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Jon blinks awake, bleary, to find the side of his face squashed against his desk. What the...?
...Oh. He groans and pushes himself upright. Ignores the sticky peeling sound his cheek makes as it separates from the wood. Stands.
He fumbles for his cane, and makes his somewhat stiff way to the break room.
His shoes scuff obnoxiously on the floor as he makes his way to the cabinet. It creaks as he opens it, and Jon's spine cracks as he stands on tiptoe to grab the largest red mug.
It clunks on the counter when Jon sets it down, and the sound echoes in his head as he picks tea, fills the mug with water, sticks it the microwave. The buttons' beeping takes it place as he searches for half-decent food. (Debatable whether he needs the nutrients, but the familiarity is nice.)
He finds a large pack of crisps, something that might once have been an orange, and a small pastry that’s probably—that has been stale for two-and-a-half days. Jon considers, for a moment. Then he takes the crisps. They’re unopened, they have more calories, they’ve got a crunch—objectively the better choice.
The choice is made, but the microwave is still humming, so Jon turns his mind back to the research he fell asleep reviewing. Another for the Flesh. Bits of Slaughter about the edges, purple fading into magenta at the corners, but—all that meat in the middle.
What he doesn’t get, though, are the inconsistencies. The date indicated in the statement versus the apparent time of death given in the police reports, based on the amount of decomposition—was the Corruption involved too? Maggots, all that sort of—
The microwave beeps shrilly.
Grinding his teeth in annoyance, Jon retrieves the tea, tucks the crisps under one arm, and heads back to his office.
-
By the time Jon remembers his mug, it's gone well past lukewarm into cold, and is thoroughly disgusting.
He drains it anyway, grabs the nearest tape recorder, and begins dictating the post-notes.
-
Jon sets the paper down and massages his temples.
The file’s as finished as it’s going to get, at this point, and he’s getting rather—
Well.
Hungry.
Jon briefly entertains the idea of opening the crisps, but why waste the time, honestly.
He stands again, grimacing—he really does need to remember to curl up on the floor, at least, slumping over his desk is clearly not doing him any favors—and heads off in search of a statement.
-
He finds one about the Vast.
-
Jon sighs, when he reaches the final word, and lets the statement slip from his still-prickling fingers, which are and aren’t pruney. He presses his hands to his eyes.
That was…adequate, more or less. The craving’s blurrier about the edges, at least, which is something. (Or. Well. It should be. Which means that it is, because that’s how this works.)
(In theory, anyway.)
He sighs again, because no one’s here to hear it—not yet, it’s still far too early, he’s woken—far too early. (Another hour, at least, before anyone bothers venturing into the Archives proper. Likely two.)
He drops his hands back to the desk. The prickling has faded, but the distant shiver under his skin lingers. (Stanford Travs felt the ocean’s chill for weeks after his near-drowning. It returned as he wrote his statement, and remained, Jon Knows, until the very second he died.)
Jon thinks, longingly, of Georgie’s worst and warmest sweater. Fraying at the sleeves, stained with soy sauce down the front, tagless, impossibly soft. Some kind of wool, she always said. Merino, maybe.
It was alpaca.
...Is. She hasn’t thrown it away. It’s still tucked in her drawer, neatly folded. It has a new stain. Ice cream, this time, from—
Jon wrenches his mind back to the statement, the freezing wet, the unfathomable deep.
But it’s too late. Georgie and Melanie passed a tub of chocolate ice cream back and forth three weeks ago, on a therapy night. Georgie was laughing, and her spoon slipped. Neither of them noticed.
Jon spares a moment to be glad that Melanie was in a bright enough mood to make jokes, then tucks the knowledge away with the rest of the useless things he isn’t supposed to know and turns back to the statement.
He rereads it silently, pauses to button up his coat, and sets about taking notes.
A few minutes in, he reaches automatically for his mug—but it’s empty, of course. He’s long since drained it, and it’s not been refilled. Because he hasn’t moved. (Because the cup doesn’t magically refill itself, and never did.)
Jon rolls his eyes at himself and gets back to work.
-
Someone's in the Archives.
Jon freezes, in his office. Early. It’s at least thirty-five minutes too early for anyone to be up and about, but someone is—
Closer, now.
Trying to Know who it is only makes his brain hurt.
But there’s footsteps in the hall and—
Oh.
Daisy.
It’s Daisy. (Must be.) No one else has quite the same gait, no one else shifts a hand along the wall on the left-hand side for balance. So.
The wires in Jon’s shoulders dissolve, and he turns back to the paperwork.
A small thud jolts him out of it, a minute later. Physically. He jumps in his seat before he realizes it’s just a very large stack of files. And then turns, more forcefully this time, back to the paperwork. Dives in, taking notes so fast the ink smears and his fingers stain blue.
There’s some kind of connection here, he thinks, to the Dark. The pitch-black void of the water, maybe, the unknowable depths. But then, what of the funny results on the samples? The indefinable pollution? The Extinction at play, maybe, or just the Corruption, or—?
“Jon?”
He flinches violently, scattering his pen across the desk. “What?” he snaps, even as he registers Daisy in the doorway.
She stares back at him, unimpressed. “No call for that.”
Jon bites back several retorts and retrieves his pen. “...Sorry. Just, you startled me.” Then, hastily, before she can comment, “What did you need?”
“Looking for a file. Think it might be related to—”
“—ah, the Extinction, yes, right, I’ve got it right here.” Jon gathers the relevant papers and stands to hand them over. “Little sparse on broader context, could do with a few more verifiables.”
“...Right.” Daisy doesn’t move. Is she tired? Is she trying to conserve steps? Or is it just about him Knowing again.
“Sorry,” he says, in case it is. “Accident.”
“Mm.” It strikes him that she actually doesn’t want to walk all the way over, just now.
He isn’t sure whether that’s also him or if that’s the steps after all. Takes a gamble. “Uh, here.” He walks over, stopping a reasonable distance away, and hands her the papers.
Daisy doesn’t bother looking over the file to be sure it’s the right one. He probably shouldn’t find that fact quite as gratifying as he does. (And yet.) “Thanks,” she says. “Let you know what I find.”
Jon nods, hesitating on the spot.
Daisy leaves, one hand skimming the wall. (She looks for all the world like Basira, so much so Jon blinks for a moment, wondering at it.)
Twenty seconds later, he blinks again. “Oh, uh—thank you, by the. Way.”
She waves her free hand over her shoulder, already several meters down the hall, and keeps walking.
Jon wonders what that means for precisely four seconds, then shuts the door. There’s still more work to do.
-
Maybe half an hour later—he’s not sure, buried in files as he’s been, time’s sort of slipped him by—Basira enters the Archives, followed by Melanie.
He doesn’t freeze at their footsteps, or flinch at any of the clatter that follows. (He’s been expecting them, and the cacophony is typical.)
He opens the crisps instead, starts eating. (The crunch doesn’t drown out the continued start-and-stop shifting of papers and pens and feet and chairs, but it’s something. And he’s been meaning to eat, anyway.)
-
Jon finishes a paragraph and pauses to shake out his hand. It’s beginning to hurt round the knuckles. (Of course it is.)
He wishes he had a cup of tea to hold. Just for the heat of it, just to shut up his stupid knuckles. (It’s a bad day for them to mutiny. And isn’t it always, yes, sure, but he’s up to his neck in loose ends that lead nowhere right now, with a thousand dangers drawing nearer all the time, and—)
There’s still no tea in the mug at the corner of his desk. It’s still empty. Still hasn’t refilled itself.
He goes back to work.
-
A knock on the doorframe.
Jon doesn’t bother looking up. (The faint pressure round his temples is slowly building towards something approaching an actual headache, and he’s none too keen to find out if it’s crested over into motion-sensitive territory.) “What do you want, Melanie.”
A scowl he can almost hear. “Don’t do that.”
He sighs. Pulls his eyes away from the page, pulls his head up. (It doesn’t pound, which is good, but the motion tugs funny on his spine, which. Well. He’ll deal with that later.) “Sorry,” he says, much too late, trying for contrition and not compulsion. “What do you need, how can I help?”
His tongue crackles with static anyway and she glares as she says, too quickly, “I need the files for case number—”
The number flies into Jon’s head and it’s only by remembering Daisy’s posture and biting his cheek very hard that Jon refrains from blurting it out. “...Sure,” he says, carefully, when Melanie’s finished speaking (not too early, or too surly, or too eager either). “They’re right here. I’ve made some notes, if you—”
“Great, yeah. Give ’em here.”
Jon gathers the file—one, singular, though in fairness to Melanie it was originally three, he’s just reorganized—and stands to hand it over.
Melanie crosses the room and takes it from him. “Thanks.”
“Of—” He begins, but she’s already closing the door behind herself. “...Course.”
Jon listens to her footsteps all the way down the hall, then shakes himself and sets back to work.
-
Jon is still hungry around lunchtime, so he decides to supplement the statement with tea. And maybe whatever else he can find in the breakroom. Man cannot subsist on crisps alone, Georgie says in his head, faux-serious.
He smiles, faintly, and stands.
The smile vanishes as his back strongly protests that move. (Floor, he thinks. He must at least sleep on the floor. Probably just move a cot in here..)
Jon winces as he straightens up fully, then grabs his things and heads for the break room.
Tea first. Rifling through the cupboards next. There’s that pastry, still. And…oh. Granola, there in the back. It’s Melanie’s, though. He shouldn’t. (He could, he supposes, ask. He could.)
(...Best not.)
There’s takeaway, he supposes. Ingredients for a sandwich. Bit of milk.
In the end, he eats three slices of salami straight from the pack, then a slice of bread, and puts his tea in a semblance of order before heading back to his office.
(Calories are calories, Melanie, Georgie says in his head. Jon doesn’t think very much about how he wasn’t actually there.)
-
Melanie is going to visit his office soon.
Jon straightens in his seat and begins organizing the files, in case she wants one of them. Best hand it over tidy, get the whole thing over with as painlessly as possible.
When the files are tidy, he waits a minute or two, then goes back to work.
-
Melanie is going to visit his office soon.
Jon stops muttering midsentence, abandoning his half-lilting narration of various small tasks (“pick up the pens, all of them, and that one, now that one, now you put the caps on, and you just lay them all—”). Busies himself with notes, instead.
-
Melanie is going to visit his office soon.
Jon drinks his tea. It’s cold, and so awful he shudders. (How has he made it worse?)
-
Melanie is going to visit his office soon.
Jon checks the time on his phone instead, and then a few other things while he’s at it. He has no new texts, the world outside the Institute is still awful, and apparently it’s going to rain today. (April showers, he thinks vaguely, as though it isn’t July.)
He tries not to stare at the door.
-
Melanie is going to visit his office soon.
He stares at the door.
-
Melanie is going to visit his office soon.
He grinds his teeth and underlines a sentence fragment so viciously it tears through the page. He scowls, crumples the whole thing up, tosses it behind himself, and starts again.
-
Melanie is going to visit his office soon.
He resists the urge to bite his own hands.
-
Melanie is going to visit his office soon.
He tugs on his hair, sharp, and plays a tape at random. It’s the Vast one he read this morning. He mouths the words as it winds along, runs his hands through his hair, loses himself a little in the ease of it, the not-quite-rhythm to the words. It’s nice, even if the ocean deep gives him goosebumps all over again.
-
A knock on the door.
Jon grinds his teeth hard enough to hurt and does not tug on his hair and does not shout and does not say hello, Melanie or what took you so goddamned long.
Which is lucky, as it happens, because when he looks up it’s not Melanie at all. It’s Daisy.
Jon holds his breath for one moment. Two. Three. And forces his face into something like a smile. (At least, he hopes it’s like a smile. At the very least like a smile in the way Martin’s sometimes were, when—hindsight says—he was actually probably desperately annoyed. And preferably not in the way Tim’s smiles were smiles, towards the end, or—well. He really rather hopes it isn’t anything like Nikola’s, because—)
Jon drops the would-be pleasant expression and tries for neutrality instead. “Dasiy. Did you need something?”
“Yeah. I need you to dig up a statement for me. Number—”
The string of numbers melts together in his ears, but that’s fine, because the sense of it pops into his head crisp and sharp. “Why don’t you go find it yourself.”
She shrugs. “It’ll take me an hour. You can find it in thirty seconds.”
Jon laughs. It’s not, he’s aware, a nice sound. “I really can’t.”
“You really can.”
He considers the last forty-seven minutes, pinged every few about an impending knock on the door that never had the decency to actually arrive, and begs to differ. “I’m a bit busy.”
“I can wait.”
Jon scowls. “Or—”
Daisy is exhausted. (Now that he Knows, he can see it. The bags under her eyes. The pinched set to her mouth. But so what? He’s exhausted too, and busy, and—)
“—you can just get off your—”
She’s exhausted. (So what? Why does he have to be the one to—)
Jon sighs, harsh, and closes his eyes, then opens them again. “...Fine.”
Daisy shoulders away from the doorframe with a frown. (Has she been leaning on it this whole time?) “If it’s really a problem—”
“No,” he snaps. “I said it’s fine, I’ll go.” A pause. He pulls the glare from his face, tries for contrite. “Sorry. It’s really no problem, I’ll go find it.” He repeats the number back to her. “Yes?”
The frown remains. “That’s the one.”
“Right.” Jon stands with a sigh, not batting an eye at the faint pounding behind his forehead, but making a slight face at the lingering ache in his back. Several moments too late, he registers the look of annoyance on Daisy’s face. Probably he shouldn’t be complaining. Clearly, of the two of them, she’s having the worse day. “Might be a bit longer than thirty seconds,” he warns, as he grabs his cane. “The Beholding’s been a bit, uh. Chatty, I suppose you could say. Today.” A terrible way to describe it. Still sounds useful. “Rather distracting.” That’s…sort of better. Maybe. Still not quite right.
But Daisy nods, steps aside to let him through. “That’s fine. I’ll be here.” She nods to the next room.
“Right.”
-
It takes Jon a lot longer than thirty seconds to find the right file. It takes him twenty-six minutes, half of which he spends sitting on the floor in a corner, listening, and the other half of which he spends trying to figure out how to reach the overstuffed box that’s singing pick me, pick me. (It’s more of a draw, really, but....)
In the end, he clambers a little unsteadily up on a pile of boxes and pulls it down. Nearly brings it crashing on his own head, very nearly loses his balance—and what a way to go, Jonathan Sims, the Archivist, taken out by a fall so short it’s really more a meal for the Buried than the Vast—but he manages, just barely, to catch both it and himself, and step down on absurdly shaky legs to sit on the floor.
As he’s sitting there, getting his wind back, plucking the file from the box, Melanie knocks on the door to his office.
Jon resists the urge to slam the back of his skull into the wall. (It won’t help. Maybe with the sudden rage, but not the situation, and certainly not the sort-of-headache.)
He takes several deep and useless breaths, then hauls himself to his feet, pressing a hand to the small of his back and wrinkling the statement in the process.
Okay. Daisy first, drop off the statement, smile. Try not to look like he’s nearly brained himself performing a very simple task because the Institute was designed for the fiendishly tall. (Such as Daisy, the absolute menace. And Tim, once upon a time. And—)
Then Melanie. Try to look vaguely pleasant, a smile might be a bad idea. Ask what she wants. Or—no, ask what he can do for her. Yes. That sounds better.
Yes.
-
If Jon shows any visible signs of the mishap, Daisy doesn’t comment, just takes the paper with a nod and thanks. If she’s angry about how long he’s taken, she doesn’t comment on that either. (She does ignore him the moment the paper’s in her hands, though, which...may well be a comment in itself? He’s not really sure.)
Melanie is at her desk. Jon’s halfway to approaching her before he remembers that he’s not actually supposed to know she was looking for him.
He turns abruptly and heads for his office instead.
There’s work to be done. She’ll either turn up or she won’t.
-
She turns up.
She wants clarification on one of his notes. Apparently it doesn’t make any sense. Which is stupid, because of course it makes sense, he knows it does, he wrote it, it’s not his fault she can’t follow his logic.
Saying so is the wrong move, though. She snaps at him. (Snaps back, a distant part of his mind whispers. It sounds a little like Tim. He ignores it.)
He snatches the paper from her outstretched hand and scans it quickly and.
Okay.
Okay, fine, it’s just that kind of day, apparently. Because she’s right, of course she is, it’s a handful of scrawled words and a couple arrows and some circling and they all read fine, if perhaps a little sloppy—except two of them, when he squints, aren’t actually written in English at all but rather in Sanskrit. Which he can hardly fault Melanie for not understanding, as he doesn’t understand it either, technically. A bastard eyeball just translates it for him, like the Duolingo owl at full power and full impatience.
He translates the words and clarifies a few of the related notes and takes care to scribble it all down in the right language this time, and then shoves it back at her with quite possibly the least sincere apology he’s ever uttered.
Except. He does actually mean it.
