sleep side by side, Martin exudes an intense swelter of thick heat, a sun-bright furnace as though he's trapped the day's warmth inside of him like a glass house. Jon's leg will be half slung over, ankle hooking him in place. The first few days out of Peter Lukas' domain, Martin's skin had chipped chill, breathing short, shallow breaths as if desperate to not take up space even in sleep. Over their three weeks, their however-long pilgrimage, any lessons the Lonely bestowed upon Martin were diligently stripped back, to Jon's immense satisfaction. The rare times they waylaid their trudging quest to slump against each other in poorly constructed tents, Martin snored with the sound of a warming up chainsaw if he'd dropped off onto his back, Jon sleepless, trying to coax him into turning onto his side with a soft smirk, Martin mumbling and batting him off in sleep.

Even in the safehouse, if Martin had woken earlier, tried to rise from the roasting clutch of the duvet without disturbing Jon, managed to place his feet where the floor didn't creak or knock something with his foot in the dark, Jon would rouse anyway. A diligent compass always pointing to where Martin was.

Martin is not here, and he knows it without Knowing.

Jon stares at the ceiling of the storage room, following the lines of exposed pipework, the warped tiles and dead light-bulbs and he tries very hard not to think about the possibility that Martin might be dead.

They'd talked about it. In the days that were not days as the Panopticon loomed closer, about what might happen. They'd spoken, haltingly, uncomfortably, the embers of words murmured sticky against skin or muttered into wisping strands of hair, never meeting each other’s eyes, about dying.

Jon hadn't considered the idea that he might live, and Martin might not.

He rearranges the angle of his spine on the taut fabric of the camping bed, the thin mattress over it seeded with grunting springs, and is rewarded with the mutinous protestation of battered limbs. In the lacklustre light of the room, he lifts his arm and stares at the expansive bruise-dark skin spreading out irregularly from wrist to elbow in blotching amorphous islands of injury. It would not surprise him if the rest of his body were in a similar battered state. Poking at the bruising, he is struck with a discomfort he can't place.

Reigning his thoughts back, sitting up and rubbing at his eyes, he frantically goes over those last few minutes. The collapsing erasure of the corridors, pluming with dust and detritus, corrupted with a spasming glitch that had rotted through wall and floor as the Powers were banished squalling back through the gaps.  The roll and writhe and tumble of the wallpapered hallways as they'd fallen, spinning and steadying and spinning again. He'd – he'd grabbed a door, surely, to be here and not to have been parcelled in with the disintegrating corridors. It had been red, or maybe a maroon, and the handle had been shaky in its moorings, the nails loose, and he must have wrenched it open, and then he, he'd fallen. But Martin had been behind him. He'd had hold of his hand.

If the corridors of the Distortion had folded like crunched paper into non-existence, crumpling smaller and smaller, maybe Martin had been erased too. It could have been quick, a smeared erasure of his limbs, his falling body. It might have been swift and painless and unlikely. Or maybe some of the leaning, entropy-ravaged structures had survived, uncommitted to the same laws as the other facets of terror. Maybe Martin was still there. Picking his way through the collapsing beams and ramshackle flooring. Wandering, his lungs festering with cinders and soot, hurt and lost in the throat of delusion, believing Jon had left him behind.

Maybe he fell through a door of his own. Distant but alive.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Jon closes his eyes and tries to Know.

A sea-sickness sloshes and buffets within him. Instead of the heady rush of fact – sensation – terror for the Eye to glut itself on, he groans nauseous and pitches forward, breathing through the queasiness.

It is not like it was before. His knowing simple as breathing, submerged at the lowest depths, moulded into something that could withstand the unnatural pressure. Now, it feels like a trickle, a burst pipe drying up, and pushing at the metaphorical door only makes something wring twisted in his gut.

There is something. At the edging of this inaccessible sea. Jon's compass broken but piteously hopeful, spinning frantic and wobbling over a point repeatedly.

There is a disruption threaded into this place. But it's time-worn and sanded down, like a footprint on a beach being eroded by rising tide. Jon's treacherous, traitorous brain reading the impression of something that has the weave and groove and sense that his Eyes recognise as Martin. He might have been here. There is something here, but the meaning of it trails elusive, provides no greater clarification.

Jon has never been able to afford to hope but he does so anyway.

But whatever may or may not be there, the room is still empty, and Jon is still alone.

A polite tap-tap intrudes, once and then again, and he first mistakes it for the clunk and eke of the overhead pipes.

There is a rusting turn of the lock being undone to the door of the storage room.

“Knock knock.” Sasha gingerly pushes the door open with her hip, hands full of two mugs. “You're back with us then.”

Jon scrapes himself back together as best as he can.

“Did you lock me in?” he asks dully.

Sasha shrugs, passing him the cup.

“You're not a prisoner, if that's what you're asking.”

“How long have I been out?”

“Couple of hours. After you collapsed, or whatever happened, we figured this was the best place for you. Better for all of us at the moment if we know where you are, till we work this out. Tim's off sorting you out some things, so we've got some time to chat.”

“You're the interrogation then,” Jon says. Sasha looks offended, ready to bristle with indignation, but she meets his eye and deflates and Jon doesn't know why.

“Nothing so dramatic. Brought you tea, didn't I?”

Jon doesn't reply. Watches the swishing liquid inside the ceramic.

“Tim only poisoned it a little bit?” she jokes weakly. Trying over-hard for levity.

It's enough to quirk the corners of Jon's lips in a sort of acknowledgement. He thinks his Sasha might have done that. There's not enough left of her in his memory to know for certain, but he'll take even vague certainties over nothing.

“It'll be too much sugar and not enough milk as usual,” he offers as an olive branch. Sasha nods conspiratorially.

There's a fold-up camping chair in the corner, near a semi-stuffed wastepaper bin. Sasha gestures to it with her free hand.

“Mind if I sit for a bit?”

It's Sasha. It's Sasha asking him. Not his Sasha, no such miracle, but the way her glasses are slipping down her nose, the hair trailing out that she persistently tucks behind one ear rings a truth in him. He should be grateful.

It's hard. The fragmenting of the corridor, the absence in the palm of his hand still raw.

The world ended for him today in more ways than one.

He waves a tired hand in permission.

Sasha's eyes don't leave him as she sits. Barely blinking, though it's unlikely she's noticed that yet.

“This is, this is so weird,” she finally settles on voicing.

“Hm.”

“Like, you're Jon. But not, if you get me? My brain knows it’s you but there's all these little things that don't match up.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

Jon stares into his mug.

“Where did you come from?” She leans forward, and the colour of her eyes catch the light behind her glasses.

“'s difficult to explain.”

“But you know us? Me and Tim?”

A clump of ash in his throat he can't force down.

“Yes. Yes, I. I knew you.”

Sasha leans back and takes a sip of her tea when it's obvious that Jon isn't going to be adding much to the conversation.

“If we're going to work on getting you back,” she says, with all the air of presenting battle strategy. “We're going to have to work out where you came from. So, me and Tim were putting our heads together. Current theory is either, a) you're another Not Them creature, though it'd be kind of stupid to try the same trick, and, well, you look like our Jon. F-from before. Meaning as a theory, pretty flimsy. Or, b) and a bit more of a wild card, yeah, blame Tim and all his sci-fi, but he's under the impression that you're some sort of intrepid mirror-verse version of our Jon, who has somehow turned up in our universe. I mean, explains the facial hair game you've got going on – ”

“I can't,” Jon's voice cracks into his tea.

Sasha stumbles to a halt.

“Sorry?”

“I can't go back,” he says. He looks at the gnawed edging of his nails. “Even if I fixed it. They – they're all gone. Or better off without me. There's no one for me to go back to.”

Daisy, a violent life ended violently. Basira, a vision of blood and Sight lost to the ocean of knowing. Melanie and Georgie, if they were returned when the world reaffirmed itself, they deserve a life escaped, a happy ending earned despite it all. His universe is better off without an Archivist.

And even if he could go back....

It doesn't matter, he keeps thinking, and each thought is vicious and cutting and unkind. None of it matters anymore. Whether he can get back or not, because his home has never been walled, has not found itself bright with windows, illuminating carpets and treasured possessions and localised sites of wear and tear beloved for their character. His home is threaded with veins that flush hot when he flirts, or teases, his home is decorated with garish shirts and a watch worn out of stubbornness, broken since the Lonely, and when Jon puts his ear to the broad wall of his chest he hears a voice rumble cavernous. Martin is his home, so it doesn't matter if he can go back. He tried to keep him safe, tried and tried, dragged him across mile and mire but he failed.

“What happened to you, Jon?”

“It's a really long story.” Jon clears his throat without much success.

He knows Sasha has questions. He can feel them pressing at the air, the way they're crowding, tight-packed as wisdom teeth in her mouth.

One more mystery, how he got here, what here even is; it isn't much to him anymore. 

“You've – er, clearly met Jane Prentiss then,” Sasha tries. “If we're sticking with the whole alternative universe thing. She came here too. Your – um, I've got them too. All down my arms. Somehow Tim pulls it off, as a ‘look’, y’know, but mine are a bit gross to look at.”

“Hmm,” Jon replies again. He rubs at his eyes with the hand not curled around the tea.

He watches her open her mouth for another question, reconsider, then adjust slightly.

“So,” she pauses. “Who's.... who's Martin?”

“It doesn't matter,” Jon's voice is low and shaky. “He's probably dead.”

“You're still alive though.”

Jon's laugh is a harsh bark.

“That's not the reassurance you think it is.”

Sasha clearly doesn't know what to say to that for a moment.

“Tim's getting in touch with some contacts,” she voices finally. “Who knows. Maybe we have a... version? A Martin Blackwood in our universe.”

“He didn't come through the door with me,” Jon snaps. “I'm not – I don't care about your version – you can't just – just replace people, you – ”

“I didn't mean it that way,” Sasha interrupts shortly, and he silences, bristling with a guilt he has nowhere to displace into anger. “We're… we’re trying to understand what's happening here. The same as you. I don't know what you've gone through, I certainly don't know how you got here, but we're trying to help in the best way we can. So, ok, maybe your Martin did come through here, but he's … I don't know, maybe he's fallen out somewhere else.”

“He hasn't.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I just do.” Jon responds, shortly, and it's shamefully easy to dredge up the ruins of his old walls, to bristle and snarl and push people away.

He is not proud of the man he used to be. He deliberately takes a long breath, and repeats, sloughing the spikes from his tone: “I just... I do.”

Sasha raises an unimpressed pierced eyebrow.

“Well, that's a cop-out.”

“I would – I can't, I can't feel him,” he tries to explain. “He's – before I always, I knew where he was, I could, I could tell. A sense or an aura or whatever word you want to use. And now, here, there's, there's.... something, but.... No. No, he's not here.”

He taps his long fingers against the ceramic of the mug. It's Tim's, one of those tea tub mugs with the Man United emblem on it, over-loved by the dishwasher, the red glaze chipped at the handle. Tim went with his brother to a United vs City match when they were younger, because Danny had had a friend who got the tickets on the cheap and who then couldn't make it himself, and Tim had said 'It's just a bunch of blokes kicking a circle for ninety minutes, where's the fun in that' and 'It's hours on the train, and the traffic's going to be shit when we try and leave the stadium, I've got an early lecture' and 'I'm not paying that for something to eat, it's extortion, that's what that is', but he'd gone because Danny had asked, and Danny had hollered and heckled and beamed the whole match, and the end of the day had seen Tim skint from over-priced pies and he'd queued for bloody ages to buy them both merch, one for Danny's team and one for their rivals.

It's a treasured memory of Tim's. Not one Jon earned. The Eye displayed it as a magpied fragment of someone else's life, unconsciously given, dropped into his head unwanted, and Tim would have hated to know it had been so unceremoniously shared.

“If he's anywhere,” Jon continues. “He's, he's somewhere cut off from here. O-or he's, he's gone.”

His voice banks trembling. He has to take a long and collapsing inhale, blinking through the threatening tears.

“What happened?” Sasha asks, and there is no compulsion twisted in her tone, but he cannot stop the words flooding from his mouth as he stares at the cooling steam.

“We were in the corridors – the corridors of Hel – Michael? The Distortion, you, um probably already – anyway they were collapsing. It... it'd take too long to explain why, but I-I had hold of his hand so we weren't separated, and it was – everything was falling apart.” He doesn't meet her eye. “What we'd done... I wasn't expecting to survive. Neither of us were. But then there were so many doors, and I – I hadn't the time to – I just opened one, and I thought that…” Another hard sound leaves his throat. “I thought that he was right with me. And that door opened here, wherever here is,  and the year is wrong, and you're you, yet you're the Archivist and you don't even have your own Martin, but I swear he was with me.”

Sasha puts a careful hand on his, and he feels like shattering.

“For what it's worth,” Sasha replies quietly after Jon has composed himself. “I'm sorry.”

From her pocket, she pulls out a packet of Kleenex and passes them to him.

After a while, he looks up at her through sore and puffy eyes, straightening, trying to pull himself together.

“I forgot, you know, what you looked like,” he says, forcing a wobbly expression that raises his mouth in something contorted and sad. “My – er, my Sasha. The Not Them took her face. Even when I killed it, the memory of what she looked like, it never came back.”

Sasha is quiet.

“You went to get help,” she says finally. She doesn't look at him but the hand still positioned over his grips him. “When Jane Prentiss attacked the archives, I shouted at you... him, I shouted at him to get help. And then that was it. Gone. That... that thing murdered you. Took everything you'd been, and we didn't even notice. Something answered to your name, and ate lunch with us, sat in the same office as us, and we didn't,” Sasha lets out a hard huff. “Christ, we didn't notice until Melanie – ”

“Melanie King?”

Sasha seems surprised to have been interrupted, but nods a 'yes', dragging herself out of her reverie with a shake of her head. Her hand still held tight over his for a moment before separating.

“Huh,” Jon says. “Some things are the same, then. In our, timelines or what have you.” He sips at his tea, feeling it prickle hot against his lips. “They collar you for murder then?”

Sasha blinks incredibly heavily.

“You what?”

Not everything the same then, Jon thinks wryly as he says: “You – er, you didn't destroy the table with an axe or something?”

“I, um,” Sasha appears to rally from the shock. “No? Tim and Gerry went all macho and set it on fire.”

“All very Kill Bill, isn't it?”

“You've seen Kill Bill?”

“Don't sound so surprised.”

“It's just... My Jon was a bit of a film snob.”

“.... Martin explained the plot to me.”

“Ah.” Sasha tries and fails to stifle a self-satisfied smirk.

Jon's brain finally skips slightly, parsing what Sasha said.

“Wait a minute. Gerry? As in Gerard Keay?”

“You can't exactly miss him. One of a kind, our Gerry.”

For the first time, his shoulders untwist out some of their tension, his expression inching in a smile. Genuine, momentarily untouched by the dusting of his too-recent grief. The knowledge that one universe treated Gerard Keay better, that an ill-used life was not cut short by a terminal sentence, that a man born into a world that had expected too much and supported too little might have experienced something approaching a freedom long deserved, breaks up the ice-flat of despair lodged in his chest.

“That's... I'm glad,” he says stiffly, not able to express further, not sure if he is capable of explaining. He proposes another white flag of a smile. “I can't imagine he was too pleased running into Leitner.”

“... Excuse me?!” Sasha replies, and this time her confusion flowers wild-grown on her face.

“Have you not...?” Jon's face creasing. He pauses.  “I think our versions might differ considerably.”

“Too right!” Sasha says. “When are you from even?”

An unrelenting quest across a wasteland etched with terror, unaffected by time except to aid the playing out of nightmares means that Jon doesn't exactly have a traditional answer.

“When are we here?” he asks instead.

“March. The…” she glances at a read-out on her watch. “…seventeenth.”

“And the year?”

“Are you serious?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“2017.”

Sasha's been mourning her Jon for less than a month. The grief sits newer on her face like freshly cut flowers.

He wonders if vengeance helped her deal with that. If she planted her feet and witnessed the flickering flames of the Web's prison, the char and crackle of the dark wood, the warping of the inlaid pattern and the screech as the Stranger's creature wailed and was consumed.

Jon stores his guilt up in himself like a library, the tomes of his remorse to be taken out and obsessively studied, but he has never opened himself up to regret killing the creature that stole his friend.

“So you've... There was a table? In Artefact Storage. And your Jon?” Sasha's face streaks with pain, but she does a good job of repressing it. “Your Jon was taken, the same way my Sasha was.”

“Yes, think so.”

“And you destroyed the table?”

“Gerry had a can of petrol and a lighter.”

“Nothing escaped?”

“No,” Sasha replies, and her voice is sated, and satisfied. “No, after we'd finished, it was definitely dead.”

“So that means,” Jon rubs at his head with his free hand, laying the pieces out carefully in his head. “You've three assistants. Tim, your Jon, and Gerard Keay.”

“That's right. Is the number important or something?”

The Eye can see little of its inner workings. He hadn't noticed the pattern until the statement regarding his predecessor had slipped like a loose reign from his mouth.

Eric – wedded with a delight to the study of the arcane and esoteric;  Emma – her fingers already threading cats-cradle with silk; Fiona – who had not known the death of Angus Stacey had liberated her, who had been bound without question or struggle to the service of another Archivist, who was left moaning and choking in the grip of the Buried when the rain was high.

Eric – hollowed out gaunt by the weight of such understanding, flicking through books and lore and statement to find the key to escape; Emma – not dissuaded by failure, hands sticky with blood and spiders’ web; Michael – tall with a body he hadn't grown into yet, who fell over his own feet and smiled when he was nervous.

  Michael – who even on the boat to an island that did not exist had not known the truth.

  Sarah – immolated to powdery ash in the embrace of the burning man.

  Emma – the first and only favour the Archivist had asked of the Desolation.

 Martin had thought there might be something symbolic involved, in the deliberate choice of three assistants. Jon had snorted and replied that it was probably more Jonah over-invested in the tradition of it, the trappings of ritual it implied.

“I've never been sure,” he tells Sasha honestly. “Gertrude had three. So did I, when I started. I requested you, and Tim, but well, Elias was awfully specific that I should have three.”

“You're the Archivist,” Sasha says after a moment. Her expression haunted and hungry and hunted. “From your timeline, alternative future, whatever. You're the Archivist?”

“Was,” Jon says quietly.

He rubs at his arms, at the bruising that is not sucking back into his skin, and doesn't know what he is any more.

“I'm – surprised,” he says. “That you know about all, all this already.” He opens and closes his burn-scarred palm, the stiff creak of the skin stretching taut as it can. “I must have taken the long way round.”

Sasha stares at his hand. Doesn't ask.

“Gerry's been able to tell us some things that he picked up from Gertrude, before she died. Smirke's fourteen and the rituals she was trying to stop. But he's... he wasn't the Archivist. And Gertrude wasn't exactly an open book.”

“Quite,” Jon says. His voice twisted funny. “You seem to be doing alright though.”

It’s not jealousy. Not precisely, but it burns similarly low in his gut, a begrudging realisation that he stews in, the final proof that he was never suited to this job. That someone else would have performed better given the same task, avoided his stumbling mistakes, not spent years fucking up his friendships and his health, consumed by terror and guilt and hunger.

Sasha shakes her head.

“Oh, believe me,” she says. “I've... I have not been coping well. I, um. Look, Gerry explained all about how the whole world was just a playground for these... these horrendous mind-boggling intrusions of horror that could be anywhere, that could not be banished, barely even fought. It was... I believed in them when he told me, I wasn’t sceptical, but it was academic, you know. They were real,  but they – to me, that meant they could be catalogued and categorised and comprehended. If I knew enough, if I studied them enough, then I could handle them.

And then, well,  Jane Prentiss attacked, a-and I froze, Jon. I was so so scared, and I couldn't help. Not myself, not Tim, not you, and Tim w-was screaming as the worms dug in, and I could do nothing. If Elias hadn't pulled the fire suppression system... And after, I didn’t… I coped badly.  I cut everyone out when they needed me to be there, I convinced myself that if I did it alone, then they wouldn't get hurt because it wasn’t their place to put themselves in danger, it wasn’t their responsibility, it was mine.  I wasn’t... I am not proud of who I became, Jon. Paranoid and isolated and cold. I didn’t trust them, and I was surprised when they didn’t trust me when I’d done nothing to earn it.”

Jon watches her leant on her knees, consumed by her failings as much as him, and places a hand on her shoulder.

“In your defence,” he says. “I think the close proximity to the Stranger didn't help you. The Eye, it knew something was off but it didn't know how to tell us, it couldn't see properly. I, um. I wasn't any better.”

Sasha’s mouth twists self-deprecatingly.

“You stalked the people who were meant to be your friends, then?”

“Yes.”

Sasha quietens. Picks at her nails. Doesn’t meet his eye.

“Tim says he's forgiven me,” she continues eventually. “That he understands. After losing... we've all had to put aside that. But I – I wouldn't have. If it had been him, and he’d acted like that… I don’t know if I would have been so forgiving. And I hate knowing that. And now you're here, and you know – you know how this all ends, surely, a-and I can't help thinking that there's so many mistakes I'm going to make and keep making, that you could stop me.”

“Well, don't talk to Jude Perry,” Jon says. “For starters.”

He tries to play it as a joke, but Sasha's face remains tight, grappling with something internal.

Finally, she looks at him.

“Would you tell me? Explain... explain all of this. I have... there's no one to ask about this, and – Tim and Gerry are, they're supportive, but they don't, they don't need to know. Not like I do. And it, god, it scares me, Jon. I don't know what I am turning into, I don't know how or if I can stop it. And even if your version isn't mine, it's better than nothing. And,” she waves a hand with a dismissive expulsion of air. “Elias, he keeps being all ominous and dropping all these fucking spooky hints about 'becoming' or whatever the hell..... Jon?”

Jon has to very consciously unclench his fists.

He hadn't thought, he'd forgotten.

He wants to ask slowly, calmly, but the sudden rush of panic knotting through his system has him demanding urgently:

“Elias. Where is he?”

“Er. Out. For a few days. Some investor's meeting, maybe? He wasn't clear.”

Jon's sigh of relief is audible.

“Then he's not paying attention.”

He glances around the cramped and boxy storage room. There's little in here in the way of decoration, spartan and functional considering its role as a document overflow room, its edges squared off with shelving units sporadically weighted with brown boxes. There's a plastic-rimmed wall clock over the exit; to the left of the door, the light switch, and to the right, the mandatory health and safety poster, laminated square pictures of various professions working in situ, set above clear and straightforward writing describing current employment laws and working rights. Jon doubts that Elias has ever given a thought to the legal rights of his workers.

“That poster,” he says, pointing when Sasha doesn't immediately follow his gaze. “Take it down.”

“Um, what?”

“Out of the room,” Jon insists, “or get a sharpie or something, scribble over the eyes. I'm not going to say anything where Elias can hear.”

“Jon,” Sasha says, body held as though she's going to move to standing, and she doesn’t get it, she doesn't know, she can't. “Jon, sorry, I don't – ”

Jon touches her wrist.

“This job,” he says, more urgently now. “The job of Archivist. It's not what you think it is. It's not even what Gertrude thought it was. It's – it's so much worse than that.”

There's a fire lighting luminous in him, flickering up the sides in a tamped down rage that remembers what Jonah Magnus did to him. How he watched, squatting in a stolen body, as Sasha was murdered, as Tim's trauma warped him spitting and hard, as he offered up Martin to be taken as a pawn in his games. He had known and watched and done nothing. And now, this Sasha is here, alive and an Archivist, so few marks collected on her, and Jon wants to be able to do something good with this.

Martin would want to warn her. Warn them all. Insist on it, argue that anything other than transparency was omission.

“We get rid of all the eyes,” Jon promises, and his burnt hand clutches hers. “And I swear, Sasha, I'll tell you everything.”

The poster is torn off the wall and thrown outside. Sasha's mug has a 'Little Miss Chatterbox' cartoon on the side, and she frowningly drains the last of her tea and puts it outside the door. Tim's Man U mug goes the same way when Jon points the red devil and its beady eyes on the crest.

“You serious about this?” she asks, looking expectantly for an answer.

“He's probably distracted right now,” Jon admits, scanning the room. “But we can't be too careful. I don't know how limited his distance is.”

“So, do we need to blindfold ourselves or something?”

Jon thinks, considering that it's a good point, but ultimately shakes his head.

“He can look through other people's eyes,” he says. “But I think it's harder to do, and unless he knows something's up, he wouldn't have any reason to.”

The flurry of movement has left him standing unbalanced. He sits back down heavily on the camping bed, the aluminium frame twinging in complaint.

Sasha ducks out of the storage room for a moment. Jon hears muttering, though it's muted through the walls; from the sound, it's probably Tim.

Their conversation is brief. Sasha returns, clutching a tape recorder.

“You'll be wanting me to give a statement then?” Jon says as she sits back down, looking at the machine critically.

“If you're feeling up to it?”

She's trying hard to be diplomatic, though her eyes give her away. He can't tell if she knows yet, how much that hunger will begin to eat her up.

“Why not.”

“Why don't you start wherever you think is best,” she says, straightening her back and crossing her legs to get comfortable. That weak tug snagging on him, unconscious, not yet harnessed into weaponry. He could shrug it off, even now, but he leans into it and surrenders to its solid grasp. His head is clear for the first time. There is only the story, the tale of horror to feed the Eye, and he lets it have this on top of everything other thing it has taken for its own.

“Account of Jonathan Sims,” Sasha begins. “Former Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Regarding his employment. March the 17^th, 2017. In your own time.”

Jon tells her as much as he can bear to. Sketches out the edges of Elias' goal, gesturing where his body displays its exhibition under clothes, its sunken sculpture of ribs, its raised lines of healed tissue like cartography.

“You'll likely have two of them now,” he says. He does not look at the harsh dipping scars up her arms, the smeared grey under her eyes, a sleeplessness born of grief, but he recognises them for what they are.  “The Corruption and the Stranger. They don't have to be physical marks, not as such. Elias called us a 'chronicle of fear'. And he will watch as you experience, as you suffer everything, Sasha, and he will use the ones you love to do it.”

He stares at the floor, picks at his nails, his leg jittering as he describes the triumph of Jonah's summoning. The ruined world he had ruled over. The way he had died under Jon's Eyes with a knife in his heart.

“What if I just leave?” she asks as Jon's tale runs down empty, the clock advanced in hours. “What if me and Tim and Gerry, we get as far away from that fucking creep as possible?”

She wants his honesty, and he dredges the murky waters left in him to offer up the limited, paltry solaces he has been able to uncover, knowing it is not what she wants to hear.

“It's not that simple. For the most part, you physically can't, leave I mean. It’s… It's a... not an addiction exactly, but if you leave the building, London, the country, whatever, it's a – it's like a sickness. If you don't feed it, the Eye, it feeds on you. And it's... well, singularly unpleasant. I never managed it long enough to see if it would kill me, but I wouldn’t have been surprised.”

“And what about Tim and Gerry?”

Jon considers it slowly.

If you had died, Martin had asked carefully.  Their shoulders slotted snug against each other, the two of them thinking about Fiona Law, how knowing the horrible rules to Elias’ games might have changed everything, or nothing. Would the others have been able to quit?

“Jonah...” Jon huffs before continuing. “I think he chooses people to work in the Archives deliberately. Not necessarily those marked by a Power, though that's sometimes the case, but more… I guess, susceptible to their influence maybe? Gertrude was of the opinion that you'd replace her as Archivist, maybe saw some inclination towards Beholding. I… I was predisposed towards the Eye’s advances certainly, but to be honest, Elias probably chose me over you because I'd, um, encountered the Web. When I was younger. I came 'pre-marked', and well, he thought it was a sign. A good omen.” Jon makes a dismissive, disgusted sound. “And what with Tim's dealings with the Circus and Gerry's exposure to the Powers through his mother. Elias knows who will best serve his agenda. It’s likely hard for them to just up and leave.”