Or. He means to mean it. (It’s the same thing. Sort of.) Because it’s not Melanie’s fault and she was right and he was wrong and he knows that and she deserves to hear that he’s sorry, because he is, mostly. In theory.
He just. Doesn’t really feel it, or sound it, and knows as much the second the words leave his mouth.
Melanie, evidently, concurs. She leaves with a very tight, pointed thanks.
He wants to scowl after her, but finds, abruptly, that it takes more energy than he actually has. And also pulls terribly at his face, which is beginning to hurt, behind the eyes. So he doesn’t bother, just sighs, and picks up his pen again, turns it round and round and round in his low-aching hands.
-
Jon tries to get through more research, more tapes, but it’s slow going. He keeps having to reread lines—skipping words, seeing them but not taking in an ounce of meaning, only absorbing the percentage of water used in the ink (ninety-seven point six) and the cause of death of the retail worker who placed it on the store shelf (diabetic ketoacidosis)—and rewrite sentences (missing words, or including them in the wrong languages), and rewind tapes (feeling the words but not hearing them).
Over and over and over.
He pauses in the middle of a paragraph, the hairs on the backs of his arms standing on end as he tastes the electricity which struck the tree which grew beside the one felled to craft the paper under his fingertips.
He swallows uncomfortably, and tries not to think of Mike Crew’s blood all over the ground. Or Jurgen Leitner’s. Or—
He’s seen rather a lot of people bleed all over the ground, it occurs to him suddenly. How many, he wonders. If he ever bothered to count?
He stands, trying not to not-think about it, and makes his way to the door. Out of the Archives. Out of the basement. Down the hall. Out of the Institute.
He isn’t quite sure where he’s going until he’s through the door, into the drizzling rain (oh, it’s raining) and beelining for a familiar alcove and reaching into one pocket for a cigarette he stashed there a few days ago (just one, the last of an old box), and reaching into another for the web-patterned lighter.
It takes a few tries to get the damn thing to light, and Jon blames the rain so he doesn’t have to blame his shaking fingers (useless with cold and exhaustion and overuse and nothing more). When it finally does light, Jon blames his stupid shaking fingers for dropping it to the ground. (It’s more the fault of the number that’s slipped unbidden into his head, though, bright as a Super 8 sign, and much larger. It shouldn’t be, he is pretty sure, fairly sure, even with—recent events. But the Eye is including statements in the blood tally, it seems.)
Jon curses under his breath and winces as he bends down to pick up the cigarette. (Useless now of course, but he can hardly just leave it here. Especially given the Ex—)
Worms on the pavement. Four. Long, pale. Squirming. Inches from his shoes—
Jon stomps on them all in rapid succession and stumbles back before he realizes—pale pink. Not silver. Lumbricus terrestris. Common earthworm, endogeic, descendants of a batch introduced by the groundskeeper for the place across the street (himself long since the victim of a hit-and-run accident)—
He steadies himself on the wall and scowls all over again. Stupid. Of course there are worms on the pavement. It’s raining. That’s normal. They do that, he knows that, he’s seen it before, read about why, doesn’t even need the Beholding explaining (though of course it’s done that anyway, and thrown in facts about decomposition of corpses besides). And Martin’s told him all that and more, too. Probably researched it all in a fit of anxiety after Prentiss. Though maybe not? Maybe he already knew, had read up on worms for fun before the whole ordeal and it was just—on his mind round then, for obvious reasons. Either sounds like him, defender of creepy-crawlies everywhere.
(...At least, he thinks it does. Probably.)
He leans down, one hand still on the wall for balance, and picks up his cigarette, then straightens again, grimacing. Maybe all this bending isn’t such a good idea. Better to sit down.
(Ideally lie down, but if he does that, if he’s idle too long, if all he has to focus on is how terrible he feels and how easy it would be to just—)
(No.)
He shuffles back inside the Institute, shoes now sodden, hair dripping, and glares at the worms he passes on the way. Then at the people glancing sideways at him on his way to the Archives. It’s not like this is the first time he’s staggered in here like a drowned rat. Surely by now they should be used to the sight?
Evidently not.
(One gawker is reminded rather abruptly of their cat, Fredd-with-two-D’s, who ran off last spring. Another accidentally stapled her own hand on her first day at the Institute, and still has the very faint scar.)
He wants very much to slam his office door behind himself, when he gets there.
He closes it quietly and deliberately, instead. Leans back against it, eyes shut. Considers sliding to the floor, just for a few moments, just til he’s got his breath back and got warm again and got his head screwed back on straight. (I’ll get over it, he thinks, in a voice that isn’t Sasha’s. I’ve just got to be dramatic first.)
Jon opens his eyes and goes to his desk and does not think about Tim saying the same thing, twice as bitter. He does not wonder if Tim also remembered Sasha memeing. (If he does, he might Know.)
He thinks very hard about paperwork. (His head pounds faintly with the effort of it, an effect which he pointedly ignores. There’s work to be done.)
-
Melanie and Daisy are not working. They’re talking.
Jon can’t quite make out what about, their voices aren’t quite loud enough for that, but they’re loud enough to be heard, and no amount of tapping his fingertips on the desktop Basira-style or humming under his breath a la Martin is drowning it out.
He should really buy a pair of headphones, he thinks, for the hundredth time. That would probably help. (But also, if he’s got a playlist going at top volume, he’s inevitably going to fail to hear someone or something he shouldn’t, and he can’t rely on the Eye to let him Know before it becomes a problem, and—)
He’s not going to buy a pair of headphones. He’s going to sit here and be annoyed instead. Maybe go out and tell them to shut the hell—
No, that involves moving.
...He could shout at them to shut up. No moving required.
...But his head throbs at the very idea. Just as well. If he did, the others would be—
—and now there’s a third voice from the next room, tinny and muffled. They’ve got someone on speakerphone. It’s not Basira (she’s gone out, yes, but her phone’s off), so must be Georgie. (It isn’t, he thinks, somewhere between dry and bleak, as though they have any other friends anymore.)
Jon runs his hands through his still-damp hair. And again. And again. And one more time. Shakes out the loose strands clinging to his fingers, rubs his hands together. They’re a bit cold. Maybe he should make more tea.
...No, that involves moving, too. Never mind. They’ll warm up soon with the rest of him.
For now.... He scrubs his hands over his dry face.
Work. He’s meant to be working.
-
Georgie’s still on speaker, and loud enough to be intelligible now. She’s making her grandmother’s pasta for dinner tonight. (Daisy lost her maternal grandmother when she was two. Heart disease. One of Basira's grandmothers died twelve years before she was born in a terrible accident.) Melanie is expected, Daisy is invited. (Melanie has therapy in two days, Daisy has physical therapy tomorrow.)
He traces the edges of the paper as he reads the first paragraph of notes. Starts over halfway through because Melanie laughs (and hasn’t in almost a week). Starts over again when he gets to the end because he’s retained none of it and also has a papercut. Starts over again after a single sentence because the lamplight’s too loud.
Droning, and a bit crackly, and a lot shrill. Like—Peter Lukas, if he were a mosquito, and in a way he sort of is. (Bloodsucking parasite, Tim says in his head. Needs a good slap, Basira agrees. Gertrude once said something so cutting about Peter that Elias felt like he’d been slapped.)
Once again, Jon considers and dismisses the relative merits of purchasing headphones. Scrubs his forehead a bit roughly, as though doing so will lessen the dull weight behind it. But it doesn’t, of course, and the light doesn’t get any quieter, so at last he reaches up, stretching horribly, reminding himself in concept altogether too much of the NotSasha, and pulls the little chain, shuts the damned thing off.
It...helps, some. It’s not silent, the others are still talking and he’s still breathing, but it’s...flatter. Emptier. And his eyes hurt less.
Almost funny how much a relief that is. Definitely funny it’s a relief at all—shouldn’t being an Avatar of the Beholding make him, he doesn’t know, immune to eyestrain? Or something? That should be a perk, he feels like. He’s pretty sure. It makes sense.
Basira would agree, if she didn’t hate his abilities so much. The logic’s pretty sound and, and besides that it’s sort of funny, and she likes when he’s—
(—Wait. Since when does she think he’s—?)
(...Oh. Since always, apparently. That’s—well.)
Martin, Jon thinks, casting his thoughts as far away from that as they’ll go, and not landing very far off at all. Martin would agree, too, if—
Jon allows himself enough melodrama for precisely one performative sigh. He wonders, vaguely, what Peter’s got Martin up to just now. Filing, maybe, or...something.
...Hopefully filing. Or answering emails, or...something like that. Something safe.
Static prickles in his ears, unbidden. Rises soft and recedes, then returns again, a bit louder, like the roar-and-crash of ocean waves on a walk down to the beach. It’s pleasant, for a moment. Familiar, in a warm sort of way. Then—screeching feedback, three violins in beginners’ hands, two radios mistuned—five microphones pressed against each other and held there—all at once.
He bites back several curses fit to make a sailor blush. (Or vanish on the spot, if the sailor in question is Peter Lukas, who did much the same fourteen years back after an incident involving Elias, two rather colorful words, and one standard office stapler.)
The number of violins increases to six. One set of hands is swapped out with the Distortion’s. (Michael Shelley held a violin, once, but has never actually played. Helen Richardson watched someone play, a handful of times. The Distortion has never done either of these things, and would almost certainly struggle to hold the bow without slicing right through it.)
Jon finds himself pressing his hands to his eyes, hard. As he considers the image of Helen attempting to hold a bow—somewhere between grotesque and grimly amusing—the number of violins drops from six, to five...to three...to one. Then zero, the world awash in static once more.
Then there is silence. (The others, it seems, have finally shut up. Presumably because Georgie’s hung up and gone to start the water boiling.)
He grants himself one more melodramatic sigh, slides his hands up into his hair, runs them through once, twice, before turning his attention to the statement at the edge of his desk. He just read one this morning, he shouldn't. Certainly doesn't need to, not yet. But it might be relevant to the notes he's been reviewing, and honestly if it makes the headache go away—
He has to feel for the corners to pick it up properly. When he does, he stares at it for a moment. The very faint wash of off-white in the dark. The blur where thin, spidery handwriting should be. The large ink splotch under his thumb, distinguishable only by the odd, wrinkled quality to that section of the paper, the funny feel of it on his skin.
A tape recorder clicks on, and he blinks.
And then laughs. A short sound, quiet. A little breathless.
Typical, he thinks.
And he begins to read.
-
“...Statement ends,” Jon says, and clicks off the tape. He doesn’t feel much better, but that's hardly too surprising. He’s already resigned himself to the fact that it’s never going to stop. He’ll just feel less and less revitalized every go-round, with shorter and shorter breaks from it all until—)
Jon shoves the thought away. Gertrude didn’t need statements every few minutes. (But then—)
Jon shoves that thought away too, begins taking undoubtedly messy notes on what he dimly hopes is a blank sheet of paper. (At the very least it’s not a statement, and in the end that’s all that really matters.) Thoughts of Gertrude and her skill and cleverness and humanity, relative to his own, creep back in, ever so slow, itchy and faint like a hand brushing his the small of his back, like web-strands on his upper arms. They’re jarred right back out when Daisy laughs, the next room over.
For a moment Jon’s furious at the noise, the intrusion into his work, then dimly glad—it’s good she’s laughing, it’s good she’s happy, and good Melanie’s in a decent enough mood for the puns again, even if they are terrible and she should be ashamed of herself for missing the far stupider one involving—
Daisy laughs again, and Jon groans and slumps over the desk, forehead flat to his notes and splitting from the inside out.
If she could just—stop. Just—go be happy somewhere else, and leave him in peace and quiet to work and—and, yes, okay, and be miserable. What of it. It’s been a long day, surely he’s earned an hour or so of uninterrupted sulking while he plays at being an Archivist.
...Though he’s not doing terribly much archiving, at the moment. Just. Sitting. Face-down. More self-pity than Archivist, really.
But. But maybe he’s earned this, too? The sitting, at least. Bit of a break. He’s been at this over twelve hours. Surely he’s earned a few minutes of rest...?
...Maybe more than a few. Maybe he can get some sleep, like this. Just a bit. Just—some. Ten minutes, maybe? Fifteen? It’s hardly something he should do on the job, of course, but—well. What’s Elias going to do, Jon thinks, for the thousandth time. Fire him?
He’s too tired to laugh, but the Tim inside his head does it better anyway. (Short and bitter in a way only he could ever manage.)
...No, Jon thinks. No, he’s not going to try for sleep. Isn’t sure he could if he tried. There’s so much to do, and bending over like this is ruining his back all over again anyway. So, so no, he’s not. Not going for that. He’s just...going to sit here. For a while. Is all. Just...for a while.
And he does. Slumped over, forehead going a bit sticky on the paper beneath it, spine protesting louder every minute. (Thinking vaguely of tea, steaming, hot.)
He turns research round inside his head, over and over, and tries to fit the pieces together. He’s nearly got it, he’s close, if he can just—figure out— (Something in the names, some connection—the friend shares a partner with Onven, who once contemplated throwing himself off a building, which means—means—)
Thunder crashes overhead.
The thread dissolves, and is replaced with a vivid image of Mike Crew, dead on the ground. Mike, and blood, which makes him think of Michael, stabbing him through the wrist. Which makes him think of Helen. Which makes him think of a sweeping wave of things all tangled and knotted and precisely the texture of damp seaweed in dry sand. (Inasmuch as thoughts can have textures.)
Corridors and compulsion, favors unearned, and a string of names that doubles back on itself to cover Melanie several times before reaching—
Jon swallows. He tries to think of Mike Crew again, bloodied and still, but all he gets is Georgie, alone in her flat last week, editing a segment of audio about supernatural events that were, for once, very very real. (She suspected as much, and was correct in her assessment that discussing them on the podcast would not harm her. This is almost comforting.)
“Jon?”
He just barely stops himself from snapping What do you want, Melanie. Opens his mouth, grinds out, “Yes?”
“Oh, you are in here.” She sounds thoroughly unimpressed as she opens the door. (Her first boss stole paperclips from work and helped cover up an attempted murder.) “Thought maybe you’d gone out. Should’ve known better.”
“Mm.” He pushes himself upright, wincing both at the inconvenience of being vertical again and at the light streaming in from the hall behind her, over-bright after so long in darkness.
“Why are the lights off? You hiding?”
“No.”
“Moping again?”
He scowls. He doesn’t—it’s not as though he’s ever made a habit of sulking in his office. (Well, says a voice in his head, drawn-out and skeptical and sounding altogether too much like Martin. Shut up, he tells it.)
Melanie flicks on the overhead light and Jon flinches at its pale green cast.
“Off,” he snaps.
Another click, and it’s dark. “Sorry,” Melanie says. He can’t tell if she sounds it. Probably not. “So...headache, then?”
“No,” he says sarcastically.
She ignores him. “Bad one?”
He doesn’t answer right away, because he’s not. Quite sure? It...does hurt, of course, but the main thing is—his eyes. (Hot and tired and stinging, before, and now, after the godawful light, positively aching, like he’s been weeping for hours, or reading by candlelight. Which would make sense, except he hasn’t been reading so much as...just sort of Knowing what the statement says, word by word, as he goes.)
He sits up a little straighter, turning that over in his head, and oh, god, right, yes, there’s that as well. His back. He should probably do something about that. Painkillers, a lie-down. New spine from Jared.
“Jon?”
He jumps. Grimaces, because fuck and embarrassing and Melanie’s frowning at him so he’s probably gone and made her angry again. Probably because he’s ignoring her. Because she asked him a question.
...What was the question?
“Well,” he says, to buy time, and the Beholding beams it straight into his brain. (He definitely hasn’t just remembered naturally. The first time round he definitely missed the carefully-curated concern and repressed desire to turn on her heel and march right out. He also had no idea that she lost her keys in February last year and—) “I’ve never heard of a good one.” The words are several degrees sharper and more derisive than he intends, and they don’t even do anything to quell the flood of Knowing, which continues right on through (—had to pick the lock on her own front door to get inside, and was terrified all the while that someone might pass by and think she was breaking and entering and—).
Melanie bristles. Then forcibly relaxes, and Jon Knows that more than he sees it, and Knows she’s copying this too. (It’s a pause-for-breath stolen from her father, a very intentional patience, a chosen grace, which she first saw clearly at the age of twenty-three, after—)
He presses his hands to his eyes, hard, and swallows harder. Please, he thinks.
“...Right,” Melanie says, after a pause that lasts precisely four seconds (the number her father favored was five, actually, but Melanie always counts a hair too fast). She forces a laugh. “Ask a stupid question, I guess.”
“Mm,” he says, though he wants to say It wasn’t that stupid and I’m sorry (though he isn't, really) and Can we start this conversation over and For the love of god can you just turn off the hall lights and Your father was a good man and I will hand you my spleen on a silver platter for a cup of tea and some painkillers. It’s much shorter than all of that.
“Is it a.” He is aware, without looking, that she gestures vaguely to the ceiling. “...Thing?”
“Thing?”
“Eye thing. Are you hungry?”
“Oh. No.” At least, no moreso than usual. A proper statement would no doubt help, but he’s got absolutely no urge to ask Melanie precisely what happened when the Flesh attacked. The very idea makes him feel a bit ill, actually, which is odd but probably a good sign for his moral compass. “No, I’m just...had two today. Took it a bit out of me, I think.” In a way it hasn't since...he isn't sure. When did they stop exhausting him? Sometime after Prentiss, but....
“You think.”
“That’s what I said,” he snaps, shoving as much irritation into it as he can muster, which is. Rather a lot, apparently. Until he Knows a passerby stepped on a worm outside the Institute, and then it's gone, and he’s just a bit squeamish.
“Right.” Melanie sounds stung.
He just barely restrains from asking whether that’s all she can say. Clings to the last shreds of tact he’s got. Very pointedly counts to three instead of four, and then says, “Sorry.” But it just comes out waspish again, so he puts his head back down on the desk with an audible thonk that does him absolutely no favors.
“Whatever.” A pause. “I just came in here to let you know I’m heading out. Georgie’s.”
His chest does something complicated at that, something he can’t follow. “Mm,” Jon says, and squints up.
“You should probably go lie down,” she says, approaching the door. (Amid a stack of evidence on her desk is a flyer for a missing dog. The flyer is seven years old. The dog was never found.)
He’s halfway to snapping that he has thought of that already, actually, but. Tired. “Mmm,” he offers instead, disgruntled as he can make it.
A small laugh, which he’s too tired to pick apart. She turns back round. “Is that all you can say?”
He resists the urge to repeat the sound. “...Yes,” he says instead, layering it with as much sarcasm as he can muster.
A more genuine laugh, and it tugs something in his chest that shouldn’t be there and he’s biting his tongue again before he knows it, resolutely ignoring the fog that sometimes curls at the ankles of the elderly man who works in the canteen (whose muted divorce, as of today, now sits at twice the length of his lively, decade-long marriage).
“Right. Okay. Well, I’m off.”
He readies himself for another nonsense humming sound in place of a goodbye—
“Take some painkillers.”
“Fine,” he says. He doesn’t bother reiterating that he isn’t hungry or asking where the painkillers are. It’ll only prolong what’s already been an entirely too extensive conversation. (And he isn’t. Precisely sure. Whether he’s hungry or not, suddenly. He doesn’t feel hungry, but it’s not as though he’s the best at noticing that sort of thing. Just because the supernatural kind’s historically been easier to identify doesn’t mean it’s always going to be. Maybe today’s just—)
“Maybe lay off the statements.”
“Fine.” He resists the urge to stick his hands in his hair and tug sharply. (Not in front of Melanie. Not in front of Melanie. Not in front of—)
Melanie turns and walks rather briskly away and Jon thinks Finally, and Good riddance, and he opens his mouth to mutter one of those just loud enough to be heard—
But she’s round the corner and gone.
He slumps forward, tugs on his hair hard, just once. Then just runs his hands through. It’s greasier than it should be, makes the motion less than pleasant, but he doesn’t stop.
It’s...something to do. Makes his hands hurt a little less. (Helpful.)
Jon sighs. It’s loud, in the quiet.
Which it is. Quiet.
Melanie’s puttering round much softer than usual as she packs up her things, murmuring to the others. (And it is a murmur. She’s keeping her voice down, finally. Even though she’s mad at him. And with good reason.)
“Jon?”
He startles violently, chair screeching against the floor, hand pressed hard to his chest. Glares up at—Daisy, because it is Daisy (just her).
“Sorry. Too loud?” She tilts her head to one side, considering. “Melanie said you looked rough.”
“This is just my face.”
The corner of her mouth quirks up. “Hah.” A split-second’s pause. “You hungry?”
Jon scowls. “Why does everyone—I’ve had two statements, I’m fine.” He’s prepared to argue the point, but Daisy just nods.
“I know. Heard you through the door.”
“Then why—”
“I meant food.”
“...Oh.” Jon rubs at his temples. “Right. Yes. Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” A pause. “So?”
“Huh? ...Oh, er. I don’t know. Maybe.” He throws in a painful shrug. “I’ll get something in a bit.” He won’t.
Daisy very clearly knows this. She’s not making the skeptical sort of face Georgie would, or the disappointed one Martin would, or the smug-indifferent one Elias would, but she has a...vibe, all the same. “Okay. Well, I’m ordering now, so what do you want?”
“Ordering…?”
“Thai,” she says too quickly.
(Oops. Although, hang on—) Jon furrows his brow. Why is she ordering Thai?
“I know you’ve heard of takeaway, Jon.”
“Well, yes, but I thought—” Fuck. He’s not supposed to know that, is he. “Uh. I, uh…”
“Thought I was going to Georgie’s.” It’s not a question.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean, it just sort of—” He gestures limply.
“I figured. Chatty, you said.”
“Very.”
“Mm. Anyway, thought about it, but I’m not.”
Jon has a sudden, terrible suspicion. “Is this a safety precaution?”
“Yeah, but also Basira’s on her way back, so I’m waiting.” A pause. “And I like Thai.”
“...Oh.”
“Yeah. So.”
“Of course. Er. Good. That’s...good.”
Daisy rolls her eyes. “Yeah. So what am I ordering.”
“Oh, uh, you don’t—”
“Jon.”
“I, um. Doesn’t matter. Anything’s fine.” A pause. “Well, nothing with—”
“Basil, I know. Not going to poison you.”
“Not your MO anyway.”
“Preferred the gun,” Daisy agrees evenly.
Jon laughs, and a moment later wonders if that was a very good idea.
But Daisy’s smiling, kind of, and she did just make a joke, sort of, so. Probably fine. “I’ll go order. You should lie down.”
“In a moment,” he says, sharp.
“Suit yourself.” And she’s gone.
He closes his eyes so he can’t watch her go, but he still knows when she clips her shoulder on the corner at the end of the hall.
He sighs. It would be too much to hope for the Eye to give him anything useful. “Something about the Extinction, maybe?” As though saying it aloud will change anything.
(Most moths stay in their cocoons for anywhere from five to twenty-one days. During which time—)
He slumps back in his chair and wonders if he’s only imagining the smug edge to that particular stream of Knowledge. (Probably. Can green even conceptualize smugness? Certainly it can conceptualize fear, in some sense, but that’s...life force. Smugness is...it probably doesn’t factor.)
(...Does it?)
Jon massages his temples. Doesn’t really matter, in the end. (And the Eye’s definitely not green, anyway. If it’s a color at all, it’s orange, halfway between sunset and neon. He’s going to stab it.)
(Or feed it, he thinks, hyperaware of the statement that burns at his elbow. One of those.)
-
He doesn’t read the statement.
He packs it up instead, with the rest of his papers and things. Into a pile. Then a neat stack. Then a bag. (Daisy is now the only other person in the Institute.)
Then he stands. Bag. Cane. Door.
-
Jon stares at the cot. One part distaste, one part longing. (Three parts Martin spilled tea there on five separate occasions, and alcohol on just one other.) Collapsing in a dramatic heap sounds unbearably nice.
Just. It also sounds unbearable, full stop. The motion of it. The impact. The texture of the material—polyethylene terephthalate, first synthesized in North America in 1941, here imbued with tea and alcohol and blood—against his hands, his face. (Normally perfectly tolerable, now a grievance.)
He sits on the cot slowly. His spine doesn’t burn with the effort, but his legs do. Obnoxious, that. He’s neither walked nor sat excessively today. A reasonable balance—Smirke would approve. (The blood was B positive. The spilled tea was cold, twice.)
He lays down, not bothering with the blankets purely out of spite for the borrowed shiver that runs through him, and wonders what kind of tea it was. Chamomile? Was Martin trying to sleep? Did the tea spill because he managed it? Or did he get busy writing poetry? Or was he just lost in thought? Or anxious, maybe? Busy checking the room for worms? Did Martin ever check the edges of rooms for worms? Did Tim? (Or was that just Jon. Just him, so paranoid an actual jar of ashes on his desk served only to cut the number of worm patrols in half rather than eliminate it entirely.) Did S—
Of course not. (A cocoon is not the same as a chrysalis. Caterpillars liquefy in their chrysalises.) But—
Daisy, the Beholding informs him, is the only other person in the Institute.
He wants, pointlessly, to roll over—as though he can petulantly face away from the Eye. He closes his eyes. It dulls their ache, some. Sets slow-warping patterns in his head. For a moment, he’s dimly grateful they aren’t fractals, but then, of course, the next they are. He keeps them closed anyway.
Tired.
The pillowcase hasn’t been washed in several weeks. Daisy is the only other person in the Institute. Moths typically stay in their cocoons for up to twenty-one days.
He thinks, a bit vaguely, that he stayed in his own for six months.
He shoves it out of mind. Wonders what Martin is doing. (Peter Lukas once—)
Again the screeching static. He presses his face into the pillow until it passes. When it does, thankfully quicker this time, his head throbs. The fractals throb with it, painfully bright, and it’s almost a relief to open his stinging eyes.
He lays there a while longer, trying to think of nothing in particular so he can just. Sleep.
But no.
No matter how still he lays, how heavy his eyes get, his mind won’t shut off. The Beholding won’t shut up. Things drift in and out, new and pointless and so frequent but irregularly timed as to be—extremely irritating. Who cares how many times that contents of that particular box have spilled in the hallway? Who cares if Daisy is the only other one here? Who cares how embarrassed the newest filing clerk was three years ago when she accidentally tripped and fell face-first in mud just because she thought she saw a shadow move, even though no one was around and it was three in the morning? Who cares how many meters there are between Jon and the door? What does any of it matter?
He sits up, after a while. It hurts, but so does laying down, at this point. He’s more ache than spine.
Jon leans back against the wall and counts sheep. He gets to fifty-seven without learning a single thing about sheep, though he does glean a scrap about the history of spaghetti sauce. There’s a connection there, he feels, but he’s not supposed to be red-stringing, he’s supposed to be sleeping.
Somewhere along the line, he begins to drift. He doesn’t sleep, not properly, and the Knowing doesn’t stop, but the door in his head gets a little more distant, a little more fuzzy, and the things slipping out from under it even more scattered, even more sporadic, until….
-
Jon jolts back to awareness. Daisy’s on her way.
He blinks rapidly and, oh, no, actually, she’s already here, shutting the door.
He straightens, swipes sleep from his eyes. He hasn’t been sleeping, not really, not properly, but they haven’t gotten the memo, it seems, and now isn’t the time to be groggy because if she’s here instead of with Basira then something must be—
“Jon?” Her voice is soft. Not remotely urgent. “You awake?”
Tension builds in his shoulders. “Yes.”
“Good. Can I turn the light on?”
“...Fine.”
A soft click, and there’s the lamp, and he braces himself, but the light doesn’t hurt. (Probably because it’s not green or flickering.)
Daisy’s hand is still on the switch. “This okay?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She moves away, sits down across from him. “Here, dinner.” She passes him a styrofoam box.
“Uh…” There’s no polite way to ask what she’s doing. Or to ask without, well...asking. That he can tell. But he has to try. “...Basira. Is, um. I thought you were…?”
Daisy doesn’t quite meet his eyes. “She texted. Found a lead. Won’t be back for a while.”
“Ah.” A long pause. Daisy eats three bites before he realizes he’s staring, and another two before he remembers there’s something he’s supposed to say, here. “...Sorry. I know you, uh….” There are words for it. They escape him, mostly.
Daisy just shrugs. “Duty calls.”
“...Right.”
“Meantime, more for us.”
“Could save her some.”
“More for us,” Daisy repeats.
“...Okay.” Jon opens the box. It smells utterly unappetizing. He begins to eat anyway. It tastes fine. Neither appealing nor revolting. Mostly just...there.
A few minutes in, Daisy pulls out her phone. “Do you mind?”
Is she going to call Basira? (She should really charge her phone, it’s at thirty-two percent and his skin is crawling. He never lets his own below forty-five if he can help it.)
He starts to say so, then remembers—he’s supposed to be answering. “No, of course, uh. Go ahead.”
She doesn’t need telling twice. There’s a bit of tapping, and then—not ringing. Instead, a very familiar theme tune.
Oh, he thinks vaguely, taking a nearly-too-strong bite on autopilot. Okay.
Daisy says nothing more.
And so they sit, and they eat, and they listen to The Archers.
Well. Daisy eats and listens. Jon picks round the carrots and lets the noise-rumble wash over him, mostly. Distantly accepts the fragments of not-quite-context that trickle in alongside, files them away.
Zeroes in, after a while, on the feel of a fork in his hand. Plastic. Oh, biodegradable though. That’s nice. Although….
He gives Daisy a confused look. She has chopsticks, herself. Which means...something, probably. Means he should be indignant, maybe? He knows how to use chopsticks. Daisy has seen him use chopsticks. But indignance takes energy, and he’s rapidly run out of reserves, so….
So he just takes another useless bite instead. Another. Shoves the carrots to one side again. (Intolerable. If one ends up in his mouth he’ll gag.)
Several carefully curated bites later, he nearly gags anyway. He’s not consumed any carrots, but the whole thing is—it tastes too much of itself, now. He can’t manage anymore. May be sick if he tries.
So he sets the rest down on the floor, brings his knees up to his chest for warmth. (Sealed against drafts or not, he’s always found this room a bit chilly.)
“Done?”
“Obviously.”
“Better?”
He considers. Headache still there. Still bone-tired. Kind of fuzzy. But...full, at least. (In one sense, anyway.) Which is something. “...Yes.” Then, belatedly, “Thank you.” He tries a smile.
“You don’t look better.”
He sours. Struggles for a response.
She frowns back, and it sends his heart rate spiking. “You look ill.”
“I’m...very tired. Been a long week, and Martin, uh...he may have had a point about the medical inadvisibility of replacing sleep with statements.” It’s a very long sentence, and not nearly as funny as it was in his head.
Daisy hums. “Want me to go? Let you get some rest.”
No. “...Suit yourself. I’m just going to…” He trails off, gesturing at his pillow.
“I’ll hang round, then. Want me turn this off?” She holds up her phone.
“Don’t care.” He closes his eyes.
“Okay.” A pause. “Ruin your back sleeping like that.”
“Go to hell.” But he lies down.
“You’re welcome.” There’s humor in her voice.
He grumbles a little more, tugs the blankets, rather painfully, up over his shoulders.
“Goodnight, Jon.”
Another grumble.
She laughs, a little, and there’s a few quiet clicks, and then the only sound is The Archers, now faded to a quiet murmur.
Jon tries to follow it, for a while, but tracking the words falls in short order to tracking their up-and-down rhythm, which falls to thinking about poetry, which falls to thinking about Martin, composing mediocre scraps in this very room, perhaps on this very cot, in the hours between work and sleep.
He wonders if Martin had enough blankets. It gets chilly in here, sometimes, he knew that even then. But he never thought to ask. Not once, in all that time.
He should have. (There are rather a lot of things Jon should have.)
He tries to put it out of mind. Slide back into the inanity of Daisy’s favorite pastime, let it lull him to sleep.
-
After a while, he drifts, not quite asleep, not quite not. Flashes of things play out behind his eyes, and stretches of soft, rumbling static overlay the murmur from Daisy’s phone.
It’s pleasant enough. Like all the world’s on pause, and there’s only this. The thousand tiny aches distant, the lingering malaise only intermittent, something soft in the fog of it all.
And then there are waxworks.
-
Jon jolts awake, a strangled noise in his throat.
He reaches wildly round himself, searching for he-doesn’t-know-what—until he finds it on the floor beside the cot, already warm and whirring, and his already-strained breath catches and—
Where, where—
Also beside the cot, spare flashlight, in case of the Dark. Click on, search, look—
Empty room.
For a moment that’s reassuring (no threat, nothing wrong, just a dream), and he sags against the cot, shaky and limp. And then he remembers.
Daisy.
Daisy was here. He doesn’t recall her leaving. She must have, though, and—and the recorder’s still running.
Jon swallows. He spares half a second for guilt, then gathers his scattered thoughts as best he can and concentrates—where is Daisy.
Nothing.
He tries again, more pointedly, forcefully, and hisses at the flare of pain he gets for his efforts. (The half-gone headache, returned and redoubled.) Still nothing. He can’t. He can’t See her, and the recorder is running, and—
He pushes himself upright shakily. If he can’t Look for her, then he’s going to have to do it the old-fashioned way. Grid search, then—oh. He slumps against the wall. He’s being stupid. He’s—where’s his phone?
He pats himself down, finds it still in his coat pocket. Fishes it out with trembling hands, clicks the screen on—
Yes, there’s a text. Relief threatens about his shoulders, but he holds it back til he opens the text, reads it. It’s—from Daisy, and says—exactly what he expects. She’s headed off to bed. Basira’s back. See him in the morning. Text if he needs anything.