“But surely it's not as strong for them? The Eye’s influence, or effect or… They're not Archivists, so they could…”

“They're as tied to all this as much as you are. Tim tried. My Tim. To leave. It made him sick, and I don’t know what would have… No. No, the only way they can escape, they’re ‘released’ is if… if you die.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s it then. There's nothing I can do to leave?”

Jon inhales sharply. Observes the hard line of her jaw. Her expression demanding an answer he wishes it was earlier to give.

“There's a tape somewhere in the Archives,” he says lowly. “If this place is anything like mine. It’s hard to find, the Eye would rather you didn't know about it. It’s a statement. Eric Delano. Regarding his life, Mary Keay and the Archives.”

“Mary Keay? You mean...?”

“Eric was Gerry's dad. He wanted… he wanted his child to grow up away from all this, to protect him from it. Didn’t work out in the end, but as far as I know, he and Melanie King – sorry, my Melanie, not yours – they’re are the only people to properly escape this place.”

“How?”

He tells her.

“Fuck off.”

A pained snort bubbles scratching in his throat.

“Martin said the same thing.”

Maybe it’s worth it, he’d babbled, hands out beseeching and desperate, watching Martin’s expression tighten cold and hard, the sea-front of fog knotting behind his eyes,  the risk, you and me, together, getting out of here one way or another.

“You’re proper serious?” Sasha asks.

“Absolutely.”

“Right.” Sasha says, and releases a long, troubled sigh. “Right. Er. Statement, ends, I guess.”

Neither of them speak. Sasha caught up in thought, and Jon all out of words to give.

The tape clicks off.

“Can I get you anything?” Sasha asks after a moment. Jon shakes his head, drained suddenly. Worn down.

“You can stay here,” Sasha says as she stands. Her thoughts murky with rumination but her smile is still kind. “For as – as long as you need. Until we fix this.”

Jon nods his thanks, and Sasha squeezes Jon's hand, his burned one, softly and carefully before she leaves.

Chapter Text

A tattoo of cheery battering on the door rouses him.

Jon swings himself up raggedly like a twist-stringed marionette. He had begun to slump down at the angle afforded between the camping bed and the bland painted wall it’s shoved up against, and rousing himself is a greater unkindness. He grunts as the tense knots of bunching muscles twinge under his sticky skin, still flaky with Magnus’ blood.

The clock announces an later hour, presumably, but since it’s an analogue clock, his internal workings find it equally likely to be eight in the morning or the evening. He’s not even sure of the day.

Another chirpy knock.

“Delivery!”

“Come in,” Jon responds in a coarse grunt, fumbling to make himself half presentable, begrudging the intrusion to his state of semi-sleep.

A capped head lurches into view as the door swings open vigorously, slamming into a well-knocked groove in the wall and bouncing back.

“I come bearing gifts,” Tim announces airily. He gestures with a shrug at the bundle of treasures he’s burdened with. The chevron-pattern of his shirt, a psychedelic run of varied neons, is almost obscured by the folders and clunky tape recorder that he’s using as a rudimentary tray, above which is what looks like a hastily purchased meal deal from Tescos, dangerously wobbling along with a bottle of water and a smaller bottle of orange juice. “Food! Of all stripes. No idea what you like, really, just went off what my Jon would have – anyway, feel free not to eat, or maybe it’s poisonous to you, I don’t even know, could be completely different.”

“It… Thank you, Tim,” Jon says, sluggishly blinking and attempting to work through the mile-a-hour chattering onslaught. “I appreciate it.”

He stares at the pre-packed sandwich promising to be ham, tomato and something straggly and green and likely lettuce-related. The water and the orange juice with condensation still sprinkled up the side from being kept refrigerated. Tim’s even got him a packet of Hula Hoops.

His mouth doesn’t remember what food tastes like.

Tim’s nervous energy dips a little at Jon’s undoubtedly lost expression. He holds out the files and Jon politely takes them because he can’t think of anything else to do with his hands.

“Statements,” Tim explains. “They’re all recent enough, over the last few years. In case you need them for… well, I don’t really get it, and Sasha made it sound like you were just going to sit and crunch down on a pile of musty A4 if you got peckish, but… you do you, I guess?”

“It’s more of a… symbolic offering,” Jon replies carefully. He is picking apart the flitting micro-expressions that slide over Tim’s face like streetlight observed through a car window. He watches a dappling confusion, a tight jump of his jaw. Something new and raw and hurting and bloody behind his eyes. But this Tim has never hated him. There are no lessons of slow and eroding loathing to witness in the slight shadows that touch up the skin beneath his eyes. “I just… I read them out loud to the recorder, and it… feeds the…um.”

“The Great Eyeball?” Tim offers.

“Something like that,” Jon replies.

Tim nods to himself, but doesn’t feel drawn to push. Perhaps Sasha’s filled him in. There’s a beat of silence that gathers awkwardness, before:

“Oh. Yeah! Also, got you these.” Tim unslings a branded duffel bag weighted laden from his shoulder. The zip is straining shut down its sides. “You have these in your universe? Clothes?”

Jon snorts despite himself. Something in Tim both unspools and tightens at once, although a smile flexes genuine across his face.

“I’m sure I’ll figure out such an alien concept.”

“Figured you’d need a change after arriving looking like an amateur Macbeth,” he says. “The clothes are all clean and everything, though I’m not sure they’ll all fit. We don’t have any of, um, Jon’s … our Jon’s clothes left, but you’re mostly the same size as me, so it should be alright. We got a shower installed, when I was living in the archives for a bit. It’s at the end of the long emergency exit corridor, you know when you turn left before Archival Storage… anyway, you’ll find it easily enough. Got you some shower gel, shampoo, razor and foam in case your grizzly look was unintentional. Give you a chance to clean up.”

The ‘thank you’ sticks in his mouth. His knuckles whiten around the duffel bag strap, and breathes through the sudden wave of regret.

He’d forgotten. How easily Tim was kind. How thoughtlessly and practically kind. Anger had not always pot-bound the branching roots of him, and Jon hadn’t remembered.

“Thanks,” he finally manages gruffly. “I – er. Thanks.”

Glancing down at his dusty, blood-marred shirt, the clagging soil of the Buried still knotted in the hem of his trousers, he wrinkles his nose.

“Anyone I know?” Tim says, trying for levity. Pointing at the ox-blood dark stain that’s orchestrated a successful invasion over the bottom of Jon’s shirt, dried hard and starchy into the fabric.

“Um.”

Tim raises his left eyebrow. He has eyebrow piercings, like Sasha, but on the other eyebrow, and the double barbells flash with the movement.

“That’s so ominous,” he says, seemingly delighted. “You’ve got to tell me now! Unless it’s some awful tragic tale of woe and misery?”

Jon tells him who the blood on his shirt belongs to. Tim’s eyebrow piercings rise higher.

“No! What, seriously!?”

Tim’s gasping, half-shocked face wrenches a creaky smile from him.

“Afraid so.”

“One performance review too far, huh?”

That stunted and newborn smile cracks across his face. Like with Sasha, Jon is fighting not to stare, to compare his recollections, to measure up these people who don’t deserve the weight of his expectation, the dulled pain of his mourning.

Tim sits himself down in a languorous motion in the fold-up camping chair.

“Sorry about the bed,” he says, waving a distasteful hand at the surface Jon’s been half-slumping down against, surrounded by his sudden riches. “That thing’ll do your back in.”

“You stayed here,” Jon says. It’s not exactly a question. “In the Archives.”

“Hiding from a worm-woman,” Tim replies. His tone slips lightly, but it doesn’t match his face. “Months jumping at shadows. Any noise, and I’d think it was that fucking knocking again. Ten out of ten, do not rate the experience. Felt like an idiot half the time, and the first one to get killed off in a horror film the rest of it.”

“Martin…” Jon says, surprising himself at speaking. “It was… where I’m from, it was Martin that lived here.  We had a load of old, random cutlery and things in one of the drawers, and we thought it might be… I’m not sure what we thought, that they’d been stolen by one of the other departments or something. Odd little bits, a corkscrew, tin opener, grater, a carrot peeler. A few forks and knives. And then, turned out Martin had been hoarding them in here. And when we found them, he stammered and wrung his hands, and said it was in case it happened again. Showed us where he’d hidden soup tins, and baked beans, a-and spaghetti shapes. He’d gone out and bought a camping stove, in case… He was so convinced that even in the Archives, she might get to him again.” He pauses. “You weren’t an idiot, Tim. You were in danger, and you didn’t feel safe. You shouldn’t… feel embarrassed about that.”

Tim is looking at him when Jon meets his gaze again.

“We’ll keep looking,” Tim says, after cleaning his throat. “For this Martin of yours.”

“You haven’t found any….?” Jon starts, but can’t finish.

“I’ve looked,” Tim says, carefully, a care Jon’s not sure he deserves even now. “All the places he might have shown up. He’s never worked here, at least. No Martins living in London, or under any school records in England. I looked in births and deaths, but nothing that seems to fit.”

“Right,” Jon replies. Fiddling with his sleeves, the words drying up under his tongue.

“There might be something,” Tim says quickly. “The whole world’s not gone digital. I asked Gerry to have a look around any of his haunts, but he’ll come back when he comes back, you know. He’s a bit more free-range than the rest of us.”

Jon nods numbly.

If Sasha’s right… that this world has taken different turns, carved out the infrastructure of unknown pathways, right turns where the road would have swerved left… This world might not even have a Martin Blackwood. Marysia Torosowicz might never have chosen to work in the office where she first met Kenneth Blackwood, might never have thought him handsome, might never have married him, too rushed and too heady with love, might never have bore a son soon after. Maybe she did all those things. Martin had been the name Kenneth had wanted, a passing down of his own father’s name. Marysia had preferred Michael or Adam, a biblical mantle, or even Peter, an anglicised version of a brother she’d lost in childhood.

This Martin, whatever name he wears, if he wears one at all, isn’t the right one. For all Jon rankles at any expression of possession, Martin was his in all the ways he had allowed Jon to be.

Whatever Martin this world has, he has never been the only person Jon has had left at the end of everything.

Tim nudges Jon’s foot with his shoe.

“Hey,” he says. “Didn’t know if you… It’s a bit silly I know, but I wanted to. Um. Introduce you to, well, my Jon, for lack of a better term. We’ve only really got this. All the other digital photos, they’re, you know yourself, they’re corrupted. Show the wrong face.”

Jon takes the proffered Polaroid. A well-loved square, its edging dogged and its corners blunted. The angle it’s taken from is poor, an encroaching flare lining the top in a slit of overexposed illumination. In the photo itself, there’s a dark, curved booth; Tim is centre, sporting an outrageous shirt and a party crown on his head, decked like a human Christmas tree with the multi-coloured straggling innards of party poppers. In front of him, a flotilla of glasses, the remnants of half-melted ice coating the bottom of each. There’s Sasha, leant in on the left, a drunk-bright smile, clearly holding the camera out to capture them.

Being pulled into frame on the right, shirt collar rumpled and the buttons done up wrong, looking tipsy and glassy-eyed, a graceless and uninhibited expression and the straggling blue paper of one of the party poppers hanging off one ear, is him. Or this other him. This Jon that Tim and Sasha know. The Jon that this Tim and Sasha have lost.

They look happy. The three of them drunk and sweaty, and the night crawling on too late.

There had been moments like this. Birthdays and afterwork drinks. Before it all started going wrong. Fleeting and soured in his memory.

“I look young,” he replies finally. Studying the faint intrusion of greys in his hair that have yet to populate.

“Correction. You look drunk.” Tim smiles. He’s still gazing at the picture. Fondly. Pained. “It was my thirtieth. Sasha got sick behind the jukebox, and I dropped that bloody camera about an hour after we took this and smashed the lens. You tried to dance with some woman who’d been giving you the eye and nearly broke her foot.”

“Sounds like me.”

Tim huffs a laugh that curls bitter. He takes the Polaroid back off Jon, corrects the bent edge of the photograph with a careful precision, like some people handle heirlooms, or museum pieces or beloved mementos.

“… It’s hard,” he says finally. His smile dimming. His mouth held tight. “Seeing you here. Not that it’s your – ‘course it’s not your fault. But you’re… you’re so, so not like him. With the scars and the grey and the dystopian-grizzly grooming routine you’ve clearly been rocking. But then, guess I never got the chance to find out what he would have looked like at your age.”

A rocky breath.

“He – when Sasha was… after Prentiss and all that, when it was all getting a lot for Sash and she, well she wasn’t really in a sharing mood. It was only us. Me and Jon. Gerry too, but he wasn’t always there. A direct attack on the Institute, it’d never happened on Gertrude’s watch and I think he felt like he’d messed up or something. So he coped by disappearing to hunt down more Leitners. He’s always popped in and out, so it wasn’t a surprise, not really, but it was – it was a lot. And you – no, sorry, Jon. Jon was the only one there. When everyone else was losing it in their own ways. And I remember, I remember being so grateful, you know. That one of us was keeping a cool head. That one of us was handling it. And then, ha, turned out it hadn’t been him at all. That that – thing that murdered him had been nodding and smiling and sympathising and fucking laughing at us the entire time, and I….”

Tim trails off. Clears his throat.

“Forgotten what I was going to say,” he says. “Doesn’t matter. Just ignore me.”

“I’m…” The words seem too small in the room, but Jon tries them anyway. “I’m sorry, Tim.”

“’s fine,” Tim shrugs. “You didn’t do anything.”

“No, but – ” Jon swallows. “I’ve a lot to be sorry for.”

“Haven’t we all.”

Jon sees his own Tim over the face of this stranger. A palimpsest image, an ugly layering that highlights his failings. His Tim wouldn’t have shook off his admission so easily. He might have dug it in, twisted it deeper, sharpened his own teeth on it, and Jon would have earned it, his apologises striking just a little too late.

“You hated me,” he says quietly. “My Tim, that is. By the end.”

“That why I blew myself up then? To get away from you?”

“You’ve listened? To my statement?”

“No. Seemed a bit unfair.  But curiosity seems to be the name of the game in this place. I asked Sasha and she told me. Hey,” Tim says, seeming to see something in Jon’s expression. “I mean, not my one of my top five ways to kick the bucket but, I-um. It’s better. Then the alternatives. No one made me worm food, or stole my skin and paraded around in the thing like a cloak. I can’t speak for the other me, but I’m… if that was how I went, I’m glad. That I could do that, for Danny. I don’t know what happened, or why he hated you so much, but if it was me… I would have been grateful. That you’d given me that closure if nothing else.”

The tumour of those years sits like a river rock at the base of his stomach, and Jon’s breathing goes shaky, his vision blurry. Tim doesn’t look much better, his smile arched wobbly.

They sit in that cramped storage room for a long time. Quietly mourning dead men.

The emergency lights outside the storage room are halogen, running at intervals along the ceiling like road lines. They’re activated on some sort of motion-sensor trip system, a delay of undisturbed dark before a click provides the only audible warning for the flood of illumination. Meaning that there’s only so much stealth he can manage if he wants to do some exploring while he’s here.

Jon doesn’t own a watch anymore. Used to wear one religiously, a sensible fawn-coloured leather strap securing a clear faced timepiece, an ivory-white face notched at intervals with unlabelled hour segments. It had had a window near the six o’clock notch to display the date. He wore it on his non-dominant hand, meaning it had curled and blackened and warped, the second hand crinkling in the heat of Jude Perry’s handshake, the metal buckle heating to a blistering temperature, leaving a scar that only added to the mess of his palm and wrist. He’d stopped wearing a watch after that.

Whatever time it is, Tim went home hours ago. Showed Jon how to ring an outside number on his desk phone. Told him to call if there was a problem. Sasha left even later. Had sat with him while he worked through statement of Ahmed Abdullah Al-Dimashqi, regarding an historical artefact, breaking at intervals to chew his sandwich with disinterest. He’d thought about starting on the others Tim had brought with him – statement of Kes Masterson, regarding their new flat, statement of Matt Dillon-Jones, regarding an unhappy marriage – but either the sandwich or the statement, but probably the latter had done the trick, leaving him full and almost bloated, had aired some of the exhaustion from him, and he’d carefully answered more of Sasha’s questions about the ruin of the world. About Magnus, sitting bloated with knowing, his eyes in another man’s head as his crypt of a body kept vigil at the centre of the Panopticon miles beneath their feet.

Both Sasha and Tim tried to coax him out of the archives. Offered spare rooms and sofas but he’d shook his head without explanation and promised to still be here come morning.

Part of him, the crumpled seizing grieving landmass of him, thinks that if Martin turns up, he needs to be here.

He doesn’t want Martin to come back alone.

Sat on the camping bed, Jon runs through his life’s work, a collation of histories and choices and mistakes and chances. His eyes drop to doze at one point, but he’d started to alertness like he’d missed a step on the stair, convinced he heard a bang, that it was Martin, falling through, bewildered and dazed and lost.

He needs to keep busy so he doesn’t fall apart. Needs somewhere for him to direct his heartbreak.

Getting up off the bed, he puts on his shoes, shrugging on an over-large jacket of Tim’s and folding up the sleeves of it haphazardly so the fabric doesn’t dangle over his wrist. He’d showered earlier, his hair still clenched with damp, and he keeps touching the smooth, unfamiliar landscape of his face since he shaved off the ragged, patchy growth, not recognising the feeling of his own cheeks or chin under his fingertips. The smell of the mint in the shower gel is incredibly potent to him after so many however-longs of water and unperfumed soap and it clogs in his nostrils as he walks out of the storage room, the lights flicking on traitorously after a beat.

He knows where he needs to go.

The trapdoor, when he comes to it, is locked, and Jon hisses through his teeth with irritation.

Elias’ office is also locked.

The first time Jon did this, he nearly filleted his hand trying to use a knife to work the lock. It had been poorly thought out from the get-go, a labouring frustration of hours, and by the time he’d managed to gain entry, he’d been wired, buzzing under his skin with irritation and euphoria as he stole into the dark of the office, sleepless and seething with intent.

This time, he doesn’t feel the need to be so coy.

It takes him a while to find a fire extinguisher. The disconnect draws him up shaking again – of course, he’d muttered to himself, of course, and he’d squeezed his eyes closed and for a minute just breathed. In his Institute, there had been fire extinguishers practically littering the space. Affixed to walls and hidden in drawers and boxes and under the staff kitchen sink after Martin had moved in. There has been no Martin to buy them. There has never been a Martin here.

Jon eventually uncovers one down the emergency corridor where the box-room shower has been secreted.

It is incredibly satisfying to use the base of the fire extinguisher to bash in the lock of Elias’ office.

The sound is loud, a scattering clang, and the metal handle is dipped misshapen, and he brings it down again,  the clang evolving into a metallic thunk and Jon is puffing and grinning savage as he heaves the extinguisher up again, again.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing then?”

Jon jumps, stifling a shout as he whirls around.

It requires concerned effort for Jon’s memory of him, incorporeal and smudged and brief, to align to the gangly structure of this man made solid. Taller than expected, poorly dyed hair looking like it's styled straight out of The Crow. It must be raining outside, for there’s remnants of the downpour buffing the sheen of a long leather overcoat that drapes over a Sisters of Mercy t-shirt.

“Gerry,” Jon breathes.

“Jon,” Gerry replies, appearing unphased. His expression hasn’t softened. “Or new Jon, apparently. Sasha did warn me we were getting visited by the Ghost of Christmas future, thought I’d see for myself.” Jon feels himself being subjected to a glowering once-over. “You look rough as all hell compared to my Jon.”

“You look a hundred percent more alive than my Gerry,” Jon replies honestly.

Gerard Keay doesn’t unfold his arms, but his shoulders relax, and a smirk blunts the edges of his scowl.

“A conversation for when it’s not fuck-off o’clock, yeah?” he says. “I’m sure my fate is suitably bloody tragic.” He gestures with his head at the door. “You didn’t answer. What are you doing?”

“Are you going to stop me?” Jon clutches the fire extinguisher closer to his chest.

Gerry shrugs. The overcoat is slightly too big for him width-wise, and the fabric shifts noisily.

“Depends,” he says. “Is it going to cause trouble for me and mine?”

He shifts his weight from one foot to another. The inked pupils of eyes stare out from his throat, his knuckles, the bump of his wrist-bone. The chains from his belt-loops jangle. He doesn’t look threatening, for all his height is exacerbated by heavy stomping boots adorned with buckles, but Jon’s not comfortable with compelling his way out of this, if he even could manage that at all, and his arms are getting trembly from holding up the fire extinguisher.

“I’m trying to stop Elias,” he says finally. He keeps it simple. Not yet sure how Gerry fits into this world, how much Sasha might have explained things.

A bold and pleased smile sneaks onto Gerry's face.

“That's more like it. Bastard's up to something dodgy, isn't he?”

Jon nods. His arms are beginning to cramp from the weight, so he adjusts the extinguisher against his chest.

“He has something in his office. I need to get it.”

Gerry gestures to the extinguisher. 

“Want a hand?”

“I wouldn't say no.”

Gerry takes the weight from him, and Jon shakes out the twinge in his arms. Approaching to take Jon's former position, Gerry plants his feet before hefting the make-shift bludgeon and bringing it down forcefully against the lock. The sound is no quieter than before, but something in Jon's spine has unbent at the solid presence of Gerry next to him.

Gerry slows down a bit as he slams it repeatedly, out of breath and trying not to show it, his pale face splotching red, but finally there's a splintering as the wooden surround of the lock caves in and the locking mechanism, warped and brutalised beyond use, hangs half-out from its moorings.

“Nothing to it,” Gerry says, panting, leaning the extinguisher down against the floor, and pushing the door open. “After you.”

Jon slips inside first. The desk takes prominence in the room, a dark lacquered oak structure, tooled green leather serving as its writing surface, empty wells at the top designed to hold ink. It's an antique ostentation matching the other flourishes in the room, chief of which is the ornately framed portrait, an extravagant rectangle of gold-painted curlicues and vine-like swirls which surround the likeness of an austere-faced older man. It's not the haughty tilt of his jaw or the capturing of something knowing and unkind in his mien that serves to betray his identity; his painted eyes oversee the entire world of his office, the same eyes that watched out of the skull of poor, stolen Elias Bouchard in a way that someone might be able to thoughtlessly attribute to familial resemblance.

“Don't turn on the light,” Jon warns as he watches Gerry's fingers go for the switch. “Not yet.”

“Correct me if I'm wrong, but Beholding doesn't exactly give you night vision,” Gerry replies, but Jon is already moving. As slowly as he feels able to in the dim, his bruised limbs creaking and punishing him for the slightest motion, he picks his way around the obnoxious dominance of the table, and stands before the painting, grasping it at both sides and heaving upwards.

It's heavier than expected. His knees near buckle as it comes away from the wall and he takes its entire weight, and it is with difficulty he sets its bottom edge against the floor before placing it flat and  face-down. Those eyes capable of seeing nothing but the specks of grit and dirt that have been ground into the weave of the rug-covered floor.

“Should be safe now,” he says, and the light clicks on with a buzz and an orangey glare.

“Care to explain any of that?” Gerry asks, trailing into the room with heavy footsteps.

“I’ll… in a minute, I need to…” Jon says, his attention only half on the conversation. The first time he did this – yes, the brass letter opener is there, in the top drawer of the desk, sharing space with correspondences and ink pens and a stamp with the owl-faced seal of the Magnus Institute. “Aha!” He interjects triumphantly when the letter opener pops the lock of one of the lower drawers.

“No,” Gerry replies, flat and low and calm. “No, you can explain it now.”

Jon doesn’t need the Eye to relay Gerry’s reticence. Trusting a man he doesn’t know that wears the face and voice of his lost friend.

Gerry has his arms folded again when Jon turns around. Jon doesn’t know if his Gerry would have done that. Never had the time to learn the mannerisms of a man already long dead.

“Alright,” Jon says in a peace offering.  “Elias. He, um, he can see through any eyes, either physical or metaphorical. Representations of eyes, things like that. And I took the painting down because I didn’t want him to know I stole this.”

Jon holds up a thick, rust-touched key for Gerry to see.

“Ok, before we unpack everything about what you just said,” Gerry says after a beat, eyebrows lowering in a frown, dropping his arms. “That's the key to the tunnels. Where you... Where the thing that was pretending to be you was hiding, bound to the table. What the hell could you possibly want back down there?”

Jon glances over him, his exposed skin yellowed and jaundiced by the unflattering light of the office. At the tattooed eyes over his knuckles, Adam's apple, the burn-scarred skin around them. He's not sure if Elias could use them, but he doesn't want to chance it.

“I'll tell you the full story when we're down there,” he promises. “Not here, but I will explain. There's something I have to get. And someone you'll probably want to meet.”

Chapter Text

Gerry, dusty, trudging foot-steps and steeped in fatigue, promises with a dismissive  'yeah yeah' wave, when Jon asks him to wake him up the moment Sasha and Tim come into work. Meaning that Jon, collapsed with his shoes still on directly onto the camping cot, opens his eyes blearily, still fuggy with unfounded dreams, and starts with a 'Jesus!' just as Tim and Sasha poke their heads through the door. 

“Soooooo,” Sasha says. She’s taken a small paper coffee from the four-pack Tim’s holding and she seems to brighten upon sipping at it.  “Gerry tells us you two went out on a night-time adventure.”

“Without us!”

“I was getting to that.”

Tim makes a dramatic wounded-heart gesture, looking wired and excited and already one coffee down. Jon, still dressed in Tim’s jacket now grimy from his journey, his head half-snared in thoughts he can’t remember,  is rapidly trying to feel more awake than he is.

“Where is Gerry?” Jon manages finally, his mouth cotton-woolled.

“Not sure,” Sasha shrugs, passing him one of the taller coffees. He attempts not to make a face at it, distasteful even of the bitter smell, but he takes it regardless and balances it on his lap.  “Haven't seen him all morning.”

The time on the wall clock betrays it as afternoon.

“What did he tell you?” Jon asks. He takes a sip and flinches at the taste. Tim passes over a wodge of sugar sachets – ‘wasn’t sure if you took them’. Jon’s lived long enough to know whatever he puts in coffee, he’s never going to enjoy it, but he diligently rips open multiple packets and pours them in, mixing them in using the little wooden stirrer, figuring he’ll need the rush of energy.

He stops when he imagines Martin, making some finger-wagging, joking comment about his cholesterol. Tastes the over-sweetened milked beverage gone lukewarm with barely a shift in expression, his interest in it deflated.

“That you apparently went down into the tunnels to go threaten some old homeless guy who's been hiding down there.”

“He put it so nicely,” Jon replies.

“Gerry was so pleased. I think you made his decade, letting him rough up Leitner.”

“Someone remind me why we're letting that crusty old bastard live down there,” Tim interrupts, taking a loud gulp of his drink. He’s already gotten a splash on himself, a brown stain the size of a thumb-print that is camouflaged by the multi-coloured explosion of his shirt.

“Gerry handed him his notice,” Jon replies. “Told him he’s got today to get out.”

“Or what?”

Jon sips again at his frankly disgusting coffee. “Gerry wasn't specific. I thought it was best to let him decide what to do with him. This being your universe and all. Don’t want to intrude too much.”

“Surprised he didn't just sort him out right there.”

“He could have. I traded his safety for something more valuable.”

Putting the paper cup down by the legs of the camping cot, Jon leans down and carefully pulls out from underneath the mattress his negotiated prize. Sitting back up and rising to standing, he hands it to Sasha.

“Here,” he says. “It's for you. I wouldn't open it, but it’s safe to look.”