His shoulders sag. He reads the text four more times before letting out a very long, slightly shuddery sigh. She’s—fine. It was just a dream and the recorder—the recorder just coincidence.
The Eye probably just wants him to record a statement. Or something.
He considers the ones in his bag, a few meters away, and slumps further. The wall’s like ice on the back of his neck, and the bag is much too far. And he’s already eaten, anyway.
Abruptly, Jon has a terrible suspicion. He leans forward, snags the tape recorder, hits play. For a long moment, there’s nothing. Then—
Ah.
Jon listens, dully intrigued and faintly embarrassed, to his own terrified mumbling for a few moments longer, then turns the recorder back off. He doesn’t generally talk in his sleep. He can see why it may have—must have—appealed to the Beholding. Something new, involving fear intrinsically connected to the other Entities.
Unless there’s more to it. Unless something else is meant to happen. Unless—
He cuts that line of thought off. Focuses on the phone in his hand, the text Daisy sent. (Bit odd, being on the receiving end—he’s the one prone to midnight wanders that drive Daisy to terrified fury, not vice versa. But...nice. That she thought to try.)
He wonders if Daisy let Basira know she was texting him. (Probably didn’t have to. They almost certainly have a similar arrangement.)
He closes his eyes, drowsy again, and tries to sleep.
-
Can't.
Painkillers might help. It’s not bad enough to really merit them, but he's tired enough that he doesn't care.
After a while, he forces himself up. Then sits there for several minutes. Then stands, hating everything, and grabs his cane, and makes his slow, painstaking way to the breakroom, shuffling his free hand along the wall as he goes.
He’s horribly thirsty by the time he arrives, so, water first. Then painkillers. Bit of trouble with the safety mechanism, fingers too stiff, eyes too blurry to line up the arrows properly. Manages, in the end, shakes out two. Takes them. Tucks the bottle in his pocket, as an afterthought.
Makes his way back.
Finally, finally sleeps.
-
His dreams are not his own.
-
Jon wakes with dust on his tongue and a chill deep in his bones. He thinks, for one bleary moment, of tea. It would chase both complaints away in one fell swoop. Maybe he can ask—
And reality sets back in.
He swallows past the dust and pulls the blankets tighter round himself. Tries not to think too hard about the fact that teacups possess no automatic-refilling properties. (Not even the ones in Artefact Storage. And there are precisely seventeen in there, all of which do possess a number of rather fascinating properties—but not that one.)
He bites the inside of his cheek to keep from groaning. (The small spike in his temples is rapidly fading, but the knowledge of what happens to the hands of anyone who holds the blue polka-dotted cup may just put him off tea entirely for the next six weeks.)
He shudders, just a little, and tries to pull the blankets even closer, tuck his feet differently so the air doesn’t get in, but shifting only makes him colder, and sets his back complaining again. (Duller than before, except round the shoulders, but still not particularly pleasant.) So he keeps still.
Ducks his head under the covers, a while later, hoping for more warmth. But it’s just a bit harder to breathe, really, so he slips back out with his best weary, put-upon sigh. It’s very loud, in the near-silence.
Then so’s his breathing. And his heartbeat.
Is this how it is, he wonders, in the Lonely? How it feels when Martin slides towards it, this jarring sort of noise? Or is it muffled, instead? (The impression has varied, from statement to statement.)
He isn’t sure which is better, which is worse. And he wants to stop wondering about it, so he rolls over. (An effective distraction, as it makes him cold all over again.)
He wallows in misery, for a while. (He’s allowed. If there’s ever a time for dramatics, it’s three forty-seven in the morning, when no one is around.)
-
Jon snaps to attention. (Maybe he’s been sleeping, maybe he hasn’t, doesn’t really matter because—)
Footsteps in the hall. Daisy? Basira? Someone else? (...Martin, on a late-night wander?)
He holds his breath. Listens. (If it’s Daisy the footsteps will be off-rhythm, if it’s Martin they’ll be slower, if it’s Basira she’ll be tracing the wall as she goes, maybe tapping it, and if it’s none of those then—)
...But no. There’s nothing. No sound at all, no one there. The hall’s empty, he Knows it. (And the Knowing doesn’t even hurt. Must have been sleeping after all, must’ve done him good. Or else the meds have kicked in. Probably both.)
Jon exhales. Okay, well. Good. No intruders, nothing to worry about. He can go back to sleep.
He ignores the slight sinking in his chest. Tamps it down. (It’s soft, loamy soil, says a voice in his head. Would you like to plant a berry?)
The voice sounds like Martin. (Martin, Jon knows in the lowercase sense, plays Pokemon entirely wrong. His team composition is absolutely atrocious, and he doesn’t bother monitoring berry quantities properly either.)
He shoves the mess away more firmly, because now it’s all tangled up in memories of one rather bizarre afternoon spent discussing the extremely dubious acceptability of playing Pokemon Go on company time, and the relative merits of Oshawott versus Snivy, and it’s making him want to drag himself to his office and also slam his head into the wall, both of which sound less than strictly ideal at present. (The headache might be gone, but he’s still very tired.) So.
The sinking fades, but his thoughts circle back round to that afternoon again and again and again, and to Tim’s expression when they walked through the door discussing the best moveset for Raticate—mortifying at the time, of course, but in hindsight....
...God, he’s being maudlin.
Part of him thinks he’s earned it. Another is disgusted (all those years mocking Martin for his rose-colored glasses and here he sits). Another reminds him, for the thousandth time, that he is very, very tired.
Go to sleep already, he tells the lot of them, and adjusts the blankets again.
-
Eventually, he drifts. Sometimes asleep, others not, mostly just—vaguely somewhere in-between.
-
Daisy is awake. It’s five o’clock.
-
He’s cold again.
-
A vast expanse of gravestones.
-
The janitor has seen the edges of no fewer than one-hundred-and-sixty-seven supernatural events over the course of his sixteen years working for the Institute. Three of them were in this room. He survived without being properly marked by anything other than the Eye because…?
-
Basira is awake. It’s five-twenty.
-
A house burns, the wood turning to cinders.
-
He’s thirsty.
-
There’s an earring in the box in the corner. It’s Gertrude’s, and has been there for seventeen years, ever since…?
-
Daisy is awake. It’s five-forty.
-
Jon stares at a sickly yellow door.
-
The headache is back.
-
It’s five fifty-two, Michael Shelley once took an ill-advised nap...somewhere, and laying down hurts.
He sits up. It’s not much of an improvement, but at least different. (And he can see the door better like this. Which is nice.)
-
It’s six o’clock. Jon should get up. It’s a reasonable hour now. There’s tea to be made. Statements to read. Fears to eat. All that sort of...thing.
So he should get up.
He should.
-
It’s six twenty-seven.
Jon stands, leaning heavily on his cane, and heads for the breakroom.
-
He winds up in his office instead.
Considers turning round, once he realizes, and heading back, making tea (if he doesn’t get caffeine in his system immediately, he’s going to die), finding something which passes for breakfast—
—sits down instead.
After a few minutes spent getting his breath back (another one of those days), he sets his bag down and starts arranging his papers. (It’s a bit difficult. His arms are heavy as a cast-iron skillet, and his hands about as stiff.)
He manages, though. Settles into the rhythm of sorting, loses track of time.
“Hey.”
He jumps. His head, predictably, throbs, but he ignores it, squints in the direction of the voice.
Basira, standing in the doorway, arms crossed, looking thoroughly unimpressed.
“Basira,” he says, and swallows. (God, he’s thirsty. Probably shouldn’t have skipped tea.) “Did you, er. What can I—um. That is, I—”
“Don’t hurt yourself,” she says dryly. “Saw the light on. Wanted to give you an update on the—”
“—lead you found last night, yes,” he says, straightening up rather painfully. “Daisy mentioned.”
Basira frowns. “She’s been with me all morning.” (Basira’s kept a very close eye.)
“She, uh. Texted.” Jon fights the urge to pull out his phone. It’s...embarrassing, how much a reassurance it was, and he doesn’t really want to show her.
“Sure,” Basira says, obviously unconvinced, and Jon fights the urge to throw the phone at her. It won’t help, either. “Whatever. Anyway. I was saying—”
“Sorry.”
“—I wanted to give you a quick update.” A pause. “Thought I had a line on Annabelle. Didn’t go anywhere.”
“...And?”
The headache blares, drowns out the start of Basira’s answer.
“—five hours on another dead end.” Basira frowns again. “Not much more to it, don’t have a statement, so there’s no point trying to drag it out of me.”
“...Right.” He presses his hands to his eyes. “Sorry.”
“Whatever.”
There’s a pause, which drags so long he looks up, half-convinced she’s left, but no, she’s still there. Still frowning at him. “What?”
There’s an unsettlingly long pause before she answers. “When’s the last time you had a statement.”
“Last night. I’m not going to go—” He casts about for the right words. “Hunting, or anything.”
“Sure.” There is a key in Basira’s pocket. “Go back to bed, then.”
“...What?”
“You’re ill.” Daisy has a matching key.
“I’m just tired,” he says. And, because it worked before, he tries a wry, self-deprecating smile. “Martin may have—”
Basira’s face shutters (her cousin, hyperexpressive and constantly embarrassed about it, always envied her ability to go blank at the drop of a hat) and Jon shuts up.
“Deflecting isn’t working,” she says. “Go. Sleep it off.”
“It’s just a headache,” he begins, defensive, “I can still—”
“Maybe yesterday. But now it’s a fever, so.”
Jon blinks. “I don’t have….” He trails off, considering. Tracing over the past few hours, the previous night, the previous day. His current physical state. (Exhausted, aching, more than a little chilled.) Tallying this and that experience, marking them up, filing them away. Then he blinks again, looks away, embarrassed. “Oh. I didn’t, uh....”
“Funny. Beholding didn’t tell you that one?”
“No.” An awkward smile. “Everything but, feels like.” He thinks something about kitchen sinks, and then his whole brain is there is mold in my drain, and he sort of wants to scrub himself clean on the spot. “Um. Exaggerating, of course.”
“Lovely.” She once daydreamed about decking the same Detective Inspector for three months straight. “Anyway, you. Out of the office. Now.”
He’s a little touched at her insistence, and is on the verge of finding a way to non-awkwardly thank her for it and assure her that it’s not so bad, that he’ll take a fever reducer or two and get back to work, when—
“You’re contagious. Don’t need everyone down for the count.”
“Oh,” he says. “Right. Right! I’ll. Sorry, I’ll, I’ll go. Just let me, uh…” He gestures at his desk. “I’ll take this with me.”
“Don’t bother,” she says. “You’re not getting any real work done. Not like this. Just sleep.” A slight pause. “Need you on your feet, yeah?”
“...Yeah,” he says. “Um. Yes. Quite. I’ll...see myself out, then.”
“Good.” Basira nods, taps twice on the doorframe, and walks out.
Jon does not watch her leave, and does not think of all the other times she’s tapped on that doorframe, or how she used to smile faintly as she left. (It’s not three in the morning anymore.)
Instead, he busies himself gathering up his papers and putting them back in his bag. (One part autopilot, one part distraction, and two parts spite.)
Then he slings it over one shoulder and leaves.
-
Jon plans to get work a little work done before crashing, he really does, but his body's gone heavy by the time he makes it back to the cot, so he just drops his bag on the floor and has a lie-down.
After a few minutes, he registers that he’s terribly thirsty, and should probably find something to drink. (Dehydration can’t be helping the fever. Also, he’ll need the water if he’s going to take more paracetamol. He hates swallowing it dry.)
There are water bottles in here...somewhere...he’s sure. There’s a water bottle somewhere, tucked beside the box containing the death certificate of a man named Herbert Higgins. Whichever one that is. (And whoever that is.)
He could get up and look, he supposes. He should. He will.
He doesn’t.
-
The door opens.
Jon startles so violently he feels dizzy, has to close his eyes. He can’t quite stop himself from groaning.
“Oh.” Daisy, moderately surprised. “You’re awake.”
A small click. Colors behind his eyelids. Pain. It takes a moment to connect the dots—she’s turned on the little lamp. (Energy-saving bulb. New. Bought three weeks ago.)
Footsteps heading towards him. “No better, I take it.”
He shrugs. Efforts to quantify his suffering are pointless and will only make his head throb obnoxiously.
“Right. Well, here.”
He holds out a hand without looking, expecting pills. He gets an unbalanced armful of heavy, scratchy something instead. It falls to his lap with a thump.
He pries his eyes open. It’s a blanket. Old, rough. Hand-made. Knitted. Possibly wool? Romney-Shetland blend. That’s why it’s so coarse.
“It’s for you,” Daisy says, in a tone that tells him he’s being dense.
He nods distantly. Then her meaning actually registers, and he frowns down at the blanket so he won’t frown at Daisy. There’s a loose string at one of the corners. It might be nice to fiddle with. But. Probably best not. With his luck, he’ll pull it wrong and unravel the whole thing. Best leave it alone. Wouldn’t want whoever made it—Basira’s grandmother, four years ago—to….
That can’t possibly be right. (Why would Basira—)
...Really can’t possibly be right, actually. Her grandmother died of lung cancer ten years ago. He's positive. It slipped into his head three weeks back and he couldn't look her in the eye for a solid six hours, certain she'd somehow Know.—
“Are you going to use it or just scowl at it?”
Oh, right.
He unfolds the blanket mechanically, lets it rest on his lap. He runs his fingers over the stitching, carefully avoiding the loose end at the corner, though it draws his eyes like moths to a flame, and his fingers like…like something else similar, he supposes. Cliches all the way down, except he’s too tired for them.
“...Right,” Daisy says, and he starts, mind torn away from sea turtles live to be— “Okay. Well—”
“Thanks,” he says awkwardly. “For the—” He winces at himself, tries very hard not to say delivery. “—this.” He meets her eyes directly. The smile he tries feels oddly stretched, so he lets it drop. He wants sincere, not alarming.
Daisy shrugs, glances away. “You looked cold last night.”
Jon blinks. “Oh. Uh. Yes. Probably the fever?”
“Yeah. Mind if I check that?”
He minds very much, actually, but he shrugs. (It’ll take, what, five seconds? He can put up with a bit of awkward physical contact for that long. He’s done it before.)
Daisy stretches out a hand, and Jon—flinches. Hard. (Mistake, he thinks. Apologize.)
“Okay,” Daisy says, flat. “So you actually meant no there. Fine. Drink that.” She points to a water bottle beside his cot that wasn’t there a minute ago. “Get some rest. Text if you start dying.”
He tries to piece together the words for an apology, tries to get his stupid breathing back under control, because it’s gone a bit start-and-stop. “I’m—” he begins after a few moments, but the lamp’s off and the door’s closing and she’s gone. (Beelining for the tunnels.)
And it’s quiet again.
He leans back against the wall, rewinds the conversation. And again. And again. And….
-
Jon’s mouth feels like the Sahara, and Daisy gave clear directions, so he tries to open the water bottle. His hands won’t cooperate. The grooves on the lid hurt. (An assistant once sat in the breakroom and used their thumbnail to break the little segments of the seals, one-by-one. The same thumb had been broken a number of years before.)
This seems useful information, for once, so he tries it. Then he realizes his fingernails are far too short, and gives up, resigning himself to a very slow, unpleasant death.
-
Jon lies down.
He still isn’t comfortable, but at least he’s horizontal now. That’s something.
-
He decides that perhaps a slow death isn’t for him after all. He sits up, retrieves the water bottle, and disappoints his grandmother by using his teeth to open it. (The monster pig’s teeth were sharp enough to cleave flesh like butter. It was rarely so tidy.)
He gets through about half before he decides that’s probably quite enough and sets it back down, the lid not entirely fastened. (Once again disappointing his grandmother.)
He lies back down.
-
Jon pulls the blankets tighter about himself.
The one from Basira bites at his hands and scratches the bottom of his chin. It’s probably making him at least a little warmer, though, even if it doesn’t feel like it, and it was a gift. So he ignores it. And ignores it, and ignores it, keeping very still so it can’t brush against his skin.
But then he’s restless and shifting and twitching and it hurts, so he curls up completely under the pile, so only the bottom one touches him.
But then it’s stifling and hot and muggy and all he can’t breathe right and has to poke his head back out and the wool scratches a line down his neck and it makes him want to claw at his skin.
He shoves it away. Then is immediately seized with the desire to push himself up and fold it properly. Maybe set it on one of the boxes instead of...half on the floor, or wherever it is. If Daisy sees, or Basira, for that matter—
But she won’t. Neither of them will. They’re mad at him. (And Basira is taking Daisy to physical therapy.)
And moving hurts, anyway, so he leaves it be.
-
Jon shivers, but doesn’t retrieve the blanket. It's not worth it.
-
Jon thinks, vaguely, of paracetamol. He should probably take some. The dose from last night is bound to have worn off by now.
He starts to reach for it, fumbling, and then lets his arm go limp. The damn safety cap. He can’t very well open that one with his teeth, and there’s no way his hands are going to cooperate with him right now. Not a chance in hell. (Still stiff, and like as not they’ll be shaking too, and neither is exactly conducive to unnecessarily complicated pieces of—)
He should try anyway, though. Give it a go. He’ll feel better, if it works. He’ll feel better. (Or maybe if he asks the traffic warden down the street about their aunt’s disappearance—)
He slides his arms back under the covers and wraps them round himself, instead.
-
The sweltering heat of flames inches from his skin—
-
Footsteps?
...No, no one’s there.
-
The rush of wind, almost as loud as the blood roaring in his ears—
-
Jon wants the Admiral.
-
Shifting, shuddering things in the dark—
-
He wants—
-
The awful, acrid smell of wasps and ants and worms—
-
Jon wakes up to his pulse pounding in his temples and something squashing him down, burning his neck.
For a moment he thinks Wax is remarkably easy to mold and can’t breathe—
But no, no, no, the room is. Is empty. And silent. No breathing, no recorders whirring. And it’s not—actually that kind of burning.
He touches the spot with a muggy frown.
Ah. It’s...blanket.
He exhales, pushes the thing to the floor, frowning, struck with muzzy deja vu. Hasn’t he already…? Didn’t he just—?
He has a fever, he Knows abruptly. (Is that the answer? Has he just got more chilled than he thought, reached for it again without realizing? Or is he just so feverish he’s confused, only imagined pushing it away? Or…?)
He shoves it out of mind, curls up small under the remaining blankets, and tries to go back to sleep.
Eventually he has to wake up feeling more—
Feeling better.
-
Soil, comforting, soft—
-
Jon wakes up dizzy.
He sits up, a little shaky, and tries to open the paracetamol. It isn’t nearly so difficult as he expects, but he still doesn’t bother recapping it afterward. (Save his future self the concern.)
He finishes most of the water, sets it back also-uncapped.
Lies down.
-
He dreams again, and for once they’re his own. Everything in them squirms.
-
He wakes distinctly unsettled, but headache-free, and significantly less freezing. Fever’s down.
He has about fifteen minutes to stare at the opposite wall and enjoy this, and then the door opens, and there’s—Daisy? (She’s been talking to Basira.)
He sits up, slow. (The headache remains mercifully absent, but his spine’s still bitching.) “...How was, uh.” There’s something. She’s been somewhere. Where…? “Physical therapy?”
“Fine.” She tilts her head to one side. “You seem better. We’ve got full sentences.” Her voice is light, but her smile’s just a touch mocking.
He returns it thinly. He’s—earned that one, he supposes. “Yes, quite. And, ah, as to that.” He fusses with the blankets while he sorts out the phrasing and screams at himself for saying anything at all, because he really doesn't want to talk about it, really wants to just pretend it never happened, but Daisy's obviously angry and— “About earlier,” he begins.
Daisy’s smile disappears. “Stop.”
“But—”
“Stop.”
Jon stops.
“We can have whatever this conversation is later.” A pause, as Daisy visibly softens herself. “When you’re well.”
Because he appreciates the effort—and not at all because he’s drowning in relief and much too exhausted for a conversation about feelings—Jon swallows his instinctive urge to point out that she’s just said he seems much better. “...Okay.”
Daisy nods and looks away. As she does, her expression hardens again and Jon wants very badly to ask if she’s angry with him about this morning. (...If it was morning? May have been afternoon by then. May be evening by now. He’s not. Actually sure. What time did she have physical therapy again...?)
“Um. What—” His mouth goes very dry. “What, uh.” He swallows. “I’m...curious what time it is,” he says instead, to the box in the far corner and not to Daisy. (It’s. A harmless question. But the thought of accidentally Asking twists his stomach in knots.)
A long pause, and he feels Daisy staring at him like she knows exactly what he’s just not-done. “...Little past noon,” she says eventually.
“...Ah,” he says. It feels like he’s been sleeping much longer than that. But, well. He’s hardly the best judge of the passage of time on a good day. “Okay. Well, I suppose I should—”
“Get some sleep?” Daisy nods. “Good idea. Here.” She stoops and picks up the blanket from the floor, hands it to him.
“...Thanks.”
“Something wrong with it?” The sentence rings like a trap swung shut.
He freezes, tongue-tied. How’s he given himself away this time? He opens his mouth to ask (he has to Know, so he can avoid it in the future), then—course-corrects, as his mouth goes dry again. “N-no, of course not. Thank you. It’s—lovely, I appreciate it.” He spreads the blanket on his lap and tries not to touch it any more than necessary.
“...You’re lying.” Daisy sounds—surprised? Which throws him for a loop.
“I’m not, I really do appreciate the—the gesture. It’s. It means a lot.” His face feels very hot, and he thinks, fleetingly, that it would be rather nice if someone would come along and just—fling him into a pit. (He hears graves are rather soothing. Embarrassment can’t eat you down in the soil. Or can it? Would the Buried and the Eye simply share the table…?)
Daisy’s got her eyebrows raised. “Then what’s the problem. You allergic to wool or something?” (Daisy, to her own knowledge, isn’t allergic to anything. Her father discovered an allergy to alder trees at the age of...of...mid-to-late-forties?)
“No.” (Stupid. That would’ve been a good lie, an easy lie. Say yes, say it itches. Say the Eye’s healing is the only thing keeping him from breaking out in hives right now and he doesn't want to risk prolonged exposure. Simple, easy, unlikely to be questioned, very likely to assuage any and all suspicions in other directions. But he’s already said no, like an idiot.)
Daisy frowns. “Then what.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Bull.”
“Nothing!” He swallows. “It’s not important, I—” He shifts, scowls past her, but his heart’s not really in it and he’s uncomfortably certain it shows. He clears his throat, reaches for his water bottle, takes a sip. “I just, uh. I don’t like how it. Scratches.”
“Oh.” Daisy’s expression clears. “Like a texture thing.”
“...Yes?” A pause. “Yes. That’s...one way of putting it, I suppose.” Moderately applicable. Concise. Less revealing than the alternative. And apparently some kind of...known thing? Handy. In any case, he’s stealing the phrase now.
“—rent one?”
Jon blinks. “...Sorry?”
She rolls her eyes. “Simple question. Yes or no.”
“I, uh—” He scrambles to cover the fact that he didn’t hear all of it. He—can surmise what it may have been, and answer based on that, but he isn’t sure, but she’s half-glaring now, he doesn’t really have much choice but to guess. “Uh, no?” He pauses. She gives no indication he’s said something unexpected or odd, but also gives no indication that he’s given the correct answer. Great. Well—in for a penny…. “No,” he says more firmly. “It’s fine.”
“Mm. Suit yourself.”
“I...will?”
“Okay. I’m gonna go. Got to track down a thing related to one of Dekker’s statements.”
He opens his mouth to ask about it, but she’s already at the door.
“If I see you out of this room I’m dragging you right back in.”
“...And if I need the bathroom?” he asks, half-derisive, rather than point out that she can’t, actually, because. Well. It’s not as though he could do much to fight off her efforts. Collapse like a load of wet paper, the pair of them.
“Not my problem,” she calls over her shoulder.
-
Jon doesn’t bother trying to go back to sleep. He’s too awake, too uncomfortable. Too thirsty.
So he finishes off the water bottle, and then pulls a few spare statements out of his bag.
None seem to want to be read aloud, particularly, so he skims them, sets them aside, and turns his attention to the statement he abandoned yesterday. He pulls out his notes and begins to add to them.
It’s quick work. Speed-reading through the old familiar words, jotting down questions and theories and old half-remembered statement numbers to cross-reference later. Or at least, it feels like quick work.
But when he’s gotten through everything he can manage without the usual reference materials and tucks the mess back away, he realizes three things:
One: his feet are asleep. Two: his back is beginning to hurt again. And three: he is very thirsty.
Wonderful.
He shifts his feet out from under himself, hissing. When he can think more things than ow, ow, fuck, ow, he crosses problem one off of the list.
Then he turns sideways and slips off the cot to solve problem three. Tracks down the water bottle (actually two of them, as it happens), and the prepackaged muffin he finds beside it (Melanie forgot it a few days ago), and brings them all back to the cot. Sits down. Opens both at once, using his teeth, just to have done with it, and places one on the floor.
Then he sips from the other for a while, until the water tastes too much of water. Opens the muffin, takes a couple of bites. Sets it aside.
Then he pulls the another four pages out of his bag and gets back to work.
-
One of the statements calls to be read aloud.
He reads it unstumbling, though his tongue feels a bit like lead, and when he’s through his throat is very dry. He clears it a little self-consciously, helps himself to more water.
Turns back to the statement, pulls out a fresh sheet of paper, and begins to take notes, a little faster this time, because this is fresh, this is new, and there are obvious connections, and he can’t risk losing them if the fever comes back.
(Not, he knows, that it’s strictly ever gone away. It’s been lingering ever since Daisy left, in the slight soreness of his eyes, the now-dampened twinge in his back, the barest wash of heat that’s made him shed his blankets. But it’s been...quiet. Low-grade. Ignorable. If it really returns—)
He takes notes a little faster.
He pauses to wring his hands out, because they ache, just faintly, takes another drink, sets back to work.
-
When the notes are made and the connections outlined in full and speculation relegated to the very-crowded margins, Jon squints at his handiwork.
“...Good enough for Sotheby’s,” he mumbles, in a cadence very much like that of one half of the being that called itself Breekon and Hope. Then he grimaces at himself. Then resists the urge to grimace again, because that kind of. Hurt. His face. Skin’s too tight.
Probably due more pills. Or. Is he…? He frowns fuzzily. It’s—he glances at his phone—one thirty-two, apparently. And Daisy was here a bit past noon. And his last dose was…?
He can’t remember. Sometime between...before twelve? So—probably a bit early for more. Probably best wait. (Although, he supposes dully. Not as though he can poison himself, probably? He’ll just—heal, won’t he? ...Though on the other hand. He’s not magically healed from this. It’s been half the day and he’s still…. Although. Who’s to say the Eye hasn’t been helping after all? Perhaps this illness is much worse for non-Avatars. Perhaps he’d be knocked totally flat, if he were still human. Perhaps….)
Jon leaves the pills alone and turns back to his mass of notes. Surely there’s something more he can do with them…?
But. No, not without a visit to Artefact Storage. (There are seventeen teacups in Artefact Storage.) Or someone to talk them over with. Or the statement sitting in a drawer in his office, in the middle of a stack discarded weeks ago as irrelevant and suddenly seeming very useful indeed.
He contemplates sneaking back to his office. Retreiving it. He doesn’t doubt Daisy will keep her word if she finds out he’s got up, but—well.
The key word there is if, isn’t it?
...No. He’s being stupid. She’ll find out, she’ll—smell him, or something. Just sort of Know, even though that’s supposed to be his thing. And. Besides. His office is rather a ways away, and that’s a lot of effort for something that’s only going to get him shouted at.
And he’s. Really not in the mood for shouting. (Is lucky, as it is, that Daisy hasn’t already. Rude as he’s been.)
So. Later, perhaps. For now he can just...sit, he supposes.
-
Sitting, it turns out, is boring.
There’s nothing to do, and staring at the walls only makes his eyes hurt, makes him want to close them. But if he closes them, he’ll sleep, and he doesn’t want to do that. He’s been doing that all day, had enough nightmares, watched enough nightmares, and it’s—it’s—
(He has a fever.)
It’s not the fear, or the waking up frozen, or the waking up not-frozen-at-all (two very different kinds of horrible). It’s—
He frowns at himself, rubs his eyes blearily. It’s the…something. Probably.
Georgie would know, he thinks, and the Eye tells him again that he has a fever. He wonders how she’s doing, and it tells him about late-nineteenth century knives.
(A little disconcerting, he thinks. Which is probably the point. If there is one. But at least it’s new.)
-
Jon pries his eyes open and is immediately, resolutely sure that he is dying.
Dehydration, he thinks, prying his sandpaper tongue from the roof of his mouth. He feels like he’s been in a desert and tried eating the soil. (Altogether too reminiscent of the Buried.)
In a word: horrible.
He fumbles hurriedly for the water bottle beside the cot, pushes himself up to a half-sitting position, takes a few shaky sips. They don’t help. He’s still thirsty, still tired, still—dying.
...Probably not dying, he thinks. He’s been dying before. Just once or twice, he thinks, with no small amount of humor, dry as the inside of his own mouth. And his eyes. And his skin. (If he moves, he thinks, it’ll crack like old dry paper—and wouldn’t Nikola just hate that.)
Jon raises an arm. His sleeve falls to his elbow. His arm stays intact. He drops it again, vaguely disappointed.
After a moment’s thought, he scratches a line down his arm with one of his fingernails. Not hard enough to really break the skin, but hard enough to leave a mark, for a while. Another moment’s thought, and then he makes a matching one on his other arm. There. Balanced. Lovely.
He thinks of Robert Smirke, and then of Tim, and he scratches several more lines on his left arm, ruins the balance. Then feels stupid and pushes his shirtsleeve back down.
Takes some pills, doesn’t think too hard about their chemical composition or the unfortunate financial circumstances of the person who bagged them in the shop. Drains the rest of the water.
Lies back down flat, kicks the blankets away.
-
Jon doesn’t bother sitting up, just drinks. Manages not to choke.
Archivist two, Buried zero, he thinks, somewhere between dry and hazy. The Eye offers something about false oases in the desert, something with the Spiral, but Basira’s grandmother’s handiwork itches so much he can’t make sense of it.
(In the back of his mind, more in concepts than words, he wonders—how did a dead woman make a blanket?
(Pity she’s dead, he thinks vaguely. There's a statement there. Must be.)
-
Jon struggles upright, pushing the covers off.
Too hot. Much too hot. And he’s thirsty again, mouth too dry, tongue too big. He reaches for the water bottle, hands trembling, and heat floods his face as his stomach lurches.
He—swallows. Hard.
Okay, he thinks faintly. Not actually thirsty. Nauseous. He swallows again. Very.
An awful stretch of slow breathing later, the feeling fades. Not gone entirely but—quieter.
He sighs, shoulders sagging, and swipes a hand down his face. Finds it clammy, his fingers buzzing.
Stupid. Should’ve realized. He’s never that thirsty normally. Forgets water exists half the time. He just thought—the fever….
He sighs again, and scrubs his face once more, trying to force color back into his cheeks, brainspace back into his head. No use, though. Gives up.
Decides, instead, to make the noble sacrifice of moving. He needs to get the bin. Christ, he hopes there’s a liner in it.
There is, it turns out, when he drags himself over to it. And several scraps of paper as well. (Poetry. Not Martin’s. More recent, someone else.)
He scrunches his eyes shut against a flood of information—poets, collection titles, publication years, all inspiration for whoever’s been writing bad poetry down here (couplets, of all things)—and very pointedly is not sick. Staggers back to the cot and lies down.
-
Sleeping doesn’t work.
Jon half-dozes, a few times, but is continually jolted out of rest by scraps of useless, vaguely unsettling information.
Every time it happens, he feels worse.
-
Another dream. Another bolt of headache, surge of not-actually-thirst.
Jon reaches for more water, but before his trembling fingers even connect he knows it won’t work this time, so he changes course, leans over the side of the cot, face over the bin, and lets it happen.
When it’s over, he shudders and stays put. He feels...not finished. Very not finished.
But several minutes pass without repeat performances, so he sits up. Carefully. Scrubs his watery eyes, reaches (wincing) for his water, and the bin, and rinses, spits. Haphazardly washes his face.
Then, because he’s not stupid, he makes himself drink some more before setting everything back down and trying to sleep.
-
It works okay, for a while.
Well. Not really—he’s tense, he’s tired, the door in his head won’t stay closed—but he manages to keep his stomach in check, at least.
Until he doesn’t, anymore.
-
There can't be anything left, but still he hovers over the bin, untrusting.
He almost nods off like that.
Rouses himself long enough to finally set the bin on the floor, and pick up the water bottle. He glowers at it before, very, very slowly, finishing it off.
Then he sits a little longer. And a little longer. After—who can say how long, he decides he’s probably safe, for now, and lies down. Pulls up the terrible blankets. Sleeps.
-
Jon wakes disoriented and dizzy and horribly aware that he’s about to be ill. Rolls over, finds the bin—god. (He can’t cut off his finger to literally save a life, he thinks between bouts, but he still has to deal with this? That’s just—that’s just....)
He hangs there, half-off the cot, for a long minute after, just. Breathing. Trying not to shudder, skin prickling with cold.
(He has a fever.)
More medicine would probably be a good idea. Maybe tea. Lower his temperature, calm his stomach, soothe his raw throat.
But what a waste. Even water won’t stay down, and he’s out of that anyway.