“Um, thanks?” Sasha says. She stares at her gift warily, taking in the red cover, foxed with age. It makes an innocent enough picture, mildew-stamped pages visible from the outside, the title printed on the binding worn down to near unreadability. She squints at the title, thumbing over the letters. “The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Looks old. First edition?”

“Of a sort,” Jon says. He watches her face as she studies it, hoping he’s not over-stepped. “It's one of Leitner's books. It's what's allowed him to live down in the tunnels for so long. It sort of … interacts with Smirke's designs, gives you the ability to manipulate the space under the Archives, and he’s been using it for years to remain undetected.  If you, yeah, you can open it at the front, there's a map and some written instructions for how to use the book.”

Sasha does so, unfolding the A4 sheet, the writing ink-splattered and rushed over a torn-out notebook page, and looking at it critically.

“How helpful of the old bastard,” Tim says.

“Gerry was very convincing.”

“Why the map?” Sasha asks. Peering at the hand-drawn diagram,  following the labyrinthine, confused and back-tracking route with her finger.

“Your, well – powers,” Jon explains. He’s still not taken his gaze from Sasha.  “I don't think they'd be enough to find the way through without the help of the book. Even when I was – was stronger, I didn't get there unaided, it's too well protected.”

Tim takes the hasty map and its scrawled instructions from Sasha and holds it up to the light, frown equally embedded.

“Where's it lead though?” he asks.

“I've told Sasha most of it already,” Jon says. Voice dropped quiet and insistent. “And she'll have given you the details, I guess. The Institute, the Archives, they're built on the remains of Millbank Prison. That’s where the tunnels go. And using the book and the map, you can get to the Panopticon.”

“Which is...?”

“It's the centre of the Beholding's power, at least in this part of the world. Far as I know at any rate. There’s other sites like the Usher Foundation, the Pu Songling Research Centre, but if they ever attempted any rituals or even had Archivists of their own, I never heard anything about it.  Anyway. The Panopticon, it’s where you'll find Jonah Magnus. Or what's left of him.”

Sasha studies the book and directions carefully before folding the paper crisply up again and tucking it into the first page, before restoring the Leitner to closed.

She looks up at Jon, meeting his eyes unflinchingly, observing his anxious shifts of motion, his furrowed brow.

“Why are you giving me this?” she asks.

“I – I wanted you to be able to choose,” Jon replies finally, the words feeling too weak to express the enormity within him. He rubs at the rucked-up skin of his left hand. “I – I didn’t…. With this, at least you know your options. So you don't spend years in the dark, being a-a plaything to Magnus' whims and grand plans and schemes.  I-I don't, honestly Sasha, I don’t know, what would happen if you – you killed him. The Eye wouldn’t show me.  I can't promise you'd survive it. You're... all three of you are tied to him in some way, but I don't know by how much. Even he didn't know, really, what would happen. But with – with the book, you get to make your choice. Informed as you can be, together. With all the cards I never had.”

He meets Sasha’s gaze full on, and does not think of clawing with dull and gnawed nails at the working column of his own throat as Jonah’s ritual ripped out of his mouth. The forcing push and gag and retch of the summoning as his eyes blurred hot and despairing, tearing up and he’d wanted to shout, to plead for Martin, for someone, for anyone to stop him, and still the words intoned dutifully out as he wrapped the world in its ending.

He does not think of how much he still does not, cannot forgive himself for that.

“Thank you,” Sasha says lowly. She telegraphs her movements, slowly closing the gap between them to wrap him in the tightest hug, and Jon finds himself forming a small and grateful smile, despite everything.

Tim gnaws at his bottom lip considering, as Sasha separates them.

“That's kind of fucked up,” he says, glancing down at the Leitner held in Sasha’s grip. “By choose, you mean like kill right?” He looks back at Jon. “How did you do it the last time? I imagine you can’t just, you know, push him down the stairs or wait for old age to catch up.”

“Martin,” Jon starts, and then swallows with a hard sigh. “Martin stabbed him in the heart, though I suppose the eyes would have done as well, symbolically. Then I um... took his Statement quite violently, and that seemed to do it. At least in my universe or whatever you want to call it, Gertrude was going to burn the whole Institute down, and then dispose of Magnus’ remaining body while he was distracted, and I imagine that would have worked as well.”

“Doesn't surprise me,” comes a smirking grumble from the doorway. “Always was a bit of a fire-starter, that woman.”

Gerry looms into vision like a  black-decked and leggy stork. Still smeared in the dust and dirt from the tunnels, he apparently hasn’t slept since Jon last saw him, his grubby face etched in tiredness. He has a proud expression of quietly intent smugness as he removes the remaining coffee cup from Tim’s tray one handed, and winces as he takes a massive, no doubt cold, gulp.

“And he returns!” Tim grins, half-turned to greet the newest arrival. “Rocking up like a Shakespearean spectre in eyeliner.”

Gerry gives Tim two fingers, but it’s heatless, a bantering rhythm they both snag onto quickly.

“Jealous, Stoker?”

“Always,” Tim gives an exaggerated wink and Gerry nudges him with his shoulder, bestowing him a long-suffering eyeroll.  “Anyway, Prince of Darkness, what you got your mitts on there?”

Gerry brings out an old, slightly shabby tape recorder from out of some deep and cavernous pocket in his overcoat. Jon blinks. He hadn't even noticed one hadn't appeared on him, so used to their manifesting around or on him.

“Present for Grandad.”

Tim laughs at that one. Easy and light at the teasing. The scene frosts an ache in Jon's chest. Because they are so comfortable with each other here, solidified into structures meshed into each other and stronger through their adversity, their loss. There is no rotting spectre of secrets hanging over them.

Gerry hands Jon the tape recorder. Pushing his free hand back into his pocket and swallowing another large sip of cold coffee, he brings forth a tape, unassuming and fogged with a slight amount of dust, passing that over too.

“Knew I'd heard the name before,” he says without explanation. “Rooted around in some of Gertrude's bloody piles. Only the one tape, far as I can tell. Though if there's anything else in all this mess I wouldn't be able to tell you.”

Jon stares down at the tape without comprehending. There’s no label or marking that might give him a hint as he turns it over in his hand.

“I don't follow.”

“Just play it.”

Frowning, Jon slots the tape in, and presses down the awkward and sticking play button.

A click, and a chatter of dead noise, and the background up-tick of staticky quality.

“... might as well get this started then, shall we?” crackles out the tape-warped voice of Gertrude Robinson. “I wouldn't want to take up any more of your time than required, and I have other things personally I need to getting on with, as I understand you do also.”

There's the sharp motion of a chair, the tape recorder being set down onto a hard surface.

“Coffee?” There's clearly some non-verbal indication of refusal for Gertrude hums an acknowledgement and continues breezily: “Right. We'll get straight to it then. I highly doubt you'll need instructing as to standard protocol, so I'll preface with the required details and you elaborate in your own time. Does that suit?”

“Works for me,” comes a flat and neutral reply. Grounded with a familiarity.

Jon's inhale is a faint and feathered thing.

"Excellent. I do like it when things aren’t unnecessarily complicated. Alright. Subject is Martin Blackwood, recorded 15^th of December 2009, regarding.... well, I imagine regarding your arrival and intentions. In your own time.”

 Jon stops the tape. He is very aware that he is being looked at by three sets of curious gazes. That his grip is no longer steady, that his shaking hold is rattling the tape recorder.

“I-i-it's him,” he says. “It's um, it’s Martin.”

He exhales hard but it doesn't seem to help.

It could be this universe's Martin of course. A Martin who encountered some shadow-bound horror, who came to the Institute to deliver his story and gain no answers.

But his voice, under the tight-wound tension, sounds so much like his Martin’s. The older grate to it. That he last heard at the end of the world as it shattered and reformed anew, as they fell hand in hand.

“Do you want to listen to this alone?” Tim asks quietly after Jon stands mute, making no effort to speak, rendered dumb by the shock of hearing the man he knows, the man he loves on a tape from nearly a decade prior, buried under the intentional detritus of Gertrude’s records.  Hearing him alive and whole and as far as he can tell, safe.

Tim touches his arm with a soft, reassuring squeeze.

“I – er,” Jon rips his eyes away from where he’s been staring off into an unfathomable distance. He clears his throat to try and clear the rocky stumble of his words.  “Um. N-no. You should – it might be important.”

Before he can change his mind, Jon presses play.

“... where d'you want me to start?” the static-blustered voice of Martin comes out reedy before the pitch settles.

“Wherever you think is best.”

A shift of fabric. “I usually skip to the end.”

“You've done this before then.”

There’s a huff of air. Jon can see the face Martin would make doing it, a rolling wide-shouldered shrug, his posture perpetually poor, a ‘what can you do’ raise of his eyebrows.

 “Yeah. Couple of times now.”

“Hm. And where have you come from, exactly?”

A dripping overlay of static, mild, more of a slight push, a whisper of suggestion.

“I’m from…” Martin starts easily before he stops, biting down through the words. Tone plunging cold and sharp. “No. Don't do that.”

“What?”

“Ask questions using your Voice, or whatever. I don't like it.  I'll get there in my own time, not because you're impatient and the Eye wants a quick snack.”

“....As you were.”

A creaking sound like shifting weight.

“I'm from a, well, figuring it out as much as I can, I'm from a different universe. It’s… it’s gone now. Or, I mean, if it worked, if we did it, then it went back to the way it was, but not for… Anyway. I can’t go back, so guess it doesn’t matter. I don’t know really if universe is the right word, I’m kinda scrabbling in the dark here, but it fits. Wherever I end up, it’s like a – a version of the same place. This Institute. Sometimes only a little different, coupl'a things shifted sideways, and others.... Yeah. Very different.”

“And what is your intention with providing a statement?”

“I.... I don't really want to go into too much detail, you know, just in case it disturbs things too much, especially because I’m – this is the past? For me, at least this time. But um, at some time in my future, o-or maybe your future, me and Jon – er Jonathan Sims, sorry. He won't start here for another few years probably, if he exists at all here. Sometimes he doesn't. A-Anyway me and Jon were in these corridors, and we were – we were separated. Everything was, it was all falling apart, and he got knocked through, a-and I. I couldn’t keep my grip.  I didn’t – god, I didn’t mean to let go. And then I fell sideways and I was somewhere else.”

“Another 'universe' as it were?”

“Right. After that, to cut a long story short, I got given this.” The rifling flicker of paper.  “By a – an interested party.”

“You're being very coy.”

Martin’s frosted over, stubborn. “Don't want to give you any ideas, do I? The interested party only exists because of what you did. You’ll do. Whatever. ”

“You don't seem very pleased with me, Mr Blackwood. It doesn't seem exactly fair, to judge me on the actions of my counter-part.”

“Oh, so tell me, how is that bloke you chopped up and chucked into a pit these days?”

There is a minute pause on Gertrude’s part. Out of the corner of his eye, Jon watches Tim mouth ‘who?’ to Gerry, who gives a shoulder motion before he responds silently ‘Jan Kilbride?’.

“... Are you expecting me to ask forgiveness?” Gertrude continues, placid as before. “I made the decision that was required of me. I didn’t think anyone was particularly keen to see The Sunken Sky brought to fruition. To prevent the ritual, it was necessary.”

“And that's the excuse you'll tell yourself when it happens again.” Martin says, before he releases a long exhale. He sounds bent over, head in hands. Tired. “And the worst thing is, it wasn’t. Necessary, I mean. Not in the way you thought it was....”

“I am not a fan of hypotheticals,” Gertrude responds. “The lessons of your universe do not necessarily apply to mine. My mistakes, if they’re such, they’ll remain my own.”

Martin makes a sound that could neither be agreement or dismissal.

“You were given this item then?” Gertrude prompts, and Martin sounds like he rallies.

“Yeah. It opens the doors. To different versions of this place. I’ve been using it to look for him. It’s a bit of a shot in the dark. They open randomly, there isn’t exactly any pattern. And he might have fallen somewhere, but arrived earlier, or later. The time, it’s within and around a decade or so from what I’ve been able to figure, always opening inside or near the Archives, but that’s – that’s not as useful as it seems. I get here, I find out if he’s showed up, if there’s some record of him. And then I  leave a statement. They’re the only indication I can give that I’ve been here. So that… so he knows I’m looking. That I’m trying to find him.”

“Hmm. And if he were to have arrived earlier than you?”

“There's only so much I can do…. I don't know. It's better than nothing.”

“Quite.”

A silence and then Gertrude says:

“You’re quite sure I can’t offer you a coffee or, perhaps something a little stronger? Unless there’s anything else you'd like to add for the record?”

“No. No, thanks.  I –  I’d best be heading off. I'm trying to avoid Elias if possible.”

Gertrude makes an amused noise.

“A reasonable precaution, I would agree. He’d have a great number of questions I’ve no doubt.” A hum at the back of her throat. “Would you mind awfully if I watched you leave?”

“I mean, you're not coming with me – ”

“Gracious, no. Mild curiosity. Entering a domain of the Spiral willingly is something I've never had the pleasure of bearing witness to.”

“Please yourself,” Martin replies neutrally. That sound again, the tumble of paper slid on paper, the scraping turn of leaves. Martin clears his throat.  “Right.....

Jon listens as Martin begins. Words sliding easily over each other, like a rote recitation.

“Under the trees in England, I meditated on this lost and perhaps mythical labyrinth.”  The warping crackling sound in the background pitches and rises, overlays the static. “I imagined it infinite, made not only of eight-sided pavilions and of twisting paths, but also of rivers, provinces – … Ah. There we are. Should do it. ”

  “A caravan door?”

  “That’s not the weirdest, trust me.”

 The tape spits another spiking crackle. Whatever Martin says next, something short and final, it’s chewed up into insensibility.

 A door whistling open, its hinges rough and unoiled. The snap of a closed latch, the warping noise cutting off.

“Quite extra-ordinary.” Gertrude murmurs to herself.

The tape clicks off.

It takes him a moment to realise that Sasha is tugging at his arm.

“Come on,” she says, feather-light, tentative. “Better sit down, yeah?”

“I, um, “ Jon vocalises because there's nothing in his head. His grip is still winch-tight around the recorder. “Was there – ” He spins to look at Gerry. “Was there anything else?”

“That was it.”

“At least you know he's not dead,” Tim ventures carefully.  “He survived. That's – that's good news, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” Jon says flatly.

Martin is alive, he thinks, and it’s a dazed thought that clarifies under a strengthening focus. He got out of the corridors, he was here, and he was alive.

But he does not understand how Martin came to arrive here, and then leave again. What he meant by going between. Where he went, and how he went. And he needs to understand this.

“Maybe there's another tape?” He suggests, tinged with desperation. “O-or maybe Gertrude did some follow-up research. That would give us, I dunno, another clue.”

“I don’t know….” Gerry says.

“Surely it’d do no harm in looking?” Jon pushes, and that cannot be all he gets, a mystery leading nowhere.

Both Tim and Gerry express their doubts that Gertrude left anything further, even if they were able to figure out her ominous piles of purposely disorganised paperwork, but something in Jon’s face convinces them to try.

They spend all day looking. Jon feverishly claws through boxes, rifles through files and folders, checks tapes before throwing them to one side in disgust. Every avenue drawing up nothing.

Martin Blackwood – his Martin – was here for a single fleeting moment, left a statement for posterity, and vanished the next, and he does not understand how.

His talk of doors and universes, of different versions he’s visited like someone checks off holiday destinations, and Jon does not know how to follow him. How Martin is able to skirt the pathways to these worlds and Jon is trapped here, useless, unable to find him.

Entering a domain of the Spiral willingly, Gertrude had said.

How? Where did he go, where is he now?

Gerry’s started slumping in his desk chair, and a heavy blink and a nod of his head before he rouses with a jolt, gives Jon the first indication that they’ve been here for hours with nothing to show for it.

“Let's figure it out tomorrow,” Tim says, finally. “Enough excitement for one day. We’re getting nowhere.”

He reads something on Jon’s face, because he says: “Tomorrow, ok? We'll find something, but none of us are of use to anyone now. Best to face it with a bit of shut-eye.”

To Gerry, he says: “You in London for a bit, Ger? Need somewhere to crash?”

“I'll stick around,” Gerry says nodding. Rising upright, his back making discomforting popping noises at the motion.

“Sash?” Tim hollers to the other side of the stacks where they lost their head archivist some hours ago. “We head off?”

“I'll leave in a bit!” comes the muffled voice of Sasha, who sounds for all as though she's got her head stuffed halfway inside a box. “Just want to check out something.”

Tim raises his hands as though resigned, but doesn't push it.

“I'll get us all a pizza or something,” he says. Shepherding Jon away from the boxes and folders and files that display his disappointments. “You have pizza in your universe, right?”

Jon nods, pushes a small smile on his face that he does not have the strength for.

The spooling, warping sound of the Spiral loops in his head, and his hands are empty, empty, empty.

There's a phone call at five in the morning. Shrill and chirpy, it warbles electronically, snapping the silence.

Jon hears it first, startled out of his thoughts. He hasn’t slept, tossing and writhing on the blow-up mattress Tim’s set up in the pokey office space that could charitably be labelled a spare room. The mattress, barely buoyant upon first inflation, has deflated rapidly over the course of the night, meaning Jon’s bruise-ache of a body has been lying on the mildly insulated wooden floor most of the night.

He’s barely noticed. His eyes have trailed over the shadow-swallowed shapes of Tim’s old uni books, a model airplane, a few music posters, but he’s taken in none of the detail.

Jon mentally dredges the flotsam of his memory to recall every Spiral statement he has come across, the labyrinths and doors and corridors and mazes, those ensnared with promises, those who had no option but forward.

Martin is out there. Somewhere and somehow, traversing the realm of the Spiral.

He wonders if Helen is involved. Michael, even. Or the Spiral as it was before it could claim itself named.

The bed is too big, and too cold and there is too much room, and Martin is looking for him.

The phone call trills insistently. 

“'the fuck?” He hears Tim swearing lethargically, his words mushed into each other, the clunk and racket of him no doubt pawing at the night-stand to grab the phone.“'lo?”

Jon listens through the wall, staring at the dust coating the red light shade over him.

“'s too early,” he hears, words rousing themselves in complaint. Then, “Uhuh. Uhuh! Shit, right er, yeah, fine, gimme a minute….. I'll get 'em, yeah, yeah, no sweat, be there in forty minutes....” There's a brief pause. “K, thirty. Fine. You better have some coffee waiting for us or summin'. ‘K. ‘K. Bye babes.”

Tim groans and swears again as he ends the call. Through the flimsy wall, the sound travels – the bed whinges on its springs as Tim gets up, and he comes to life noisily, staggering and fumbling around, mumbling to himself half-awake.

“Jesus Christ, Stoker,” Gerry complains from the living room from where he's crashed on the couch, disrupted from his steady snoring. “You'll wake the dead. The hell’s the matter?”

There's uneven footsteps moving through the flat, the slumping sound of some fabric being thrown.

“Up and at'tem, Ozzy,” Tim says. “Chop chop, get your leathers on, come on, we're going into work.”

“If you think I'm giving that leech any overtime, you've got your head screwed on wrong.”

There's more fumbling.

“Shoes, where're your shoes, come on,” Tim says, and there's an 'oof' sound and a ‘fuck’s sake!’ that strongly suggests that Tim's thrown them at Gerry. “Sasha called. She's got something.”

“What kind of something?” Gerry grumbles, but Tim's not listening, and Jon hears his footfalls patter closer.

“Yo. Marty McFly. Knock knock.”

Tim pushes the door open without waiting. He's got a wrinkled t-shirt with a charity slogan mostly on, his jeans hastily pulled up, belt untied and jangling and his fly still undone, showing off a hint of brightly coloured boxers. His hair is stuck up flat on one side, and his skin looks sallow and morning-washed.

“Sasha called,” he says, too loud for the hour. “We're heading in now, throw on some clothes, and we'll grab a taxi, bill it to Elias or something.”

He's beaming toothy, despite obviously still waking up. Delighted, eyes sparkling and giddy.

“She thinks she's got a way to get your Martin back,” he says.

“You are a queen,” Tim gasps, effusive and melodramatic as Sasha passes him a coffee upon arrival. “A treasure, a wonder, a joy, the brightest star in my sky.”

“Yeah yeah,” Sasha says, making a ‘flapping mouth’ motion with her free hand.  She's got the sleepless half-dazed look of someone who hasn't been to bed, still wearing the clothes she had on the day before, but she returns Tim’s smile easily, passes Gerry his coffee.

“You said you'd found something,” is the first thing Jon says when he sees her.

Sasha nods. From her expression, she probably knows he hasn’t slept either. She gestures him over to her desk.

“I was listening to the tape again,” she explains. “And Martin, right at the end, when he left, or disappeared or whatever, he was quoting something,  reading from something even, and I knew I recognised it. So I, you know, did what you do when you sort of know something but can't quite remember and I put it into Google. Those lines he was saying? ‘Under the trees in England, I meditated on this lost and perhaps mythical labyrinth’. They’re from a short story, by this Argentinian writer called Borges. I think I read it when I was a teenager. And then I remembered.”

She points on her desk.

Carefully stored in an air-tight container, there's a book. Looking at it is harder than expected; his glance when he tries to read the title slips off the sides of it. Its colour shifts like opal.  The front appears to ripple, like water catching light, fractal and maze-like and shimmering. If he were to open the cover and take a glimpse of the frontispiece, he knows what name plate he would see stamped there. 

“A Leitner?” he asks.

“I came across it, years ago now, when I was working in Research,” Sasha explains. “They did a few tests on it when someone brought it in, enough to follow up reports or any associated statements and assign it to the Spiral, figure out basically what it did. Then it got locked up, and hasn’t seen the light of day since. It’s not as extreme as some of the more potent ones, but it's still, you know, a Leitner.”

“The Garden of Forking Paths,” Tim, squinting and intently staring, manages to read the title on the front of the book.

Sasha looks at Jon.

“I can't be sure,” she says. “But on that tape, Martin quoted this story in particular. I didn't read this book obviously, I'm not an idiot, but I did go online and look at the story, because I remembered absolutely nothing about it from school. And basically, it's about alternative universes. Or the possibility of alternative universes. It's all, you know, quantum mechanics and the many worlds theory, but before those were proposed scientific ideas. So, right, it got me thinking. Martin clearly has a book, like this, or maybe even this book specifically, just a version from his universe. He says something about an interested party giving it to him; now, not sure who that refers to, but he does say that it allows him to 'open the doors'. Well, when the researchers were doing tests on it, that's what the book did. You read a few lines, and a door would appear. Always a different door, and they never went through any of them. They figured it might be associated with the Distortion to some extent. But, my the point is, if this is the book he’s reading, then it’s not too far of a stretch to assume that this is how he’s doing it. Travelling to different universes.”

“So, what,” Jon says slowly after a minute parsing through Sasha’s bundling of information. “You're saying that Martin, somehow, has got his hands on this Leitner? Or a version of this Leitner.”

“And that's how you could find him,” Sasha presses, waving a hand over the neatly wrapped book. “I'm not going to lie, Jon, it's not been fully tested, and it's certainly not safe to use.  There's no certainty where you'll end up if you end up anywhere at all, that you'll find him, or even that you'll be able to come back.”

“But,” Jon prompts, and Sasha nods to herself before continuing.

“But I think there's a good chance this book is your way to find him. The only way.”

Jon moves closer to the book. No one stops him. He traces his finger over its light-twitching title, following the letters with a nail-gnawn finger. He picks it up, and ever so carefully unseals it from the container, until he’s holding the object in a two-handed grip. It’s cooler than he expected, the texture of the book cloth ridged with irregular raised circles like the scales of a chameleon.

“I have to try,” he says. “I can't just – knowing he's out there, looking. I have to do something. If there's even the slightest chance of finding him.”

He trails off. The book a weight in his palms. Looks at the three, forming a loose semi-circle around him. Looking on with worry, but not surprise.

“I – um. I don't know if I'll be able to come back,” he says quietly.

Tim gives a bereft smile that he does not mask as quickly as he tries to.

“Hey, we get it. You’ve got your quest and all.  It was nice. Having you back for a bit.”

He gives an offering gesture, and Jon nods. Tim’s hug when it arrives is as full and tight and firm as he remembers them being. Jon returns it, one-armed, the book still in his hand.

“Try not to get yourself eaten by the Spiral,” Gerry says. He hangs back, hands shoved deep into pockets, but he looks with a steady expression at Jon. “For my sanity, yeah?”

“I can't promise anything,” Jon says, his joke falling a little flat, twisted with an anxious knotting of nerves that have budded despite his determination. He gives Gerry a small nod.

Sasha bundles him up even tighter. Her earrings jangling, her hair soft against his cheek. Jon's throat constricts, and he does not think he has the fortitude within him to say goodbye to these reminders of his lost people again.

“You can always come back here,” she murmurs. “If you can. It’s not your home, but it could be, if you wanted.”

“Remember about the map,” Jon says instead, pulling himself away from her hold so he can look at her properly. The time suddenly doesn't feel long enough, and he has so many things he wants to warn her about.  “And be – be safe.”

He means a lot in that. She understands.

Jon steps back. Sucks in a shuddery, poorly grounded inhale, as he opens the book, skimming through before he finds the lines Martin had spoken out loud on the tape.

“Do I just read them?” he says.

“I guess?” Sasha replies.

He takes a long breath, forcing himself to focus on the black shapes on the page until they flourish into letters, and thinks of Martin so hard it hurts.

“Under the trees in England,” he reads aloud, fumbling a little at the start. “I meditated on this lost and perhaps mythical labyrinth.”

He feels a tug in the air around him, a pressure shift like a storm-bank approaching.

“I imagined it infinite, made not only of – ”

He stops abruptly, the next word caught under his tongue. In front of him, in the middle of the room suspended in absent space near to where Tim's desk sits, is a door.

Unobtrusive, for all it is unnaturally ledged with no support. Wooden panelled, varnished to a darker shade that almost trips into black, a square-shaped metallic latch.

Jon turns to look at the gathered people watching his departing. Gives them a weak smile and tries not to look terrified.

He thinks of Martin, and doesn't hesitate.

Clutching the book against him, he opens the door, and steps through.

Chapter Text

Jon opens the door.

And opens the door.

And opens the door, and opens the door, and opens the door...

A composite front door, off-white with a squeaking letter box.

A bathroom door, frosted glass, plastic, round handled.

A blue car door, wing mirror attached, the window tinted.

Jon tries reading from the beginning of the story, the end, haphazard and arbitrary clumps of the middle, but there doesn't seem to be any noticeable difference in his destination. He stops for a few minutes in wherever he has ended up, trying to avoid contact as much as he can with the inhabitants of this version. He lingers, hoping to catch the dust-mote hours of early morning or the night-pall of evening when the Institute runs down silent, staying long enough to get the sense of whether Martin's been here or not.

There's that particular pressure, that something, a unquiet sense in his head, a tremor in the waves of his Knowing, that indicates to him that a man who was not meant to be here has disturbed the lines of this universe.

If Martin's been here, sometimes he's left Jon a statement. He tells it to Gertrudes and Sashas and Basiras, the same trotted out tale of imprecise destruction and loss, an explanation given out by rote. Unaware that his trail of audio breadcrumbs is being so feverishly followed according to the random whims of the Leitner in Jon’s possession.

Jon will hunt down a tape recorder to play whatever evidence has been left behind, the black plastic tape container usually carpeting the floor of some over-heavy, rip-handled box, the  tape  Jon is seeking out not even given the kindness of a label. Often, the tape is imprecisely stored in one of the many chunky folders and files organised by Power or date or location, nestled alphabetized in amongst other testaments to the Spiral.

Statement of Martin Blackwood, some variant will read, printed or looped or scratched in the handwriting of whatever Archivist holds precedence in this place. For the attention of one Jonathan Sims.

Martin’s statements, when Jon does find them, are played more than once, translated near obsessively and scoured over like a dig-site. The pitch of his voice, does he accept a drink if it is offered, are his sighs and moments of weighted silence anger or frustration or tiredness. Is there any indication that he knows Jon is alive, and looking for him?

Some universes, Jon's missed him by years. Others by months.

In a universe almost the same as his own, the same composition of team photos blu-tacked to the Archive fridge, the same broken-backed kitchen chair that no one can sit in, the irregular tripping bump in the floor as the room transitions from kitchen to main office space,  Jon sits near a plastic potted plant with flat and arching leaves glowing an unrealistic green at the centre of the staff room table. He plays back a statement left in 2016.

“Apologies for the mess,” trundles out the sharp, brisk voice of this alternative Jon. “We don't often get visitors wanting to give their statements in person.”

“Not at all,” replies the voice of Martin – his Martin. There is the pivot of a chair. A few bumps of someone moving things around.

“Are you....” this world's Jon pauses before trying tactfully: “You don't exactly look very well.”

“'m tired, that's all,” says Martin. “Let's... let's get this over with, yeah? I've, I've got to head on.”

Martin delivers his statement, sounding drained, and Jon sits like a coiled comma on a hard, uncomfortable plastic chair, and misses him.

“Well, fanciful as your story is,” scoffs the Jon on the tape once he’s wound his tale down. “You'll have to forgive me if I don't exactly believe it.”

“No offence taken,” Martin seems to be smiling, the hint of something warm in his tone. “I wouldn't expect anything else.”

This Jon makes an acknowledging noise.

“I must say, the resemblance is uncanny. I’ll confess to not knowing Martin Blackwood very well – you know how it can be, in buildings with different departments, and it’s not as if we regularly have dealings with the library staff – but you look, well. As I say, there’s certainly a resemblance, though I’d draw the line at putting it down to inter-dimensional travel via book.”

 “When you put it like that,” Martin says, a curve to his response like he’s mildly teasing.  “Sounds so much less cool.”

“Indeed. “So, you're looking for your version of me?”

“Yep.”

“And you're leaving a statement because?”

“… What else can I do?” Martin asks faintly, after a long pause and Jon doesn’t have an answer for him.

Jon reads the lines from the story as over time, they mulch into meaningless, snippets of sound. He grows to dislike the sound of his own voice.

A door always appears. Mahogany, plywood, fibreboard, oak, some carefully touched up with paints and stains and varnishes of varying colours, some crooked or the panelling neglected, smashed, some with circular door knobs polished to a sheen and some with rust-bitten half-moustache shaped handles. There does not seem to be a relationship between the door and the world he steps out into.

He never sees the same door twice.

He presses on.

A four-panel door slick with forest green opens out into the Archive staff room. The clock on the wall says it's going on nine. Jon stumbles through the door, using the sides to balance himself, taking a moment to breathe in the air, touched with air freshener and lemon-scented bleach that betrays that the cleaning staff have already been and gone. Giving him a minute to quash down the unsettling wave that rises over him with every journey completed, a tide-washed nausea that needs a moment to die down.

He opens his mind to any impression, casting out his awareness laboriously.

Martin hasn't been through here. No ripples or intrusions in the fabric of this universe.

There's a headache building up behind Jon's eyes.

He'll leave in a minute, he tells himself. Just a moment, just to rest. 

“And I'm saying it needs to be done again!”

Jon stills at the sudden noise, echoing in the vacant spaces. From beyond the staff room, off to the left near what is likely Jon's office.

“I've gone over it again – it – it can't be the references, I've – I checked.”

That's Martin's voice. Slightly younger perhaps, pitching high with frustration, unhappy and threading with anxious nerves.

Jon creeps closer to the door. Propped open with a grey rubber door wedge, the kitchen and its newly mopped laminate flooring, small islands of puddling not quite dried, transition into the carpeted corridor. Along the narrow walk-way, dim with a lower glow, angles of light branch onto it from adjoining offices. 

“Your referencing is, by some small miracle, competent enough in terms of format. But these statements you're referring to – ” There’s a rustle of paper, like it’s being shaken “ Look!– half of them misfiled, the rest of them, I’m not even sure I could begin to cross-reference. You've mis-spelled names, and misquoted important information, and it's just not good enough, Martin!”

Jon flinches at his own spiking harshness played back to him.

“I'll go over it again,” This Martin says. Wrung out, and stammering.  “I-I'm just, I'm not thinking, I've had a lot on my....I-I'll fix it.”

“No, you've done enough I think,” comes the snapping response. “I'll do it.”

“R-right. I – Right, yeah, I'll just, er, do you...?”

“Just go, Martin.”

Jon hears the door open and close. The weighty tread of this Martin’s footsteps as he trudges back to his own office space further down. His poorly controlled out-breathes.

“Right,” he hears him murmur unsteadily. “Right, of c-, Christ, you idiot, why couldn’t you just – ” His ramble trails off into a groan, belly-deep, the one Jon’s Martin used to make, clenching his hands into fists in his hair, rubbing hard over his eyes to stave off something he is trying so hard to force back inside.

Jon wants to stamp down the hallway to his own office and pick himself up, shake him down snarling, ask himself what the hell does he think gives him the right to spit and bite and rage at others and not care where the shrapnel lands.

 But that's not going to help anything. This isn’t some magical journey of wish-fulfilment. He can’t fix the mistakes of his past all that easily.

He pads his way soft-shoed back into the staff kitchen, and boils the kettle. Up on the higher shelf of the over-sink cupboard, straining and reaching up, his fingers finally grasp a mug – there’s a cartoon creature on it that he suspects is a Pokemon or something. There's still a capful of semi-skimmed milk in the bottle when he opens the fridge, and there’s an box of PG Tips already stood on the counter-top.

Martin's hunched over his computer. He has his headphones on, painfully loud, drowning out the rest of the room, the music heavy and guitar-laden and audible from the doorway. Jon knew he’d find him like this. That's what his Martin used to do, sometimes, when everything got a bit too much. It wasn’t exactly a possibility after the apocalypse, but Martin’s emotions, iced over from the numb of the Lonely, had been painful to thaw midst the dreichy landscape of a Scottish autumn, and every other night, Jon would shuffle downstairs, his feet treading chill over uncarpeted flooring, to find him on the sofa, his legs tucked under himself, sunken into the sides, having borrowed the cheap and shitty in-ear headphones Jon had brought with them. This outlet  healthier for him than the subtler embrace of the night-time quiet.

Jon would place himself down next to him. The first time, Martin had jumped, starting like a back-fired car, excuses knotting in the reeds of his speech. But soon there was only the soft lull of the witching hour, and Martin would cry without noise, a slow and sedate purge of every damned-up emotion he had not allowed himself to express, and the music would be tinny and crackling as Jon lay next to him, burrowing into his hold and dropping off back to sleep, a solid, grounding weight.

Now, in this place so far from those ephemeral evenings, another Martin has the inputting software for statements and records open on the screen but he's not looking at it. He's staring out at another horizon, looking hurt and lonely and tattered.

Jon wonders if it's his mum again.

He puts the tea down on the desk at the furthest end, making sure not to intrude on Martin’s peripheral vision. Martin doesn't notice him, continuing his unhappy ministry, because Jon is quiet, knows that Martin's not the most observant, does not have the excess of himself to be, not when he’s so bogged down in the clagging mire of his own head.

Jon doesn't say anything but he wishes he could. He'd start by apologising.

Instead, he returns to the kitchen unnoticed, giving the office of his other self as wide a berth as he can. He pulls out the book from his coat pocket, setting his shoulders with a long sigh. Recites a few lines from the middle, concentrating with a glower, as if force of will shall manifest the reality he so desperately wants restored to him.

A glass patio door, its window tinted with an opalescent patina that that he can't see through, shivers like a mirage to form where the microwave and fridge were.

Turning the handle, Jon walks through and carries on.

Behind the doors, endless Institutes. Departures on people he has known, loved, lost; Sashas and Tims and Daisys and Basiras and Melanies and Martins. Jon breaches the borders of Institutes where Magnus’ eyes smile out of Tim’s face; where a short, dark-haired thin man in a sporty t-shirt and shorts strides over to Jon and cheerily introduces himself as Martin, and Jon’s Eyes recognise the slick dishonesty of the Stranger in his motions; where the Corruption burrowed too close to Beholding’s seat of power, where Elias’ intervention didn’t come fast enough to save his budding Archivist.

Doors upon doors. Decisions made, or not, or changed, or reconsidered. Slip ups and fortunate misses and unlucky hits. Jon is dead in so many of them, but then again, so are the others.

And in some, only some: Statement of Martin Blackwood, for the attention of one Jonathan Sims.

Jon surges forth restless, repeats himself into nonsense as he reads aloud from the book, feeling the wisps of headache squander the sense and clarity of his vision.

Behind every door he checks, he does not find Martin.

A scuff of well-kept, primly polished leather brogues behind him. Jon doesn't glance up. Almost confrontational in his dismissal, he takes another pointed inhale of his cigarette and is reminded with the thick, cloudy taste of ash of why he gave up in the first place.

“Mind if I....?” the voice behind him prompts, managing impressively to appear both semi-polite and testy.

Jon shrugs,  gestures one handed.

It's technically a fire exit, a short spurt of three steps from the dip of the lower ground floor leading up to a concrete, rain-smacked side alley where the recycling bins crouch at dizzy-wheeled angles. There's a brick ledge, more a belt of space, that follows the steps up, and that is where Jon is currently uncomfortably hunched. Earlier damp has soaked the brickwork so the water starts to bleed through the seat of his trousers, and it's nippy,  the cold cramping his hands around the cigarette he is smoking without much enjoyment.

On the ledge opposite that flanks the other side of the stairs, he watches, moody and unimpressed,  his past unfold his long legs to perch himself with a twin demeanour of discomfort, leant forward in an approximate ‘r’ shape like a gaunt cathedral statue.

He's being observed over spectacles that never suited the structure of his face. He doesn't much care for the intrusion, or the unspoken enquiry, but the gaze has the weaker fission of the Eye’s attention, an unyielding awareness that’s difficult to ignore.

The younger Jon’s foot taps. He carries himself ramrod-spined, and he wears those buffed shoes, that combination of jacket and shirt because he’s under the impression it makes him seem more professional. A wire-strung, dragon-toothed man playing pretend with the rest of the world, and Jon is not in the right place to handle this maturely, with a grace he’s never been gifted in abundance.

“So,” his younger self begins with an air of brisk impatience.  There's nothing delicate in the interruption. Side-eying him, Jon doubts he's slept more than a few hours a night in the last few weeks. “You're....me, then.”

Jon doesn't answer. He sucks on the cigarette  and watches this younger Jon’s foot go tap, tap, tap.

Martin was here. Martin was here and Jon was too slow again.  

A day. A whole day he’s missed him by.

Jon wants to scream.

He tries to take solace. Knowing that Martin's still out there, alive, looking for him. But it's hard, it's hard. To know that there is no end in sight to his labours, the possibility of nothing but more of this. 

“I didn't quite believe it,” the other him continues. “When he told me that he was Martin from, and I quote, another universe. All seemed a little bit too science fiction for me.”

“Don't,” Jon warns. The cold makes him shirty, the exhaustion irritable. He doesn’t like the sound of Martin’s name in the other man’s mouth. The strain of dismissal, indifference, that he’s so ashamed of now. “Don’t do that. The whole ‘playing sceptical’ bit. It’s always been bollocks, and we both know it.”

The other Jon shuts up with a pursed, upset expression. They sit in uncomfortable silence. There’s an outburst of bolshy chatter from a nearby street, a police siren keens even further out. The other Jon brings up his hand to scratch at some of the deeper worm scars that pattern like acne along his throat, recent enough to still be scabbed over.

“You'll make them worse,” Jon says.

Younger Jon looks at him.

“Seems as though they'll look bad either way,” he snipes, deliberately not pulling his hand back immediately,  pointedly giving Jon a biting once-over.

Jon returns the look, and consciously takes the heat out of it. Tries to remember where he was then; strung out on conspiracies and all his fears made manifest, the nagging warning of the Stranger’s breaching and subtle encroachment setting off every alarm bell in a radial shock. Takes in the scarecrow of a man he makes, losing the stuffing of himself he’s spent so long packing his limbs and chest with, his spine straight like he’s geared for a fight he’s already come to expect. Wonders if there’s any versions of him out there that don’t have to learn their softness the hardest way.

He offers the younger him a cigarette. They’re not exactly his to give, having swiped them off another version of himself from a universe with a sea-green door, but he had felt the itching need rise like gall after a consecutive series of jumps had all presented cold trails.

“I've given up,” the younger Jon says finally, after a considered pause. “But – um, thanks.”

Jon's lips quirk in a wry expression. His hackles disarm.

“Good for you,” he says.  He takes another drag, holding his breath in for a moment before releasing the smoke out of his mouth in a feeble billow. “So. What did Martin say to you?”

“Your Martin?”

“Of course, I mean my Martin.”

The younger Jon doesn’t rush into the answer, perhaps gripped in the thrall of some brand of rare tact. He eyes the cigarette semi-enviously.

“There was all this shouting, from the record stacks,” he says finally. “I thought it was Tim or Sasha messing about, but I, well these days… I needed to check nothing was wrong, so I went over. There was this door there, at the end of one of the stacks, big and wooden and solid. And Martin was there. But he was – he was older, taller, though I know that's unlikely. And had a beard. I didn’t recognise him, not immediately, Martin – my Martin, I suppose I should clarify – tried to grow that ridiculous goatee a few months ago, but he’s usually clean shaven. But this new man... it was him. And he was grinning and sweeping Tim up in this big hug like he hadn’t seen him for years.”

The younger Jon glances aside to him, obviously hinting for an elaboration, curiosity striking like a open-door light patch across his eyes. Jon doesn't take it.

"I obviously asked what all the fuss was about, and what the hell was going on, and Martin put him Tim down to look at me, and his face was  – ” Here, the younger Jon clears his throat and a dark, blotching heat rises up his face. “A-anyway. Long story short, he told us that he was from a slightly different version of our universe, and that he was trying to find you. He asked us whether you’d shown up, any records or statements within the last decade or so – Tim checked any Institute databases we might have, and Sasha had the unenviable task of attempting to bring order to my predecessor’s slapdash approach to archiving. While they were doing that, he asked if he could leave me a quick statement, in case you ever came through. I wasn’t going to begrudge the opportunity to gain further illumination on such a singular event, so I obliged.”

“Do you have it? The statement?”

“It’s only a short one,” The younger Jon says. “You can listen if you like, although.”

“I – Later,” Jon says. “If you wouldn’t mind.” He has no aspersions that the statement will be anything other than what Martin has said before, but he feels obligated. To treat each missive with the attention in which it was given. A message meant for him, delivered with every unspoken tone for him to read between the lines, every wrinkle of disappointment, every crinkling irregularity that might speak of loss or love or surrender.

“Of course,” the younger Jon says. There’s a tone to his voice Jon doubts either of them could easily recognise. “He – um, well, he essentially said that he was looking for you, though he didn’t go into much detail as to why, that he had this book – ”

“The Garden of Forking Paths?” Jon asks.

“Yes,” the younger Jon replies. “How did you...?”

From the gulf of Tim’s jacket pocket, Jon unearths his own copy, gives it a mild wave. The younger Jon blanches, although he does a valiant job of not letting it show in the actions of his body.

“It's a Leitner,” he says. “Isn't it?”

Jon nods. Pockets the offending article back out of sight.

“A-anyway,” the younger Jon pulls himself back to the task at hand.  “He told us he was using the book to travel, gave some vague details about why, and that was it. We couldn’t produce any evidence that you had come here, then we left him alone for a bit. Sasha came in to give him a cup of tea and he'd already gone again.”

“How did he – ” Jon inhales a hard breath, and the question is harder to voice than he'd thought. “How did he look?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, did he look well? Safe, tired, sick, in danger, what?”

“He, er,” the younger Jon considers. “Honestly? He looked tired. Weary. He – there was a moment, after he finished with the statement and we were waiting for Tim and Sasha to get back, when he was just – not staring exactly, but he kept…. and I asked – well, I asked him what he was looking at, and he roused himself and apologised, and told me he'd just watched me die. In the last universe he'd visited. The Jane Prentiss there was apparently more successful than here.”

The younger Jon rubs at the healing scabs on his arms.

Jon wants to push for more. His tongue’s still lined with that extra nudge that Beholding provides, he could ask and this Jon might not even recognise the compulsion laced through it. He wants to know if Martin’s been hurt. If he was injured, if he’s safe. If he has even the slightest idea that Jon is alive and searching for him in kind.

“It's.... when is it, for you?” he asks instead, dismissing the temptation. “Date-wise?”

“Is that advisable?” the younger Jon says. “Surely there are rules, about….” He has an expression of singular discomfort, as if realising how ridiculous he sounds. “….talking about other universes, timelines and such like.”

“I'm not sure if there's rules,” Jon says finally. “Or if I can do any damage by being here and, I don't know, change history. But I don't think it matters. Enough things are going to mess with you and they won't worry about the niceties. I don't even know how similar this version is to mine. You might end up going a completely different way. There’s no one way this unfolds, I don’t think.”

First-hand, he has already seen Sasha. Sasha-as-was, her gaze brimming with curiosity; Sasha, with her life and history not filched from her for some other callous thing to parade in as a mask.

The younger Jon's eyes spark with cautious intrigue.

“What can you tell me then?”

“What date is it?”

“September. 21^st. Um, 2016.”

Jon thinks for a moment. Dropping the butt of the long extinguished cigarette, scraping it under the toe of his shoe out of habit.

“You've met Basira then?”

“She's... is she in my future?”

“Was.”

“What happened?”

“She’s… She’s dead now.”

“Oh.”

“Have you met Daisy yet? Alice Tonner?”

“I – no? Don't think so. In my – er, your future, is she....um, also?”

“Yeah, she's dead.”

“The...” the younger Jon seems to pull himself up, buoyed with a tone of distinct and insistent distress. “The others. Sasha, and Tim, and Martin?”

“What do you want me to say?” Jon says quietly after a moment.

His younger self bristles.

“Well, I was hoping you’d be able to give me, I don’t know, some good news perhaps about this possible future of mine, something that isn’t how much I’m going to lose, but apparently that’s asking too much from you!”

Jon allows the tirade to simmer down from its outburst, and holds his tongue. It is harder than it should be. He has no patience for his past, and little kindness left to forgive himself but he bites back words that rankle too quickly in his mouth. He knows Martin would have glared, and nudged him, reminded him admonishingly to play nice. But Martin’s not here. And Jon is left to watch the evidence of his old failures that have silvered like scar tissue over his recollection of these years.

This younger version, leaning forward with his eyes wide, the sniping bluster not disguising his distress, he doesn’t deserve his own self-hatred long carried.

“What do you want to know?” he offers instead.

His other self pauses. Pulls himself back with a dug-in frown.

“Really? You’d… you’d tell me. Just like that.”

“Yes,” Jon says. “You answered my questions, it's only fair.”

The younger Jon collects his thoughts for a moment. Hunched over, his fingers tugging at a loose thread of his jumper, before he clears his throat, flicks his eyes to Jon in that snatching, unblinking way of his that he does not yet know the relevance of.

“Who killed Gertrude Robinson?”

The compulsion is not strong, but it's rooted there. Jon tastes the aftertaste of static on his own tongue.

“Elias.”

It's not the answer the other man is expecting.

“B-but why?”

“She was trying to burn down the Institute.”

The younger Jon visibly gulps back an instinctive 'why? There were so many questions then, and right now it is not the one that occupies the forefront of his faculties.

“What is under the Institute?”

Jon hums, nodding to himself. “That's a bigger question than you think it is.”

“I went down there.”

“Oh, I know. Creepy voice and weird worm doorways. I’d try a different question.”

“Why?”

The other Jon seems suspicious at his avoidance. Jon ignores it, and responds in the sort of reasonable ‘I know best’ tone that used to drive Martin up the wall.

“Because there isn't one answer, and I don't want to overwhelm you with everything.”

“Fine,” the younger Jon huffs after a split second. “What is living in the tunnels, then?”

“A good deal of spiders,” Jon replies, deliberately casually. “A few worm corpses. Jurgen Leitner.”

The effect is as good as he'd hoped.

“The fuck,” the younger Jon explodes. For some reason he can laugh at that, at the outrage on his younger self's face, the blistering, boiling loathing he’d harboured for the man who bore that name.  He had thought he was too tired for that.

“Ha. Yeah. That old bastard's been hiding down there for years.”

The younger Jon, after blinking, allowing the shock to settle, manages a weak chuckle of his own.

“You’re – Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh,” the younger Jon says. “Right.”

Content to stew in his answers for a while, he runs down silent. Jon watches the sky for a while, the colours beginning to choke pink and bruise-yellow between the blockages of buildings. The night will be warm, he thinks idly. Sticky, clinging. The festering hazy heat of an Indian summer. He can’t remember if it was like this in his universe that year. If Tim wore t-shirts and shorts and enthused about all the outdoor activities he could get up to in such a warm spell. If Sasha had groaned and switched to skirts for a month, if Martin had complained about the lack of air-conditioning, fretted about heat stroke and dehydration and all manner of ills. If he himself had sweltered in the offices, his top button popped in concession to the unseasonable warmth. He supposes he had other things on his mind.

“I've a question,” Jon says in the humid silence. His other self, his brooding disrupted, glances up.

“Go on.”

“Where's your Martin?”

The younger Jon scoffs, and quickly interjects with.

“He's not my Martin.”

“Tetchy,” Jon replies, raising a knowing eyebrow. “I wasn’t implying anything.”

“Well. Good.”

“… So. Where is he?”

“He's taken a few days of absence. He rarely uses his annual leave, I saw no reason to deny the request.”

“He's not sick?”

“I don't think so,” the younger Jon says. “He said he just wanted a couple of days off. What with everything…. I didn't begrudge him the time.”

“He’s probably gone to Devon,” Jon says mildly, kicking at the wall rhythmically with the back of his heel. “Did you know his mum's in a home down there?”

Slivers of knowledge, gleaned by the hungry gaze of the Eye before Jon had possessed the strength to wrench his Sight shut: plastic carnations in a ceramic flowerpot on the sill, a second floor window overlooking the car-park, its edges marked out by prickly hedgerows; it’s been a bad night, and accidents happen, and they always seem to happen these days, so the room is pungent with bleach and cleaning fluids, and Martin holds his paltry offering of supermarket flowers to his chest, anxious of touching anything, of upsetting her routine, of upsetting her; a maroon pillow topping a clinically made bed, stitched with poppies, the bedside table with the vicious ticking of the alarm clock; his mum, sat in the wicker-backed chair framed by the window and the fake carnations, a large-print book held in her hands; “I can’t talk for long,” she will say, or “I’m busy”, or “Why haven’t you come to see me?”, or “You never call”, even though Martin does, religiously, every week, and on her worst days, she will say all these in Polish, knowing Martin’s tongue fumbles to respond in even the simplest of sentences in her mother tongue, another thorn of disappointment in her side, or else she will stare at the words on the page in stony silence and say nothing to her son at all.

“…no,” the younger Jon says. His expression softens guiltily. “I-I didn't know that.”

“We never asked,” Jon says. He lets out a breath.  “If I've any advice, you should take better care of the people around you. Tim, and Martin, and Sasha. You don’t – You don’t know how long you'll have them for.”

“I – ”

“That means not stalking any one,” Jon interrupts, and his younger self has the good grace to wince. He relaxes his tone. “And it – it’ll help. The fear. I know right now it’s all… it’s a lot. But it’ll help to have people on your side, and they will be, if you don’t spend all your time trying to drive them away.”

The younger Jon doesn’t reply, gnawing at the skin around his nail. After a moment, he plucks himself up to ask:

“There's something bad here, isn't there? At the Institute.”

“Yes.”

“Should I leave?”

“Are you asking me?”

“Well, obviously.”

“I don't think you can. We were all in too deep, even now.”

“And Tim and Sasha and Martin...”

“They're as tied to this as you are.”

Haltingly, Jon tells him the short tale of his employment. And when it is done, and the night has dipped dark, fuggy with light pollution and the evening heat lacquering his skin, the younger Jon thanks him quietly, and earnestly.

 Jon doesn't know how much help it'll be. How much this world differs, will twist and angle adjusted.

“Do you have any more questions?” he closes up with. His hands are beginning to get shaky. A throbbing rising behind his eyelids, his throat dry. He should have left hours ago.

“Why Martin?” the younger Jon asks. The edges sanded off his tone.

“Because I love him,” Jon says, as though it’s an easy truth, one of the easiest, a simplicity that life has rarely afforded him. “He's the only good thing I have left, and I – I can't have lost everything.”

They sit for a while.

“You should, er, you should stay here,” the younger Jon finally says. “Sounds like you haven't exactly stopped to rest what with, well, one thing and another. There's a cot in the storage room, you probably know already. No one will disturb you, and I’ll – I’ll be here, in case. ”

Jon should refuse. Push on, push through.

“Thanks,” he says, meaning it.

The younger Jon gives him an aborted smile, and Jon hopes he's helped, somewhere.

He leaves in the morning without saying goodbye through the glass sliding door of a conservatory.

Chapter Text

It is an indelicate bludgeoning of an art, traversing through the doorways, a breaking through of an unnatural window into places he has not been invited into. The detritus of metaphysical plasterboarding, walls, paint-chippings coats his clothes, rubs his skin wrong; this travel is neither natural or safe, and his body knows it.

He manages three jumps in succession, two white doors and a blue door, before his stomach rebels violently, a break-slam of an internal insurrection, and he nearly doubles over in some unfamiliar dust-stuffed storage room in some other Archives, a cramping sensation splintering like something structural giving way.

Spots patter dizzily in his vision like rain breaking the skin of puddles, and he needs food, he realises, he's hungry.

Martin hasn’t been through here, but he’s caught this place at the tail-end of dawn, an hour or so before anyone will come unlocking the building. He has time to stray for a moment.

After rifling slapdash through some boxes, he liberates a handful of folders and sits himself cross-legged on the hard, concrete floor. There's still the twinge of recognition, the scent of some Power in cursory lines of that he casts his eyes over; he discards the dull nothing taste of Alicia Johannson, Jorge Luis Gallego, Claudette Bisset, all of which he knows would record without effort to tape, and picks up the statement of Malcolm Anders, regarding a health and safety inspection. A wisp of ozone snakes through him, snaps an alertness as the statement thrums petrol-tainted, rainbowing with oil.

He's about to start reading when he notices that there's no tape recorder nearby. He checks his pockets more out of habit, the inside of his jacket where he's stashed The Garden of Forking Paths. He hasn’t been accompanied since he started travelling through the Spiral’s doors, but still he checks.

Looking around, there’s nothing sitting unobtrusively on the shelves behind him. Nothing in any of the nearby boxes, and he’s not comfortable with chancing the main office spaces, for fear he’ll find himself disturbing some other Jon, sleeping fitful on his desk, with his head pillowed on his own arms, perhaps some other Martin, struck with the dimming of wakefulness, blundering around before anyone arrives in his boxers, fumbling for the kettle switch.

He’s never read a statement like Gertrude apparently did, denoting her missives of horror to the empty air for the Eye to gorge upon.

In the yellow-slicked glow of the indoor lighting, he haltingly starts reading the statement.