So—later. For now—
He shifts back on the cot and shivers, thinking of Tim’s electric blanket. (He tried to Know how Tim was once, and all he learned about was that damn blanket. Green, and three years old at the time, and very well-used.) He wonders whatever happened to it, if it might still be in the Archives somewhere—gets a flood about the Institute’s architecture.
He rolls over to be sick again.
-
He thinks, a bit longingly, of the few inches of air above toasters, when they’re in use. Seat buckles in midsummer. Very fat cats.
He curls smaller under the blankets and amuses himself by imagining what might happen if he texted Georgie demanding to borrow the Admiral.
The vision isn’t amusing for very long, so he abandons it, and resigns himself to life without a personal, purring space heater. Life as an icicle. An Archiv-icicle. Achiv-ice-t? Archiv….
-
Noise.
Jon burrows deeper in the blankets, tries to get away from it.
Something tries to pull the covers away, and he clings—no use. They’re pulled off his face. He makes a noise of protest, clings tighter, and whoever-it-is at least doesn’t pull them away entirely.
More noise.
He furrows his brow, trying to puzzle out the sounds. It’s like being in a crowded supermarket. There’s a lot of roaring. He thinks it might be his own blood, in his ears.
...Daisy? He pries his eyes open.
...Not Daisy. Basira.
Jon tries to sit up, because she has a look on her face like they need to talk. (He’s gotten very good at recognizing that face. She wears it all the time now.) It takes him a couple goes, but he manages, leans back against the wall. “Sorry,” he says. (He’s not quite sure what he’s apologizing for, but, well. There must be something.)
Basira ignores him. “You’ve been sick.”
Jon stares at her. How does she know that?
Noise. It takes Jon a moment to register the sound as Basira having kicked something.
He looks down, and. Ah. The bin, yes. He probably...should’ve made an effort to clean that up. “Sorry.” He's more embarrassed than actually sorry, but it still seems the thing to say.
She looks annoyed, and turns, and for a terrible moment he thinks she’s going to leave—but she just walks over to the table, retrieves a glass of water, and walks back. “Drink this.”
He really doesn’t want to, but she’s doing that thing that isn’t a glare but passes for one, on her, and he’s thirsty, so he does. Slowly. Until he can’t anymore, and has to hand the glass back. “...Sorry,” he says, tongue thick. Is vaguely annoyed with himself. He means thanks, but that one’s harder to reach.
She ignores him. “Have you had anything to drink all day?”
He points to the bottles on the floor.
Confusingly, that just seems to make her more annoyed. “Any medicine?”
He waves in the general direction of where he left the painkillers.
Unsettlingly, that seems to make her angry. “Any food?”
He’s about to shake his head when he remembers the half-muffin still sitting...somewhere on the floor, probably. Gestures vaguely at the space beside the cot. Then, after a pause, to the bin.
She’s far too still and Jon is suddenly, viscerally certain that she is furious. He has no idea why, and trying to puzzle it out sends a spike through his skull that makes him think he wasn’t trying to puzzle so much as Know, and that.
Jon swallows.
That. Yes. No. He can’t be having that.
When Jon pries his eyes open, Basira’s staring at him. “What about statements.”
He says nothing. Then motions to his bag.
Her mouth presses into a thin line. She picks up the bag, rifles through it, nods to herself, and slings it over her shoulder. “Was it any help.”
He tilts his head to the side, nonplussed.
“The statement. Did it make you feel any better.”
He doesn’t know what the right answer is, and his reckless impulse to Know turns up only information about longhair cats, of all things. “...Thirsty,” he says truthfully, as his head pounds. It had made him terribly thirsty.
“...Right. Okay. Well, I’m going.”
Going? Where? Out on recon, or just...away?
“You stay here.” She takes the glass and hands it to him again.
He furrows his brow as he takes it.
“That’s for drinking.”
Yes, I know, he wants to say. I’m not completely stupid. But his mouth won’t cooperate, and then she’s gone.
-
He manages two thirds of the glass before he has to put it away and lie down. Something like a success, there.
-
There’s noise again. Voice. Voices?
Jon forces himself upright again. The blankets fall down to his lap, and he squints, bleary, dead ahead.
“Down here.”
He blinks, blearier, and looks down, and there’s Daisy, cross-legged on the floor. His eyes track hazy across the room, and oh, there’s Basira too. Standing, though. (She’s owned those shoes for six years. Has repaired them four times.)
“...Hi,” he says.
“Hey.” Daisy nods at him. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you.”
Jon shrugs.
“Feeling any better?”
He shrugs again.
“That’s a no, then,” Basira says.
Actually, it’s a shrug, he doesn’t say, because before he can she’s shoving pills and a glass of water at him. He’s too tired to pull a face. Just does his best not to gag as he takes them, or drop the glass as he hands it back.
“Sleep,” Basira says.
“I’ll be here,” Daisy adds. A pause. Then, with faint humor, “Not like I’ve anywhere else to go.”
He tries a smile. (Daisy has so very many places she can go. One of them is in Scotland. The others are—are…?)
“—n?”
He starts. Struggles to focus on Daisy’s face. Stares at her hair, instead. (Just after the Buried, Basira sat her down with a pair of scissors and—)
“Jon?”
He blinks. Stares at Daisy’s forehead this time.
“There you are.”
“He’s really out of it.”
Is he? ...Maybe. Maybe. He does feel a bit...woozy.
“Want to lay down?”
Jon considers for all of two seconds before concluding that what he really wants is another drink—so probably if he moves even a single centimeter he’s going to vomit.
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t risk opening his mouth to answer, either. Just half-glowers at Daisy and makes a short sound that’s almost a hum but mostly a groan.
“The bin?”
A shorter sound that he hopes tracks as please. It must, because the bin’s pressed into his hands in short order, and oh, it has a new liner. Vaguely embarrassing.
“You want privacy or a distraction?”
Yes, he thinks, a little helplessly, half a second before he is violently sick.
As he tries to catch his breath, after, Basira clears her throat. “You done?”
“Mnnh.” He grips the bin tighter. (The plastic is firm under his fingers, and its polymers contain only aliphatic carbon atoms in their backbone chains. Apparently.)
“Here.” Basira, with the glass again. “Rinse, at least.”
He does.
She nods, curt, and takes the glass back to the table. “You’ll need to try the meds again.”
He makes a face.
“Not yet,” Daisy says.
Basira crosses her arms. “Soon.”
“Soon. But not yet.”
Basira nods, curt, and Jon. Relaxes, fractionally. Loosens his hold on the bin, lets Daisy tug it from his grasp. Pretends he can’t hear her footsteps crossing the room, the snap of a new bag unfurled. Bites back an apology.
Droops forward, a little, eyes slipping shut, and wraps his arms around himself. Partly to keep his insides in, and partly because now the rush of heat has passed he’s gone a bit cold again.
Something settles heavy over his chest and shoulders. Jon flails weakly before it registers—blankets. Now fallen about his waist in his—he’s not going to call it panic. (The Eye tells him the biological processes involved in the fight-flight-or-freeze response, but it’s a bit muddled with Basira’s staring, which is, somehow, louder.)
“Uh. Sorry.”
He looks at her, wishing he could physically manifest question marks around his head. Like in cartoons. Express confusion without asking any questions.
...Oh, Basira’s talking. He should listen.
“—warned you. Try that again.” She’s picking up the blankets.
Jon shrinks away, but she sets them round his shoulders anyway. The wool scrapes at the underside of his chin. Its bulk pins him to the cot. He tries not to shudder.
“Better?”
He pauses, one hand creeping out of the blanket stack to peel the outer one away. He tucks it back again, subtly as he can. Shrugs-and-smiles for yes, because nodding sounds awful.
Basira nods. “Right. Maybe now we—”
“Oh.” Daisy slips alongside Basira, sets the trash bin—with, yes, a new liner, Jon notes dully—on the ground near the cot. “Really, Jon. You look like you’ve been stabbed.”
He feels like he’s been stabbed. And he’d know. Oh. And she'd—now he thinks about it, sort of. Probably that’s the point. She’s making a joke. Oh, is that why Basira used to—
“This is stupid.”
“What’s stupid.” Basira’s frowning.
Oh no.
Jon tries to catch Daisy’s eye, convey shut up, Basira doesn’t need to know Jon hates this thing of hers—this impossible thing her dead grandmother can’t have made but did, somehow, that maybe, now he’s thinking about it, maybe means a lot to her? (He isn’t entirely sure how other adults feel about their grandmothers, but he gathers they’re generally more attached to them than he ever was to his own, so—so probably. Rude. More rude than just disliking an ordinary blanket. And will maybe hurt her feelings, or worse, make her angry with him again.)
“He hates the texture.”
Damn it.
“And the weight, I think.”
...What? No, that’s not right, he likes heavy things. Georgie always used to laugh at him, call him a big cat, going boneless when she used him for a pillow.
“...one, but he decided to play tough. Figured I’d let him.”
Basira blinks. Then nods, just once. “Right.”
She steps forward, brisk, and Jon only manages to keep from flinching because he closes his eyes and goes very still the moment he sees her move. Which. Is a kind of flinch in itself, really, but maybe Basira won’t have noticed that.
There’s tugging, and a prickling that means someone is standing to close and when he opens his eyes again there’s Basira, pulling the top blanket away from his shoulders and stepping back, something tight at the corners of her mouth and oh she has definitely noticed and Jon should feel bad about that but mostly he can breathe again.
(When did he stop?)
She folds the blanket methodically, sets it down on a box across the room, turns in a half-circle—and then leaves. The door closes very quietly behind her, but his teeth still rattle like it’s slammed. (...Oh, no, he’s just shivering again.)
Daisy curses.
Jon offers an apologetic noise as best he can through his now-gritted teeth.
“No, not—” She growls, a little. Then sighs, harsh. When she speaks, though, her voice is soft. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
A skeptical half-laugh, as he glances at the door.
“You didn’t,” Daisy repeats. “She’s just—been stressed.”
Another half-laugh, strangled this time. Been stressed. Yes. Haven’t they all.
Daisy shoots him a sharp look. Jon stares at his knees before he catches more than the edge of the glare.
“She has. She’s—”
He makes an apologetic noise again, just to shut her up. (It isn’t that he disagrees, exactly. Of course Basira’s been stressed. Of course it’s having an effect. Of course that bleeds over into social interactions, sometimes, and it’s not intentional. But just now Jon doesn’t have the energy to actually care. He’s expending what little he’s got trying not to dwell on the soft sound of the door clicking shut.)
(The door used to squeak rather horribly, once upon a time, before Michael Shelley got his hands—and a canister of WD-40—on it. Jon can’t decide if this is amusing or just....)
“—listening?”
He looks up, meets Daisy’s eyes by sheer force of will. There’s—rather a lot staring back, so he looks at her eyebrows instead. It’s a little better.
“...Right. We’ll pick this up later.”
No, no, he can focus, just—what?
“Think you could try those meds again?”
He’ll probably be sick, but he can swallow them, yes, and then maybe Daisy will stop looking at him like that. He holds out his hand, palm-up. His fingers tremble, but he ignores them.
Daisy retrieves the pills, hands them over. When they’re in his mouth, bitter and terrible, she passes the water as well. Takes it when he’s finished. Hands him the bin, which he takes without complaint, because he’s no more optimistic than she is.
But the minutes pass, and Jon doesn’t throw up. So he sets it back down and pulls the blankets (less smothering, now, and, okay, maybe Daisy had a point before) tight round himself again.
He expects her to leave, then, go find Basira, but she doesn’t. Just stays sat on the floor, swiping on her phone.
Jon leans back against the wall and watches her. Then realizes he’s staring and closes his eyes.
She still doesn’t leave. And doesn’t leave, and doesn’t leave. And then the door opens and he sighs, internally, because there she goes—
But no, the footsteps are heading in. And there’s the swish of Daisy standing, and—
“Hey,” Daisy says, soft.
“Hey.”
Shifting. Murmured conversation. More shifting. Then he catches his name.
“...asleep.”
A soft snort. “No he isn’t.” The calm certainty in Basira’s voice is achingly familiar and a little unnerving. In some ways, it reminds him of Elias. Mostly, though, it reminds him of—old conversations. From before the Unknowing. Before Leitner, even. (It should be pleasant. It’s exhausting.)
“Sit up, Jon.”
Jon hesitates. Then does as asked. He wipes some of the fever-goop out of his eyes, but it doesn’t make things much less fuzzy.
Basira steps forward, holding. Something?
“Thermometer. Here.”
He struggles to extricate himself, manages, takes it. Sticks it in his mouth. The Beholding tells him the symptoms of Mercury poisoning. He tells it thermometers don’t use Mercury anymore. It tells him more symptoms of Mercury poisoning.
Time passes. Excruciatingly slowly.
It beeps, he removes it, tries to squint at the numbers. Can’t make them out.
“Give it here.” Basira takes it. “Thirty-nine point three.”
Could be worse. (The highest temperature Melanie has ever had was after she got shot. Thirty-nine point eight.)
“Nothing by halves,” Daisy says.
“Has he taken—”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Well. Sweat it out, I guess.”
Jon takes this for a dismissal and closes his eyes. A bit distorted, as though through water, he hears:
“You staying?”
“For a while. Talk later?”
“Yeah.”
-
Jon tosses, turns. Dreams odd, fuzzy, patchwork things—Daisy cobbled from clockwork, painting bowls with someone who might be Tim; Melanie melting to candlewax one one side as she teaches Georgie how to make jam from eels’ eyes and toads’ legs; escape rooms with silver in the walls and his grandmother on loudspeaker; a hole in his satchel, spilling everything he owns on the floor so he has to pick it all up but his hands are too slippery and he can’t focus and he’s going to be late—
-
He dreams crisp, linear things, too, in between the rest. Running from fractals, tasting ozone. Watching sickly gray tendrils swell across the deck of a ship, seizing control. Vomiting grubs.
-
He wakes without panic. That’s a relief, for all of ten seconds, before he realizes he feels awful. It’s not even quantifiable anymore into things like headache or nausea or chills. It’s just a swirling mass of...of....
He wants a statement. (The statement he thought of earlier is still sitting in its pile. It involves toxic waste.) He wants the Admiral. (He has a fever.) He wants a distraction. (Grapes are toxic to dogs, as one man discovered upon perfecting grape ice cream and failing to keep his girlfriend’s dog from consuming some of the—)
He wants a different distraction.
He wants to sleep, but he’s far too uncomfortable for that, so he just lays there, wanting.
-
The door opens. (There is a door in the Institute, two lefts and three rights away, in the middle of the corridor, mustard yellow.) The door closes. (The gap under the door in his mind is growing.)
Jon sits up, head pounding horribly, and rubs his eyes. They’re gummy in a way that he’ll probably find revolting, later, but just now he’s too preoccupied with the all the doors to care. He stares at the figure in front of the one to the storage room, tries to peer past their blurry edges.
“You look terrible.”
Oh. Melanie. She’s come to deliver...something. Probably whatever it is she’s holding. She hates it, whatever it is.
Maybe it’s a statement? He hopes it’s a statement. (He desperately hopes it’s anything but a statement.) If he reads one, the crack under the door will shrink. He’ll feel better. (The door will open. He’ll be violently ill.)
“—not staying, just dropping this off. Don’t want whatever that is.”
He can’t blame her. He doesn’t want to have caught it either. Is going to leave an ill-tempered post-it on the desk of whoever gave it to him. (It’s been going round for the last two weeks. Patient zero is one of the research assistants. First name Adam. His mother was touched by the End. There are seventeen teacups in—)
Jon swallows heavily. Scrunches his eyes against the onslaught of Knowing. Tells it not-in-words to fuck off. Returns to the post-it. Five words. All caps. Use your goddamned sick leave.
Hypocritical, maybe, as Jon has only ever used his own twice since joining the Institute, and both times were neither remotely honest nor actually his doing. But at least Adam's leave isn’t only theoretical. Doesn’t have world-altering consequences. (The world doesn’t end if Adam-from-researchtakes a sick day, but if the Archivist is down for the count—)
“Here,” Daisy says. “Want this?”
He rubs his eyes again. Takes a moment to focus on Daisy. (She once fully dismembered an avatar of the Slaughter with an axe in early winter and had to wait several hours for the ground to thaw enough so that she could bury her.) Then another to focus on what she’s holding up.
It’s...a blanket. Deep purple, edged in gold. (Melanie’s grandfather bought her a starry nightlight. Its designer had a run-in with the Dark at the age of twenty-six. Daisy once felt the urge to follow Melanie home.)
Stop, he thinks. “Mm,” he says, with a weak give here gesture, trying not to dwell on the lingering ache in Melanie's leg, worse in the cold and worst during slasher flicks.
Daisy drops the blanket in his lap unceremoniously, and he tangles his fingers in it. (Plush. Microfiber. Washed in something scentless, because Melanie can’t stand sharp floral things, and a woman once used this brand as a poison when—)
“Good?”