The words tangle wrong in his mouth, swell unfitting. Malcolm Anders had a history of ill-health, asthmatic amongst a cadre of other genetic hand-me-downs, and Jon's breathing clatters with ill-shaped breaths as he reads. Malcolm Anders had a skipping, jumping cadence when he delivered his statement, half nerves, his sentences tangled and run-on, and half a brogue flattened to a hint from years living this side of the border, and Jon feels the accent twist his tongue, unnatural,  heavy and unwanted. Malcolm Anders didn’t believe what had happened to him, but he’d wanted someone to hear, and as Jon begins his testimony, he does not feel in control as he should.

He gets through a page before he stops. Breathing hard, the dust tickling his nose, the paper leaves unsteady in his clenched palms.

It doesn't feel good to read the statement. It's not even that it's stale, or too old. Like a mangy dog gnawing at a near-stripped bone, in those last days before the Apocalypse, vision polka-dotting with black spots, limbs motioning like moving through water,  Jon would have read anything to assuage how hungry he was.

 No, reading this, Jon feels overwhelmed by the chronicle of fear, over-taken by a sense of self that’s not his own, the clear impression of invasion within him.

He’s still hungry. He pockets the clump of pages just in case, folding them hurriedly and irregularly and shoving them into the cavernous pockets of Tim’s jacket, but even then, he knows he won't need them for later.

Instead, he creeps into the small staff room off along the corridor to the right, opens the squat, elderly shared fridge, blinking at the harshness of the inner light, and finds a Tupperware box half-full of pasta. It looks like one of Sasha's recipes, vegetables and quorn mince and the strong waft of something spicy,  and he guiltily thinks about leaving a note even as he removes it from where it’s been kept, but that would likely cause more trouble than it's worth.

To say he devours the pasta would be an accurate assessment.

When he's finished, he has to sit at the table that serves as the centre point of this measly dining area, squashed central with too many chairs in the poky room, inhaling through the bloating fullness and feeling incredibly sick with the weight of food he’s just consumed.

He feels full, sated. The food banishing the shakiness from his limbs, the headache in a band across his forehead turned down to silent.

The statement of Malcolm Anders sits unread and unneeded in his pocket.

He wonders if, when, he'll start needing to sleep again. If he doesn’t need statements to survive, if his compulsion is running faint and fickle, what else he might be having taken from him, the gifts bestowed upon an unwilling acolyte of Beholding now being returned.

If his connection to the Eye is straining so tenuous, he wonders how much longer it'll be able to help him find Martin.

He should hurry. He pushes himself up with a fresher strength to clean the now-empty plastic square in the kitchenette sink with the dripping, limescaly tap, letting it drip dry for this Sasha to find on arrival.

Unpocketing the book, he  reads a line or two, precisely and carefully enunciating the words. A ledged door, like the weather-warped door of a long-standing shed, with black hinges and the varnish wearing down, opens up where the sink was.

Jon carries on.

 A car door about the size of a Fiat Punto arches open in the floor of the men’s bathrooms, and Jon has to struggle out, undignified and panting at his shocking upper body strength, his elbows slipping on tiles the cleaning crew have scrubbed recently. He has to stand still for a good minute, the spiking odour of bleach and urinal cakes making him feel heady,  forcing his way through the murky detritus of inanities and useless flotsam before the Eye even gives him a hint that Martin’s passed this way.

It takes a good half an hour of groping about in storage, following the Eye’s hints like a nose-blind bloodhound. The tape is secreted away in a box helpfully, but rather ambiguously labelled ‘2018’, and upon further inspection, is bulging pregnant with files from various years, branching through the decades and adhering to some higher level of organisation he can’t clarify.

Mid-rifling through a clutch of statements stinking of the Dark, a few crinkling fractal tales of Spiral encounters, he fists his fingers around a little plastic tape case.

Inside, there’s a loopy left-slanting print that’s likely Sasha’s, the handwriting squeezed thinner to squish down the spine of the tape container – Statement of Martin Blackwood, for the attention of a (future?) Jonathan Sims.

It takes a few more minutes to hunt down a tape recorder, eventually finding one in a desk drawer so neat and co-ordinated with pencils and pens by ink colour and a cornucopia of different post-it notes it can only be Basira’s. Perching himself on the edge of the wheeled desk chair, listening for any signs of life within this particular Archive – the last few have blustered frantic and morose with stress, and he’s been lucky to avoid most confrontations –  he presses play.

The click, and fuss of static is the first thing he hears, refracting tinny in the wide space of the office.

“…. knew you’d come creeping around here eventually,” comes the unimpressed tone of Basira. “What’d you want?”

“My dear Detective.” The obsequiously smug voice of Elias Bouchard filters smoothly through the speakers.  “Surely it’s only polite, for the Director of the Institute to welcome such an esteemed and unusual guest to our humble Archives.”

A disbelieving snort. “Riiight. As if you don’t know exactly who this guy is.”

“Oh, I am afraid you somewhat overestimate my abilities in this matter.  I do, certainly, have my suspicions that our guest has come on rather a long journey, but ultimately, I am as eager to uncover the root of his identity as you are.”

“How reassuring.” Basira retorts. “Almost human after all. Doesn’t matter anyway. He’s in no state to be talking to anyone at the moment.”

“And yet you didn’t phone the hospital, I can’t help but notice.  Not much medical attention to be had in that cupboard charitably called a storage room. Which, and correct me if I'm wrong, leads me to believe you’d rather our guest was kept close at hand for the time being. Am I close?”

“Do you actually have anything to contribute, or are you just going to continue to piss me off?”

“Manners, Detective,” Elias chides, before there’s some distortion on the tape, a non-verbal gesture the recorder doesn’t pick up. “I can always come back later. When our visitor is perhaps in a more talkative mood.”

“Goodbye, Elias.”

“Detective.”

There is the clack of smart leather shoes striding away. Basira lets out a grumpy exhale, mutters something disparaging.

A roll of crackling tape for a few seconds before footsteps again, faster, hurried, squeaky like the tread of worn-down trainers rubbing on tile.

“Where is he then?”

Sasha’s voice – tired, wound with strain.

“Good morning to you too,” Basira responds dryly. “In here. Thought I’d stand outside just in case. The guy’s not likely to do much damage, all things considered, but still. Elias was sniffing around, by the way. Seemed very interested.”

A snort. “Course he was…. Any updates then?”

“Not a peep.”

“I still think you should have taken him to the hospital.”

“Look, it was a couple of minutes, if that, and he regained consciousness pretty quickly. Potentially has a history of them, we don’t know enough. After, yeah, he was confused, which was to be expected, but he was lucid enough before he started nodding off.”

“And you didn’t ask him any questions?”

“Gosh, I didn’t even think of that.”

“Basira.”

“I tried. He couldn’t give me the year, or even the Prime Minister, but – look, he knew who I was. Knew where he was. And I got his name, before he passed out, so thought that was enough to be getting on with. Figured you’d be all up for the grand inquisition once he’d woken up.”

“Anything on the name?”

“I ran it through the usual systems, criminal records, any Archive mentions. Mel got a ping through Work and Pensions, and we verified it against HMRC. The only guy with that name lives in some shitty flat in Vauxhall. Melanie even gave him a call – he’d just come back from night shift from the sound of it, but he confirmed everything easily enough. I think Mel pretended to be the tax office to put the frighteners on him, but there wasn’t much need.”

“So what… fake name?”

“Could be. Or there’s two of them.”

“… Christ, just one day where nothing weird happens, all I ask.”

“Can’t see it, but you never know.”

A puff of sound breaking up the dialogue.

“I don’t like this,” Sasha continues.

“When do you ever?”

“I’m serious. He could be dangerous.”

“This guy, whoever he is, he could barely walk. We’re probably safe.”

“Hm. Doorways always make me think Helen’s involved somehow…”

Jon’s thumb slams down on the pause button. At first, he assigns the jittery paranoia to his imagination, but then he hears footfall, a tidal rise and fall of a conversation getting closer, idle and chit-chatty and washing through easily as wave.

There isn’t time for him to read from the book. Besides, he doesn’t want to leave, not immediately, not until he’s finished this tape.

He retreats noiseless from the central office space. There’s a room on this floor, a workspace in name only, too stuffy and cramped for anyone to claim that’s been left as an overflow room with a desk.

Mercifully, it’s unlocked. He lets himself in, being careful with the handle, and the room is near identical to his own version; he has to shimmy through two towering structures of boxes to even see the desk. It’s doubtful anyone will come this way, but the Head Archivist’s office is not far, within hearing distance. He locks the door from the inside and secretes himself further from the immediate entrance, tucked behind the lazy lean of the towers.

He listens. Outside, there’s chatter – he makes out Sasha, Basira, Melanie. Wonders where Daisy is. Their motions are unhurried, and after a while, he feels confident enough to unwind his tension, loosen the death-grip he’s been throttling the tape recorder with.

His shoulders bricked in by boxes, he thumbs the volume slider down to the lowest before inaudibility, wincing at the click when it begins playing again.

The recording doesn’t begin instantly. He expects Sasha and Basira’s conversation to continue, but that’s cut off unceremoniously, and with another snap, another conversation intrudes, mid-flow. The volume causes the voices to mumble meaningless, and Jon chances a slight increase, the speaker-part of the recorder held up against his ear.

“… the book’s causing them, isn’t it?” Sasha is asking.

“The more I use it, yeah.”

That’s Martin’s voice. Tumbling out throat-scraped, groggy.

“You thought about, you know, not using it?” Basira interjects.

“Gee, I hadn’t even considered it.” Martin snarks, irritable and waspish and Basira snorts in amusement.

“You want to use an evil book to give yourself brain damage, be my guest.”

“So,” Sasha interrupts the two of them, clearly pressing to move on. “You want to give that statement then? If we take it now, we’ll store it in the Archive so if he comes through, he can find it.”

“Yeah,” Martin says. An exhale of sound, ribbed with tiredness, loosened in its mooring, and Jon presses the speakers harder against his ear to try and catch each faint, tape-scrambled noise. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll, I’ll do it now.”

Martin gives his statement. It’s rote, a near identical weaving pattern of speech to every other time he has done this. The usual questions from his audience, the production of his usual answers. Jon listens, but only half to the actual words he produces, the rest of him consumed by the background that he can catch through the turned-down playback.

Martin is holding something, ceramic, a cup maybe, and it clatters erratically in an unsteady grip when he places it down. His sentences trail off, tug themselves back from the brink of sluggish. More than once he stops as if the air in his lungs has not expanded the space properly, draining down to a faint wheeze.

Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong, and Jon wants to know, but he can’t, he can’t, because he’s not there. Because Martin is out there, alone, sick and getting sicker, and Jon doesn’t understand.

Basira and Sasha tie up their questions, clearly intending a longer conversation out of ear-shot. Martin waves off their offers of more food, mumbles something about closing his eyes for a bit, which they agree to easily enough.  The wince of a door opening and shutting with a harsh snap. The damning thunk of a lock being turned.

The tape doesn’t stop. Jon listens, barely breathing in case the sound interjects, attempting to interpret audible stimuli into comprehension; he hears a long, gulping thirsty noise, the knock of something heavy being put down, a breathing in-and-out, overfast, through the nose, the moan of the bed as weight shifts.

Martin’s muttering to himself. A habit ingrown from childhood. In the early days, he berated and scolded and vocalised the poisons he’d internalised, only whenever he believed himself alone – Jon had heard him sometimes, during his twilight hours still awake, trammelled up in some knotty project, irritated with himself that he hadn’t completed it faster, produced better. Later, Jon privately thinks the habit grew as Martin’s small rebellion against the silence, expanding from negative to neutral, a trait he refused to concede to the shores of the Lonely, and he’s carried that through, chatting to himself or verbalising the run of his thoughts when he hasn’t noticed he has company.

Brief interludes of noise coalesce into meaning – Jon hears ‘…put my sodding shoes?’ and ‘…get up’, and ‘…is it?’

That one repeats, the creaking getting louder. The lock unclicks on the recording.

“Where is it?” Martin asks himself. The rub over flooring of laden boxes being moved. “Where have they…?”

“Looking for something?”

Martin gives a shout of surprise that has Jon wincing, pained and near deafened, almost knocking himself over. He stops the tape, heart hammering a tattoo in his chest, but no one comes running, no one has noticed him, and with trembling fingers he continues.

“Surely you aren’t leaving so soon. We haven’t been introduced properly.”

Jon can only stare, mute and useless and horrified at the unrelenting whirr of playback, the pleased voice of Jonah Magnus speaking with the robbed everything of Elias Bouchard.

Martin doesn’t reply.

“Goodness, you are the jumpy sort. I don’t bite, you know.”

“S-stay back.” Martin stutters out. His laboured words sound smaller than they should in the space, take up less room.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Elias scoffs. “I’ve simply come to make introductions. However, if I were a betting man, and I do indulge on occasion, I’d wager we’ve met before, from your reaction.  How interesting. One does forget things at my age, but I’m certain I don’t know you.”

Footsteps prowling closer. Footsteps lurching backwards.

“You’ve no idea how much of a bore it is, knowing where all the puzzle pieces go, waiting for them to move. A little bit of upsetting the board can be very entertaining, and how entertaining you’ve already been, arriving with such bluster and fanfare. Caused quite the stir.”

“Happy to oblige,” Martin replies, seeming to have bolstered his nerves, and Jon can almost imagine the image he makes. The stubborn wrinkle of his forehead sent into a mulish belligerence.

“Care to tell me why you’re trespassing in my Archives?”

“Not particularly.”

“Hmm. I’ll confess to being a little disappointed at how unforthcoming you’re being.”

“Fine by me.”

“Some manners,” Elias says, a cutting slide creeping into his tone. “would be advised for such a reckless intrusion. You’ve got the pitiful way of the Lonely about you, perhaps one of Peter’s lost souls, but it doesn’t matter.  I owe no allegiance to that Power. You know which Power holds sway here?” A lingering pause. “I can see you do. Now. Some answers, if you please. What can I call you?”

“… It’s none of your business. ”

“Everything that occurs in my Institute is of the utmost interest to me.”

“…”

“Any time this year would be ideal.”

“…I don’t want to talk to you.”

“You’re mistaken in thinking that’s my concern.”

“Then fuck off then.”

“What is your name?”

There is a pitching, squealing rise of static that feedbacks through the tape. A heightened, gasping choke, spluttering, air hard won and fought for.

“-M-Martin Blackwood.”

“That’s better. Isn’t that better, Mr Blackwood? Now, are you going to play nicely?”

A heady panting curse.

“Now, now. Why are you in my Archives, Martin Blackwood?”

“I – ” A gulp of noise, harsh, scrabbling, like he’s trying to force the words back down. “I’m – huh – I’m looking for Jonathan Sims.”

A flutter of confusion in Elias’ response.  “One of my Archivist’s wayward assistants? Former, I should say perhaps, he wasn’t made of as stern a stuff as I’d…I – oh.” There’s another bite of static that whines as it pushes greedy. Martin makes a cut-off noise of pain that he cannot muffle. “Oh, my. That is delightful. I see now. Not our Jonathan Sims then, I’m to understand. How curious. The Throat of Delusion always did enjoy playing with its food.”

The static upticks, hisses louder.  Jon’s knuckles whiten around the plastic box of the recorder as on the tape, Martin swallows down a shivery, sobbing breath.

“You’ve come such a long way, Mr Blackwood. So bloated in misery and terror,”  There’s a hungry edge to Elias’ voice, a considering touch, that frightens Jon. “You would feed the Eye well, were it to turn its gaze to flay your wretched terrors from you. A pity you are so ensnared already. I suspect the Spiral’s games explain this curious artefact I found so incongruously this afternoon.”

“…G…Give it back,” Martin replies raggedly. Jon can’t picture the room any more – where Martin stands, how near Elias is, if the door is locked, if anyone is going to hear, if anyone is going to help him.

“Hm.” There is the swish of pages moving nonchalantly. “You should know better. Leitner’s little collection, well. They aren’t toys, are they, Mr Blackwood? I can see its use is taking its toll on you quite drastically. How much longer do you think you have left?”

“Give it back.”

Static boils over, and in response, the room overflows with hitching aborted intakes of air, a dulled whimper. It is a horrendous echo of that first time, and Jon wasn’t there either, couldn’t have protected Martin,  his hands latched around half-burnt paper, a spiderweb lighter dropped underfoot, Elias irritated and cruel and petty in his ministrations, his warning limited by his waning attention, his dismissive disinterest, his need to punish Martin’s outburst but not break his toys beyond use.

 This Elias has no reason to hold back, and Jon listens horrified as Martin’s weight buckles groundward as the acolyte of the Eye feeds wantonly.

“Oh, Martin. What a tragedy this has all turned out to be. You don’t know how long you’ve been searching for him, do you? I could tell you, though that may perhaps be an unkindness too far.  So many doors. Doors, and doors, and doors, and always nothing.” A satisfied noise interrupts a punctured shuddering exhale. “The book’s killing you. You can feel it, getting harder and harder to use. Poor, confused, frightened Martin. And it’s ultimately pointless, surely. You don’t even know if he made it out of those corridors. There was such a chaos, wasn’t there, as you fell,  you lost sight of him for simply a moment, you tell yourself it wasn’t your fault, but you’ve always been careless with your things, always let down the people who need you the most. And then you fell alone. Down, down, down.  You could be searching for a ghost, for all you know.”

“Shut up,” Martin whispers, stripped of any brash defiance, his voice almost lost under the thrum of static. “S-shut up.”

“One final inquiry,” Elias says like he hasn’t heard Martin, as if it’s just occurred to him, a passing consideration.  “If you’d indulge a sentimental old man. My ritual, the creation of my Archive in all their glory, a catalogue of this world’s terrors.  Does it succeed?”

A pained and croaking whine. The crumpling rumble of static spikes again.

“Answer me, please, Martin, it’s much less painful that way. Does my ritual succeed?”

“Yes,” Martin sobs, crying out enraged and pitiful and terrified, and Jon can envisage the smile that graces Jonah Magnus’ face as he purrs out:

“Excellent.”

The background whine of feedback dies down like a storm passing. Martin tries to quieten himself without success. There is a thump.

“Here. Returned to its current owner. What you do with it is your own business, I’ve certainly no intention of stopping you using it. I really ought to thank you, Mr Blackwood.  This really has been the most enlightening conversation.”

Martin breathes in-and-out and in-and-out to stay afloat.

“I’d wish you luck,” Elias Bouchard says, his voice a little faded, as if he’s moved away from the recorder.  “But I doubt it would do you much good.”

The door shuts quieter than Jon feels it should, and Martin is alone again.

Martin’s panting drops into a jagged, hiccupping weeping that he tries to stifle. The sound buried against fabric, perhaps the crook of his arm, full-bodied, way-down-deep from the depth of him.

From years ahead, a hundred different doors between them, Jon grasps the tape recorder close and feels himself splintering.

Eventually, ever so slowly, Martin’s weeping dies down, replaced by roughshod breathing as he tries to steady himself.

“Ok,” Martin says, slurring over his words. “Ok, ‘k, can’t stay here, c’mon. Next one. Maybe the next one.”

There’s the rustle of pages, a few more unidentifiable noises, before Martin clears his throat from where it’s swollen thick, and begins to read.

“He believed in an in-infinite series of times,” he recites, pushing through the words jerkily. “In a-a dizzily gro – growing, ever spreading.” A shuttered gasp for air. “…network of diverging, c-converging and p-p-parallel times.” A rattling inhale. “We do not ex. Exist in – oh fuck, h-huh, come on, come on – in most of them. In some you exist and n-not I, wh-wh. While. While er. In others, I do, and you do not.”

The crackling distortion breaches. Fades. Jon listens as the brutal and gasping recitation of the paragraph tunes out into nothing.

The tape clicks off. And Jon sits cramped, scaffolded in by boxes of other people’s horror, muffling the sound that spills like a flood dam breaking from his mouth so hard he leaves fingerprints in the flesh of his cheeks.

This time, Jon does not step through the door to another universe.

He is spitting and crackling rage, it’s a thrumming snarl sprang through tendon and marrow. He has tear tracks blinked back blinding, and all he can hear is Martin’s jump-start-failing, a structure disintegrating in the battering face of endless waves; Martin is sick, and that book is doing it. Martin is sick, and Elias is too mired in the mud of his amorality to be trusted to speak truth but he only wrenches and winds and braids into cruelty a venom already broken skin. Martin is sick, and Elias isn’t lying, and Jon is looking for someone to blame, because someone must be.

His body and mind and throat well remember the mantle of being an Archive.

When the next door appears, he shouts a name through the opening, and the other side unfolds into a hotel corridor. Plush-carpeted in a mild-mannered teal, neatly wall-papered in a conservative egg-white.

“Helen!” Jon shouts down the corridors, his fury eaten up by the vacant air. His head and heart sick of doors, of blindly hoping he’s catching up to Martin, not getting further away. “Helen! Or Michael, o-or who or whatever is here! Where are you?”

Sconces, rounded upside-down triangles like the opening buds of lillies, break up the colour of the walls. One of them flickers with a flutter of electricity, of connection, before dimming in uniform line with the rest.

“Helen!” Jon hollers down the length of the corridor. He doesn’t know if the Helen he knew, that rescued them from the endless Vast, died. If they could die. If there’s anything at the centre of these corridors, but surely the Spiral must exist in some form, some diminished fashion for it to be feeding so voraciously through its artefact, so why does its manifestation not come forth.

The lights offer another feeble, disinterested flicker.

“Where are you?!” he asks louder. “Where is he!? Why can't I find him, why won't you let me, what are you doing to him?!”

The noise echoes back at him.

“Answer me!” he screams, the ghost-faint tenor of an Archivist in his voice.

The question snags like fish-hooks in his mouth, and he gags, chokes wretched as the compulsion catches on nothing, no one, no one, and the lights don’t even flinch as he drops to his knees, his fingers fisting in the upshock of the carpet, and he cries out enraged, the failed compulsion forking a headache like lightening through his head, and ripping another groan like following thunder from him.

“Give him back,” he howls toothless into the weave of the carpet. “Give him back, you can’t have him, give him back.”

Missing Martin is like snapping out a rib, wax cauterising the flesh of his palm, the unyielding frost-bite of an empty beach.

“You can’t have him,” he repeats, straining hoarse.

It takes a long time, to drag himself crone-spined back to upright. To thumb another page of the book, and start reading again.

The corridors stay empty.

The office has all the trappings of his own.  It’s depressingly familiar, in the way old photos are of rooms you inhabited in younger days, a snap-shot segment lost to time.  The piles of statements are not neat, slanting overburdened, frazzled with bulk and hastily added sheets of paper, but they might have their own systems of organisational logic. The cork-board, fat with layering papers and photos and clippings, is bloody with red pins. The little desk calendar he's always forgetting to change is lingering somewhere around June. It was a Secret Santa gift, the culprit likely Martin, who in a bid to bring some serenity to the collapsing peace of the Institute had bought a calendar decorated with incongruously peaceful scenes – the broad lush stroke of trees angling to a summit along the Appalachians, a twee and picturesque ‘Wind-in-the-Willows’ type shot from some point along the Llangollen Canal. June is coastal, a swathe of headland dappled green and blooming with wildflowers, and he thinks it’s probably been taken down Devon and Cornwall way.

Moving carefully, Jon makes his way over to the desk, nudged by a curiosity and opens the top drawer; midst half-used pens and loose staples and a rubber-band ball, he finds the white-ish curve and cleanly snapped edge of his rib bone, his strange treasure of a woman's ashes.

This must be his office then, he assumes.

He glances around, afforded a moment by the stillness that touches the room like sunlight. Takes in the room in terms of what occupies it:

Two doors, one off in the corner, fashioned of cheap plywood, possessing a badly splintered lintel and a drooping handle that’s identical to his universe’s, loose from when Tim slammed it once after an argument bubbled up, nasty and foul and scratching. The other is the door he has come from, the door that looks like someone's drawing of a door, ill-rendered, the colours slightly off. The shadows of the room do not approach it, although its handle is beginning to frost with condensation.

A radiator squats, coming slightly away from the wall, ineffectual in all the years Jon inhabited this particular corner of the institute. It is chilled to touch when Jon checks, and the paint on it is chipped, flaking.

A clock, round-faced, bland. It's a little faster than the other clocks in the building, always has been, even when Jon replaced the batteries. Its internal noises are adamant, almost intrusive – tick tick tick tick tick – and hearing it again, Jon can't quite dismiss it as background.

“Oh,” comes a voice from the first door. “Hi. Er. Wasn't, wasn't expecting company, heh.”

Martin offers him a fast, quicksilver dash of a smile as he comes through the door, a slim file in his hand. Jon jumps, starting back and knocking his leg against the table. He stares, and he knows he’s staring, unable to help the desperate gaze he tries valiantly to reign in.

It’s not his Martin. Logically, he understands this. This version is bundled in a thick cable-knit jumper, his reddish hair unimpeded by a slow speckling infiltration of white from the roots down, grown out in a wave that grazes his shoulders. A beard’s grown in to mask his rounded baby face, neatly kept for all its bushy heft, and it thins his cheeks out. It is not Jon’s Martin, though Jon is still run-through with the after-echos of that conversation with Elias, is still blinkered by the despair that’s knitted through him that he is where Martin is not.

This Martin doesn’t question his appearance. There’s no wash of surprise, or crinkling frown, so perhaps this version of Jon is not far off, close enough that he can sink into a pretence, stay a little longer.

“I – I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Jon tries carefully.

“That's alright,” Martin says amicably. He sits down, behind the desk, edges the chair in tighter, adds his folder to a flourishing ecosystem of papers and reminder notes and askew pens on his left hand side. “I wasn't really doing much anyway. Keeping busy, you know. Have a seat if you like.”

“Hmm,” Jon agrees, raggedness seeping in. He takes the chair Martin has waved him to.

Reaching out, casting wide the net of his Knowing and dredging little to his harbour, he's trying to tell if Martin has been through here, to rake back through the leaves some evidence of disturbed ground, imprinting footprints, snapped twigs that break up the forest floor of this universe.

It's harder to concentrate. His head feels muggy, awash with a bank of cloud. Some mechanism internal acknowledges that there’s not the time there was before, that he cannot continue to search and search and open door after door forever. That Martin’s ability to travel before he’s grounded castaway is finite. And this sediment is coalescing into a flatter, demanding panic that chases any clear decision, thought from his mind.

The clock on the wall is still overworking, its inner working clanking like pistons. The plastic curve of the chair unforgiving. He fruitlessly shifts to settle as Martin clips a few papers together, pulls open a low-bellied drawer of files to store them in.

“Are you going to be staying long?” Martin asks politely after a few minutes. He hasn’t interrupted whatever Jon’s reverie has been, aside from a few glances where his gaze slides over him, barely registering him.  “I don't mind the company, of course, but I am rather busy.”

“I – er, oh,” Jon replies, wrong-footed. Martin doesn’t lose his friendly expression, but he is a study in continuous motion: he scribbles notes to himself to join the thronging canopy of post-its around the frame of his computer screen, he sips from a glass of water, his phone makes an irritating notification ping, and he rattles off some nimble fingered response to whatever demands his attention.

 “I just. I was looking for you,” he finishes lamely.

“Always looking for something,” Martin says, with an understanding look. “Always just a bit too late.”

It's very hard to focus on Martin, what with the constant drone of the clock.

“You're not a ghost, are you?” Martin says, responding to another notification ping before placing his chunky mobile back on the desk.

“Sorry?”

“I don't mean to be rude. Only…. You did leave. Seemed a rather permanent decision to make, resignation.”

Jon mentally adjusts his knowledge of when he might have strayed to.

“Resignation?” he enquires, the words rolling out slowly.

“Did you need to do anything special?” Gertrude had asked of the unhappy remnants of Eric Delano, unable to mask the teeth in her tone. “Any… ritual, or?”

“Just as long as they’re useless,” Eric had replied. His thoughts gnarled with regrets, for the son he never saw grow up in the looming shadow of his mother’s care. “I went the extra mile, destroyed them completely.”

“Yeah,” Martin says, and after an awkward moment when it’s clear that hasn’t brought enlightenment, he makes a 'stabbing eyes' gesture like he’s enacting the Psycho shower scene. “You know. Quitting the Institute.”

“Oh,” Jon replies quietly. “Yeah. Right. I resigned, yeah.”

“I never heard anything from you after,” Martin says. “Rumour was you’d died, I mean, there was a lot of blood when I called the ambulance, but I hear wounds like that bleed a ton anyway.” He offers another one of those genial, distracted smiles that slip on and off his face like smoke wisps. “I was… I thought about calling, or dropping by even to check. But then again, we were never very close.”

Jon flinches.

“I'm not a ghost, no,” he responds finally, haltingly. “I’m not – I’m not from around here.”

“Figures,” Martin replies after a nodding pause, like the puzzle pieces have slotted into place for him. “Nothing much surprises me about this place anymore. What are you doing here then?”

“I'm looking for Martin. M-my Martin. He's lost.”

“Have you been looking for a long time?” Martin's expression waxes sympathetic. He glances up and the glare of the computer screen makes his skin glow sallower in the starker light.

“I think so.”

“It sounds exhausting.”

“It - it is.”

“You should stay here,” Martin says, his gaze sliding back over to something on the screen. Taps a few keys, adjusting the cursor with his thumb over the keyboard touch-pad.  “Get your breath back for a bit.”

 It sounds like a good idea, coming from his kind, absent face. A rest. Jon thinks he could get used to the metronome beat of the clock, become comfortable in this seat. Even if the room is spiked with a chill, pimpling the gooseflesh of his arms under the jacket sleeves cold.

“What about you?” Jon asks. His back settling into his position, acknowledging that for the moment, the Eye is going to provide nothing useful about whether Martin has travelled through here or not, he looks over the occupant of this office to see what's different, what's been taken or changed or shifted, but there isn't anything. Martin mutters something under his breath as he scrawls another choppy reminder onto a note.  “Why haven't you left? You... surely you're free now? Now I’m – now there’s nothing tying you here.”

Martin shrugs easily.  “You know me. There's not such a thing as free, not really. It's just moving around between different prisons, keeping your head down. And at least I got to choose this one. It's not so bad, to be honest. Peaceful.”

“I don't understand?” 

Jon takes in Martin's pale face, thinned under the beard, his freckles scrubbed out to a faint brown. The greying shade of his eyes sapped colourless as a calm sea. The heatless, sidetracked smile.

The tick of the clock is ever so loud.

 “Martin, where's Peter Lukas?” he asks.

Martin is fiddling with some bulky financial-seeming document chocked with digits, checking between a leaf-thin paper copy in front of him and a ream of figures and tables Jon can half see at an angle on his computer screen. “He had nothing else to keep him here, I guess, after he won his bet. Probably on his ship or something.”

There is no fog in the room but there is a misty weather-front in the glassy hoarfrost of Martin’s gaze.

“What did he – what did he do to you?” Jon whispers.

“He didn't do anything,” Martin replies freely. There is no ripple of a lie. “No, pretty much after I did what he asked, he told me he’d give me what I wanted, as a sort of, well, reward, I guess. Employee bonus.” A chuckle breathes and dies aborted in his throat. “And I wanted to be left alone. To be allowed to get on with things, work, so I didn't have to think about it all.”

“Did what he asked?” Jon repeats, blunt and horrified. Martin, he wants to explode, stand up, make him care about what’s happened, he’s tricked you; Martin, this can’t be what you wanted; Martin, why didn’t you go with your Jon, why didn’t you just say yes?

Instead, he says, near numb: “Martin, did you, did you kill Elias?”

Martin nods as though he’s agreeing on some small talk about the day’s weather.

“Jonah Magnus though, really, wasn't it.”

“So, who’s running the Institute?”

“Peter left me as interim director. It’s – you know, it’s actually quite nice. I’ve my own little office, when I go home, Peter – he pays me enough to live in a flat that’s somewhere half-decent. I don’t have to talk to many people, I delegate a lot of the face to face work; I sort out the finances, move money around, send emails mostly. It’s a big enough responsibility, but I can, here I can just get on with things. This whole place stays open, and folks have jobs, and I’m needed.”

“Did I – did I not tell you?” Jon asks despairing.  “That you could leave? Before you killed Magnus, and Peter Lukas left you here, did Jon not tell you could escape all –  all this?”

“You mean the whole – ?” Martin makes the 'stabbing eyes' gesture again. “Yeah, yeah you told me. The Delano statement, and how if we blinded ourselves, we could leave together. I said no, I had a lot of stuff on with the Extinction, and I needed – I needed to be there, helping Peter. Rather than helping you. So you’d be safe. Though it didn’t matter much anyway, you went ahead the next day and resigned yourself in the middle of your office.”

“And you didn't think about coming with me?”

“Why would I have done that?”

“I wanted you to come with me,” Jon says in a small voice.

“You barely knew me,” Martin replies, kindly, indulgently. Remotely. The desk between the two of them wide and layered with the organised detritus of paperwork. “We didn't really talk, even before Tim died, and after, it was all a bit too late.”

“I would have waited.”

“You didn't though. Not that I thought you would because why would you, but, let’s be realistic, you asked me as a courtesy, Jon. Someone to hold your hand while you did what you were going to do anyway.”

“You could come with me now,” Jon says. He could yank this Martin away, stiff with a placid friendliness and nothing breaking the ice-sheet of his expression, drag him bodily through a door – anywhere, somewhere else, that’s not here. He can help this Martin, he can help his own, and maybe somehow they’ll all deserve their happy-enough endings.  “I could take you somewhere else.”

“I'm here.”

“You can't be happy.”

“I wasn’t much happy when Elias was running things. I wasn’t happy even before that. This is fine. I’m my own boss, it’s peaceful, and people leave me alone. I do my work and I do it well to my own standards, and no one tells me I’m doing it wrong or to do it again. This is all I need, right here, just to keep busy.”

“We're in the Lonely, Martin!” Jon’s outburst is muted, taken in by the frost and dampened. “You're in the Lonely. Here, now.  Doesn't that bother you?”

“Oh.” Martin blinks, before that composed, meaningless smile is back. “No, not really.”

Jon looks at a man who is not Jon’s Martin – not even his own Jon’s Martin. A man who was never anyone’s Martin, against whom no one ever laid a claim, subsumed by the Lonely in steady, chipping increments, while nobody was left to raise a fuss. If someone had held out a hand, a shoulder, told him to hold on, simply a little longer, maybe this Martin might have taken it. But hypotheticals are useless now.

Martin pauses. The ping of his mobile cracks the forbidding peace of the office.

“I really do have a lot of work to do. Sorry. If you're not going to stay, then I won't keep you.”

“I – ”

“Goodbye, Jon.”

Martin bends his head down to his sheet of figures in obvious bland dismissal, and Jon stares, heartbroken at the washed-out imprint of a man being slowly chewed into apathy.

The clock goes tick tick tick.

Martin glances up again. His expression melting into a polite, detached smile.

“Oh. Sorry, didn't see you there. Wasn't really expecting company. Can I help?”

Jon can’t save him. He can’t even save his own Martin.

He stands from the chair, sensing where the sides have nipped into him, dug into the small of his back.

“I – No, thank you, Martin,” he says faltering. “I'll – I'll let you get on.”

Martin nods benignly, already returning to his work. He doesn’t look up when Jon starts reading, when he steps through the door, incongruously brightly coloured for the room, a stylised rose formed out of glass held central in the main panel of the window, flanked by rich, red wood.

The chill takes a long time to fade from Jon’s skin.

He should leave.

The Magnus Institute stands imperial but toothless. Newer-brick, some dogged outposts of moss spotted in the grouting. Nothing remains of the original structure razed in cleansing inferno, but it has been rebuilt according to exacting and precise specifications upon the receipt of generous funds gifted to the effort by the Lukas Foundation. There is a gilt plaque detailing the donation outside of the building, atop the severe slant of stone steps. Not for the first time, Jon wonders about the man who wore the name of Elias Bouchard, and what he meant to the monster who titled itself Peter Lukas, to have this solemn monument built in commemoration of his passing.

He is wasting time. Martin has not been through here. The signal had been confused initially, a thumping bassline of a headache when he’d tried to See clearer, so he'd fronted his best smile to the intern at the sleek-floored reception, spinning him a story only mildly seasoned with compulsion about writing for a local rag about such a curious building smack bang in the heart of London. The man, ground bored by a morning of dry phone calls and fetching photocopies, gladly tells him the facts he knows and the gossip he's heard, about the fire that crested a crescendo of flame over a decade ago,  and claimed the life of the director and head archivist. With a bit more pushing, only a small crack in his smile, he asks about employees.

A Sasha James worked in the Research Library, but she left after the fire. There’s never been a Tim Stoker, not even a wisp of a Jonathan Sims. The intern confesses that their archives are mostly digitised these days, hiring fewer staff for the job, that it’s mostly a curio maintained because that is how it has always been, and that is what the Foundation was insistent upon.

This world's Martin Blackwood has never heard of the Magnus Institute. His name crops up on no employee roster for the library, no hiring records. If, and only presupposing that certain events have not swivelled compass-knocked on their pivot, Martin ever applied to work here, his submission was unsuccessful.

Jon has no reason to stay. He is short on time, and there is only the onward, and he needs to leave.

Jon has always had so many weaknesses.

The fume-ran, puttering vestiges that the Eye permits him hint at the Tube, and he skulks to the underground, hands shoved into his pockets as he heads through the throngs of commuters and locals and tourists, sheltering his fingers from a brisk riverbank breeze. He gets on the Northern line to Morden following the frisson of Knowing. Planting himself near the end of the carriage on one of the scruffy blue seats, he leans with his elbows on his knees, crumpled like a collapsing scarecrow, runs his trembling fingers through his ratty hair and doesn't know what he's doing.

Martin gets on at Old Street station, and sits down heavily in the sit opposite Jon.

Jon stares. He is trying not to be too obvious, yet it’s unlikely he’s managing it, as he drinks in every evidence he can read, trying to interpret this Martin who has never known Jonathan Sims.

This Martin perches on his seat edge as though ready to get up at the slightest notice, but then Jon's Martin has always done that. He slouches, poor-postured, the wires of headphones dangling from his ears, the small rhythmic tapping of his scuffed and loosely-laced trainers. He takes his near round browline glasses off, wipes them on the hem of his shirt idly. It's not one of his overly colourful garish t-shirts, laden with pop culture references all equally incomprehensible to Jon. It's a relatively smart, unspectacular shirt, the collar a little skewed, no tie, the top button undone. Has he come from work, is he going? He has a backpack that he's planted between his legs that sounded heavy when he took it off. He rubs his eyes under his glasses and looks tired but this tells Jon nothing. Throughout the short journey, he doesn't check or fiddle with his phone but that doesn't mean he has no-one wondering where he is.

Martin looks up at him, and Jon casts his glance away whiplash fast. Martin frowns, a crinkle on his forehead, and his skin prickles pink, but he doesn't offer conversation.

Jon wants to Know so badly if this Martin is happy. If his life was better, this way. If this was what it would have taken to give him a proper life. Without the Institute. Without Jon.

Jon could look for the answer.

He doesn't. He can't.

Martin gets off at Stockwell, hefting his straining backpack onto his shoulder. He flicks a small, self-conscious look at Jon before he alights.

Jon lets him go.

He gets off at Kennington, and reads a door directly opposite the ticket machine. He doesn't look back.

Chapter Text

The door doesn't open at the Institute this time.

 Jon peers out onto a rain-slick street that he doesn't recognise, potholed and the tarmac pocked shambolic, a residential road, lined with cars that have seen better days and the skeleton frames of pillaged bicycles, that travels up into a raucous main street. There's loud shouting in the distance somewhere, someone swearing spitting in a barrage of curses. A ambulance siren throws the echo-distant jumble of noise into further disarray.

The street hosts two boarded up cafes and a tapas bar, which has a spider-web of smashed glass instead of a window. The flats flanking the pavement huddle close and crowded, militantly miserable in brown council-build brick and plastic white windows that go up three storeys.

The Eye is useless as ever, the mental door refusing to nudge, providing him nothing. But Martin, or a Martin must be nearby, surely, for him to have ended up here, and that's enough to have Jon gingerly stepping out of the door frame, and sensing rather than seeing it dissipating like smoke on water behind his back as he tucks the book back into his pocket.

He heads for the nearest door he can see, directly within his line of sight. Nothing different about it particularly; the brickwork has just as much looping graffiti, the words and shapes overlaying each other like multi-coloured scales, there's the shattered glass of a broken bottle amongst the weeds. But if all Jon's going to get is a vague sense that this is the right direction, he's going to take it.

He squints at the list of names on the flat buzzers. Most empty, or removed and never replaced. There’s only one that’s readable.

Martin Blackwood, notes the neatly printed label near the top. The ink has smudged and run in the rain but the handwriting follows familiar rounded forms – the circle for a dot over the ‘i’, the double ‘o’s joined up.

Jon rings and rings but no answer.

He tries the door handle more as a last resort, but surprisingly it turns with a scraping complaint from the hinges. There are no lights inside that flicker on in response to his entry, although there’s the sickly green wash provided by the emergency lighting as he walks up the stairs very slowly to the top floor.

The carpet outside the top-floor flat, its original colour lost, squelches under his feet, and he pulls a distasteful moue at the sodden fabric that swells bloated with water under the pressure of his shoe. There must be a leak, somewhere, maybe rainwater getting in from a skylight he can’t locate in the dim, and he takes another squelching step, and looks down, and with a jolt, a rising emotion within him that has all the familiar resemblance of panic, he notes the sporadic desiccated husks of worms that spot the area.

There’s a mud-tracked mat in front of the door, the ‘welcome’ obscured by dirt. The door handle to Martin’s flat falls off in his hands when he grips it, rusted, but the door swings in anyway.

“M-martin?” Jon whispers to the poorly defined cavern of the hallway that’s revealed.

No answer greets him. His next steps have the external carpet sucking wetly at the tread of his trainers, but going inside the flat provides no greater illumination. There’s a thick smell, musty and pungent, that coats his tongue; he brings his arm up to cover his nose and mouth in an attempt to ward off the worst of it, and it barely helps. He creeps in, wishing he had a phone or a torch, or something in order to see by. The light offered within is a gloomy parody of the concept as he makes his way into the room, the front door opening directly into a cramped and dark-swamped open plan living room, what he presumes is a kitchen area immediately sharing the space opposite. 

“Martin?” he repeats, the words letting the stink into his chest.  “Martin, are you there?”

He can’t make out much. The living room has a sofa tucked against the wall to his left, an effort to enhance up the space’s domesticity in the application of cushions, mis-matched in their shape, a coffee table with an empty fruit bowl, a short bookcase stuffed with paperbacks, the miserable spiked bulb of a cactus furnishing the uppermost shelf. Across the room, a metal carpet strip delineates between the carpeting of the living space and the tiling of the kitchen area, the blocky shapes of the fridge-freezer, the washing machine, the sink hampered by unwashed pots and pans, a single plate.

There's a shifting noise that rips up the unsettled silence, populated only by the buzz of the fridge. The shadow of what he’d assumed was the cumbersome and over-exuberant application of cushions ripples, and he realises the mountainous rise is someone splayed uncomfortably length-wise along the sofa, draped in the ballooning mass of a blanket or thin duvet.

“Martin?” He feels around, wincing at the tacky substance coating the walls, but he locates the light switch. It does nothing. He glances up, and there’s no bulb in the bare socket hanging down noose-like in the room’s centre. “It's – it's Jon.”

“Jon?” comes the croaking hum of a response. The bulky shadow turns in its cramped position, the fabric of the blanket agitated, but it is too dark to make out his features, even if the obscuring coverlet wasn’t pulled up so high over him.

The reply is feeble, warbled with an unhealthy pitch as if just roused from a feverish disjointed slumber, stuffed up and ill-sounding.

“Are you – are you alright, are you hurt?” Jon asks. He slowly crosses the room, keeping his distance and skirting around until he knows what he’s dealing with, the dull anxiety evolving easily into a burgeoning flash-flood of something heavier. He tries the light over the small gas oven, the hob crusted with oil splash and food starting to harden and rot, but that doesn’t work either. The countertop by Jon’s elbow is littered with cans upon cans of tinned food, a scrunched up and soiled washing-up towel, and the drone of the fridge is persistent, a bassline of noise.

“We were.”

Martin’s breathing is unsteady, laboured. Ailing, and no wonder – he must have caught something, Jon thinks, outraged at the state of Martin’s place that he surely stays in because he can afford nothing else, this horrible flat that’s breaking down around him, a sickness or something that’s crept into his lungs, that he’s too ill to get up and clean.

Mentally, he’s scatter-gun trying to map when he might be. Jane Prentiss clearly has happened in this universe, to read from the worm corpses, and yet she’s gone, her fun and games over, and Martin has stayed in this deplorable, gloomy, ruinous flat, and Jon doesn’t understand – has this world’s Jon not offered him the room in the Archives? Why the hell has Martin stayed here, why has no one taken him away from here, when it’s clearly making him so ill?

“Martin, I – I'll find a light,” Jon promises, his gaze darting around for anything to achieve this. “Just – you’re going to be ok –  I'll help you – just give me…”

“The knocking was so loud,” Martin’s shadow murmurs with a grated-down whisper. “We were in here for weeks, and every couple of hours she wanted to be let in. I plugged up all the gaps and stamped down on anything wriggling that got inside. Thought someone would come looking, check why they hadn’t heard anything for so long, but no-one ever did.”

“I – I'm sorry I took so long,” Jon says, and Martin takes another rocky inhale, and the sofa creaks as if he’s shifting to stand. “No-no, don’t get up, you’re… I – I'm here now, I’m going to help, if I can only find a bloody light, or – I'm here now, I’m sorry I wasn’t faster.”

“We're not angry,” Martin says, as his shadow forces itself to a swaying sitting. The kindness is thick and soupy in his throat. “Jane explained everything to us, through the door, and it wasn’t like we could listen to anything else stuck in here. She told us how it didn’t matter that the cracks were boarded up, that we refused to listen to the lullaby of the worms. She said the rot was long set into us anyway. Years and years of it, mature and tended to and growing at my centre like a garden of mould. And it-it made sense, really, when she put it like that. When she explained how easy it was to help it flourish, how lonely she’d been before she’d been chosen as the treasured host of her hive. How we’d never feel lonely again, if we let it love us the way we needed someone to.”

Jon stops. Martin’s body lurches dizzily.

Jon’s hand is cramped around the handle of the fridge.

“Did you open the door, Martin?” he asks after a shaking moment, trying not to let his voice betray him. “Martin – please, tell me you didn’t open the door.”

Martin's shadow twitches as he hefts himself to standing, takes a groggy and precarious step forward.

Jon takes a step back.

“Martin?”

“She was polite, to knock,” he says, his bulk teetering as he commits to another step nearer. “The door was never a problem for her. She wanted someone to play with, at the beginning. A toy she could wind up with terror, to run pathetic and scared back to the Institute. But the more we talked… She understood. She got it.  That loneliness, it – it chews you up from the inside, that it’s insidious, that it corrodes the inside of you like limescale, that it can become structural if you leave it too long. And she stopped trying to get in, sat herself down with her back to the door, and we – we just talked. She spoke about how she’d been so worried about money, all the scraping and penny-counting. Always the discount products, the own brand items. The guilt whenever she wanted to treat herself, because it was frivolous, a stupid expense that she’d pay for later. How she wanted friends, and had maybe had some, how she wasn’t any good for them or they weren’t good for her. How much she wanted to be loved. And she asked us, about the job and mum and the flat and friends, and she listened, and it – it was nice, so nice just to be heard.”

“I don't...” Jon starts, watching his debilitated stance, listens to his whistling breathing.

“’Lived in this flat for about five years now, you know,” Martin says. Not interrupting, not quite, but he speaks distantly, knocked with a restlessness now he has company. “It’s not much, really. Commute’s handy what with work, but London’s so expensive to live in, and it’s not like the Institute pays badly, but what with, expenses and mum’s care… there wasn’t a lot left over, so had to go with what was available on the budget I had. Tried to make it more homely, but it’s, you can see, it’s small, and the boiler’s always playing up, and my neighbours would have arguments, or smoke indoors, or be making noise at the all hours. There’s damp in the walls. Kept telling the landlord about the mould, but he’d wave it off, wouldn’t come and fix it, no matter how much I complained to him, and eventually he told me if it bothered me that much, he’d find someone else to live here. So I stopped saying anything. It started in the corner, originally, over there, and it’s been growing for years, this black furred speckling working up the walls. It’s meant to be really bad for you, can give you headaches and stuff, but it wasn’t like I could do anything about it. We never invited anyone round, in case they saw because I was so embarrassed about it. And I was in here for weeks, the windows all shut, all the air holes plugged up with tissue and bits of fabric to stop the worms getting in. And the mould, it likes that, hot and damp and humid, and I’d wake up from where I’d dozed off and it’d be working its way onto my clothes.”

“Mart – ”

“Jane told us it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. How easy it was, that it wanted to love me, that something wanted me, and this time I could let it in, that I only had to listen to its song. And we’re not lonely anymore, Jon. We can never be lonely. Don’t you want that too?”

His hand wobbling, Jon opens the fridge door. The weak spectre of light from the inside bulb illuminates the confined edges of the room in a yellowing arc.

Martin takes another step forward.

Jon holds his hand to his mouth, muffling the afflicted noise that he expresses unbidden.

Martin’s face, highlighted by the light of the fridge, is half-subsumed by a blanketing mould that smothers the flesh there. There is enough of his collapsing jaw to give a broken-down smile, and Jon baulks to see the places where Martin’s skin is being slowly consumed, eaten away and devoured by grey and fungal rot.

“Oh,” he says mildly. His disintegrating limbs stagger another step closer. His fingers are blacked as if by frostbite, the nails fall out from their beds to be replaced by the bubbling fuzz of the grey. “Oh. You’re not – you aren’t Jon, are you? You look, and you sound…. But no. You’re someone different.” His rotting lips roll in a self-deprecating smile. “Makes sense. Jon wouldn’t come here.”

“I would have” Jon says fervently, desperate to believe it. Martin’s smile is wrong, riddled with holes where the skin of his lip and cheeks have been eaten away, but there’s enough familiar remnants in its curve to make Jon’s stomach roil, his heart shuddering, breaking. “I would have come if – if I’d known you were here, that you were in danger, I…”

“It’s alright,” Martin cuts him off. “It doesn’t matter now. This is better. Jane wished me luck, and left, and the mould crept over my skin and there were spores in my mouth and the air was so humid and I felt them growing in my lungs. But we’re not lonely anymore. You can’t hear it, can you? The singing. It’s beautiful, and it loves me, and you’ve no idea – ”

“Martin, I-I’ll get help, you’re… she’s made you sick, it’s this place, it’s… it can’t be too late, I’ll get help, I’ll – ”

“We don't need help,” Martin murmurs. He takes another rocking step, like multiple instincts and directions are being warred with at once. Jon doesn't realise how close he's gotten until another waft of that musty stench sweeps over him.

“You do though, don’t you? You’re looking for something, you’re so lost with the hurt of it, and it’s festering you from the inside. We could help. We always liked helping people. It made us feel needed, feel like people might want us around more if we did things for them. But you’re so lonely, and you needn’t be. Why don’t you let us help you?”

A laden, misshapen hand lands on Jon’s shoulder. The smell is putrefying, seeps into the fabric of his jacket.

“I – I – no, I – ”

The hand presses heavier, and there is an undertone, like the buzz of the fridge, but beneath that, and perhaps the noise has been in the room this whole time, an atonal musicality to it. It sings to him. Martin’s destroyed face is still lumpy with its puzzle-piece of a smile, and the smell is overpowering.

Jon wrenches his body away and runs.

Martin doesn’t chase him. But the boggy carpeting grows slicker, spongy with fungus as Jon’s feet skid and slide and squelch as they flail in their fleeing motion, the walls of the room buckling with a grunting sound as the damp further destabilises the structure. The singing doesn’t get louder, but in some ways, it does, resonating, chiming in the places inside him that are rotten with grief, and the song promises love and companionship and a balm for heartache, the soothing he never gained from allegiance to Beholding. The song tells him he’ll never be able to abandon it, or let it down, it’ll never find out how unworthy he has always been because it will love him regardless.

Jon cannot listen, cannot, or else he’ll be lost.

Down the stairwell. Almost tripping, taking two, three at a time. Staggering out of the front door of the building into the empty street, in its own way as lost to ruin as Martin’s flat.

With a yell of disgust, Jon rips off his jacket, chucking it to the floor. By the watery cast of the street light, the mould coats the sleeves, a white and grey foaming that rides up the arms. There’s an itch, a fizzing that bubbles against his skin, and it’s suckling against his socks so he kicks off his shoes, the creeping mildew starting to pock the worn cotton fabric of his socks so he removes them too.

He stands, panting, feverishly checking his shirt, his trousers for signs of further invasion, until the terror dials down to manageable.

It’s fine, it’s fine, he thinks, it hasn’t got me, it’s over, it didn’t catch me, I didn’t listen.

His mind suddenly free-falls into a white panic.

No, no, no, no.

The jacket is more of a lump of cloth now, some small patches of colour disintegrating into grey, and Jon makes a noise of vocal disgust as his hand reaches out and comes onto contact with it. At the spongy touch of the rot, he recoils and cries out, but he finally manages to push his hand inside, avoiding most of the growths, pulling out the book from its grasp.

The damage has been done.

The pages of The Garden of Forking Paths are crimped, formed wavy and warped like they’ve been dried out with water damage. Over the cover, and when he cracks it open, any font is slowly speckling with bulging, growths of rot and damp, and he watches numbly as the grey mould steadily consumes the pages until he has to drop it to avoid it transferring to his own hands.

His eyes are going blurry. The horror of Martin, stolen away by simple promises of being loved, of companionship he felt no one else would give him, left to rot in his own flat will not budge from behind his eyes.

His hands held palms-up are dry-skinned and empty.

Jon tries to recall the lines from the book as best he can. Stumbles through a few. But the book, dropped to join the disintegrating pile of Tim’s former jacket, is lost, and the words are unwieldy and uncooperative in his mouth.

No door opens for him.

It takes him hours to walk to the Institute. It shouldn’t, really, the distance only about three miles, an hour or so of single-minded trekking, but Jon’s stomach is carved out with hunger and fear and his limbs have been caught in a mesh of trembling like he’s coming down off some twitching high. He must make a sight, for people give him a wide berth on the night-time streets, an oil-and-water mix of pity and concern.

Jon feels like he is in a state of unending collapse.

His bare feet are aching and bruised by the time he gets there. Mucky with street dirt and damp with rainwater from earlier showers, and they’ve swelled sore and tender, will blister something fierce. At some point, he started limping but the mechanisms of his body are well used to the suffering of forward motion. Caught up in the pallor of night, the pungent memory of mildewing rot not yet shed deciduous.

Martin’s flesh digested by the assimilating, swallowing grey rot, a sickly song curated to speak to the estranged honeycombing parts of a painfully human heart. Martin’s eyes slick like sea-glass, coasted by apathetic waters, mild-mannered and devoid of anxieties and hopes and fears and desperate loves. Martin’s wavering voice as he destroys himself trying to find a Jon who can’t save him.

Breaking into the Institute is easier than expected.