He settles it over himself clumsily in lieu of answer. It's almost warm. (A new hire in Artefact Storage got third degree burns last week from a crocheted blanket.)
“Take that as a yes,” she says, stepping back again. (She hasn’t had a natural illness in five years. Hasn’t been violently ill in eight. The last time—)
Stop, he thinks again, more insistently, his own stomach turning at the thought of Daisy half-delirious in her old flat, which is now owned by a very elderly woman with no fewer than four dogs and absolutely no friends or family.
“Mm.” The heat in his cheeks spreads up to his eyes and they start stinging so he lays down abruptly. His head feels like someone’s taken an axe to it, and everything spins, but it’s worth it. His face is buried in the pillow before it does anything funny. (The pillow is four years old and has been used by no fewer than eight people. All but two of them are dead.)
“Whatever,” Melanie says from the doorway. (There is a yellow door in the Institute, two lefts and three rights away.) “Burn it when you're done.” There’s a kind of lightness in her voice. It takes a moment to register as forced. Then another to register as joking. (Melanie hasn’t tried this in six months, two weeks, and five days. She thought about killing someone while wrapped in this blanket, nineteen times. Four of them were thorough plans.)
Stop it.
There’s a buzzing in his head, mixed up in the pain, that tells him if he tries to speak, it won’t work. A pull somewhere above his missing ribs that says if he opens his mouth at all, he’s going to start making noise. (Low, half a sob, half a whine. The precise pitch is usually—)
If he starts making the noise, he knows, he’s not going to stop. He’ll only—get louder. End up with the sound somewhere between whine and scream, the one that always made him turn on his shower and bite down on his wrist so he didn’t disturb the neighbors. (He did, once. The man next door was preparing dinner at the time and flinched, gave himself a cut on his finger.)
And if he does that it’s going to split his skull in two, and he’s going to either be sick about it or do something worse, like slam himself upside the head. Or slam his head straight into the wall, and— (Basira’s grandmother once suffered moderate blunt force trauma to the—) and the others will see, and—
No. No.
He takes a slow breath, through the splitting in his skull, and tries to get a grip. (Melanie has knocked on Helen’s door six times in the last month.) He's only going to make the headache worse.
(He cannot possibly make the headache worse.)
His face crumples as an influx of information about cluster headaches and prolonged exposure to the Distortion crashes together, making him taste fractals and proving him wrong. He bites the middle joint of his index finger. Something else to taste. To hurt, distract. Take up his focus.
A flood about fidgeting, now. A million little habits a million people have that Jon doesn't and some that he does and how very, very afraid Mavis from filing is about anyone noticing the two that they share and the six that they don't.
Jon bites the side of his finger hard. Then the side of his thumb, harder. Stop. Breathe. Think. Something else. (Romney sheep originate from marshlands. The Buried claims a particular swamp in North America as a place of power. Swampwater in one’s lungs feels remarkably like—)
He’s going to vomit. His eyes are watering. (The Lonely man who works in the canteen is not crying in his flat. The leftovers in his fridge are growing mold. There is mold in my drain.)
Please, he thinks. (There is a tupperware container of pasta in the break room fridge. It is all Georgie would eat, the year after Alex. Melanie has forgotten it for two days.) Please.
“Jon?”
He bites down harder, piercingly aware it should leave a mark but won't. (It has been over six months since any lingered. Two weeks and two days since he last made one.)
“Uh,” she says. Her footsteps track slow around the corner of the cot, stopping at the head of it rather than the side—with a bit of a scuff. “Jon?”
He pulls his hand away from his mouth, shrinks further into the blankets. His eyes hurt. (The exact chemical composition of saltwater is—) But they haven't spilled over. Maybe she won't see. (The Tundra once—)
“Oh hell,” Daisy says.
“Huh.” Melanie, a little closer than before. “Didn’t even know he had tear ducts.” (Melanie has seen everyone of the Archives cry save Jon and Basira. Elias once showed Melanie—)
Jon curls smaller.
“Shut up,” Daisy says. (Daisy fell once and couldn't get back up. Melanie helped her and Daisy's eyes burned hot and wet and she wanted to rip Melanie's throat out for precisely—)
“I’m just saying—”
“Melanie.”
A four-second pause. (Melanie’s father used to—Elias showed her—) “...Fine.” Another four-second pause. (Elias showed her—the Lightless Flame once—) “Sorry. I’m just gonna...go, I think.” Another pause, a little longer. “Feel better, Jon.” (The Lightless Flame once—Smokey the Bear was devised in the year—Melanie’s father used to—)
Thanks, he wants to say, because it’s polite and she’s been pausing for him a lot today, but one of the doors in his head is on fire and Jude Perry still dreams of setting Gertrude Robinson’s head on fire and the noise is pressing at the base of his throat, so he doesn’t.
Footsteps. The door closes, shuts.
His hand finds its way back in his mouth.
“...Jon.”
He doesn’t answer. (The human hand has precisely twenty joints. The Distortion’s hands—hands—hands—hands—hands—)
“Can you sit up?”
He pulls his hand (hand—hand—hand—hand—) out of his mouth and sits up. For a moment that ache is louder than everything streaming out from under the door.
And then it isn’t, and it’s a struggle to coordinate his limbs enough to keep his face shrouded in blankets so she doesn’t see—the Knowing or the tears. Though he isn't—isn't crying. Is he? It’s hard to tell, it all hurts, jumbled and twisting and layered with too many joints and fractals and fire and circus music and shadow that bites.
Her lips are moving, and it takes several long moments to translate the jumble of sounds into words. “Oh,” she’s said, nearly a fully minute ago. “Okay. Good. You...want me to stay?”
Jon has no idea how to answer. Several options occur to him at once, each with multiple corollaries. If he opens his mouth to say no, the control he’s clinging to by the skin of his teeth is going to evaporate, and also she’ll actually go and he’ll be alone. (And so will Daisy, and he’s never claimed to be very good at feelings but he remembers very vividly the tremor in her voice, forever deep below creation, and even more vividly the look in her eyes when he found her in the hallway that first night with Basira gone away, hand—hand, hand, hand, hand, hand pressed hard to the wall to stay upright—)
“Jon.”
It’s the third time she’s said his name. (There are three spiders on the ceiling. They are all different species. They are all of them watching.) He looks at her so he will not search for them.
“Budge up.”
He shifts. It hurts, but not enough to drown out the doors. (Maybe he should slam his head into the wall, maybe that would be enough, maybe—)
Daisy sits beside him, her shoulders not quite brushing his. Too close, prickling, terrible. Too far, crawling, awful. (Avatars of the Buried and the Vast collaborated on a project once in...in…? Seventeen people died. So did all three avatars.)
Jon shifts again, away from Daisy, until the spiders under his skin vanish. (There are two spiders on the ceiling. They are different species. They are all watching.)
(...That isn’t right. Why isn’t that right? The Lonely feasted in the aftermath of the collaboration. The whole ordeal took place in...in…? Inside a common garden spider on the ceiling, on a web which has been occupied for four years running.)
Daisy takes in a long, deliberate breath that Jon barely registers through the average lifespan of common garden spiders. (Shorter than four years, and astronomically shorter than two centuries...which is how long the project took, or—no, how long ago it…?)
When the breath does register—someone is on the threshold of the Institute, but are they entering or leaving? Melanie’s sweater is made of cotton and she’s pulling it over her head, but is she donning it or removing it?—Jon thinks for a horrible moment that Daisy’s preparing to Say something. Possibly about his feelings, or, or maybe her own. (God.) He has just enough time for a sweeping wave of dread and exhaustion to suffuse the twenty-six death certificates in the box two meters to his right—
And then Daisy exhales, long and slow. (Melanie’s father—)
Another long, deliberate breath. (There are seventeen teacups on fire in the care home. None automatically refill the fire extinguishers. The symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning are—)
Another exhale. (Basira’s blanket was green and well-used. Tim’s long-dead grandmother was instrumental in making the knitted one. Melanie’s—)
Another long, deliberate breath.
And then it clicks and Jon grapples with the sudden urge to shove Daisy off the cot. He hasn’t actually forgotten how to breathe, he remembers exactly how to breathe, the Beholding is telling him every single step involved on exponentially smaller and smaller levels, he doesn’t need it demonstrated on top of that, he’s not forgotten he’s not panicking the blanket is territorial and the spiders are microfiber and Daisy is stupid and—
Jon takes a shuddering breath in and thinks of swamps and care homes and Daisy exhales and he follows suit and thinks of cobwebs and fever and—
Does it again, and again, thinking of other things, slipping out of the door like the mist rising round the Institute and swirling the hallways beyond the door four rights and one left away and—
Daisy leans back against the wall. (She’s exhausted and hungry and Jon is hungry and exhausted and defenseless and—)
His almost-settled breath hitches. (It is not the first time it’s done so, he Knows suddenly. Not crying, not hyperventilating, but—close. Tears are mostly—the precise composition of swampwater.)
Daisy shifts. He stiffens, and then there’s something like guilt, except it isn’t his, except it is, except—
He blinks and tries to focus and there’s Daisy’s hand resting between them, palm-up. (Twenty joints. Callused. Never broken, the wrist twice-sprained. Unexpectedly soft, forever deep below creation. Maybe still?)
Jon hesitates. (The temperature of Jude Perry’s hand exceeded—the weight of the Buried exceeded—)
He can ask Daisy about one of the monsters she killed. He can ask about all of them, even, but one will do, just one—and all of this will stop. A live statement will make it stop, he is sure of it, he is positive. (It may cure him. It may kill him. Either way—)
“Daisy,” he says. (He just wants it to stop.)
“Yeah?” (Please make it stop.)
He swallows. “I…” He swallows again, past grape ice cream and endless dust. He thinks of fingers, twenty joints on the hand, dozens more, yellow doors. He thinks of ribs. Tape recorders. Tape recorders. Tape recorders.
One in his pocket, right now. Whirring away.
He opens his mouth. It tastes of sand, and dust, and sick. He thinks of Thai. Of The Archers.
He closes his mouth and grits his teeth and moves his hand—hand—by Daisy’s. His knuckles brush the side of her palm, which is cooler than he remembers, but just as soft. (Nikola Orsinov arranged for no fewer than twenty-five different brands of—)
Daisy doesn’t move her hand. He doesn’t move his, either. Doesn’t go to clasp them, palm-to-palm. (In the Buried, they interlocked their thumbs and didn’t let go. Contact and pressure, constant, the only ounce of it in the whole of everything that they controlled. Strong one moment, soft the next, as Daisy willed. Because Jon followed, he remembers, matched her squeeze for squeeze, thumb-brush for thumb-brush, unable to conceive of anything else to do.)
(There are no teacups, forever deep below creation. There is only weight, and dirt, and fear, and you.)
Jon presses his hand a little firmer against the side of Daisy’s. She presses back. Then takes his hand properly, and threads her fingers through his (not like in the Buried, they did not do that in the Buried), and squeezes. Her calluses press into his knuckles and it’s a strange feeling but not a bad one and it’s almost louder than the number of spiders on the ceiling which is suddenly, inexplicably five.
He squeezes her hand without meaning to, and the spiders double to seven, except the math isn’t right and really there’s only two of them and seven is the number of statements involving candles in the lowermost box in the corner, which hasn’t been touched in—)
Daisy squeezes back.
He tries to focus on it. On the growing warmth of her palm, the lines of her fingers crossing through his own. It’s—difficult. There are so many doors, they are so distracting, and he is so tired.
(He has a fever.)
His jaw hurts. He focuses on that instead, the burning ache. If he just stops clenching it—
No. (No, no, no, no. Only seven people have used this pillow, and—seven.)
He keeps his mouth closed. Refocuses on the ache in his jaw and the press of Daisy’s fingers and it’s a good thing this isn’t the hand Jude Perry got to because there’s not a lot of feeling in that one but in this one he can tell where her fingertips meet his worm scars and—
And—
He can sort of almost think, when he squeezes back, and—
Daisy breathes in and out, and Jon follows. His mind wanders, things continue to slip through the cracks, the tape recorder continues to whir away in his pocket, comforting and nauseating and enticing, filled with nearly as much wonderful dread as the screaming boxes lining the walls—but he follows.
It’s hard to think, and what little room there is between the Knowing and all the knives in his skull is mostly taken up by snatches of statements, by mold in my drain and the message could not have been clearer and my dearest Jonah and will be the same as this one and—
He thinks of Georgie, fleetingly, and spaghetti in the fridge, and Thai, and The Archers.
He thinks—with some difficulty—of fragments of dialogue. Scraps, here and there. Then plot points, here and there. Then lines, here and there and everywhere among cobwebs and corridors and common earthworms introduced by old groundskeepers. Then multiple in succession. Exchanges.
And slowly (slowly, slowly, time trickling by like syrup from a bottle left too far in the back of the fridge again), the Knowing grows fuzzier. (Not softer, cloudier.) Jumbled, mixed with half-remembered scenes and odd facts about scenes he hasn’t heard yet, and about actors and production mishaps and techniques he mostly doesn’t understand and….
It’s still a lot, it’s still too much, too sharp, the maze is sharp on my mind, the angles cut me when I try to think, he still wants it to stop, but.
“Daisy,” he says, at last, his voice thick, throat tight.
“Yeah?” Her voice is quiet, wary. (Jon’s chest hurts.)
“Can you…” His tongue buzzes with static. He bites it for six seconds. Then, “Archers.”
There is a very long pause. She has been listening to The Archers for over seven years. She has never listened to this not-question before. “...Okay. Sure.”
There is a very long pause.
Familiar music plays.
He squeezes Daisy’s hand again with aching fingers, and leans against the wall. He spends the next several minutes listening as hard as he can, and then just listening, and then just hearing, vaguely, as he goes more and more boneless, and fuzzy, and soft.
And drifts.
-
Jon becomes aware, by degrees, of sound. Voices, soft, a little tinny, coming from...somewhere. (Not a threat. Safe.)
He sighs, and becomes aware of warmth under his cheek. Fabric. A shirt. A shoulder. (Not a threat. Safe.)
But his back hurts, a bit, leaning like this, so he pulls away with a small frown. Rubs his face.
“Hey,” someone says.
“Mmmmh,” Jon says, scrubbing his eyes. “...Daisy?”
“No, I’m Batman.”
She sounds dry as Basira, which makes him snort, which makes his head hurt, which makes him remember, all at once—
“Jon?”
“I’m fine,” he says automatically, trying not to think too hard about anything in particular and trying to resist the urge to slam his head into the wall—both because it will drown out the flood of information that’s sure to return any second now and because maybe it will make him forget—all of that. And even if it doesn’t, it’s something to do about the embarrassment that’s making his head pound viciously all over again.
...But if he does that, it’ll be something else to be embarrassed about, so perhaps best not. Perhaps best—wait it out.
So he waits it out. And finds that, though the embarrassment doesn’t fade, the ache does, back to something duller, quieter. And no Knowing swoops in to take its place.
The door is—possibly as close to sealed as it ever gets? (He’s afraid to check.)
“You need me to turn this up?”
He blinks. Opens his eyes to find Daisy brandishing her phone. “Uh, no. No, it’s. Fine. I just, uh.” He makes a face.
Daisy seems to understand. She nods, lowers her phone again. “All right.”
He runs his hands through his hair. “How—uh. I…” He pats his front down, searching. “My phone, uh. The time. I want—”
“Your phone’s over here. And you’ve been asleep about—” Daisy glances down at her own phone. “—seven hours?”
“...Seven hours,” he repeats.
“Give or take.”
“Right.” And she just...sat there the whole time? Has she slept? What’s—?
“It help any?”
“Uh,” Jon says. “I...think so?” He still...hurts, there’s the headache when he moves, but his stomach’s in fewer knots and he can think again. “Yes”.
“Good.” A long pause. (Oh, god, she’s she’s going to want to talk about it, isn't she?) “You hungry?”
“Uh,” he says again, intelligently.
“We don’t actually have anything in here,” Daisy says. “But there’s water. Statements.”
“No.” He realizes, about ten seconds too late, that he’s been unnecessarily harsh. “...Sorry. Um. Water would—would be lovely, actually.” He’s thirsty again. “But maybe, uh. I...just in case, if you wouldn’t mind, um.” He can’t bring himself to say it.
“Don’t have a conniption,” Daisy says, standing. “I’m getting it.” She fetches a glass of water from...somewhere, he’s not really paying attention, one minute she’s up and the next there’s a glass of water in his hand and a bin at his side. (That’s...odd.)
(...He’ll worry about it later.) “Uh, thank. Thank you.”
“No problem.”
Jon takes a cautious sip. Then another. Then another. Then drinks the rest of the glass at a normal pace, til it’s nearly gone, at which point a rattling sound gets his attention.
Daisy, shaking the paracetamol. She tosses it to him. He doesn’t catch.