He heads straight into Artefact Storage. Vision bleary with tiredness, he scans the records of all the Leitners they hold, upending box after box, uncaring of how much noise he makes, panic cooling in him like the groping arching stretch of frost, because there isn’t anything, no record of The Garden of Forking Paths here, they don’t have a copy, there’s nothing, but there can’t be. Because that means he’s stuck, he’s stranded here, empty handed and heartbroken and Martin’s out there and Jon can’t tell him he’s here, that he misses him, that he’s so sorry he keeps letting him down.

He shoves another dead-end of a box to the floor in a incoherent wail of fury. The papers scatter in a collage, and the Eye is silent, does nothing but drink in the ignorance of a failed and failing Archivist, an Archive run down barren.

It takes Jon a long time to realise there’s a door behind him that wasn’t there before.

Robust, rectangular. Yellow. Warped and knotted with a spiralling grain of wood.

It politely opens for him. There is nowhere else for him to go but forward.

“I must say, you look quite awful.”

Jon squints in the biting and unnatural light, attempting to take in the jumbled, harum-scarum visage of the Distortion in the ways his human sight is able. He’s on the floor, though he’s not sure why, the buoyant wave of the carpet fronds pushing imprints into his cheek.

“The state of you – you really haven’t been looking after yourself. It’s a good thing I picked you up when I did, before you frightened the poor staff at whatever Institute you ended up in.”

“Helen,” Jon says in greeting, his tone gritty and lacklustre.

“Jonathan.”

Jon pulls himself up with a jerky effort, sitting with his back against the corridor wall, which pulses and digs in a way it shouldn’t, his throbbing feet laid out in front of him.

“Why are you here?” he asks.

“You’ve been providing me with such entertainment for months now, how could I not be entranced?”

Helen’s form is angled up and looming, broken-backed and choppy, glitching with spasming light and perspective that traverses over her body. The corridor itself is little changed from before, the carpet an out-dated ugly pattern in clashing colours, the wall painted magenta, but Jon fancies that there are signs of wear; the lay of carpet up at the edge of a distant door up at the other end is curled as if fraying, a sooty residue tainting the paper-white of the wainscoting.

“I thought you died,” he says.

“I did!” Helen says brightly. Her lipstick is garish, and makes her smile look wet. “In so much as we can die, these little things are all very complicated. People die very easily, but for concepts such as myself, it becomes a bit trickier. Your ritual worked, you’ll be pleased to hear! The Powers banished back to the gaps in the universe from whence we came, only intruding to play their truncated games of terror, that sort of thing, all very impressive. Everything back to normal! But I’ve has always contained multitudes, as it were. We refract, if you like, like carnival mirrors, although that’s not it, not really. I’m trying to make it simpler for you. How about, yes, in some ways your Helen is gone, but no, there were always many facets of us and the more conceptual parts of her stuck around? Does that make sense?”

It doesn’t, but Jon doesn’t say. Instead he asks:

“Is Martin here?”

“He has been. I’d say a day or a week or a month ago, but as you know, time doesn’t get on well with my hallways. Who knows when he’ll be back. Running back and forth like the busiest of bees. He is looking a little bit frazzled around the edges these days.” She leans over and closer, as though to faux whisper: “I think he’s missing a certain special someone.”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Jon snarls but Helen smiles guileless in the face of his indignation.

“I won’t deny watching you two soul-searching around the multi-verse has been especially engaging to observe. Popping in and out of my doors, it’s been difficult not to at the very least notice you. Neither of you are very subtle, emoting all over the place.”

Jon considers standing but his feet twinge at the prospect. His stomach, now the adrenaline has bled from his system, is beginning to cramp with the reminder that he doesn’t remember the last time he ate.

One of Helen’s oversized hands make some sort of wavy gesture that has the knock-on effect of adjusting all of the details of her form a little off-kilter. She lobs something to Jon, which he fails to catch, so it lands with a soft thump on his lap.

He frowns as he picks it up, a squishy baton covered in plastic wrap.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a sandwich Jon, honestly.” She raises both of her hands in a mocking gesture of surrender. “It’s not poisoned, I promise!”

Cautiously, he unwraps it,  sniffs to make sure before taking a tentative bite. The seeds of the bread get in his teeth, the filling something chicken-based.

Waiting for his mouth to be empty before continuing, he asks:

“Did you separate us deliberately?”

Helen laughs fractal, the corners of her mouth curving outlandishly high.

“Such distrust! Maybe yes, maybe I wanted to see just what would happen. What you’d both do without the other. But no, Archivist. I didn’t. Simple bad luck, but then, that’s par for the course with you. Nothing but a string of bad luck, one would think you’d gone looking for it.”

Jon glowers, his mouth full of sandwich.

“You look ever so tired, Archivist,” Helen says. Neither pity nor glee in her muddled tone. “It’s getting harder, isn’t it? To look for him as the Eye’s gifts leave you. You could of course keep going, for the rest of your life really, but eventually you’ll simply be going from door to door, scrabbling around in the dark for any hint he’s still alive. And you’d go quite mad.”

“You’d like that,” Jon tries to snap, but it has no strength in the face of her neutral declaration of fact.

Helen nods, and the motion has too many interlocking parts to it.

“Well, that was the original intention of my book. People do tear themselves into the most delicious knots, trying to find their happy endings. You’re more of an unusual case, but generally, The Garden of Forking Paths is intended for the dissatisfied, the people who worry if they’ve done the right thing, taken the right chances, that they’re living their short measly little spans in the best way when there’s really no such thing. So they jump from world after world after world, trying to find this mythical perfection where everything turns out to their satisfaction, until they’re too exhausted to struggle when they come across my door instead.”

“So that’s what this is then?”

“All things considered, I’d rather not. You would taste just a little too full of eyes, even now, barely an Archivist at all. And I’ve promised myself not to eat Martin. He’s doing a grand job destroying himself without my help, what with the book being so much more taxing to use without the protection of the Eye. I’ve committed to let you two scamps get on with it. I am, regrettably, still rather fond of you both.”

“But you won’t help me,” Jon says accusatively.

Helen’s head quirks in a way that involves the wrong bones.

“What makes you say that?”

“You’ve not exactly been teeming with advice so far.”

“Big bright boy like you! Didn’t think you’d need it. And that’s very small-minded of you. I have helped! I gave your boyfriend his copy of the book, after all. The universe he tumbled into didn’t have one of its own, like the sordid little one I just pulled you out of. He didn’t trust me any more than you do, but he couldn’t help taking it nevertheless. You two lovebirds deserve each other, you really do.”

Helen’s expression glitches with delight.

“Oh, but it doesn’t really matter if he has the book now, does it. Because you’ve lost yours. Tut tut tut. Poor Martin, universe-hopping away, not knowing that you’re stranded. That you aren’t looking for him, because you can’t.”

“Are you done?” The venom coats his tongue.

“Not quite,” Helen simpers. “But, yes, maybe here is a good place to stop and unveil my gift.”

Two crackling, splintering, refracting talons, sprouting snap-boned out of an ill-formed and mangled hand that does not follow the shape it should, drop something they’ve pinched in their grip.

A book drops heavily onto Jon, pushing an ‘oof’ out of him.

“I wouldn’t let the Crawling Rot touch this one.”

“Why?” Jon asks. Taking in its binding that fish-scales with incoherent mixes of colour, beheld in an bizarre light. The precisely engraved title. The lines he has near read to memory when he opens the hardback and hears the binding creak.

“I would have thought that was obvious, Jon, really. One time running into some mould monster that looks like your boyfriend would be an accident, another would be simply carelessness.”

“No, I meant why are you giving this to me? Why are you helping?”

“Why does anyone do anything? Ultimately selfish reasons.”

“Helen, I’m being serious.”

“As am I, Jon.”

Helen strokes the side of his face with a sharp talon, shy of breaking skin.

“Because it is more fun watching you torment yourself with the hope of the future when there is possibility of it. Because it is crueller, offering kindness to a starving man, makes your terror quench deeper thirsts. Because we will not forget the being we saw you as, the resplendent unwilling king of a ruined world, when you banished us with only the words held septic in your throat. Because we remember the man Helen knew you as before she became us. Because I want to witness whatever you will be henceforth. All of these reasons and none of them, Archivist.”

She pauses.

“Some advice, though.”

“...Go ahead.” 

“It seems to me that the problem is actually you. That you don’t believe you’ll find him.”

Jon scoffs hollowly.

“So what, you’re saying if I close my eyes and I wish hard enough, I’ll find Martin?”

Helen laughs again, and it makes the wall sconces shiver and tinkle.

“You are funny when you want to be. No. No, however much Martin wanders through my doors and wishes to find you, and he’s such a fervent believer is our Martin, I think it’s all that religion his dear old mother used to spout, he has no better chance of finding you. And – considering how many universes there are, it’s nearly statistically impossible that he ever will. Random chance, fairer that way. But you haven’t been playing the game fairly for a long time now. You proved that when you upended the chess-board of the world twice.”

“That wasn’t me, that was – ”

Helen waves a dismissive hand.

“For all his grand schemes, dear Jonah wasn’t the one who ended the world. You did that. Dear Jonah didn’t have the power to wrench it back from over, you did. Have a bit of self-confidence! And there’s still enough of the Eye’s favour for you to tweak the rules a little. Martin can’t better the odds, but you’re an Archivist. Take advantage of it!”

“So why haven’t I found him? If the Eye’s helping, if I can change the rules, or whatever you’re saying, why?”

“Partially just bad luck choosing the doors,” Helen says. She shrugs, and her entire form ripples like a rock splash. “But really, you’re so sure, every time you open the door, that deep down, you don’t deserve to find him. I’m not saying you don’t want to!” she says when Jon’s expression turns mutinous. “Simply that, some part of you thinks that somehow it’ll turn out better for him if you aren’t in his life. You want him to be happy, which is lovely, it really is, makes the heartstrings bleed, but the more you watch the ways you’ve failed him, the more you believe in it, the more you’re drawn to universes of the same. Martins you’ve treated badly, or abandoned, or let down. Martins that were better off without you. There’s so few happy endings for you crazy kids and you’re convinced this little narrative you’re playing out is going to be one of them. That it’s going to be your fault in the end.”

“And what’s your opinion?”

“Your ill-sketched morality never interested me, Jon,” Helen replies dismissively with an ambiguous non-answer.

In the wall of the corridor, a door opens. Jon staggering painfully to standing, and when Helen holds out a limb enough like a hand, he takes the support.

“Now. Food for thought. I’d have a stop in this next one, give yourself a bit more pep. You might still have a long way to go yet.”

Helen’s laugh lingers like toothache as he steps through to the beyond.

Chapter Text

The safehouse is cluttered with a life settled into living. Sitting at the kitchen table, with his hands on his lap tucked under the study wooden structure that’s abundantly freckled with biscuit crumbs, Jon finds his eyes drawn ceaselessly to the details of the space, its impression building up like the layers of a painting in his mind. The distinctly shaped containers on the marble countertop by the red plastic kettle, a  squat square canister with a lid like a paint tin that this other Jon had easily prized up with his nails to liberate two triangular tea bags; to its left, a rounder ceramic container following the bulged shape of a Winnie the Pooh honey jar, a spoon already stuck out of it at an angle to measure out two sugars into both of their cups. The other Jon, after a pause, had added another dump of sugar to the mug on the right.

On the kitchen windowsill, there are sprouting herbs, a tightly packed jungle of parsley and basil and thyme, each with a lollipop-stick shaped label dug into the recently watered soil. The other Jon passes him the three-sugared mug, before sitting down with his own drink in the chair opposite. A cat, tortoiseshell with a crumpled ear, winds around his leg in a warm wrap of fur, before jumping up to the other Jon's lap and settling down. 

Jon's mug has 'Torquay' printed across the bottom and proudly presents a blue-skyed harbour and a shining white sailboat. The other Jon's mug is altogether more garish – a cartoonish Loch Ness monster waves a green flipper at him, framed by a kitsch Highland backdrop only broken up by a bubble of speech that cheerily declares 'I believe!.

Jon barely recognises this as a life he could have lived. Could have had any chance of living.

“You stayed here, then?” he asks. Eyeing the silvery fridge-freezer overrun with magnets and postcards and dentist reminder cards.

The other Jon shrugs peaceably. His cardigan bunches thick at his elbows, his hair chopped back neat and now entirely grey, verging into white. An older-looking man, comfortable in the cherishing gifts age has bestowed.

He’s probably pushing forty, if that, but that is not the story his body tells.

“We just never moved,” he replies. “At first it was more for convenience. Daisy offered, and it was the sort of closed-off environment I could get around easily while I was healing. And the distance to amenities is close enough by car, there’s a little village about a forty-minute walk over the moorland. But then, I’m not sure. I healed. I got a job. Martin did distance learning with the OU and got his degree, and now he’s got his job in town. And then we just… built a life here, I guess.”

The other Jon scratches the cat behind the ear. The tortoiseshell, gummy mouthed, missing teeth at the front of her jaw, purrs within an internal roar like a combustion engine, and butts his hand with her head when he shows signs of slowing down. 

“Can I get you anything?”

Jon is still running on fumes, but he musters himself enough to shake his head. Then awkwardly remembers, repeating a vocal no.

The other Jon nods. Doesn’t push the conversation. They’ve already made what introductions they need to, the histories of their distinct lives, and now they can sit, at odds with how disparate their fates have been.

Jon takes in the kitchen cupboard with a wonky door off-angled, a crowded spice-rack chock full of half-used containers. The fridge magnets holding up a domestic collage of photographs; this other Jon, his face settled in a small smile and holding a newly topped-up glass of wine, surrounded by a slapdash muddle of people Jon doesn’t recognise; Jon and Martin, looking wind-tussled and bundled in waterproofs at the top of some dreary-weathered fell; Martin, smart in an egg-shell blue suit, a thistle on his lapel, flanking Jon who is dressed in a silver-grey suit the colour of an overcast morning, a purple tie matching the colour of the thistle.

“How long have you been married?” Jon asks quietly.

The other Jon touches lightly at the metal band around his finger with the tip of his thumb.

“A couple of years,” he replies. “It was a quiet ceremony. I don’t think either of us wanted anything big.”

His smile curves easily on his face, its grooves well worn. Tim had laughed from his stomach, Sasha’s smile would catch in her teeth as she bared them delighted at a joke, and even Martin’s laugh was eddying waves from the back of his throat, sprung up wide and shocked at their own brazenness. Jon has never worn smiles well in contrast, flitting good-humoured things that pass as clouds, that surprise him in their arising.

This Jon is used to smiling. His scars softened with the wash of years.

“I didn’t think I was the marrying kind,” Jon says finally.

“There’s a lot of things I didn’t think I was,” replies the other Jon. “Yet, here we are.”

The cat stands up, stretches itself in a small arc before adjusting and settling back down. The other Jon’s fingers knead placidly through her fur.

“I couldn’t have done what you did,” Jon says. Looking at the other Jon’s dark glasses. Braille books in a cairn pile near the fruit bowl.

Jon hums noncommittally, shrugs.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Sounds like it’s exactly the sort of thing you could have done.”

“And it was worth it?”

“Stupid question,” the other Jon replies, raising his eyebrows to communicate a semi-reproachful look. Jon snorts a tired acknowledging sound.

The scratch of a lock being turned has the cat jumping up and trotting out of the room.

“Had a good look, but couldn’t get you any!” Martin – this other, happier Martin – hollers from the front door, words muffled through the walls. There is the clunk of things being put down heavily, a sliding swish of fabric being removed, a chink of keys. “Checked Sainsbury's, and even thought I’d try the big Asda, you know Broughton Road way, but apparently they’re all…”

Martin stops with a horrible abrupt stillness when he comes into sight of the kitchen. Jon takes him in, his hairline gradually receding back at his temples, his hair colour paling to rosy blonde from the copper it used to be, a full beard kept neat and almost stubble-short. He’s dressed smart for work, black slacks, and buffed shoes, and a crisp white shirt crumpled over the course of the day, a navy lanyard around his neck displaying his name and an ID photo.

“We’ve a guest visiting,” the other Jon says easily. “This is – Martin, this is Jon. Another Jon, from somewhere else. He’s… just passing through.”

Martin gives Jon a sharp-eyed once over. Jon can’t tell what picture he must make, bedraggled and shoeless and dirt flecked up his trouser legs.

“Alright,” he replies tightly. He doesn’t move any closer. 

Subtly, in a quirk of gesture almost unnoticeable, the other Jon taps his fingers faintly against the side of his mug, as if keeping time to a silent beat, a little ceramic ting to each faint impact.

Martin’s posture softens from combative. An open expression broaching friendliness re-emerges cautiously on his face.

“You been interrogating the poor man, then?” he asks of the other Jon.

“Would I?” The other Jon says innocently.

Martin makes a disbelieving ‘huh’ sound at the back of his throat.

“You going to be staying for tea?” he directs at Jon, before he continues, more to himself than anyone in particular: “I was going to heat up that lasagne, but maybe mightn’t be enough for three.”

“I -er,” Jon says. “You don’t need to, I’ll be fine, probably should be getting going anyway really.”

A discomfort has risen bold and bearing in his stomach. His hands grubby and dust-chapped and dry around the mug he’s been given. He feels like an intrusion, an unwanted reminder of how things could have gone wrong, a breathing spectre of all their fears made manifest and sat at their kitchen table.

He does not fit here. Not in their world, not in this life.

“Don’t be daft,” Martin replies. His expression manages to branch across several shades of disbelieving and displeased. “Eaten anything substantial recently have you?”

“I – ”

The sandwich was several hours ago, surely, a whole conversation ago in a nowhere place. Martin’s face cements with decisiveness with a satisfied nod to himself.

“Love,” he directs to other Jon. “It won’t be anything fancy, but if you could sort us all out something? Cheap and cheerful. You and other – Jon – it’s still Jon, yeah?” At Jon’s affirmation: “You and Jon take the lasagne, Prisha had tons of leftovers that she brought in so I’m good with toast or something.”

To Jon, he says, pointing and offering a sympathetic look: “First, before we do anything, we better sort them out, yeah?”

For other Jon, he clarifies: “The man’s got no shoes or socks on, and he’s got blisters that’re absolutely going to go horribly septic if he doesn’t clean them up.”

Jon hasn’t even thought about his feet, held hovering above the swept linoleum. He winces when he looks down at the mud-dressed mess of blisters and bruising from his frenzy-delirium stagger through night-time London after losing the book to the creeping rot.

They hurt, a pressing smarting that smothers all other sensation, and they’ll be slow to mend, leaving him hobbling and encumbered. He still bears speckling jaundiced smudges up his arms and lower legs, one nasty splotch over his hipbone, from his free-fall through Helen’s corridors, so he’s come to terms with healing the long way round, like normal people do.

It’s been a long time since he felt like anything approaching normal people.

“Can you stand on them?” Martin asks, and Jon doesn’t know. 

“C’mon,” Martin’s moved closer, holding out a hand, and after a moment's vacillating, Jon takes it, using Martin’s sturdy weight to bring him to upright. His manner practical, calm in the face of what surely has to be unspeakable bizarre, witnessing this weakened battered reflection of his husband.

In their trudging steps ever towards the Panopticon, Jon’s feet had caught in sticking mud, sucking viciously at the soles of his shoes. He’d lost a boot that they'd had to replace further on, his arm hefted over Martin’s shoulder, the two of them providing the required leverage. A number of domains on, Martin’s leg had been scored with a razing burn from their sojourn through Jude Perry’s domain, a blistering slant of reddened skin like a scratch that had wept when they stopped to treat it, and Martin had leant as much of his weight on Jon as he could hold up as they left the ceaseless inferno of the tower blocks.

This Martin’s hold is too much like those gestures of comfort, and Jon is quick to pull away once he finds his balance.

Martin takes them upstairs, Jon’s steps arduous and strained, and he’s sweating by the time they reach the top. Martin makes a detour into the bedroom, and hefts a sports bag down from where it’s been shoved up at the top of the wardrobe. Jon lingers outside of their room, refusing himself a glimpse inside and scolding himself mentally when the urge nearly trips him up – it all feels too private to witness somehow.

“It’s a bit cramped in the bathroom, but we’ll manage,” Martin says when he re-emerges, and herds Jon inside.

Jon gets himself sat down on the closed toilet lid on Martin’s insistence, and the sports bag, once unzipped, is revealed to be swollen with first aid items. Martin darts out, and returns with a plastic washing up bowl that he fills with lukewarm water.

Jon flinches as he submerges his feet but the sensation soon trickles down into almost soothing.

Martin passes him a clean face-cloth for Jon to gingerly wipe the dirt off.

“You’ve really been through the wars, haven’t you?” he says softly.

Jon can’t meet his eyes.

“Something like that,” he replies, cringing with a hiss as his efforts at cleaning the soles of his feet aggravate a tender spot of skin.

“Where have you come from?” Martin asks delicately after a moment of rooting through the first-aid bag for the supplies he needs.

“It’s… It’s quite a long story."

“Always is with you,” Martin teases with a small smile as he lays down a spare towel for Jon to dry his cleaned feet. As he bends over, his lanyard sways and clicks in its arc, and Jon gets to have a closer look at the words, the overly-formal passport-like photo where this Martin clearly brushed his hair immediately before having it taken.

“You’re a lawyer?” Jon finds himself asking.

“For a couple of years now,” Martin replies. “Don’t look so surprised! It wasn’t like I was going to be a substandard archive assistant all my life.”

“No, it’s just – ” Martin’s offence is a joking one, but Jon rushes to get his excuses out regardless. “I thought you’d be a librarian or a primary school teacher or something.”

“Nah, teaching’s Jon’s thing. No surprise, he’s brilliant at it, no matter how humble he’s inevitably played it to you.”

“So, why a lawyer?”

“It’s nothing fancy – I’m not like those people making grand speeches in courtrooms like you see on the telly. I work mostly with employment law. Cases for charities and unions generally. It wasn’t anything I thought I’d get into – but Jon, he had such a time of it, originally, trying to get a job that would look past the disability, or he’d get one, and then suddenly fulfilling their quota didn’t seem as appealing when they actually had to be proactive helping him integrate, make reasonable adjustments and the like. And it was all bollocks, and I spent so much time reading up on all the laws and acts and precedent cases in order to make them do their bloody jobs or bring grievances to them if they didn’t pull their act together… and then, you know, I met people, who put me in touch with other people, etc, etc, and then by that point Jon had settled into teaching and I was looking for something a bit more challenging, and I thought, why not. Not like there’s much out there that’s scarier than all the stuff we went through. Other people would go through the same as Jon and I just thought, I could help elsewhere and do a little bit of good.”

There’s a lump in his throat, and a wetness to his eyes that have little to do with his smarting feet.

“Sounds like my Martin.”

“Where’s he then? Is he going to be joining us at some point?”

“… He’s – um, he’s lost. N-not dead, it’s not a euphemism or anything like that, I-I’m – that’s why I’m here. I’m looking for him.”

“I’m sorry,” Martin says, and his sincerity has Jon staring at the white tile of the bathroom blinking hard and willing himself to hold together.

“You’ve,” he says, scrabbling around for a different conversational topic. From the kitchen, he can hear the other Jon talking to the cat. “Your wedding photos are lovely.”

“Don’t be fooled,” Martin snorts as he passes Jon the antiseptic cream to apply to the worst of the blisters and scratches. “The heavens opened immediately after that picture, we were absolutely drenched. A proper Scottish wedding.” He eyes Jon’s feet critically. “I’m going to apply the bandaging now if that’s ok? Might sting a bit but I’ll be as quick as I can.”

True to his word, Martin is mercifully quick, placing a sterile dressing pad over a particularly vicious red wound from where a blister has popped, efficiently holding it still while he gets the bandaging in place and wraps it around to secure it. He does the same with an injury at Jon’s heel.

“All done,” he says, and Jon nods with a shivery breath. “Let’s just, sit here for a bit, let you catch your breath before you start moving around.”

“Can I ask you something?” Jon says once the throbbing has died down.

“Sure."

“You’re… you’re happy?”

Martin is clearly thrown by the intensity of the question but he must see something in Jon’s expression because he meets his gaze without baulking.

“Ridiculously,” he replies. “This, all this,” he waves a hand around nebulously. “The house, the job, Jon… There was a point in my life, when I didn’t think I’d ever get a happy ending. When I was working for Peter Lukas, and my mum had passed and Tim and Jon were gone… when I had nothing to – anyway. That… it all feel like a lifetime ago, you know? But I did. And now there’s no monsters or creepy books or the bloody Archives. I get to spend my evenings hunting for obscure spices in the supermarket because my husband wants to get fancy and show off in the kitchen.”

“I… I can’t imagine it,” Jon says. Unable to look at the untarnished, fierce joy that has bloomed over Martin’s face.

“Course you can,” Martin replies, and he is so sure it’s almost startling. “It  just takes practise.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

Martin’s hand, embellished with the plainest of silver-sheen bands, touches Jon’s shoulder briefly.

“It’s not,” he says. “But it’s worth it. Honestly, It’s – it’s all worth it, every moment.”

And there is nothing Jon can say to that.

Dinner is a quiet enough affair. Jon is mostly content to listen, boxed in by his own thoughts. His feet are sore, but he can walk on them, the pain and pressure on any injury muffled by two layers of thick walking socks donated to the cause by this other Jon. The microwaved lasagne is fenced in by a bed of shop-bagged greenery, and Jon does his best to appear a grateful guest, forcing himself to at least make a sizeable dent in the meal before apologising and declaring surrender.

It must have been later than expected, for twilight steals in swiftly to touch the window panes, and for all his earlier calm energy, the other Jon starts flagging at nearly nine-ish, secreting his yawning behind a polite palm.

“We’ll be heading up in a bit, Jon,” Martin says after the other Jon has been unsuccessful in hiding his faltering attention. Martin nudges him to wakefulness. “The sofa’s yours, if you want it.”

The other Jon bids him a goodnight. Clenches his shoulder with a kind expression.

“You’ll find him,” he says, Martin having gotten up to finish wiping down the surfaces in the kitchen with a bustle of sound. “You will. And there will always be difficulty, because that’s life for us, but we… there is a version of this where we get to be happy.”

Jon is unable to think of a response, saved eventually by Martin’s re-emergence holding another tea in the Torquay mug, setting it down on the coffee table after hunting around with a muttering under-breath for a coaster.

“We’ll see you in the morning?” Martin asks.

“Maybe,” Jon says, meaning no, and both of them give different expressions of unspoken understanding.

“Goodnight, Jon,” Martin says, squeezing Jon’s arm. Jon struggles to give him a smile in return.

He’s left alone in the living room. The patter of the cat’s footsteps follow the two up the stairs.

The tea is made strong, steeped until the water darkens to the colour of tarmac, a splash of milk enough to brighten it to a surly terracotta. No sugar. The other Jon takes it differently than him. This Martin can't have known, can't be expected to be aware that this is just another way in which this universe has swerved tangential, but Jon finds himself assaulted by the thought anyway as he sits perched and discomforted on a new sofa surrounded by the re-painted walls of Daisy’s safehouse, clutching the tea two-handed, the warmth bleeding against his skin. The thought that no Martins are ever going to be the Martin who gets grumpy, short-worded and ill-tempered when he's tired, the Martin who trudged across the wastelands and through the sick villages and endless carousels and corpse routes with him, always trailing a little slower. The Martin whose grip turns sweltering in the early hours when they bundled up together against the chill of Scotland, a dozy, pawing hold that Jon eventually had to worm out of, overheating and fussy with warmth.

The Martin who makes Jon's tea weak and black, barely touched by the teabag, seasoned with a sweetener. The only Martin that is his Martin, two last shipwrecked survivors of a universe now swallowed up and backtracked. The last of the Magnus Archives.

Jon knows very logically that he might never stop searching for Martin, opening door after door after door, each a hopeless offer of chance that is crueller than a finality. He's not quite made his peace with that. The unfairness of it all.

He sips at his tea, and thinks for a long time about what Helen said. Considers this room, and its photographs. The herbs on the windowsill. This Jon’s collapsible folding cane on the narrow side table near the front door. Martin’s lanyard spooled next to it.

When the mug is drained and cool with the evening, Jon takes The Garden of Forking Paths out of his pocket. Its cover shimmers like fish-scale. 

He flicks to the paragraph he often starts with. Breathes in deeply, the air around him warm from the central heating, the spiced notes of a re-heated dinner, and intones quietly.

“Under the trees of England I mediated on this lost and perhaps mythical labyrinth…”

Still reciting the words with clear and careful annunciation, though the meaning of them has long been whitewashed to backdrop, Jon opens his Eyes as wide as he still can and thinks of Martin.

He Looks, squints through the murk and light-blind swell that eddies against him in the face of that wide, dark sea of knowing, Sees the Martin he had journeyed with, the Martin he remembers. The pressure of his hand as he made some weak joke, gripped Jon's palm with such a sad finality as they ascended the tower of the Panopticon. The set of his jaw as they traversed the corpse routes, the chaotic discordant loop of the carousel of strangers. The receding pale of a misted seafront smothering the colour of his eyes as he stepped away and out from the domain tailored especially for him, wreathed in the chill of a window left open but his body warm alongside Jon's.

“…I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars…”

Jon hisses as a throbbing, tearing headache starts to embed in him, and he almost doubles over, folding at his stomach, wants to grip the screeching in his head and shut his eyes, but still he wrenches and tugs at the half closed door in his mind, the ocean rising to meet him and eager to drown such a lost and wind-tossed soul.

He looks, Sees the Martin that was, his Martin in the days before his feelings had dug themselves out from a pretentious front of apathy, the Martin that he never took the time to see properly. His curved-spine, heart-thundering terror as the banging on his flat door persisted, the temptation that would whisper in his marrows as Corruption tried to root him with its song. The familiar burial of unsought, unwanted understanding that Elias had piled into him with a knife-twist enjoyment, the weight of disappointment and despising he'd long known without knowing. Jon pushes and the image of Martin spreads fractal, multi-faceted, his Vision swamped with Martins that have never been; Martin dead or Martin lost or Martin happy, Martin who the Powers and Institute never touched.

And Christ, it hurts, fuck, he can’t do this – and Jon chokes on a breath that does not come and he gathers together the snarled and disintegrating strips of himself to Look out, further, and the images flicker and flex like shadows in candlelight, and for a moment – Jon sees his Martin that is. Lost, breaking down, wasting away with the burden of hoping. Sees how much using the book costs him, how easily this stubbornness might be the thing that kills him.

Martin believes that they could be happy. Martin opens door after door, stumbling and stripped to despairing because he is cursed with the unfairness of his belief that they could be happy, because why not them, why do they not deserve to be allowed that mercy.

It hurts to continue reading. It hurts to read but everything else has demanded its pound of flesh from him, so Jon grits his teeth and bites down a whimper and drowns willingly, because he has suffered so much more for so much less. 

“…He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzyingly growing, ever growing, ever spreading network...”

Jon can't breathe at all now. Shallow inhales stoppering in his chest. The pain splintering, splitting, degrading the world around him, and as a sound scrabbles up his throat, he tries to think of a Martin that could be, a life they could have, but all he can manage is the Martin that does. He wants to know what their future could look like if only they were permitted it, but the waters are too deep there, his treading noiseless, too weak.

He can't know what Martin will look like in ten, twenty, thirty years, but he wants to find out. He pushes at that, but gets nothing but a greater swell of knowing that sinks into his lungs; he can't know if Martin will always look at him with that fondness, that gentleness, that trust that's struggled up tenacious as weeds through the paving stones life made him put down. He can't know if Martin will always love him, if they'll be finally, complicatedly, happy.

There has always been so much he hasn't known, that he's been kept in the dark about, and he doesn't need to be handed that knowledge, god, he could be satisfied, he would be, finally, as long as he can find out for himself if Martin's hair will recede as he ages, if Jon's walk will slow down arthritic. He wants to know, wants to see, and learn with his own two unaided eyes, and he wants, for once in his life selfish and grasping and demanding. He wants Martin and he wants to make a home with him, somewhere, anywhere, he wants the future always denied him.

“I leave to various future times,” the words retch in his mouth, “but not to all, my garden of forking paths.”

 The pain is peaking insensate, and Jon thinks he might be bleeding from somewhere, his mouth tasting coppery as he fights with the words on the page, as his vision spirals and spots and sways, and the door is open and Jon can See in the harshest, most drowning light everything that makes up Martin Blackwood, but no, no , this distanced knowing is not enough, Seeing is not enough, and he wants and he wants and he wants....

 He doesn't feel the hinges of the trapdoor open under him. He's too busy drowning.

Chapter Text

“Oh thank – He's not dead!” is the first hollering voice audible, warping from snatching distortion to clarity as Jon resurfaces.

His eyes feel gummy. Sleep-stuck and gritty as he pries them open with a groan.

Tim leans over like a beaming willow branch. Relief marking the bark of him, his smile full-faced and packed with teeth. His hair is frond-like and bunched in waving sodden clumps that are steadily dripping, little soapy islands of shampoo suds like coral growths fizzing quietly under his ear, at his crown.

“Look what the cat dragged back!” Tim continues, effusive and run-away with his excitement. “Door dragged back, whatever. Classy entrance as usual there. Seriously, I nearly brained myself in the shower, did you really have to be so loud?”

Jon tastes blood. Reaches up and touches his face hesitantly, a sticky residue coating and flaking under his nose, his top lip.

Tim looks delighted and Jon isn't sure why. Isn’t sure which door he has fallen through this time, his last-ditch attempt at a shoreline.

“I,” he begins, then coughs to clear his throat because his voice resembles an un-oiled portcullis. “I, do I, um... know...?”

“It is you, isn't it?” Tim passes Jon a tissue for the blood, which he takes cautiously, unsure of how much good it'll do to improve the current horror-show of his face. “Old Grandfather Sims, travelling the interdimensional streams in search of his true love. You've done this one before, mate.”

Jon sits up, sways, counts it as a bad idea and retreats to his previous set-up of sprawled and face up to the ceiling. Managing to glance around, he's in an entrance hall of some flat, his head angled by an umbrella stand, someone's muddy walking footwear and a pair of platform-heeled leather boots, heavy with thick metallic buckles, stood sentry next to it.

“Which universe is this?” he asks. His throat is parched and painful.

“We found you that magical book!” Tim looks pleased with himself, even if he'd had nothing to do with it. He holds out a hand that Jon then takes and heaves him to a limp-backed sitting. “I think we were your first, I can't believe we meant so little to you.”

A poorly dyed head bends out from behind a door lintel, and carefully kohled eyes give him a quick assessing once over.

“How's our stray?”

“Leave the man alone!” comes Sasha's voice from the same room, before she also pokes her head out. Her hair swishes shorter than it used to, twirling out in looping coils, its colour shifted radically, a pen perched behind her ear. Her expression softens on looking at him. She looks older, older than she maybe should after the time that's crept by, but her eyes are light and swallow no shadow.  “Christ, you look a mess. Good to see you're still kicking.”

Jon feels scraped and overstretched and his headache crests. He blinks heavily at her, the words washing like tide leaving only silt to serve as comprehension.

“Come on,” she says, and pads over. With Tim, they wrench him to standing, and with shivery steps, he is manoeuvred into the living room, where they plonk him down on the nearest chair. Gerry's vanished but his clattering and the wince of the water pressure is clue as to where he's gone – the kitchen, while decoratively modern, was clearly a seventies build, for Gerry pokes his head through the wide-open serving hatch that looks into the galley kitchen, holding out a slopping glass of water.

Tim takes it, passes it to Jon. He downs it gratefully, thick-tongued and dry-mouthed.

“This is... your flat?” he asks Sasha.

“No,” Sasha starts, at the same time as Tim snorts 'Might as well be.'

“It's mine,” Tim clarifies at Sasha's look, a cheeky expression painted on his face. “Forgot you’ve only seen the old one. I’ve moved since then, this is my gaff now. Gerry's too, when he deigns to show his presence. But – well, it's more a base of operations for us these days, since Magnus kicked it.”

Jon's probably sitting on the only clear spot in the room. The walls have been shored with hastily erected and overburdened IKEA shelves, stuffed with lever arch files and box folders. The surface of the coffee table has been consumed by unsteady book piles and papers acting as coasters for half-drunk coffee cups. There's a freestanding whiteboard, tattooed with commentary in green and blue and black.

Jon looks at Sasha. Her hair trammelled with greys and whites, her crow’s feet and laugh lines and forehead crease at least a decade older than her body should be. The price she paid to end Magnus' Archive.

She holds her head proudly. Keeps his gaze.

“We got to choose,” she explains kindly.

“Chose to get the hell out of dodge,” Tim snorts.

“And Magnus...?” Jon asks.

A smug smirk on Tim's face, a satisfied set to Sasha's jaw and he knows before they tell him.

He struggles to imagine that the Institute is gone. The shape where it would stand scaffolded and fenced with rubble. The remains of Millbank's Panopticon razed, consuming its squatting skeletal centre.

He is having difficulty imagining what that freedom looks like.

“... the Eye's not gone, 'course,” Tim says. “I'm mostly free of it, but it, well, it lingers a bit for Sash and Gerry. So we use it! What's left of the Eye's favour, might as well get something out of it. Not like any of us were going to be able to go back to normal nine-to-fives, not after. You know. Stabbing the immortal figurehead of a cosmic sentience of terror, and burning down our former employment. Not exactly any good references out of that.”

“So, you, what, just spending your time looking for Leitners?” Jon asks.

“And making a mess of my living room,” Tim grouches.

“Our living room,” Sasha retorts sunnily. Tim gives her two fingers and sticks out his tongue. “Look, if you're going to get keys cut, and give them out willy-nilly – woah, where you going?”

“I need to – ” Jon says, having risen half to standing before unbalancing again. “The book, I must have dropped it, I...”

“It's right here,” Gerry is returning from the hallway, carrying the tome with a distasteful expression.

Jon grabs it back over-zealously. Snatches it to him, checks it for damage.

“Mate, you look awful,” Tim says quietly. “Just, rest a bit here, yeah?”

“I have to – ” Jon says, “I-I can't stay, I have to, I know if I try again....”

He reaches out. To pull at the fraying fringe of his sight, his vanishing horizon flickering dusklit, the waves of knowledge seeping shallow.

Frowns.

Tries again. Feels out grasping now, searching for the water's edge, the eddies that have rocked ceaseless and unbearable for years now, the greed of the Eye oh so willing to burden him with knowing.

There's no Eye. His own thoughts unimpeded, alone within him. A straightness to his spine there had not been. Silence where there should be static.

“Jon?”

His face wet. Vision blurry. He is pressing his lips together to crush the terrible cry that seeks to pour from his empty throat.

“Jon? What's – ”

“It's – it's gone.”  The truth of it fuses to his tongue like plastic. “It's – it's gone, it's – ”

“What's gone?” Sasha asks urgently.

“I can't... I can't sense him anymore,” Jon says, and it pours from him like a bricked-up reservoir giving way. “The – the Eye, it's gone, and I'm not – I'm not the Archivist anymore – any power it left me with, it's all, it's quiet, it's gone.”

“That's a good thing though?” Tim says, biting his lip nervously, fronting with an unconvincing confidence.

Jon looks at the book sat on his lap, and he is trying to shake the distress out of his hands, but it only galvanises the panic growing sediment inside.

“No, no, no,” he says. “No, because now I can't... I can't find him, I can use the book but it's like, fuck, it's feeling around in the fucking dark, and I can't sense him, I can't sense anything, a-and s-so that's it, that's it, there's nothing...”

From the hallway, a door slams thunderous.

“Jesus, what now?” Gerry demands, but Jon is already up. Hobbling on limping legs back out into the entrance hall.

A door, yellow paint weathered to expose the raw wood beneath, crowns the end of the hallway. Garlanded by the cramped lintel of the flat, and the disruption wrought upon the narrow space; the jackets, hoodies and scarves formerly neatly paraded on the coat pegs have been scattered to carpet the wood flooring in a lacklustre pile, the small side table that houses its easily-lost odds-and-sods of house keys, and bus cards and spare change and umbrellas has been equally upended.

The door that should not be there is closing. Crooked, branch-like fingers move around from behind, making an unsettling, unnatural gesture made up of too many bones. It could almost be a wave, before it shuts with a click that echoes, the distinct strict snap of a locking mechanism.

Left behind, the mess the disruption has thoughtlessly caused, and a man who has fallen through.

The man is struggling to stand. Bow-backed by the effort. His hands pushing against the scuffed polish of the floor, his elbows unsteady and shaking, his weight held up by his arms before he slips, losing the strength, his breathing sharp-shock exhalations as he strains again.

The man looks up, through the scene he has intruded on. His red hair branched through with a frosted unnatural greying, splaying out from the roots like the spread of paint in water. Eyes bloodshot, bleary, and his naturally pale complexion skinned of all colour. Like a collapsed ghost, he quivers, his breathing rattling laboured in his chest, and he is a photographic negative, a blurry badly-taken Polaroid.  Jon re-learns every facet anew as he wavers, gasps.

He is moving. Down the short hallway, falling to his knees. He envelopes the quaking, near insensible body, which seizes, tenses up with a flinch as he tries to pull back.

“Martin,” Jon babbles, tracing his shape with his hands, the places where his travels have eroded him, grasping him tighter like he's trying to merge them into one landmass. “Martin, Martin, Martin.”

Jon separates from him, enough to cup the man's face, bring his sleepless, dizzy eyes to meet his own, and they fight to focus, but then he is seen, Martin sees him – at last, at last – and gasps wetly, brokenly.

“It's me,” he tries to say, as Martin's whole body starts seizing in great, rocking sobs.

“I've found you, I found you,” he tries to say but there is too much space between the two of them even as Martin's hands paw frantic at his sides, squeeze around him painful.

 “Martin, you came back to me,” he tries to say but his words are crushed into Martin's shoulder, and he's not sure if saying anything is needed, not when they have surged against each other like the meeting of seas, not when Martin's words, if he had found any at all, have shattered into senseless, overwhelmed sound. Something animal in its intensity, a hitching wail, that shipwrecks his body against Jon's.

They fall against each other in a world that is not theirs, surrounded by fallen coats and loose coins, and the yellow door behind them fades away like a healing bruise into nothing.

There are parts of Martin that Jon doesn't recognise.

Almost obsessively, he catalogues the things that time has changed while his back was turned, the testaments left behind that he must interpret from limited information. Two fingers on Martin's left hand are blackened with bruising under the nail. A twisted starburst of ugly scarring punctures just over his collarbone, the skin pouched and gathered in poorly-healed wrinkles. Martin will never be a small man, but there is a mountain-ridge prominence to his hipbones that unsettles the geography of him that Jon thought he'd mapped. His expression vacillating between raw and confused, the Spiral's impact clear in his faltering memory. Sometimes he will stop, and frown, and he has forgotten where he is. That he has Jon back.

His first seizure, Jon thinks he's lost him. Gerry pushing him out of the way as Martin's body snaps rigid and jerky, efficiently getting a pillow under his head,  Tim is pulling him back as Sasha calls an ambulance. He thinks that's it. 

They keep him in for observation. The doctor's presume an ongoing neurological condition like epilepsy, and there isn't exactly a better explanation that Jon can provide them with.

Martin's fits fade in severity and quantity over time. Jon is not so optimistic that he thinks they'll go any time soon, but they are infrequent, and although distressing to watch, and undoubtedly for Martin to suffer, there isn't any immediate danger as far as the doctors tell him. Sasha looks into medications they could try, if it's clear it's going to be a permanent ramification of using the book. 

The other side effects of travelling via Spiral are as drastic as threatened. For weeks, Jon is feverish, run-down with a croaking throat, can barely stand bright lights. Tim has a spare room that is technically Gerry's room, a narrow box-room where the bed fits length ways across its width, tucked snug against the back wall dominated by a large window, and they spend the next few weeks living out of there, the curtains remaining firmly closed.

Martin sleeps a lot. Jon too, but whenever he wakes up, Martin is lying asleep and held stiff,  curved in on himself, over-still and a tension formed taut the threading of him. At any motion, he will stir. At noises or movement from the room outside.

There's a sharpness in his eyes that Jon doesn't recognise.

“It's alright,” Jon will say. “I'm here, close your eyes, go back to sleep.”

Martin struggles up through his silences. A numbing fog gripping him all too evocative of the Lonely. But after a moment, he will nod. His hand tucked militantly against his ramrod sides will reach out. His eyelids drooping heavily, he will touch his hand against Jon's, not even gripping, just skin brushing skin,  like he did when they first arrived in the safehouse. Tentative, achingly slow, as if Jon would disappear in a vapour, spooked if he moved too fast.

Jon is the one who bridges that final gap and takes his hand. The heft of it unchanged, despite the bruised nails, the rough skin. 

Martin visibly fights to push off sleep to keep looking at him.

“I'm here,” Jon says again.

One night, but really afternoon in all likelihood, black-out curtains on the windows and the bed muggy with occupancy, Jon wakes up and Martin is awake before him. Staring at him, focused, with blood-shot, welling eyes. He has been biting his lip to stop himself from crying.

“Jon?” he asks.

“Yes." Jon reaches over the slight expanse that separates them, and  Martin's grip is hard and tight when their palms press against each other. 

“Which one?” Martin says after a moment, his voice small and anxious.

“Yours,” Jon replies. “Yours, Martin.”

Martin is gasping air he does not hold within him as he lets go, the space inside him reserved for hope taken up by uglier, darker things he's long been colonised by.

“I didn’t mean to let go,” he babbles. “I didn’t mean – everything was falling apart, and then you fell and I couldn’t… I didn’t mean it, God, I didn’t – I didn’t – ”

Jon crushes them together, his lips brushing the curve of his ear, tells him it’s over, that they found each other, that it's finally, finally over. Promises into his sweat-damp hair that this will pass, that this will get easier, that he’ll be here with him while it does.

He believes it. He believes it.

With every pulse of his stubborn heart he believes it. 

Ever so often, Jon wakes with a head-full of warping static, feeling pulled under by a tide of potentiality, a terror that scores him awake that he has to scold himself free of the shackles of, that this Martin might not be own, that he has further to go, and no light to guide him by. Tim’s top-floor flat slots above an off-license, and they’re sometimes able to hear the staff on the till or in the stock-room, bird-chattering throughout their shift with gossip and jokes and complaints, and sometimes this lulls them with its normalcy. Other times, the light of the day and the nattering squawk of noise sparks a raging, gnarling headache in Martin’s brain that has him huddled in the dark, his groaning muffled in the pillow. It’s not easy. Like the other Martin had promised. The bad days come as easily as good, and there is only so much progress they can make at any one time.

Jon doesn’t hear a song on the radio and know its lyrics without trying. He feels no pull towards strangers for them to recount their dark and morbid close encounters. His hunger is human, and voracious, and Martin goes from picking at Gerry’s meals to steadily working his way through them, to the chef’s immense satisfaction and Jon's pleased relief. No fog touches Martin’s eyes or caresses his thoughts come night time. They have nowhere to escape from, nowhere they must run to, nothing they must stop.

For the first time in a long time, Jon can think about standing still.

As the days get longer, the nights tinged light long after the evening has shut up shop, they begin to leave the hidey-hole of Tim’s flat to venture forth into this new universe.

Martin clutches him gimlet-fingered, deadening the nerves of his arm as they pick their way through the milling London crowds. He’s paled pasty, and Jon asks lowly if they should go back, that they don’t need to go far, they can do this slowly.

“I…I can keep going,” Martin says in a sandpaper-voice. “Let’s… let’s find somewhere.”

There is a park, perhaps a fifteen minute walk away. They drop onto the nearest bench, puffing.

“You ok?”

“Yeah,” Jon replies, clammy-skinned and feeling hot under his light coat. “Yeah, it’s just a lot.”

“Yeah. I – I get that.”

Martin enfolds their fingers together as they watch dog-walkers and teenagers on bikes and parents with prams.

Their walks lengthen over the days. They trace the higgledy-piggledy pathways of the park, the rockways and inclines and kid’s play area with a steep slide and a tangled-up swing.

When he feels he can, Jon tells Martin about the universes he visited that have not quite faded into unreality. The admission of each universe he failed to find him is cathartic, rhythmic and mingled with the settling of warm air, the words expelled from him like confessionals.

Martin doesn’t talk about his journeys, and Jon doesn’t push.

One day, a Tuesday where an Atlantic front has knotted the city in a cold-snap twine, Martin seems reluctant to go back. Their walk follows their usual careful delineated route, the worn pathways around natural water reserves, the artificial pond mossed over with algae and a scattering of simpering ducks, but the landscape has gone grey and dull, the two of them bundled up in coats and scarves even as the temperature straddles two digits. Martin keeps striding onward, Jon’s two strides to each of his one, and although he’s attentive and listening, his gaze doesn’t catch any of their surroundings.

Eventually, they find a park bench, and Martin only tarries when it’s clear that Jon’s feet, still dressed and twinging painful with overexertion, aren’t going to carry him any further without a break. The wood of the bench was likely painted black originally, weathered with the scar tissue of old frosts, decorated with a small memorial plaque dedicated to someone neither of them will ever meet, a touching epitaph of a life from someone who loved them.

Martin brings something out from his coat pocket, turfing out littering flotsam along with it, a tube of mints half empty, a scrunched receipt, an empty packet of chewing gum. With a frown, he shoves these strange examples of life back inside the fabric confines until only the book clutched in his palm remains. At first, Jon assumes it’s Martin's copy of The Garden of Forking Paths, and he gives a wary jolt at the sight of it, though he doesn’t pull back. Yet it’s too small, A5 size, a cheap, disposable notebook with a hard cover easily found in any WHSmiths. Its edging and corners are bruised, water-damaged in parts, the pages dried strange and crackling.

“Here.” Martin offers it to him.

“What is it?” He rubs tentative fingers over it, the blemished and lacerated front surviving some unknown violence.

“You can look,” Martin says quietly. His eyes have found a spot against the tree line nearby, but his back is held rigid and posed in a tension Jon sees far too much of these days.

The spine of the notebook cracks like a broken bone, a painful popping sound as the crimped and stained pages splay open. He studies the information presented to him, as though divining some secret articulation of the stars. On each page, squashed up against each other are crudely made drawings of doors, circled with a slap-dash yet consistent label denoting major details. Dutifully and diligently positioned sentinel next to the sketch is a short spurt of text, an entry populated by curt essentials not afforded elaboration.

The drawing of an oblong door, like that of a painted houseboat, is wreathed with: bright yellow – canary, medium-sized, stiff latch. And its condensed missive, all the more difficult to read for what it does not include: 2017, Prentiss successful, no Archive. No J. No statement left.

A rectangular door: light brown – student flat? MDF, handle wobbly. Year?, pos. late 2010s. Archivist lost. Statement left.

A hastily-scribbled central four-square window: white, plastic, tinted glass. 2019.  Basira Archivist, no J. Statement left.

There are so many pages. Cramped and messy, the handwriting getting progressively worse, stuffed with so many doors that the words crawl up the sides of the paper like raucous and unhappy vines. Jon’s eyes have started blurring as he realises that this, god, this is everywhere Martin looked. Every dead end, every lost cause. Door after door after door.

“How many?” He is proud, for his voice doesn’t shake.

Martin’s does. He breathes out and it’s not a calm breath, and his eyes on the tree line are not steady.

“I stopped counting, after a while,” he answers when he’s composed himself. “I just, I just kept going. I couldn’t not, you know. I… I couldn’t stop, because if I stopped, then I’d be giving up, and I don’t know if I would have been able to forgive myself.”

“I heard your messages,” Jon whispers. He’s closed the notebook, unsure if he can stomach to read more, if the horror will lessen through exposure or grown only deeper roots in such fertile soil. There’s too much space between them on the bench, and so he moves closer, his hand resting over the fabric covering Martin’s thigh. “Not every one of them. Don’t think there’s any way of knowing which ones I did or that I missed, but I looked, I… God, Martin, I tried so hard. I would have kept going if that’s what it took.”

“The first universe," Martin says after a pause. "Where I arrived. I don’t even know what year it was, only you were dead already. I think it must have been… the universe was so similar, you know, when you and Tim and Daisy…. Only afterwards, you never woke up. Not sure if you made the conscious decision not to come back, or maybe your body just, it was tired, had been through enough, gave out on its own. You were in hospital  for nearly six months, and then you died. I arrived after all this happened, so I wasn’t there, but that universe’s Martin, he told me most of it. He – he wasn’t in a good place. I show up, and he gets to see another version of himself w-who failed you. He tried not to hate me, but…”

Martin’s hand covers his lightly.

“I didn’t know what had happened. I kept thinking that I’d… I’d had hold of your hand hadn’t I? You’d been with me so – so why… and then Helen, I dunno if she was our Helen or some other version, but she showed up and pointed me in the direction of the book. And I didn’t hesitate. Because it was that or – that or nothing, that after everything we didn’t get to win after all. Because that book was the only chance I’d ever have of seeing you again.”

“You could have died.”

“I thought we were going to die at the Panopticon. I-I know we never really talked, not really. But it wasn’t exactly likely we’d survive it. A-and I knew that, I thought I was fine with that, that I’d made my peace with it. Then, well, we didn’t, a-and I was alive and I hadn’t thought I’d be, only you weren’t there with me. I was on my own, in a world I didn’t belong to, surrounded by all the ways I could have let you down, all the ways I could have lost you. And that wasn’t… that wouldn’t have been living. Not for me.”

There is the shout of some distant kids playing behind the copse of trees. A dog gives a number of fervent barks in unison.

“What do you think?” Jon asks.

“About what?”

“Staying.”

“Here?”

“It’s not our universe,” Jon continues. “I don’t know, even with the book, that we could find it again. Perhaps everything went back as it was, before I ended it. Daisy and Basira might be alive. We could… I dunno, check. Maybe. If you wanted.”

“We saved it though, didn’t we?”

Jon glances over at the stubborn intrusion of white in Martin’s hair. The age on his face his years haven’t earned him. The firm way he still holds Jon’s hands as though assuring himself they won’t be separated.

“I think so.”

Martin nods, satisfied.

“They don’t….” Jon stumbles over the expression of what he wants suddenly, so desperately to say. “They don’t need us any more. Our universe doesn’t need us. Nowhere does, not really. B-but that’s… We get to choose now. We could be.... Martin, we could be happy. We could have that. We get to have that, and I want that. More than anything. ”

“A happy ending,” Martin’s lips quirk. “It sounds strange.”

“One day it won’t.”

“So, what? Leave? You don’t want to get involved in Sasha’s whole evil-book hunting enterprise?”

“No,” Jon says, surprising himself with how easy it is to say. “No, I mean. We don't have to up and just vanish, but that....That isn’t… that isn’t our part to play. They’ve got this. We’re… we’re allowed to finally be done with all of it.”

Martin kisses him. It’s chapped lips and noses knocking, and they have to manoeuvre the angle until it’s comfortable. But it’s Jon’s happy ending. And as they separate, Martin swooping in almost daringly for a follow-up peck, resurfacing with a smile, Jon wonders if they can make a life for themselves, just like that. Domestic and complicated and happy, despite it all.

Knows he can’t wait to find out.