Does set his glass between his knees belatedly, fumble for the bottle, swear at it, get it open in just two tries through a minor miracle. Then takes two pills, though one is probably sufficient. If the fever returns and it happens again—
He shudders. Best stay ahead of things.
He drains the glass, hands it and the pills back. “Thank you,” he says again.
“Mhm.” There are bags under Daisy’s eyes. She’s leaning a bit too heavily on the wall.
“I, uh.” He struggles for the right words. “You…should get some rest.” Those are the wrong ones. “You look awful.” Worse ones.
“I’ve slept,” she says shortly.
“But—” Daisy went over forty-eight hours without sleep once, nine years ago, and Jon’s voice sticks in his throat. He waits, tense, unbreathing, for an awful second—but the Beholding shares nothing else, so he sighs and slumps again.
“Maybe take your own advice.”
“I’ve just slept s—” Because the universe hates him, he yawns. “—seven hours.”
Daisy gives him a look.
“Shut up.”
“Didn’t say anything.”
Jon glares.
Daisy rolls her eyes and makes a show of sitting down. “Happy?”
That’s not at all what he expected or even intended to achieve by glaring at her, but it’s reasonably satisfying, yes. But he’s not about to admit that, so he just squashes another yawn behind the back of his hand and grumbles, “Am I ever?”
She laughs. “Go to sleep, Sims.”
He doesn't want to, but…he is still tired. There’s still the headache. And his skull’s heavier by the minute.
So he mutters an insult without any sharp corners, and lies down, eyes closed.
He’s asleep in minutes.
-
When Jon wakes, again, after too-crisp statement dreams, someone else’s fear on his tongue, he’s clear-headed in a way that makes it abundantly clear Daisy was right. He must have still been laughably out-of-it before.
He scowls, and glances round the room, and oh, there’s Daisy, still sitting on the floor. Asleep, now, under Basira’s grandmother’s impossible blanket. Seems she wasn’t the only one who was right.
...Although, he thinks, belatedly. She’s on the floor. Sitting. Got to be hell on her back. And he should probably care about that. Probably do something. Move her to the cot, maybe.
...It sounds like an awful lot of effort, though, and if she wakes more than a quarter of the way she’ll refuse, probably. Or maybe even just stay awake. Probably better to let her sleep.
He lets her sleep.
-
After half an hour, Jon gets bored. (There are statements he can read, but.)
He’s—restless, he thinks. Needs to get up. Get out. Go for a walk. Maybe get some tea.
His stomach growls, and he adds breakfast to the list. It’s gone six in the morning, according to his phone. Not too terribly early for breakfast.
...Although. If it’s gone six in the morning, Daisy will be waking soon. (A little strange she’s still asleep, really, she’s usually awake by five.)
He frowns. She’s not ill, is she? She’s been around him for a lot of this. And—he feels himself flush—she kept changing the liners on the bin. So it’s very possible that—
He pushes himself to his feet, braced for pain that—never really arrives, apart from the usual twinge in his leg. It’s very strange, and a little exhilarating, and distracting. He needs to focus. Get to Daisy.
He makes his way over, crouches down beside her awkwardly. Presses a hand not to her forehead, because he doesn’t particularly fancy being stabbed if she wakes up, but to her cheek. From the side.
Her skin feels...normal. Not hot, not clammy. She’s probably not running a fever, then, at least. That’s good. That’s something. (Fever was the first symptom to show up, for him, after headache, so unless she’s in very early stages she’s probably fine.)
Satisfied, and unwilling to linger in case Daisy wakes up, Jon straightens again, pulls out his phone, sends her a quick text. I’m going to make breakfast in the breakroom. I’ll be back soon.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket, as expected, and he holds his breath, but she doesn’t wake.
So he grabs the rest of his things and leaves. If he’s lucky, he’ll be back before she sees the text.
-
It takes him a little longer to get to the breakroom than he expects. (He’s curiously weak, for all the fever seems to have passed.)
It also takes him longer than he expects to wash his hands and make breakfast. He has to sit down in the middle. After the brief rest, during which he drinks his microwaved tea, he flings himself into searching for food—crackers, which he tucks in a pocket, and oh, there’s bagels and cream cheese, those’ll do—and then begins the laborious process of walking back, laden down as he is.
He manages. (If he leans on the wall a bit more than usual as he goes, well. Only the Eye sees. And maybe Elias.)
(After a moment’s thought, he flips off the ceiling, just in case.)
-
Daisy is still asleep when Jon gets back. This is both a minor miracle and a significant cause for alarm.
He doesn’t dare check her temperature, just sits down a fair distance from her and sets the food on the floor. Then sets about eating, because it is something to do besides wonder when Daisy is going to wake up, or think about how late she must have stayed up with him.
He’s a third of the way through the sleeve of crackers when Daisy stirs.
“...You’re awake,” she says, after a few bleary moments.
Jon nods. “There’s bagels. If you’re hungry.”
“Mm,” Daisy says, reaching for them. “You seem better.”
“I am, I think.” He shrugs self-consciously. “Must’ve been a, um. Forty-eight hour thing.”
She undoes the twist tie. “So you were ill Tuesday.”
“Probably a bit?” He braces himself for a frown, or a sharp remark, or—
But Daisy just grins, pulls out a bagel. “Hah. Melanie owes me ten quid.”
Jon very carefully does not squawk at the indignity of his coworkers taking bets on the particulars of his indignity. Instead, he glares.
Daisy ignores him, takes a bite.
“...There’s also—” He nudges the container of cream cheese.
“I’m good,” she says, through a second bite.
Yikes, he thinks. “...Okay,” he says.
Daisy raises an eyebrow and takes a third bite.
Jon thinks perhaps she’s doing that on purpose, and busies himself again with the crackers. Suddenly he’s starving.
-
When he’s finished the sleeve and filched a bagel and spread cream cheese on it properly and polished it off, he sits back and sighs, content.
Silence follows. Pleasant, easy. He thinks about, maybe, possibly, pulling a few statements out of his bag, going over notes. (Now that he’s been awake an hour or so and had food, the prospect isn’t quite so daunting. There’s still that statement somewhere in his...his…?)
Jon furrows his brow. He’s positive he Knew, several times, about a statement in a pile in his office that may be useful. He Knew precisely which pile and precisely which case number, the Beholding wouldn’t shut up about it—
But it’s gone wispy, now. When he reaches, it’s like catching smoke, and he ends up with a rudimentary understanding of the earliest method of sheep-shearing and how badly injured someone once got after trying to use Corruption-touched shears.
He frowns. That the information is just gone is…unusual, to say the least, and incredibly inconvenient, and unfair, and what is it with the Watcher and textiles lately, anyway?
“Penny for your thoughts?”
“I think the Eye has a fixation,” he says automatically.
“Uh?” Daisy sounds like she’s trying not to laugh.
“Nothing. Never mind. Just—nonsense. Um. Why do you ask?”
Immediately, “You looked distracted.” A pause, then, begrudgingly, “And I saw an opening to start a conversation. Want to apologize.”
Jon frowns. “What f—” He closes his eyes. “I…” He feels for the words. “...don’t see what there is to apologize for. If anything, I should—I’m sorry, that was more than—”
“No. Let me talk.”
Jon shuts up.
“I’m sorry about the blanket.”
He blinks. “The—blanket.”
“Yeah. I didn’t think.”
“Didn’t think,” Jon repeats, intelligently. “Sorry, what are you—?”
“I picked it cause I like it.” Daisy frowns. “But part of that is because it’s heavy.”
“Daisy,” he says, but there’s no end to the sentence.
“It’s. I can take it off. Kick it away. Put it back. Fold it up. Use it for a pillow. You know.”
Jon thinks of palms clasped, thumbs interlocked, squeezing, and he says, “Yes.”
Daisy nods, short, sharp. “I didn't think. You were weird about it, I should have—I’m sorry.”
A short silence falls. A bit awkward. Then, “Well, for what it’s worth, you did...sort it out? And in any case, I uh. Forgive you.”
“Right.”
It’s even more awkward now, so Jon presses on. “Honestly, it—it wasn’t the weight that bothered me most, anyway. Not—not consciously? Or even the texture. It was more—it didn’t make any sense.”
“...The blanket.”
He nods.
“Couldn’t wrap your big stupid brain round the concept of a big square that keeps you warm?”
“Shut up. No. I mean, yes, obviously, I know what a blanket is, Daisy, I just—”
“Keep your shirt on. What did you mean, then?”
“It—didn’t make sense. I kept—” He breaks off, glances at the door. It’s closed. There’s no one on the other side. Still, he lowers his voice. “I kept Knowing things. And I kept Knowing that Basira’s grandmother made the blanket. Except I also Knew it was only four years old, and Basira’s only grandmother died of cancer—”
“—ten years back, yeah. That is a bit weird.”
“Isn’t it?” Jon gestures wildly. “Kept driving me mad. I still don’t—mind you, there was a lot from the Eye that didn’t make sense in the middle there, so maybe it was just….”
“The fever?”
“Mm.”
A pause. A shrewd look. “Is that what all that was about, then.”
There’s no need to ask what she means. “...Yes. It, uh. The Eye, it.” He wrestles with the words for a long minute, half-hoping all the while that Daisy will tell him not to hurt himself and he won’t have to bother. But she doesn’t, so eventually he just says, “You know the uh. The door? Not, not Helen’s, I mean—” He taps awkwardly at his temple.
“Yeah.” Another shrewd look. “Wide open, was it?”
“Yes. Or. No? Not quite. It, it felt like—the gap was widening, underneath.”
“And that hurt.”
He laughs, short, humorless. “Just a bit. And then didn’t make a lot of sense. And I can’t even remember half of it now, and I’ve been trying, so it’s just like—” He gestures vaguely.
“Thanks?” Daisy suggests, oozing sarcasm.
“Yes. And the other half isn’t even useful,” he adds, warming to his theme. “It was just—just the same thing over and over again, like—oh, you’ve got a fever. Oh, Melanie’s going to visit your office. Oh, Melanie’s going to visit your office. Peter Lukas wants to feed this man to his god. Here’s how to pick a lock. Oh, you’ve got a fever. Oh, you’ve got a fever. Here’s how to pick a lock. Peter Lukas wants to feed this man to his god, Melanie’s going to visit your office, this impossible blanket’s a Romney-Shetland blend, and by the way, you’ve got a damn fever.”
Daisy laughs. “So when you said chatty—”
“Like your great aunt,” Jon says darkly. Then wonders if Daisy’s ever actually told him about her motormouth great aunt, who somehow only died two years ago. (...Ah. She told him the motormouth part in passing, but not the death date. Okay. As long as he doesn’t go and mention it, then….) “At least Tuesday it was only interrupting. Vaguely trying to be useful. But yesterday—” A dismissive handwave, a disgusted face. “Worse than your great aunt.”
Daisy grins. “Sounds like—hey, remember Clippy?”
He struggles to maintain a straight face. “Worse than Clippy.”
Daisy laughs again. “Right, of course.” A dramatic pause. “Eldritch Clippy.”
The sudden visual—a dark purple eye centered on yellow notepaper—breaks him. He laughs and intones, straight-faced, “It looks like you’re trying to remember a file number. Would you like a fun fact about someone’s recently-murdered uncle?”
Daisy grins.
“Or,” he continues, still straight-faced, “a blanket that doesn’t make sense?”
Daisy grins wider. “You’re really stuck on that.”
“Look, everything else went odd later, the blanket was when things were still mostly in order.” A pause. “...I think.”
“Mm.” A pause. “You know, you could just ask her.”
“What?”
“Basira.”
Jon stares. “No. You know she hates—all this. And after yesterday—”
“I told you, she’s not angry with you. She’s just—”
“Yes, I know, I know, stressed. You said. But you didn’t see her, Daisy, it was—”
“Okay, fine. She’s pissed. But—look, you’re easy to be pissed at.”
“Hey.”
“Not like that. Or, well, yeah, like that. But just—everything you’ve been doing. Those statements, and now your little collapse. Pissed is easier than—”
He laughs, derisive. “She’s not worried about me.”
“No,” Daisy agrees quietly. “She’s not.”
He frowns. “Then what’s your—I don't know what you’re getting at.”
Daisy shakes her head. “I’m not gonna spell it out for you. Just...talk to her.”
He swallows back a very pointed question. It tastes like magnetic tape. “...Fine.”
He meets Daisy’s eyes, and in that instant he’s positive they both know he’s not going to bother. Daisy doesn’t look surprised. Only—he thinks, maybe—a little disappointed. (Or maybe she’s just tired.)
“Good,” she says. “...I’m gonna go. Got some files to sort out.”
“I can—”
“Lie down and go back to sleep? Good idea.”
“I’m—”
“Probably still contagious? Good point.”
Jon gives her a sullen look.
“You really want to risk being sick on the statements?”
He increases the sullen look, but does, begrudgingly, say “No.”
“Thought not. Rest up. I’ll be back round lunch.”
-
Much to his chagrin, he sleeps through lunch.
When he wakes, there’s a cooling mug of tea and some prepackaged sandwiches. He finishes them quickly and, out of sheer spite rather than any actual desire to accomplish anything, pulls out his bag and starts sorting through papers.
Halfway through scribbling a few notes, he thinks he might, maybe, remember the first half of the file number for the statement about the toxic waste from last night, possibly, and is about to jot it down when the door opens.
“Daisy,” he says, without looking up. “I think I might—”
“Not Daisy,” Basira says.
Jon drops his pen and looks up. “Oh. Um. Hi?”
“Hi.”
“Did you, um. How can I, uh. Can I...ask why you’re here?”
“You can. Rather you didn’t.”
“Right.”
“Daisy said you were dead to the world again. I’m just making sure you’re not pulling another yesterday.”
“...Pulling another yesterday.”
“Letting yourself collapse.”
He scowls. “It wasn’t on purpose.”
“Course not. But you could’ve texted.” She fixes him with a flat stare. “Daisy told you to, even.”
“Yes, if I was dying.”
Basira rolls her eyes. “You know she didn’t mean it literally.”
“I…” Jon furrows his brow. He...must’ve known, yes. Obviously. But it really wasn’t that bad. Not until later, when Daisy was already back again. And besides— “Sorry I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly,” he says tightly. “Bit hard when you’re—”
“Don’t start. You did that to yourself.”
“Excuse me?”
“With the statements.”
The overwork probably didn’t help, okay, sure, but— “I stopped, and I was—”
“Clearly not soon enough.”
Jon strangles a frustrated noise in the back of his throat. “Yes, well—” He fumbles for words. Gives up. “I’ll text next time I’m sick for an hour. Is that what you want to hear?”
Too quick, Basira says, “No.” Then her mouth tightens.
He opens his mouth to ask what the hell she does want to hear, then—
“Right. Obviously you’re...recovering,” she says. “If that’s back. I’ll leave you to it.” She gestures to the papers spread in front of him. “Just take this, be on my way.”
She gestures to the blanket and Jon’s suffused with an inexplicable, insurmountable desire to interrupt.
“Uh, Basira.”
She picks it up.
“Basira.”
She looks at him, flat. “What.”
“Can I, um.”
Her expression stays the same, but her hands tighten on the blanket.
He switches tacks. “I, uh. I’m curious. It’s, um. It’s not my cup of tea, unfortunately—” He laughs a bit self-consciously. “—but that blanket is, um. Well, it’s stunning. I was just curious if you might know who made it.”
“I do,” Basira says. “Why.”
“I.” His stomach curdles round the truth. “I...know a few knitters?” (He does. It’s not a lie. One of them is Martin. Another is an old classmate from uni he hasn’t spoken to since graduation.) “Sort of...vicariously curious, I suppose.” His face feels very hot. This is all very stupid of him. “It’s not important, you don’t have to—”
“No,” Basira says. “I don’t.” A long, long pause. “I really don’t.” A slight head tilt. “It was my aunt, though.”
He blinks. “Your...aunt.” Presumably, she’s still alive. This...makes sense. He must have just been—confused. In the beginning stages of delirium, after all. Or whatever that was with the doors.
“Yeah. Birthday present. My gran’s old pattern.”
“...Ah,” he says, and a piece clicks into place. “I see. That’s, um. That’s lovely.”
“I guess.” Basira shrugs. “It’s a blanket. Warm. Does the job.”
He smiles awkwardly. “That it does. Ah, thank—thank you for the use of it.”
She snorts. “You hated it.”
Jon starts to protest that he didn’t hate the blanket itself, just how it felt like being stabbed and how it was suffocating, and something ticks over in his mind. (Triggers.) “It’s the...thought that counts?” he says vaguely, as the something continues to tick. (Blueprints. Things built on other things.)
“If you say so.” Basira turns to the door. “Anyway. See you.”
“See you,” he echoes, but she’s already gone.
His mind keeps tick, tick, ticking, and the Eye tells him a bit about fractals, and he thinks, with a funny, sinking feeling, as he turns back to his papers, Yes, I know.
Patterns.